HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVEThough vegetarianism has been very popular and practiced in the east since ancient times, in the west it is now fast gaining popularity. However, the history of vegetarianism in the west dates back to 2600 years ago. Pythagoras is generally acknowledged to be the father of Western vegetarianism. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, vegetarians were known as Pythagoreans. He lived about 2,600 years ago and was born into a society where holistic ideas were dominant. For Greeks before the time of Socrates believed, that the world was a living organism which unified all life. Pythagoras developed a view about the transmigration of souls: the belief that on death the soul migrates to the body of another living creature. Pythagoras is famously said to have warned a follower not to eat an animal lest it be his grandmother! For Pythagoreans, all souls spring from the same source and inhabit every living thing. It follows from this that all living things are related and there is literally a kinship of nature.
Among the famous adherents were the Roman poet Ovid, and Porphyry, whose ‘On Abstinence from Animal Food’, published in the third century, is the classic statement of Pythagorean attitudes to vegetarianism. |
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