In the user’s guide to alchemy, Michael Maier told aspiring alchemists that the Egyptian priests, Orpheans, Samothracian Cabiri, Persian magi, Brahmins, Ethiopian gymnosophists, and Pythagoreans were all alchemists dedicated to the secrets of nature.83 Maier had even read Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s recent Itinerario and enthusiastically alerted the alchemical and Rosicrucian brotherhoods to the fact that the renowned, frugal Brahmins had survived into the modern world, representing an unbroken chain of alchemical and natural wisdom at least as old as Abraham.84 Newton had read and marked up his copies of Porphyry and Philostratus and owned a copy of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy; he knew that the ancient philosophers purified themselves by abstaining from meat.85 Modern alchemists all agreed that adepts had to be pure and temperate or their efforts would be wasted.86 Even Newton’s favourite prophet Daniel had, according to Josephus (AD 37–100 ), acquired the occult skill of the Chaldaeans by forbearing ‘to eat of all living creatures’.87 Newton once told Conduitt that ‘They who search after the Philosopher’s Stone by their own rules [are] obliged to a strict & religious life,’ and Conduitt commented that ‘Sr I excelled in both.’88 Perhaps when attempting alchemical feats, Newton followed in the footsteps of the ancient wise men, keeping himself pure by refusing to eat animals.89
Newton shared many opinions more usually associated with retrospectively marginalised characters like Thomas Tryon.90 But although by Newton’s contemporaries’ standards such beliefs were far out, his religious opinions can be seen as pushing an Enlightenment agenda. His faith was founded on an empirical observation of the universe (the power of gravity alone was enough to prove the existence of God), and his religion was based on a comparative examination of world cultures. Not only did he challenge entrenched orthodoxies about man’s relationship with nature, he also threw aside the millennia-old detestation of ‘pagans’ and established that they had the same origins as European Christianity.
NINE
Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy
By the end of the seventeenth century, a band of secretive philosophers were taking the inquisitive principles of the early Enlightenment to a logical extreme. Some proponents of the radical Enlightenment merely doubted a few biblical tenets; others rejected religion outright. At the heart of the movement were the deists, who accepted that the world had been divinely created but regarded all other religious doctrines as highly suspect human fabrications. Bundled together by contemporaries and invariably misrepresented in the press, the ‘deists and atheists’ were regarded as the epoch’s greatest threat. At the head of this supposedly demonic alliance stood the apostate Jew Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) whose philosophy spread across Europe in clandestine manuscripts and books, triggering a new wave of thinkers for whom it often seemed – shockingly to Christians – that ‘God’ meant little more than ‘nature’.1 Because they rejected tradition as a basis for morality, they were commonly portrayed as amoral, Godless rakes. But many of these ‘libertines’ believed they were simply ringing the death knell for an outdated system of oppression.
Under the scrutiny of their unflinching gaze, customary treatment of non-Europeans and the natural world came in for a dramatic reappraisal. This effort reached a pinnacle in the incredible eight volumes of Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, purportedly a cache of personal papers penned in Arabic by an Ottoman spy called Mahmut operating in Paris from 1637 to 1682. The letters unfold Mahmut’s story as he lives through this fraught period of Christian – Muslim relations preceding Europe’s final defeat of the Ottoman army in 1683 after narrowly escaping humiliation in the final siege of Vienna. Mahmut’s intelligence despatches to his political masters in Constantinople concerning the European courts’ military actions and political intrigues are interwoven with gripping stories about his escapes from assassination, his failed affair with a married Greek woman, his culture shock and psychological turmoil as a Muslim in Europe. The Turkish Spy is a deeply sympathetic political romance.
The first volume was in fact written by the Francophile Genoan journalist Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–93) after his release from an Italian jail for sedition, and the subsequent seven anonymous volumes may have been the work of a coterie of British authors (with an aberrational sequel added in 1718 by Daniel Defoe).2 From the moment of its first publication, the Turkish Spy was a literary sensation throughout Europe. Among the most popular works of the period, read by adults and children alike, it was published in Italian, French, English, German and Russian; reissued at least thirty times and was still being read more than a century later, not least by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.3
Part of its popularity was due to its position at the vanguard of a new literary genre: the novel. Widely imitated, the Turkish Spy spawned a rash of fabricated collections of letters such as Charles Gildon’s The Post-boy rob’d of his Mail: or, the Pacquet Broke Open (1692), and was a forerunner of Samuel Richardson’s novels. Numerous other copy-cat spy thrillers rolled off the press, including the Golden Spy, Jewish Spy, German Spy, London Spy, York Spy, and Agent of the King of Persia. Mahmut’s role as an outsider in Europe also mirrored that of della Valle and Bernier in their travel narratives which were themselves written in the form of letters and from which the Turkish Spy occasionally copied whole chunks verbatim. Indeed, the Turkish Spy’s sceptical comparison of different cultures was a logical progression from the voice Bernier developed in his travelogues. From this point on, the satirical foreign observer became a standard figure of European literature, perfected, for example, in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Voltaire’s Letters of Amabed (1769) and Eliza Hamilton’s Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796).4
Particularly curious given its popularity is the fact that the Turkish Spy is one of the most radical assaults on established religion to have made it past the censors into print – apparently providing a rare glimpse of the openness to scepticism and even closet deism in Europe.5 In the interests of the plot, Mahmut himself vacillates between the extremes of devout mystical enthusiasm and Epicurean atheism,6 going so far as to suggest that the world is no more than a random conglomeration of atoms ‘Tack’d, and Stitch’d, and Glew’d together, by the Bird-lime of Chance’.7 But the most sustained philosophical position constructed by the Turkish Spy as a whole is revealed when Mahmut declares his allegiance to ‘a Sort of People here in the West, whom they call Deists, that is, Men professing the Belief of a God, Creator of the World, but Scepticks in all Things else’. In a remarkable display of the authors’ knowledge of Islamic history, Mahmut aligns himself and the European deists with the tenth-century coterie of irenic Neoplatonist Muslims based in Basra and Baghdad, the Ikhwan al-Safa. Mahmut says correctly that the ‘Sincere Fraternity’ (as he calls them) made inviolable pacts and met in secret clubs to discuss all topics ‘with an Unrestrained Freedom … without regarding the Legends and Harangues of the Mollahs’.8
The Turkish Spy evaded prosecution for irreligion partly by disavowing its most execrable opinions as belonging to the ‘Muslim’ writer.9 But even the moments when Mahmut professes pious adherence to Islam – despite his denials that there is any solid basis for doing so – are surreptitious rhetorical devices used by the authors to show that dogmatic faith in any religion (including Christianity) is absurd. His argument for the authenticity of the Qur’an is a mirror image of the Christian defence of the Bible; if European readers were to dismiss one, they had to dismiss the other. Likewise, his withering demolition of Judaeo-Christian mythology, his fears of the Inquisition’s lethal persecution, and his passionate yearning to share his religious doubts, are neatly consistent both with Mahmut’s Muslim identity and with the anonymous free-thinking authors who spoke through him.10
Religions are human inventions, and ceremonial prayers, declares Mahmut, are nothing but ‘Hocus-Pocus-Whispers’.11 ‘What signifies it,’ he asks in a classic statement of indifferentism, ‘whether we believe the Written Law or the Alcoran; whether we are Disciples of Moses, Jesus, or Mahomet; Followers of Aristotle,
Plato, Pythagoras, Epicurus, or Ilch Rend Hu the Indian Brahmin?’12 With its liberal Muslim hero arguing that religious affiliation was little more than social conformity,13 the Turkish Spy opened the door to an unusually favourable view of Ottoman Islamic culture (which, it showed, was no more or less legitimate than European Christianity).14
Having cleared the ground with the bulldozer of scepticism, Mahmut proceeds to display an astonishingly fervent admiration for one particular religious group: the Indian Brahmins.15 An ardent reader of Indian travelogues, and frustrated with the biased accounts of Jesuit missionaries, he begs his masters to send him as their agent to the Great Mughal so he can interview the Brahmins himself. ‘There is nothing that I have a greater Passion for these many Years,’ he declares, ‘than … to converse with the Bramins, and pry into the Mysteries of their Unknown Wisdom, which occasions so much Discourse in the World. I know not what ails me, but I promise my self more Satisfaction from their Books … or from the Lips of those Priests … than from all the Prophets and Sages in the World.’16
Indeed, it transpires that the Brahmins are a linchpin in the Turkish Spy’s attack on Christianity, for Mahmut snidely points out that their ancient Sanskrit scriptures – as the recent travelogues had revealed to the discombobulation of Christians – described events that happened many thousands of years before the biblical beginning of the world. The realisation that Indian history pre-dated everything in the Bible struck a blow to Christianity, and it gave powerful ammunition to the sceptics’ argument that religions were products of history’s tangled thicket and not transcendent truths.17
Having loosened Christianity’s stranglehold over moral norms, and also established India as an alternative moral platform, the seven anonymous volumes of the Turkish Spy then launch into an attack on one of Europe’s most basic tenets: man’s right over nature.18
Putting Europeans to shame by contrasting them to the humane Indians, Mahmut declares that ‘India is at Present the onely Publick Theatre of Justice toward all Living Creatures.’ The idea of applying justice to animals flew in the face of all expected norms. And yet, Mahmut intends to convert his readers to this cause: ‘I have been long an Advocate for the Brutes, and have endeavour’d to abstain from injuring them my self, and to inculcate this Fundamental Point of Justice to others.’19 Mahmut’s effusions about Indian vegetarianism often replicate passages in John Ovington’s Voyage to Suratt (which, strangely, was not published until 1696); but the Turkish Spy transformed the dreamy utopian tradition of prelapsarian harmony into the much more radical demand for real legislative or moral reform.20
In Mahmut’s opinion, Hinduism had preserved what was once a universal law of nature to which all cultures bear vestigial testimony.21 Beginning with Islam, Mahmut claims that Muhammad the Holy Prophet charmed animals and discoursed with them just like Orpheus, Apollonius or St Jerome. In repayment for his kindness, wild animals listened to Muhammad’s preaching and a leopard guarded his cave ‘and did all the Offices of a kind and faithful Servant’.22 Mahmut concedes that the Prophet ‘did not positively enjoin Abstinence from Flesh’, but insists that he recommended it and that his first disciples refrained ‘from Murdering the Brutes’. Transposing onto Islam arguments familiar from vegetarian Bible glosses, Mahmut adds that the Qur’anic food laws were designed to make it as difficult as possible to eat flesh.23
Turkish ‘charity’ to animals was by then a familiar trope: Francis Bacon compared the Turks to Pythagoras and the Brahmins for bestowing ‘almes upon Bruit Creatures’, while George Sandys described their universal ‘charitie’ of which Samuel Purchas had commented that ‘Mahometans may in this be examples to Christians.’24 Other commentators were more critical of their soft-heartedness, and, as a Turk himself, Mahmut lamented that bigoted Europeans ‘censure the Mussulmans, for extending their Charity to Beasts, Birds and Fishes … who, in their Opinion, have neither Souls nor Reason’.25 Mahmut’s aim is to isolate Western Christians with regard to their rapacious treatment of animals.
Next, Mahmut enrols Judaism to the cause, writing to his Jewish confederate that the Mosaic law ‘obliges all of thy Nation to certain specifick Tendernesses towards the Dumb Animals’. (That the law contradicts itself by also instituting barbaric sacrifices, argues Mahmut, only shows that the Bible is a hopelessly unreliable ‘Collection of Fragments patch’d up’.26) The true original law, explains Mahmut, having heard the story from the legendary ‘wandering Jew’, was still maintained by the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. This isolated stock, he says, reside beyond a mountain range in northern Asia living off the fruit of the land, adhering to the common oath: ‘I will not taste of the Flesh of any Animal, but in all things observe the Abstinence commanded by Allah to Moses on the Mount.’ While the Christians and Jews had debased their Bible so much that they believed that the law ‘Thou shalt not Kill’ only applied to humans, the lost tribes (and to some extent the modern Muslims) had not forgotten that ‘This Prohibition … extends to all Living Creatures.’27 At the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Mahmut identifies a long-lost vegetarian dictate.
Christianity too, ventures Mahmut, was originally vegetarian. Like Thomas Tryon and Roger Crab, he invokes John the Baptist (who did not eat ‘locusts’ as the translations of the Bible stated, but, as a true rendering of the Greek revealed, ‘plant buds’ like asparagus28), Jesus’ brother James, and even Jesus himself, who ‘was the most Temperate and Abstemious Man in the World’.29 Jesus, he claims, was a member of the Essenes, the ascetic Jewish sect who ‘would rather suffer Martyrdom, than be prevail’d on to taste of any Thing that had Life in it’.30
Mahmut doesn’t stop there. He finds vegetarianism in all cultures: ancient Egyptian, Persian, Athenian, Druidic, Lacedemonian, Spartan, Manichean and ‘almost all Nations of the East’. His taxonomic collation of the world’s civilisations is a stepping stone between the Renaissance prisci theologi and eighteenth-century Orientalism. Making Neoplatonism and deism bedfellows, he fervently declares that he is ‘inflam’d afresh with Pythagorism, Platonism, and Indianism’.31
For the most part, Mahmut recognises that cultural values are arbitrary; but if something occurred universally, it was reasonable to suggest that it was natural (a deduction not so far from those of modern sociobiology). In comparing world cultures, the Turkish Spy came to the same conclusion as Isaac Newton, Thomas Tryon and no doubt numerous other contemporaries: that the universal law of nature ‘to do as you would be done by’ applied to animals as well as humans. Vegetarianism, he concludes, is based on ‘the Fundamental Law of Nature, the Original Justice of the World, which teaches us, Not to do that to another, which we wou’d not have another do to us. Now, since ‘tis evident, That no Man wou’d willingly become the Food of Beasts; therefore, by the same Rule, he ought not to prey on them.’32 ‘In a Word,’ Mahmut declares, ‘let us love all of [the] Human Race, and shew Justice and Mercy to the Brutes.’33
Thomas Hobbes had argued in Leviathan (1651) that ‘doing as one would be done by’ was a mutual contract which it was impossible to make with the beasts because they did not understand human speech. The Turkish Spy used its empirical analysis of world cultures and its ethnographic description of Hinduism to challenge the basis of Hobbes’ argument. In a scene reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne’s affectionate sport with his cat, Mahmut pointedly explains how the social contract can be undersigned without the use of verbal language: ‘I contract Familiarities with the Harmless Animals,’ he explains. ‘I study like a Lover to oblige and win their Hearts, by all the tender Offices I can perform … Then when we once begin to understand each other aright, they make me a Thousand sweet Returns of Gratitude according to their Kind.’34 Identifying the reciprocal agreement as a natural law meant that the social contract was embedded in nature, and thus animals were bound by it too.
Western Christians, by contrast, had manipulated the Bible to give them authority for their abhorrent behaviour: ‘They assert, That all Things were mad
e for Man, and style him Lord of his Fellow-Creatures; as if …[they] were Created onely to serve his Appetite.’35 The Bible itself was not at fault. It had been wilfully co-opted to justify Christians’ gluttony, cruelty and pride, providing a mandate for the ‘Epicurism of those, who ransack all the Elements for Dainties’.36 The true Christian message, argued Mahmut, was encapsulated in the harmony of Paradise which was an image of the original state of the world when man and beast did as they would be done by. By decoding the prelapsarian myth as anthropological data, the Turkish Spy showed that even Christianity enshrined a mandate for the natural law regarding animals.
To show that adherence to nature’s laws was still a viable option, the authors of the Turkish Spy put Mahmut into regular correspondence with five living vegetarians. Most prominent of them is Mahmut’s spiritual guru, Mahummed the Hermit, who lives in a cave on Mount Uriel and has recreated harmony with the animal kingdom – just like the Prophet – converting the idea of saintly kindness to animals into a manifesto for interspecific egalitarianism.37 Others include a Christian hermit, a Muslim monk and Mirmadolin the mendicant who ‘suck’d the Milk’ of Mother Earth like the first inhabitants of the world.38 Mahmut writes to them about other vegetarian hermits such as ‘Ilch Rend Hu’, the centenarian miracle-working hermit of Kashmir described by François Bernier.39
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