A group of people decide to promote the abandonment of all products of animal origin in the last year of World War II. Vitamin B12 is still unknown and there is no recipe book in the country that is exclusively plant-based. What does exist are attacks by the Nazis and severe rationing. When everyone is hungry and hungry, this group comes together to formalize their commitment to an even more restrictive diet, inconceivably restrictive by the normal standards of that culture. What led you to do it?
The motives of the pioneering Western vegan collective, the Vegan Society of the United Kingdom, are difficult to fathom, even with all the information we have today. On the one hand, they have been cut, consciously or unconsciously, by later generations (like the apparent leather shoes in the wedding photo of Donald Watson and Dorothy Morgan), as they do not fit with the idea that those generations had of veganism. On the other hand, the same protagonists censored some of their personal commitments and concerns, with the aim of creating a platform that was as broad and inclusive as possible.
It is, therefore, impossible to reconstruct in detail the ideas of the key figures of the first Vegan Society. However, there is enough in the public record to conclude that the motivations are quite different from those that will become common in veganism from the 1980s onwards. This cannot be emphasized enough: veganism, at its origins, has little to see with animal activism, just as animal activism will avoid addressing the challenge of veganism for a long time (and in part it continues to avoid it, in 2024). Veganism formed, in its first generations, a total worldviewwith a deep ecosocial consciousness, a spiritual background and a clear historical perspective.
Roger Yates, who studied the sociology of the movement, suggests that the Vegan Society was established, not despite the war, but in answer to it, when its founders realized that “recent history had revealed some form of involution of humanity.” The Society’s earliest documents show a concern for human evolutionary progress, both physical and mental. Foods of animal origin are considered an obstacle to such progress: the first page of the first magazine they published, The Vegan Newsasks whether “as a result of eliminating all animal vibrations from our diet, we can discover the path not only to the construction of truly healthy cells, but also to a degree of intuition and psychic perception unknown at present.” The first manifest of the group (1944) categorically states that, “if the curse of (animal) exploitation were eradicated, spiritual influences, operating for good, would develop conditions that would ensure a greater degree of happiness and prosperity for all.”
Donald Watson He is today the most remembered of the founders of the Society, the main person in charge of organization and writing in its early years. Watson preferred an objective presentation of vegetarianism, which will avoid creeds, personal idiosyncrasies, and “exaggerated claims” to focus on shared beliefs and accepted scientific facts. However, a persistent occult interest is evident in the years to come. In the first number of The Veganfrom 1946, Watson claims to have received from a kind of dowser “some evidence that occult powers can be developed (in a diet) without milk.” Such “hidden powers” remained central to his vision of veganism. In one interview of senescence (1) stated that food can be converted “into spiritual enlightenment,” suggesting “the spiritual advances that veganism will have on human life in the long term: understood not over years or even decades, but over generations.” . A year before his death in 2005, Watson he reiterated his lifelong interest in “cultivating ‘the latent powers in Man’” (cut phrase theosophical) and wondered, in line with that 1944 manifesto, “if eating guilt-free food for a long time can turn our bodies into better ‘receiving sets’ for whatever wisdom is in the environment.”
Donald Watson defined So the first vegan circle: “We were not religious in any orthodox sense, but we did accept that our consciousness could not have arisen if the universe consisted only of rock, liquid, gas and space.” That is to say, they were all spiritualists, in the broad sense, and this is demonstrated by almost all those who have left writings. A crucial marriage in the primitive nucleus was the Henderson. G. Allan Henderson coincided with Watson that the vegan lifestyle produces “a spiritual uplift,” with “greater physical energy and increased mental activity.” His wife Fay (née Jones) introduced veganism, in a article of 1947 on “Vegan Values,” as a way of respecting “the rhythmic flow of divine forms”: if humans return to their natural herbivory, restoring the order of life that “emanates from the Divine Source,” they become into “a channel of service through which the forces of good can operate.” (Donald Watson, at the time, rejected emanantist or pantheistic ideas, favoring “the orthodox theory of a personal god”).
The memory of the first veganism was meticulously pruned to eliminate its connections with esotericism, theosophy, frugivorism or naturopathy. A description of the first meeting of the Vegan Society includes, as an “interested observer,” the Russian Barbara Moore (Anna Cherkasova), a future respirationist who even predicted that she would live to be 150 years old and have her first child at 100 (died at 73). For its part, the first The vegan group’s publication proclaimed—and many members continued to believe for decades—“that the anatomy of man is unquestionably frugivorous.” As late as 1968, most vegans seem to be “followers of Natural Healing”.
Some observers attribute Leslie J. Cross a first break with this background bordering on spirituality and alternative therapies. Such would simply be the eccentricities that surrounded the vegetarian scene at the time, and Cross, who began to distance veganism from them. Cross is the most important of the early vegan thinkers, as well as the first systematic one, responsible for expanding the definition of veganism to cover all forms of animal exploitation. His two-part 1949 article, “In Search of Veganism”, represents a first historical moment of vegan self-reflection.
Now: why not exploit other sentient beings? Much has been written about the differences between Cross and Watson, but a simplified and anachronistic version of their ideas is often used, which ignores that both were, above all, “spiritual” vegans. Cross’s emphasis on animal exploitation does not respond to utilitarian or deontological arguments, such as those styled in the last half century, but to a conception of evolutionary progress inherent to vegans of his generation: institutionalized cruelty against animals.is destined to constantly return like a boomerang over humanity’s own head”, enlivening nature inferior of the man who captures his soul. In these coordinates lies “the true and indelible meaning of veganism.”
Cross wrote that phrase groundbreaking, legendary: “Veganism is not so much well-being as liberation.” The coda is less well known: “for creatures and for the mind and heart of man.” Dairy products are, as we know, “products of pain, suffering and an abominable interference in the law of love”, but ignoring this also obstructs “our own spiritual evolution.” In a called to “animal emancipation,” Cross attributes some human diseases to “foods that have an immoral basis.” Like Watson, he believed in “the non-physical, vibrational properties of food.” The adoption of veganism will bring “an immense change of heart and mind in the majority of men and women”, as a result of which the human being will abandon “much of what is crude in his nature” and will obtain “benefits that today by his own short-sighted volition he denies to himself” . Cross concludes: “We are in the very initial stages of the new mutation.”
Leslie Cross seems to be a bridge between an early veganism that was more bordering on spirituality (it was of Quaker origin) and the abolitionist activism of later decades. But even this author so in tune with current animalism—and justly celebrated for it—did not lose sight of a broad conception of the destiny of humanity and its position in the universe. The transition to a more political veganism was not smooth: for several decades, animal activists disengaged from veganism and Vegan Societies (British and American) were careful to venture into activist territory. And before this final and late synthesis will come environmentalism, the pursuit of new food production techniques and a generation of leaders and editors who will elaborate occult vegan cosmologies, esoterically formalizing those initial intuitions about the moral order of the world.
(1) Although the most widespread opinion at the time was that they would die soon, the opposite happened for many of the early members of the Vegan Society whose dates we know (and who maintained the diet until the end): Donald Watson died at 95 years old, Catherine Nimmo at 97, Mary Bryniak at 91, Mable Cluer one month away from 104.
Source: www.eldiario.es
