Mahmut also thinks that ascetic abstinence from flesh elevates the intellect and is the path to spiritual restoration.43 However, in moments of disillusionment, he sardonically reflects that his experiences of religious ecstasy while abstaining from flesh are really the physiological effect of fasting and hyperventilation induced by repeatedly saying prayers (a sceptical critique of asceticism that Bernier deployed in his comments on Indian yogis).44 But despite these scoffs at monasticism, Mahmut remains committed to the morality of vegetarianism and sees it as ‘the way of perfection’ and the route to Paradise.45
His tumultuous wrestling between ethics and appetite is designed as a manual on how to become a vegetarian in real life. Addressing the social difficulties any aspiring vegetarian would have to contend with, Mahmut acknowledges that were his vegetarian sentiments publicly known, his neighbours ‘would censure me as a Heretick, a Fool, or a Madman’.46 Turning away from authorities and reasons, Mahmut ultimately appeals to his human instincts: ‘am I not obliged to obey the Inspirations of my Nature, or Better Genius, which tells me, ‘Tis a Butcherly and Inhuman Life, to feed on slaughtered Animals?’47 At the same time as being an emotional appeal, this also makes the subtle claim that the law of nature is inscribed in every human: this is the voice of nature speaking. There is no doubt that the Turkish Spy promoted the cause of vegetarianism across Europe; it opened the minds of its readers to the far-flung ethics of the Brahmins and recommended treating animals with high standards of justice. Unlike their mystical contemporary Thomas Tryon, the authors of the Turkish Spy advanced their case in a finely tuned voice which blended cool rationality with heartfelt human sympathy.
The Turkish Spy showed what could happen when European norms were abandoned for a fresh examination of man’s relationship with nature, especially when they were held up against the moral example of Indian vegetarianism. But the Turkish Spy was not an isolated case. The scriptural sanction for killing animals was the mainstay for justifying meat-eating. Indeed, one of the principal functions of religion was to create a fundamental distinction between man and beast. Once faith in Scripture was shaken, and people started turning to other ways of codifying behaviour, the ethics of meat-eating became more problematic. Even the defenders of meat-eating in the past had acknowledged that without the express permission from God in Genesis, the idea of eating animals would be repellent and one would do it, as Calvin said, with a ‘doubtful and trembling conscience’.48 One critic of the deists, John Reynolds, realised that one of the worst aspects of dismissing Scripture was that it undermined man’s right to kill animals. He argued that everyone who denied revealed religion should logically be vegetarian. The intelligence of animals, our sympathy for them, the inferior nutritional quality of meat, and the practice of the Indian vegetarians, all suggested that it was wrong to eat flesh: if the Bible and with it God’s permission to kill animals was just a mythical invention, he said, then everyone would have to ‘let the Butcher’s Trade be cashier’d from off the Face of the Earth; let the Shambles be converted into Fruiterer’s Shops, and Herb-Markets …[and] have done with their Ragous, with their Fricassies, and Hashes, made of broken Limbs of dismember’d Brother-Animals.’49 The Bible was the meat-eaters’ greatest bulwark, and the foes of religion were also the biggest enemies of meat.
Man’s dominion and superiority over nature had for millennia been framed by theology. When deists and free-thinkers came to challenge this framework, the distinct boundary between man and nature, which the Judaeo-Christian tradition had reinforced, either vanished or had to be redrawn. Contemplating vegetarianism became a fashionable way of articulating a rejection of orthodox Christianity as a whole. This trend was often coupled with interest in Eastern culture and the use of that perspective in attacking European norms. At the time of the Turkish Spy’s publication, there was a coterie of free-thinkers in Britain who were clearly willing to scrutinise the practice of meat-eating from a radical perspective.
Even before the Turkish Spy, those who questioned religious orthodoxy also often questioned dietary norms. The heretical sixteenth-century ex-Jesuit Guillaume Postel and his followers were among the first ever people to be accused of being ‘Deites’.50 The Inquisition imprisoned Postel for trying to prepare for the second coming by uniting all the world’s religions under his humanist banner and joining forces with the Family of Love. Postel influenced the heretic Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) whose challenge to Christian orthodoxy in turn inspired the Turkish Spy.51 Postel, like the Turkish Spy, was particularly interested in the vegetarian Indians. Poring over the travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ludovico de Varthema among others, Postel was overwhelmed by the virtue of the Indian Brahmins, who, he remarked, ‘abstain from everything that has life like the Pythagoreans’. The Buddhist holy men of Japan, he noted admiringly, also ‘never eat flesh, nor any animals, from fear that the flesh would make them unruly.’ This, he said, was a universal practice ‘approved of from all times’, in which, like the Pythagoreans, the Buddhists exceeded even the purest Christians. He concluded that the Buddhists had originally been Christians who had ‘bit by bit converted the truth of Jesus into the fable of Shiaca [Buddha]’; they and the Brahmins still held divine secrets that had been lost to the West and had constructed these into a perfectly adequate religion through their own superior reasoning faculties.52 Even though skewed by idealism, such syncretic impulses were like porous inlets through which Asian culture influenced the West’s construction of man’s relationship with nature. Renaissance Neoplatonists, India-loving deists and eighteenth-century Orientalists all contributed to changing European culture by importing the Indian perspective.
Most people holding radical anti-Christian views concealed themselves in anonymity, circulating their ideas in clandestine manuscripts, or using ruses like the Turkish Spy to air their ideas in print. Foremost in the British network of deists were Charles Blount (1654–93) and Charles Gildon (1665–1724) and it may be that these two even had a hand in writing the Turkish Spy. (If Charles Blount was involved, his decision to escape government spies and the harangues of his detractors by stoically hanging himself in 1693 would help to explain the embarrassing two-year delay between the publication of the Turkish Spy’s fifth and sixth volumes.53)
In 1680 Blount had used his study of paganism – particularly the writing on Hinduism by Rogerius, Bernier, Tavernier, Roth and Kircher – to assault Christian orthodoxy.54 Blount translated and copiously annotated Philostratus’ biography of the legendary vegetarian, Apollonius. But his critics quickly realised that his book was no simple reservoir of erudition, for beneath its placid surface lurked the serpent of sardonic scepticism.55 There was also a broadside critique of society’s bloodthirsty practices.
In his notes on Apollonius’ attempts to abolish sacrifice, Blount propounded a popular conspiracy theory which blamed the superstitious practice of sacrificing animals on the priesthood who ‘grew so covetous, that nothing but the Blood of Beasts could satiate them’. As well as ensuring a constant supply of ‘Rost-meat to the Priests’, Blount went on, ‘The other concern, viz. of the State in those great Sanguinary Sacrifices, was by innuring the People to such horrid and bloudy Sights … rendring them fitter for the Wars, and thereby more capable either of defending or enlarging their Empire.’ Meat-eating, Blount showed, was a sinister instrument that the state and its conspiratorial