An Internet search for John Zephaniah HOLWELL (1711–98) produces thousands of references, most of which contain the words “Black Hole.” The back cover of Jan Dalley’s The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire explains:
The story of the Black Hole of Calcutta was once drilled into every British schoolchild: how in 1756 the Nawab of Bengal attacked Fort William and locked the survivors in a tiny cell, where over a hundred souls died in insufferable heat. British retribution was swift and merciless, and led to much of India falling completely under colonial domination.1
Dalley’s book tells the story of this foundation myth of the British Empire, a myth that was “based on improbable exaggeration and half-truth” and “helped justify the march of empire for two hundred years” (2007: back cover). The reason Holwell is associated with this myth is that he was its creator. When Holwell’s account of the dreadful night in the Black Hole was printed in 1758, it provoked scandal and horror. Fueled by numerous reprints, the story soon became an event of mythic proportions, a symbol of the fall of Calcutta and the beginning of empire that Dalley lines up with the likes of the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Wounded Knee (2007:199). According to Hartmann (1946:195) this story was “about as well-known in the English-speaking world as the fact that Napoleon was Emperor of France”; but the fact that this statement occurs in a paper titled “A Case Study in the Perpetuation of Error” points to the raging controversy about the “Question of Holwell’s Veracity,” as J. H. Little put it in the title of his influential 1915 article. Having examined Holwell’s original Black Hole report line by line, Little arrived at the conclusion that the whole episode was a gigantic hoax. Hartmann summarized Little’s observations as follows:
Specifically, Little shows that Holwell (1) fabricated a speech and fathered it on the Nawab Alivardi Khan; (2) brought false charges against the British puppet ruler of Bengal, the Nawab Mir Jafar, accusing him of massacring persons all of whom were later shown to be alive . . . (3) forged a whole book and called it a translation from the ancient sacred writings of the Hindus. (Hartmann 1946:196)
Hartmann defended Holwell against the last accusation by portraying him as a possible victim of fraud rather than a forger:
This last might be defended on Holwell’s behalf if we assume him to have been victimized by some Brahmin or pundit who enjoyed pulling a foreigner’s leg; but certainly the first two cases have a brazen political significance also possessed by the similar story of the Black Hole. (pp. 196–97)
The book that Holwell (according to Little) forged and sold as a translation from the ancient sacred writings of the Hindus was the very Chartah Bhade Shastah that Voltaire from 1769 onward so stridently promoted as monotheism’s oldest testament (see Chapter 1). Is there any evidence that Holwell’s Chartah Bhade Shastah is a brazen forgery? Some modern historians and Indologists have tried to identify the text translated by Holwell, thereby absolving him of the charge of having invented the whole text. For example, A. Leslie Willson thought that Holwell had adapted a genuine Indian text:
John Z. Holwell (1711–1798), a former governor of Bengal and a survivor of the famed Black Hole of Calcutta, gives an account of his favorable impression of the religious and moral precepts of India. Because of his acquaintance with one of the holy books of the Hindus (the Sanskrit Satapatha-brâhmana, called the Chartah Bhade in Holwell’s adaptation), he believed he discerned a great influence of Indic culture upon other lands in ancient times. The more familiar he became with the Sanskrit work, the more clearly he claimed to see that the mythology as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans was borrowed from the teachings of the Brahmans contained in the Satapatha-brâhmana. Even the extreme rituals of Hindu worship and the classification of Indic gods found their way West, although extremely falsified and truncated. (Willson 1964:24)
Based on the authority of Johannes Grundmann (1900:71), Willson claimed that Holwell’s source, the Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, was later lost (p. 24). In The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, P. J. Marshall argued that “judging by the words which he reproduces, Holwell must have made his translation out of a Hindustani version” but added that “the original of Holwell’s Shastah cannot be identified” (Marshall 1970:46). Marshall, who took the trouble of annotating Holwell’s Shastah text, thus seems to have regarded it not as a literary hoax or an invention but as a translation of a genuine Indian text, albeit not from Sanskrit but from a Hindustani original. More recent research has questioned earlier opinions but otherwise hardly advanced matters.
In the introduction to the 2000 reprint of Holwell’s text, M. J. Franklin calls the Shastah text “a text which must remain rather dubious as Holwell asserted it covered all doctrine, and no independent record of such a work exists” (Holwell 2000:xiii). Franklin and other recent authors all rely on Thomas Trautmann’s excellent study Aryans and British India, which found that Holwell’s book “contains what purport to be translations from a mysterious ancient Hindu text, Chartah Bhade Shastah (Sanskrit, Catur Veda Śāstra), a work not heard of since” (1997:30). Trautmann characterized Holwell’s “supposed translations of the supposed ancient Shaster” as “obscure and dubious” (p. 33), his Indian sources as “not otherwise known, before or since,” and the details of his account as “confusing” (p. 68). Thus, his valiant attempt to identify Holwell’s Indian sources2 ended with a sigh: “It is all rather murky and more than a little suspicious” (pp. 68–69).
According to his obituary in the Asiatic Annual Register for 1799 (1801:25– 30), John Zephaniah Holwell was born in Dublin on September 17, 1711. At age 12 the intelligent boy won a prize for classical learning but was soon sent by his father as a merchant apprentice to Holland, where he learned Dutch and French. Before he turned eighteen, he became a surgeon’s apprentice in England, and at age twenty he embarked as a surgeon’s mate on a ship sailing to Bengal. As surgeon of a frigate of the East India Company, he soon was on the way to the Persian Gulf and studied Arabic, and on his return to Calcutta he also learned some Portuguese and Hindi. At the young age of twenty-three, he was appointed surgeon-major, and after another trip to the Gulf he could speak Arabic “with tolerable fluency” (p. 27). During his residence in Dacca, he was “indefatigable in improving himself in the Moorish and Hinduee tongues” and began “his researches into the Hindû theology” (p. 27). Back in Calcutta, he quickly rose through the ranks; at age 29 he was appointed assistant surgeon to the hospital, and in 1746 (age 35), he became principal physician and surgeon to the presidency of the Company. In 1747 and 1748, he was successively elected mayor of the corporation. In the winter of 1749/50, he returned for the first time from India to England. It was for health reasons, and while recuperating, he enjoyed the leisure “to arrange his materials on the theology and doctrines of the ancient and modern Brahmans.” Only after his return to India did he become acquainted “with the Chartah Bhade of Bramah,” of which he claims to have translated a considerable part (Holwell 1765:3). During the sack of Calcutta when the Black Hole incident took place, Holwell allegedly lost both the Indian manuscripts of the Chartah Bhade Shastah and his English translation.
After this incident Holwell had to sail back to Europe for the second time, and this time he used his sojourn to publish the famous Black Hole narrative (1758). Upon his return to India, he became governor of Bengal for a few months but was soon replaced. During the last eight months of his long stay in India, he was “freed from the plagues of government” and reassumed his researches into Indian religion “with tolerable success” when “some manuscripts” happened to be “recovered by an unforeseen and extraordinary event” (p. 4), which Holwell never explained. In 1761, at age 50, he returned to England for the third and final time and lived there for almost four leisurely decades until his death in 1798 at the age of 87. Of particular interest among the books published during these decades are the three volumes of Interesting historical events, relative to the provinces of Bengal, and the empire of Indostan (1765, 1767, 1771) and his Dissertations on the Origin, Nature, and Pursuits, of Intelligent Beings, and on Divine Providence, Religion, and Religious Worship of 1786.
In order to understand Holwell’s pursuit and intention, one needs to examine not only the second volume of his Interesting historical events (1767), which contains the Chartah Bhade Shastah “translation” with his commentary, but also the first and third volumes. The title page of the first volume (1765) indicates that Holwell had from the outset planned a three-part work of which the first was to present the historical events of India during the first half of the eighteenth century, the second “the mythology and cosmogony, fasts and festivals of the Gentoos, followers of the Shastah,” and the third “a dissertation on the metempsychosis.” In the first volume (published in 1765 and revised in 1766), there is an easily overlooked account that is crucial for understanding both the “Question of Holwell’s Veracity” and the character of his Chartah Bhade. Modern scholars paid no attention to it, but Voltaire highlighted this sensational report by Holwell in chapter 35 of his Fragmens sur l’Inde under the heading “Portrait of a singular people in India” (Voltaire 1774:212–16). Voltaire wrote:
Among so much desolation a region of India has enjoyed profound peace; and in the midst of the horrible moral depravation, it has preserved the purity of its ancient morality. It is the country of Bishnapore or Vishnapore. Mr. Holwell, who has travelled through it, says that it is situated in north-west Bengal and that it takes sixty days of travel to traverse it. (p. 212)
Quickly calculating the approximate size of this blessed territory, Voltaire concluded that “it would be much larger than France” (p. 212), and exhibited some of his much-evoked “complete trust” in Holwell by accusing him of “some exaggeration” (p. 212). But Voltaire did not exclude the possibility that it was someone else’s fault, for example, “a printing error, which is all too common in books” (p. 212). Instead of double-checking the number in his copy of Holwell’s book (which on p. 197 has “sixteen days” rather than “sixty”), Voltaire proceeded to correct Holwell:
We had better believe that the author meant [it takes] sixty days [to walk] around the territory, which would result in 100 [French] miles of diameter. [The country] yields 3.5 million rupees per year to its sovereign, which corresponds to 8,200,000 pounds. This revenue does not seem proportionate to the surface of the territory. (pp. 212–13)
Feigning astonishment, Voltaire adds: “What is even more surprising is that Bishnapore is not at all found on our maps” (p. 212). Could Holwell have invented this country? Of course not! “It is not permitted to believe that a state employee of known probity would have wanted to get the better of simple people. He would be too guilty and too easily refuted” (p. 212). When reporting biblical events that defy logic, Voltaire often cut the discussion short with a sarcastic exhortation to his readers to stop worrying about reason and to embrace faith. Here he “consoles” readers who are surprised that this blissful country is not found on any map with the tongue-in-cheek remark: “The reader will be even more pleasantly surprised that this country is inhabited by the most gentle, the most just, the most hospitable, and the most generous people that have ever rendered our earth worthy of heaven” (p. 213).
Today we know that Bisnapore (Bishnupur) is located only 130 kilometers northwest of Calcutta (Kolkata). The city is famous for its terracotta craft and Baluchari sarees made of tussar silk and was for almost a thousand years the capital of the Malla kings of Mallabhum. But Holwell’s report carries a far more paradisiacal perfume. The country that he reportedly visited is portrayed as the happiest in the world. It is protected from surrounding regions by an ingenious system of waterways and lock gates that gives the reigning Rajah the “power to overflow his country, and drown any enemy that comes against him.” Holwell, ever the sly and devoted colonial administrator, suggests that the British could avoid an invasion and easily bring the country to its knees through an export blockade that would oblige the Rajah to pay the British as much as two million rupees per annum (Holwell 1766:1.197–98). But, of course, this was just an innocent idea and by no means a call for the colonialization of paradise:
But in truth, it would be almost cruelty to molest these happy people; for in this district, are the only vestiges of the beauty, purity, piety, regularity, equity, and strictness of the ancient Indostan government. Here the property, as well as the liberty of the people, are inviolate. Here, no robberies are heard of, either private or public. (p. 198)
When a foreigner such as Holwell enters this country, he “becomes the immediate care of the government; which allots him guards without any expence, to conduct him from stage to stage: and these are accountable for the safety and accommodation of his person and effects” (p. 198). Goods are duly recorded, certified, and transported free of charge. “In this form, the traveller is passed through the country; and if he only passes, he is not suffered to be at any expence for food, accommodation, or carriage for his merchandize or baggage” (p. 199). Furthermore, the people of Bisnapore are totally honest:
If any thing is lost in this district; for instance, a bag of money, or other valuable; the person who finds it, hangs it up on the next tree, and gives notice to the nearest Chowkey or place of guard; the officer of which, orders immediate publication of the same by beat of tomtom, or drum. (p. 199)
The country is graced by 360 magnificent pagodas erected by the Rajah and his ancestors, and the cows are venerated to such a degree that if one suffers violent death, the whole city or village remains in mourning and fasts for three days; nobody is allowed to displace him- or herself, and all must perform the expiations prescribed by the very Chartah Bhade Shastah whose existence and content Holwell herewith first announced to the world (pp. 199–200).
The country described by Holwell is a carefully delimited territory within whose boundaries time seems to have stood still since the proclamation of the Chartah Bhade Shastah several thousand years ago. Its elaborate water management system with lock gates and canals offers total protection from the dangers of the outside world, and within its boundaries perfect honesty, piety, purity, morality, tolerance, liberty, generosity, and prosperity reign since time immemorial. Surely some of Holwell’s and Voltaire’s readers must have asked themselves why—given the free transport, food, accommodation, and even health care for visitors—Mr. Holwell was the only person ever to transmit the good news about this paradisiacal enclave at Calcutta’s doorstep. Is it too farfetched to think that Holwell endowed Bisnapore with its ideal characteristics in order to prepare the ground for the Chartah Bhade Shastah in the second volume of his Interesting events? If a real country with a real economy existed—a country whose religion was strictly based on the Chartah Bhade Shastah and whose rites had followed this text to the letter for millennia—then the existence of this ancient sacred text could not be subject to doubt, could it?
Of course, Holwell was not the first person to imagine a paradise in or near India; medieval world maps are full of interesting information about it. In the year 883, about eight hundred years before Holwell wrote about Bisnapore, a Jew by the name of Eldad ha-Dani (“Eldad of the tribe of Dan”) showed up in Tunisia.3 Presenting himself as a member of one of the ten lost tribes of Israel (which according to Eldad continued to flourish in Havilah), he told the local Jews a story that could have been written by Holwell. Beyond the boundaries of the known world, somewhere in Asia, he claimed, four tribes of the “sons of Moses” continue to lead pure lives protected by a river of rolling stones and sand called Sambatyon, and their laws and texts remain unchanged since antiquity.4 Their Talmud is written in the purest Hebrew, and their children never die as long as the parents are alive. Eldad supported his own credibility by an impressive genealogy stretching back to Dan, the son of Jacob. Eldad’s tales provoked an inquiry addressed to the rabbinical academy in Sura, Babylon; and while not much is known about the further fate of Eldad, his story pops up here and there in medieval manuscripts. Eventually, the inquiry triggered by his account and the response it received were printed in Mantua in 1480 (Wasserstein 1996:215).
About three centuries after Eldad, in 1122, a story with many similar elements began to make the rounds in Europe, and its protagonist ended up as a prominent feature on numerous illustrated world maps. It was the tale of John, archbishop of India, who had reportedly traveled to Constantinople and Rome. Patriarch John was said to be the guardian of the shrine of St. Thomas, the favorite disciple of Jesus; and through his Indian capital, so the story went, flow the “pure waters of the Physon, one of the rivers of Paradise, which gives to the world outside most precious gold and jewels, whence the regions of India are extremely rich” (Hamilton 1996:173).
In 1145, Otto von Freising also heard of “a certain John, king and priest, who lived in the extreme east beyond Armenia and Persia.” He reportedly was of the race of the very Magi who had come to worship the infant Christ at Bethlehem (p. 174). Otto first connected Prester John with the Magi and with Archbishop John, and soon after the completion of his History in 1157 three corpses exhumed in a church in Milan were identified as the bodies of the Three Magi (pp. 180–81). These relics were solemnly transported to the Cologne cathedral in 1164 and became objects of a religious cult (p. 183). It is around this time that a letter signed by a Prester John began to circulate in western Europe. In his letter Prester John portrays himself as the extremely rich and powerful ruler of the Three Indies, whose subjects include the Ten Lost Tribes beyond the river Sambatyon. Prester John claims to live very close to Paradise and emphasizes that he guards the grave of St. Thomas, the apostle of Jesus.
Though the country described in Prester John’s letter is richer and far larger than Holwell’s Bisnapore, it is also extremely hospitable and its inhabitants are perfectly moral: “There are no robbers among us; no sycophant finds a place here, and there is no miserliness” (Zarncke 1996:83). As in Holwell’s Bisnapore, “nobody lies, nor can anybody lie” (p. 84). All inhabitants of Prester John’s country “follow the truth and love one another;” there is “no adulterer in the land, and there is no vice” (p. 84).
The Prester John story became so widely known that the famous patriarch became a fixture on medieval world maps as well as a major motivation for the exploration of Asia (from the thirteenth century) and Africa (from the fifteenth century).5
Another layer in the archaeology of Holwell’s Indian paradise can be found in the famous Travels of Sir John Mandeville of the fourteenth century, a book that fascinated countless readers and travelers as well as researchers.6 Mandeville’s “isle of Bragman”—like Prester John’s Indies, Eldad’s land beyond the Sambatyon, and Holwell’s Bisnapore—is a marvelous land. Its inhabitants, though not Christians, “by natural instinct or law . . . live a commendable life, are folk of great virtue, flying away from all sins and vices and malice” (Moseley 1983:178). The still unidentified Mandeville, who habitually calls countries “isles,” described a great many of them in his Travels. But the country of the “Bragmans” (Brachmans, Brahmins) is by far the most excellent:
This isle these people live in is called the Isle of Bragman; and some men call it the Land of Faith. Through it runs a great river, which is called Thebe. Generally all the men of that isle and of other isles nearby are more trustworthy and more righteous than men in other countries. In this land are no thieves, no murderers, no prostitutes, no liars, no beggars; they are men as pure in conversation and as clean in living as if they were men of religion. And since they are such true and good folk, in their country there is never thunder and lightning, hail nor snow, nor any other storms and bad weather; there is no hunger, no pestilence, no war, nor any other common tribulations among them, as there are among us because of our sins. And therefore it seems that God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life and their faith. (p. 178)
Of course, the antediluvian patriarchs of the Old Testament who lived many years before Abraham and Moses were not yet Jews blessed with the special covenant with God, something only conferred finally after the Exodus from Egypt at Mt. Sinai, much less Christians. But the virtues of these antediluvians were so great that they enjoyed extremely long life spans. Mandeville’s Bragmans, too, though ignorant of God’s commandments as conveyed to Moses, are said to “keep the Ten Commandments” (p. 178) and enjoy the benefits:
They believe in God who made all things, and worship Him with all their power; all earthly things they set at nought. They live so temperately and soberly in meat and drink that they are the longest-lived people in the world; and many of them die simply of age, when their vital force runs out. (p. 178)
Like Holwell’s inhabitants of Bisnapore, they are a people without greed and want; all “goods, movable and immovable, are common to every man,” and their wealth consists in peace, concord, and the love of their neighbor. Other countries in the vicinity of the land of the Bragmans for the most part also follow their customs while “living innocently in love and charity each with another.” Almost like Adam and Eve in paradise before they sinned, these people “go always naked” and suffer no needs (p. 179).
And even if these people do not have the articles of our faith, nevertheless I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature, and their good intent, God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan, yet nevertheless his deeds were as acceptable to God as those of His loyal servants. (p. 180)
Mandeville’s naked people are extremely ancient and have “many prophets among them” since antiquity. Already “three thousand years and more before the time of His Incarnation,” they predicted the birth of Christ; but they have not yet learned of “the manner of His Passion” (p. 180). These regions that evoke paradise and antediluvian times form part of the empire of Prester John. Mandeville explains: “This Emperor Prester John is a Christian, and so is the greater part of his land, even if they do not have all the articles of the faith as clearly as we do. Nevertheless they believe in God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost; they are a very devout people, faithful to each other, and there is neither fraud nor guile among them” (p. 169). In Prester John’s land, there are many marvels and close by, behind a vast sea of gravel and sand, are “great mountains, from which flows a large river that comes from Paradise” (p. 169).
The lands described by Eldad, Prester John, Mandeville, and Holwell share some characteristics that invite exploration. The first concerns the fact that all are associated with “India” and the vicinity of earthly paradise. In the Genesis account (2.8 ff.) God, immediately after having formed Adam from the dust of the ground, “planted a garden eastward of Eden” and put Adam there. He equipped this garden with trees “pleasant to the sight, and good for food,” as well as the tree of life at the center of the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The story continues:
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pishon: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2.10–12)
The locations of this “land of Havilah” and the river Pishon (or Phison) are unclear, but the other rivers are better known. The second river, Gihon, “compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia,” the third (Hiddekel) “goeth to the east of Assyria,” and the fourth river is identified as the Euphrates (Genesis 2.13–14). In his Antiquities, written toward the end of the first century C.E., the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus for the first time identified the enigmatic first river of paradise as the Ganges river and the fourth river (Gihon or Geon) as the Nile:
Now the garden was watered by one river, which ran round about the whole earth, and was parted into four parts. And Phison, which denotes a Multitude, running into India, makes its exit into the sea, and is by the Greeks called Ganges. . . . Geon runs through Egypt, and denotes the river which arises from the opposite quarter to us, which the Greeks call Nile. (trans. Whiston 1906:2)
The location of the “garden in Eden” (gan b’Eden), from which Adam was eventually expelled, is specified in Genesis 2.8 as miqedem, which has both a spatial (“away to the East”) and a temporal (“from before the beginning”) connotation. Accordingly, the translators of the Septuagint, the Vetus Latina, and the English Authorized Version rendered it by words denoting “eastward” (Gr. kata anatolas, Lat. in oriente), while the Vulgate prefers “a principio” and thus the temporal connotation (Scafi 2006:35). But the association of the earthly paradise and enigmatic land of Havilah with the Orient, and in particular with India, was boosted by Flavius Josephus and a number of Church fathers who identified it with the Ganges valley (p. 35) where, nota bene, Holwell located his paradisiacal Bisnapore.
For the Christian theologian AUGUSTINE of Hippo (354–430), too, Pishon was the Ganges River and Gihon the Nile, and his verdict that these rivers “are true rivers, not just figurative expressions without a corresponding reality in the literal sense” hastened the demise of other theories as to the identity of the Pishon and Gihon (p. 46). In the seventh century, ISIDOR of Seville (d. 636) described in his Etymologiae the earthly paradise among the regions of Asia as a place that was neither hot nor cold but always temperate (Grimm 1977:77–78). Isidor also enriched the old tradition of allegorical interpretations of paradise. If paradise symbolized the Christian Church, he argued, the paradise river stood for Christ and its four arms for the four gospels (p. 78).
The allegorical view of paradise as the symbol of the Church, watered by four rivers or gospels and accessed by baptism, had first been advanced by Thascius Caelius CYPRIANUS (d. 258) and became quite successful in Carolingian Bible exegesis (pp. 45–46). The Commemoratio Geneseos, a very interesting Irish compilation of the late eighth century, identified the Pishon with the Indus river and interpreted Genesis’s “compasseth the whole land of Havilah” as “runs through Havilah” while specifying that “this land is situated at the confines of India and Parthia” (p. 87). The Commemoratio also associates the Pishon with the evangelist “John who is full of the Holy Ghost,” and the gold of Havilah with “the divine nature of God [diuinitas dei] which John wrote so much about” (p. 87).
Such Bible commentaries helped to establish an association of paradise with the name “John,” with India, and with a mighty Indian river. Until the end of the fifteenth century, many medieval world maps depicted paradise somewhere in or near India (Knefelkamp 1986:87–92), and travelers like Giovanni MARIGNOLLI of the fourteenth or Columbus of the fifteenth century were absolutely convinced that they were close to the earthly paradise.
Their view that paradise itself was not accessible does not signify that for them “earthly paradise . . . was in a sense nowhere,” as Scafi (2006:242) argues. When Marignolli met Buddhist monks at the foot of Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, he noted that they “call themselves sons of Adam” and reports their claim that “Cain was born in Ceylon.” According to Marignolli, these monks lead a “veritably holy life following a religion whose founder, in their opinion, is the patriarch Enoch, the inventor of prayer, and which is professed also by the Brachmans” (Meinert 1820:85). No wonder that the missionary felt close to paradise. Did these monks not refrain from eating meat “because Adam, before the deluge, did not eat any,” and did they not worship a tree, claiming that this custom stemmed “from Adam who, in their words, expected future salvation from its wood” (p. 86)?7 Marignolli also reports about his arrival “by sea to Ceylon, to the glorious mountain opposite paradise which, as the indigens say according to the tradition of their fathers, is found at forty Italian miles’ distance—so [near] that one hears the noise of the water falling from the source of paradise” (p. 77)—and was proud to have visited Adam’s house “built from large marble plates without plaster,” which featured “a door at the center that he [Adam] built with his own hands” (pp. 80–81). A pond full of jewels was reportedly fed by the source of paradise opposite the mountain, and Marignolli boasted of having tasted the delicious fruit of the paradise (banana) tree, whose leaves Adam and Eve had used to cover their private parts (pp. 81–83).
Figure 14. Paradise near India at Eastern extremity of Osma world map (Santarem 1849).
This paradise mythology was very influential and far reaching, and it shows itself sometimes in perhaps unexpected domains. Christopher COLUMBUS (1451–1506), a man who was very familiar with maps and had once made a living of their trade, also thought that he approached the earthly paradise on his third voyage. While he cruised near the estuary of the Orinoco in Venezuela, he firmly believed he had finally reached the mouth of a paradise river.
Holy Scripture testifies that Our Lord made the earthly Paradise in which he placed the Tree of Life. From it there flowed four main rivers: the Ganges in India, the Tigris and the Euphrates in Asia, which cut through a mountain range and form Mesopotamia and flow into Persia, and the Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows into the sea at Alexandria. I do not find and have never found any Greek or Latin writings which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise, nor have I seen any world map which establishes its position except by deduction. (Columbus 1969:220–21)
Since Columbus knew that the earth is round and that he was far away from Africa and Mesopotamia, he apparently thought that he was in the “Indies” and noted the unanimity of “St Isidor, Bede, Strabo, the Master of Scholastic History [Petrus Comestor], St Ambrose and Scotus and all learned theologians” that “the earthly Paradise is in the East” (p. 221). Columbus clearly imagined himself near the Ganges and the Indian Paradise.
I do not hold that the earthly Paradise has the form of a rugged mountain, as it is shown in pictures, but that it lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear, and that by gradually approaching it one begins, while still at a great distance, to climb towards it. As I have said, I do not believe that anyone can ascend to the top. I do believe, however, that, distant though it is, these waters may flow from there to this place which I have reached, and form this lake. All this provides great evidence of the earthly Paradise, because the situation agrees with the beliefs of those holy and wise theologians and all the signs strongly accord with this idea. (pp. 221–22)
Who would have thought that the “Indian” fantasies of Flavius Josephus, Augustine, and the medieval theologians and cartographers in their wake would one day play a role in the discovery of the Americas? But while Columbus was looking forward to exploring the East Indies and enriching himself with the gold and jewels promised by the Bible commentators, the heyday of the “Indian” Paradise on world maps was coming to a close. In 1449, Aeneas Silvius PICCOLOMINI (1405–64; Pope Pius II from 1458–64) had already come to doubt the identification of the Gihon with the Nile (Scafi 2006:197), and soon the learned Augustinus STEUCHUS (1496–1549) argued that Pishon and Gihon had nothing to do with the Ganges and Nile since Havilah and Cush were not located in India and Ethiopia but in Mesopotamia and Arabia (p. 263).
Subsequently, the location of earthly paradise became unhinged and drifted for a time; Guillaume Postel, for example, first located it in the Moluccas, the home of the paradise birds (Postel 1553a), but subsequently made a U-turn and placed it near the North Pole (Secret 1985:304–5). Though arguing that the entire earth had once been paradise, Postel’s contemporary Jan Gorp (Goropius Becanus) of Antwerp believed that Adam had lived in India (Gorp 1569:483, 508) and that Noah’s ark had landed not on Mt. Ararat but on the highest mountains of the Indian Caucasus, that is, near Mt. Imaus in the mountain range that we now call the Himalaya (p. 473). In his History of the World of 1614, Sir Walter Raleigh called this view “of all his conjectures the most probable” (1829.2.243); and around the end of the seventeenth century, some physical theories related to the deluge and the formation of the earth also revived Gorp’s idea that the entire earth had initially been paradise (Burnet 1694). However, around the turn of the eighteenth century most specialists of biblical exegesis tended to place earthly paradise somewhere near the Holy Land.
While the physical paradise had found a more or less stable abode in the Middle East, the search for the religion of paradise entered a period of chaos. Textual criticism of the Bible increasingly threatened scripture’s claims to antiquity and authenticity; Moses’s ancient “Egyptian” background was explored; and gradually texts from far-away China and India that purportedly were much older than the Old Testament entered the picture.
In contrast to physical and historical interpretations, some allegorical or spiritual (spiritaliter) Bible commentaries likened the lands in the vicinity of the Ganges to the holy Church, its gold to the genuine conception of monotheism, and the four cardinal virtues and foundational gospels to the four paradise rivers (Grimm 1977:87). The land of the Ganges was thus associated with the pure original teaching of Christianity, and Christianity in turn with humankind’s first religion that was personally revealed by God to Adam before the Fall. Indeed, the view of “India” as a motherland of original teachings is a characteristic that links the reports by or about Eldad, Prester John, Mandeville, Prince Dara, Holwell, and Voltaire. They all portray pure original teachings and practices that survived in or near India: Eldad of the original Judaism of the sons of Moses, Prester John of the Ur-Christianity of St. Thomas, Mandeville of the seemingly antediluvian monotheism of the Bragmans, Prince Dara of Ur-Islam, Voltaire of Ur-deism, and Holwell of the Ur-religion. Characteristically, each author also had a particular reform agenda that is apparent or implicit in the critique of the reigning religion as degenerate compared to “Indian” teachings and practices.
The example of Mandeville’s Travels is quite instructive. The pilgrimage motif that forms the setting for his entire tale is really “a metaphor for the life of man on earth as a journey to the Heavenly Jerusalem”—but this promised land can only be reached if Christians reform themselves (Moseley 1983:23). Interestingly, the model for this reform is found not in Rome or the Holy Land but rather in far-away India. This region in the vicinity of the earthly paradise and its extremely ancient religion are held up as a mirror by Mandeville to make his Christian readers blush in shame. Prester John, the guardian of the shrine of Jesus’s favorite disciple, managed to keep original Christianity pure and heads an ideal Christian state where even the empire’s heathen live in ways that Christians should imitate.
Mandeville’s description of non-Christian religions, particularly those of the regions near paradise, thus has a definite “Ambrosian” character and very much resembles Voltaire’s use of the Ezour-vedam and Holwell’s Shastah (see Chapter 1). Like St. Ambrose’s Brachmanes (Bysshe 1665), Eldad’s Ur-Jews, Voltaire’s Indian Ur-deists, Holwell’s Vishnaporians, and Prester John’s prototype Christians, the heathens and Christians of Mandeville’s India have the mission of encouraging European Christians to reflect upon themselves and to reform their religion according to the “Indian” ideal. In each case, the model is the respective Ur-tradition—appropriately set in the vicinity of paradise—which forms both the point of departure and the ultimate goal. This goal can typically be reached by a “regeneration of the original creed” that entails eliminating degenerate accretions and stripping religion down to its bare Ur-form.
As we have seen in Chapter 4, the three-step scheme of golden age/degeneration/regeneration and return to the golden age formed the backbone of Andrew Ramsay’s book The Travels of Cyrus, first published in French and English in 1727. It was a smashing success; a Dublin print of 1728 is already marked as fourth edition (Ramsay 2002:7). One of its readers in London may have been a London liveryman8 whose Oration, published in 1733, caught Holwell’s attention at an early stage and influenced him so profoundly that he “candidly confessed” in the third volume of his Interesting historical events that the “well grounded” yet “bold assertions of Mr. John Ilive”9 had given him the “first hints”:
[It was Mr. Ilive’s bold yet well grounded assertions] from whom we candidly confess we took our first hints, and became a thorough convert to his hypothesis, upon finding on enquiry, and the exertion of our own reason, that it was built on the first divine revelation that had been graciously delivered to man, to wit, THE CHARTAH BHADE OF BRAMAH; although it is very plain Mr. Ilive was ignorant of the doctrine of the Metempsychosis, by confining his conceptions only to the angelic fall, man’s being the apostate angels, and that this earth was the only hell; passing over in silence the rest of the animal creation. (Holwell 1771:3.143)
Jacob ILIVE (1705–63) was a printer, owner of a foundry, and religious publicist who in 1729 wrote down a speech, read it several times to his mother, and was obliged by his mother’s testamentary request to proclaim it in public. Ilive went a bit further; after his mother’s death in 1733, he read it twice in public and then printed it in annotated form. Later he rented Carpenters’ Hall and lectured there about “The religion of Nature” (Wilson 1808:2.291). His Oration of 1733, which so deeply influenced Holwell, addresses several themes of interest to deists such as the origin of evil, original sin, eternal punishment, and the reliability of Moses’s Pentateuch. Ilive offered more or less creative solutions to all of the above. Moses was for him not only a typical representative of “priestcraft” but one who began his career with a vicious murder. “I observe, that for the Truth of this, we have only Moses’s ipse dixit, and I think a Man may chuse whether he will believe a Murderer” (Ilive 1733:37). Moses not only commanded people to steal and cheat but he also contrived “a great Murder, yea, a Massacre” while lying to his people as he told them that “the Lord God of Israel” had ordered “to slay every Man his Brother, and every Man his Neighbour” (p. 42). Ilive regarded the author of the Pentateuch as far from inspired:
What is to be understood by delivering Laws as the Result of Divine Appointment, if hereby is not meant, that Moses had for every Law and Ordinance he instituted not received miraculously and immediately the Command of the Great God of Heaven, but delivered them to the Jews only as (what he thought) agreeable to the Mind of God. (p. 41)
Ilive was not content with the Reformation either and described how the first reformers “glossed away the Christian truths”:
In the first Article they say God is without Body, Parts, or Passions: in the second they sware, that God the Son has Body and Parts now in Heaven. In the third, that he went down into Hell, i.e. into the Centre of the Earth, or a distinct Creation from the Earth, I suppose is meant. Article Six they do not insert here, that the Books of the Old Testament were written by the Inspiration of the Holy Ghost, but they dub all the Stories contained in them for Truth. In Article seven, they are not Jews; but because the Old Testament would be necessary to back Christianity, they say, therefore, it is to be held in respect. In the ninth they establish three Creeds at once: in two of them this absurd Doctrine, the Resurrection of the Body, or Flesh. It is too tedious to go through them all. (pp. 43–44)
Ilive was clearly planning a more thorough reform of Christianity and was not happy with the Pentateuch. He felt that Moses had not explained who we are and why we are here in “the Place we now inhabit” (p. 9). Inspired by the notions that there is a plurality of worlds, that our world was created long after a more perfect one, and that souls preexisted, Ilive came up with a scenario that could very well have been inspired by Ramsay’s Discourse upon the Theology and Mythology of the Pagans at the end of the Travels of Cyrus. The Discourse contains almost all the central elements of Ilive’s system and appeared in 1727, exactly two years before Ilive apparently wrote his text, in the city of London where Ilive happened to earn his living in the printing business. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Ramsay had traced in the kabbala and various ancient cultures the idea that angels had fallen from their state of perfection and were exiled; that they formed the souls of beings on planets that are like hospitals or prisons for these fallen higher intelligences; that they were there imprisoned in the bodies of men; and that they had to migrate from one body to another until their purification was complete and the return to their initial state of perfection possible. This was the central theme of Ramsay’s Of the Mythology of the Pagans where it was presented as “a very ancient doctrine, common to all the Asiatics, from whom Pythagoras and Plato derived it” (Ramsay 1814:384–85). The idea had also played an important role in early Church heresiology since it was one of the main accusations leveled against Origenes (c. 185–254).10
Ramsay called this “the doctrine of transmigration,” and its features of “a first earth” where “souls made their abode before their degradation, the “terrestrial prison” where they are confined, and the divine plan for their rehabilitation in order to regain their original state (pp. 366–67) form the very fabric of Ilive’s system that so inspired Holwell. It is a classic golden age/ degeneration/regeneration scenario proposed by people intent on reforming the degenerate Christian religion and defending ideal Christianity against “all the Atheists” including “Spinoza, Hobbes, Toland, &c.” (Ilive 1733:25). The task was to show that the world was “created for the Good and Benefit” and that its evils (ignorance, wars, cruelty, illness, etc.) are not due to the creator God’s sadism but are part and parcel of his compassionate rehabilitation plan for fallen angels. Since “there has not been given as yet any real satisfactory Reason for the Creation of the World,” Ilive (and in his wake, Holwell) attempted to furnish exactly that: an improved creation story. While Holwell eventually cobbled together an “Indian” one and presented it as a better (and older) Old Testament, Ilive relied mostly on inspired interpretations of New Testament passages.11
Ilive’s creation story begins long before Adam enjoyed paradise. “Many years, as we compute Time, before the Creation of Man,” God “thought fit to reveal the Eternal Word, his Equal, unto the Angels” (p. 10). While two thirds of them “were chanting forth their Halleluja’s,” another third were “seized with Anger and Pride” and rebelled (pp. 11–12). Soon there was war in heaven, and the rebels were cast “into this very Globe . . . which we now inhabit, before its Formation out of Chaos” (p. 15). At that time the earth was just a “Place of Darkness, and great Confusion, a rude Wilderness, an indigested Lump of Matter.” The matter “out of which this World was formed, was prae-existent to the Formation of the Earth, and to the Creation of Man,” and this dark chaotic world “was a Dungeon for the Punishment of the Lapsed Angels, and the Place of their Residence” (p. 26). After about 6,000 years of such confinement in chaos, “God began the Formation of the World” (p. 16) as we know it. Whereas for Milton this formation of the second world was designed to repopulate heaven by giving men on earth the chance to join the diminished number of good angels in heaven (Milton 2001:163; book 7, verses 150–60), Ilive regarded it as an act of divine compassion with the aim of giving the banished angels a chance for rehabilitation. Our planet earth, therefore, is, as it were, a rehabilitation center for rebel angels, and the bodies of men are “little Places of Confinement for the Reception of the apostate Angels” within this gigantic facility (Ilive 1733:23). Contrary to Holwell’s assertion (1771:3.143), transmigration is clearly part of Ilive’s design since rehabilitation and purification can take a very long time: “The Reader is desired to observe, that I suppose the Revolutions of these Angels in Bodies, and that they may have actuated or assumed Bodies many times since the Creation, in order for their Punishment, Probation and Reconciliation” (Ilive 1733:24).
In Ilive’s narrative, human souls are thus fallen angels who must atone for past rebellious acts in small prison cells (our bodies) within a facility (the earth) that was created for the very purpose of punishing and rehabilitating them. One might say that our earth resembles a giant Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which during the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush was established as a facility tailor-made to house evil spirits (terrorists) brought in by “extraordinary rendition.” The delinquents were incarcerated without the possibility of appeal since they were considered outlaws undeserving of the ordinary course of justice. The worst offenders were subjected to the trademark “Guantanamo frequent flier program” in which prisoners were constantly moved from cell to cell after short periods of sleep. In terms of our metaphor, they had to undergo seemingly endless transmigration from body to body and feel lucky if they got to inhabit a better cell for a little while. The final goal of this grueling regime was atonement, rehabilitation, and eventual release; but since this was a realm without habeas corpus rights, the best the prisoners could do was to follow the rules in order to accumulate expiation points. Regaining their original status and returning home, however, possibly necessitated an almost endless sequence of transmigrations.
In the Historical events, Holwell makes a great effort to convey the impression that his entire system is based on the Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah and that he is no more than a translator and commentator of an ancient text who intends “to rescue from error and oblivion the ancient religion of Hindostan”12 and to “vindicate” it “not by labored apologies, but by a simple display of their primitive theology.”13 Following Holwell’s candid confession that he took his “first hints” from Ilive and “became a thorough convert to his hypothesis,” one would expect him to acknowledge that he subsequently found a similar system in the Shastah. Instead, Holwell makes the startling claim (1771:3.143) that Ilive’s system “was built on the first divine revelation that had been graciously delivered to man, to wit, THE CHARTAH BHADE OF BRAMAH”!
Not only Egyptian religion and the Pythagorean system but even Ilive’s ideas are thus supposedly based on an ancient Indian text whose two manuscripts Holwell claims to have bought very dearly and thereafter lost in the sack of Calcutta:
It is well known that at the capture of Calcutta, A.D. 1756, I lost many curious Gentoo manuscripts, and among them two very correct and valuable copies of the Gentoo Shastah. They were procured by me with so much trouble and expence, that even the commissioners of the restitution, though not at all disposed to favour me, allowed me two thousand Madras rupees in recompense for this particular loss; but the most irreparable damage I suffered under this head of grievances, was a translation I made of a considerable part of the Shastah, which had cost me eighteen months hard labour: as that work opened upon me, I distinctly saw, that the Mythology, as well as the Cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Bramins, contained in this book; even to the copying their exteriors of worship, and the distribution of their idols, though grossly mutilated and adulterated. (Holwell 1765:1.3–4)
If Holwell had spent no less than eighteen months of “hard labor” to translate a “considerable part” of the Shastah, then one must assume that he had bought a text of gigantic proportions. The manuscripts that he owned and translated were, he says, lost in 1756. However, he claims to have recovered “some manuscripts . . . by an unforeseen and extraordinary event” that allowed him to publish his translation; but though he tantalizingly adds that he “possibly” may “recite” this wondrous recovery afterward (p. 4), he never explained himself, and nobody has ever seen an original manuscript. One is reminded of James Macpherson’s phantom Ossian manuscripts that excited the curiosity of an entire generation of Europeans after the publication of their English “translation” in 1761. But though there are some striking similarities one notes a major difference: Macpherson’s Ossian was very prolix compared to Holwell’s Brahma. Holwell’s entire translation from the Shastah amounts to a skimpy 531 lines, printed in large type on narrow pages with very conspicuous quotation marks at the beginning of each line. In fact, there was so little substance that Edmund Burke decided to include Holwell’s entire translation in his Annual Register book review (1767:310–16), and it fit neatly on six and a half pages!
This means that the “unforeseen and extraordinary event,” which Holwell never explained, yielded very little material. Moreover, over 80 percent of the translated text deals with the fate of angels: their creation, their fall, their punishment, and of course their incarceration on “rehab station” earth. A single section entitled “The Mitigation of the Punishment of the delinquent Debtah, and their final Sentence” (Holwell 1767:2.47–59)—which basically replicates Jacob Ilive’s argument spiced up with some Indian terminology—constitutes no less than two thirds of Holwell’s Shastah translation; see Figure 15. This is the section that explains the core of Holwell’s system, namely, that human bodies host the souls of rebellious angels; that the earth was created as a rehabilitation facility in which these souls could purify themselves in successive existences; that transmigration is part of this rehabilitation process; and that vegetarianism is obligatory for the obvious angelic reason
Figure 15. Chapter theme percentages of Holwell’s Shastah translation (Urs App).
Table 10 shows that the volume of Holwell’s commentaries on sections translated from the Shastah is similarly lopsided.
The thematic analysis of Holwell’s Shastah fragments indicates that the Shastah author’s interests strangely resemble those of Ilive and that the possibility of an ancient Indian origin seems remote. But does the content of Holwell’s text—which purportedly “is as ancient, at least, as any written body of divinity that was ever produced in the world” (Holwell 1767:2.5)—support such doubts about the Shastah’s authorship? Let us examine the first section of Holwell’s translation, which is shown in Figure 16.
While an ancient Indian inspired by Brahma might have had other ideas, a European would quite naturally tend to have a catechism begin with an affirmation of monotheism and a creator God. The very first sentence of the Shastah already points toward an author familiar with Christian theology. Holwell seems to have vacillated on how to formulate this crucial initial statement that echoes God’s first commandment to Moses. The text cited in Burke’s review in the Annual Register for the Year 1766 (1767:310) must stem from the galley proofs and begins with “God is the one that ever was” in place of the final version’s “God is ONE.” If Holwell’s Indian text—which was written in Hindi, as his note suggests—contained the words ek (one) and hamesha (always), then “the one that ever was” or “the eternal one” seem just fine. So why did Holwell at the last minute decided to change his initial translation (which did not need a note) to “God is ONE” and to banish the literal translation into a note? Did a unitarian friend who read the proofs suggest this, or did Holwell try to “improve” the text Voltaire-style? At any rate, the published text begins with a strong statement against trinitarianism.
TABLE 10. TEXT PERCENTAGES IN HOLWELL’S TRANSLATIONS PER THEME
That this God rules all creation by “general providence resulting from first determined and fixed principles” again points to an author familiar with eighteenth-century theological controversies. Moreover: what ancient Indian author would have thought of prohibiting research about the laws by which God governs? Here, too, one has reason to suspect the interference of a certain eighteenth-century author who was opposed to scientific research into the laws of nature. It so happens that Holwell had exactly this attitude. Pointing out that Solomon had called the “pursuits of mankind, in search of knowledge, arts, and sciences . . . all futile and vain,” Holwell called it a Christian reformer’s duty “to prevent the misapplication of time, expence, and talents, which might be employed for better purposes” (1786:45). Of what significance is it, he asks (p. 46), “to know whether our globe stands still, or has a daily rotation from East and West?” This might sound strange coming from a man who had traveled so much at sea, but Holwell offered an explanation in tune with Brahmah’s will:
Figure 16. First section of Holwell’s Shastah in review and published versions.
It is highly improbable, that when the DEITY planted the different regions of this globe with the fallen spirits, or intelligent beings, his design was, they should ever have communication with each other; his placing the expanded and occasionally tempestuous ocean between them exhibits an incontestable proof to the contrary. But in this as in every thing else, man has counteracted his wise and benevolent intentions. (pp. 49–50)
The first lines of the Shastah thus already strongly indicate European authorship. Another example suggesting an eighteenth-century author is the crucial passage in Section 2, titled “The Creation of Angelic Beings.”
The ETERNAL ONE willed.—And they were.—He formed them in part of his own essence; capable of perfection, but with the powers of imperfection; both depending on their voluntary election. (Holwell 1767:2.35)
In his commentary Holwell explains that this passage is related to the problem of “free will” and “the origin, and existence of moral evil” (p. 39). Here he openly joins the fray and attacks authors “who have been driven to very strange conclusions on this subject” and even “thought it necessary to form an apology in defence of their Creator, for the admission of moral evil into the world” (p. 39). One of the culprits is Soame Jenyns’s A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil whose fourth edition appeared in 1761 just after Holwell’s final return to England. Holwell quotes from Jenyns’s book and then contrasts it with the Shastah’s solution that is, in his eyes, by far the best to date:
How much more rational and sublime [than such eighteenth-century apologies is] the text of Bramah, which supposes the Deity’s voluntary creation, or permission of evil; for the exaltation of a race of beings, whose goodness as free agents could not have existed without being endued with the contrasted or opposite powers of doing evil. (p. 41)
Though Holwell gives all the credit to his Shastah, this was an ingenious if somewhat circular solution that both Ilive and Ramsay had proposed.
Whoever authored the Shastah, it certainly addressed problems of utmost interest not to any ancient Indian author but rather to a certain eighteenth-century Englishman familiar with Indian religion as well as the theological controversies of his time. Is it not noteworthy that Holwell seems to have recuperated only Shastah sections that deal exactly with the questions he felt passionate about? One gets the distinct feeling that he was considerably more than just a translator of “Bramah’s” ancient text, and as one reads on, the signs pointing to Holwell multiply. Section 4 of the Shastah begins with the words: “The eternal ONE, whose omniscience, prescience and influence, extended to all things, except the actions of beings, which he had created free” (p. 44). In his remarks Holwell points out that this section begins “by denying the prescience of God touching the actions of free agents” and that “the Bramins defend this dogma by alleging, his prescience in this case, is utterly repugnant and contradictory to the very nature and essence of free agency, which on such terms could not have existed” (p. 46). Whatever these Bramins may have explained to Holwell, here it is old Bramah himself who seems to react to the attacks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deist writers, and it is striking how familiar he is not only with Indian religion but also—as his omniscience and prescience would have one expect—with eighteenth-century Europe’s theological controversies!
It is certain that during his long stay in India Holwell had conversed with many Indians about their religions. He severely criticized Western authors who “have (either from their own fertile inventions, or from mis-information, or rather from want of a competent knowledge in the language of the nation) misrepresented” the Indians’ religious tenet (pp. 4–5). Holwell was proud of having studied the language and to have had “various conferences with many of the most learned and ingenious, amongst the laity of the Koyt,” the tribe of writers,14 as well as “other Casts, who are often better versed in the doctrines of their Shastah than the common run of the Bramins themselves” (p. 21). Holwell also mentions a “judicious Bramin of the Battezaar tribe, the tribe . . . usually employed in expounding the Shastahs” who explained images to him (p. 113). It is from such Indians that Holwell claims to have learned about the origin of his text.15 But the origin and other aspects of this text are clouded by a number of strange contradictions. On one hand, Holwell openly admitted that his idea of “the antiquity of the scriptures”—namely, that the Shastah of Bramah “is as ancient, at least, as any written body of divinity that was ever produced in the world”—is based upon “our conjecture and belief” (p. 5) and emphasized that the ideas of the Brahmins are not very trustworthy and that they led to conjectures rather than historical facts:
Without reposing an implicit confidence in the relations the Bramins give of the antiquity of their scriptures; we will with our readers indulgence, humbly offer a few conjectures that have swayed us into a belief and conclusion, that the original tenets of Bramah are most ancient; that they are truly original, and not copied from any system of theology, that has ever been promulged to, or obtruded upon the belief of mankind: what weight our conjectures may have with the curious . . . we readily submit to those, whose genius, learning and capacity in researches of this kind, are much superior to our own. (p. 23)
On the other hand, Holwell presented an elaborate scheme of the origin of Indian sacred literature with precise dates: it was precisely “4866 years ago” (3100 B.C.E.) that the Almighty decided to have his sentence for the delinquent angels “digested into a body of written laws for their guidance” and ordered Bramah, “a being from the first rank of angels . . . destined for the eastern part of this globe,” to transmit God’s “terms and conditions” to the “delinquents” (pp. 11–12). Bramah “assumed the human form,” translated God’s sentence from “Debtah Nagur (literally, the language of angels)” into “the Sanscrît, a language then universally known throughout Indostan.” This oldest book of the world “was preached to the delinquents, as the only terms of their salvation and restoration” and is known as “the Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah (literally, the four scriptures of divine words of the mighty spirit)” (p. 12). This was the text that Holwell claimed to have found, translated, lost, found again in fragments, translated again, and finally published in 1767. Since Holwell’s text titles are a bit confusing—he claims at the bottom of the same page that Bhade means “a written book”—I will call this first Sanskrit scripture from 3,100 B.C.E. “Text I.”
For a thousand years Text I remained untouched and many delinquent angels were saved by its teachings; but in 2100 B.C.E. some commentators wrote a paraphrase called Chatah Bhade of Bramah or “the six scriptures of the mighty spirit” and began to “veil in mysteries the simple doctrines of Bramah” (pp. 12–13). The product of these commentators, Text II, consisted of Text I plus comments.
Again five hundred years later, in 1600 B.C.E., a second exposition swelled “the Gentoo scriptures to eighteen books”; this was Text III, called “Aughtorrah Bhade Shastah, or the eighteen books of divine words” (pp. 14–15). In Text III the original scripture of Bramah, Text I, “was in a manner sunk and alluded to only” and “a multitude of ceremonials, and exteriour modes of worship, were instituted,” while the laity was “precluded from the knowledge of their original scriptures” and “had a new system of faith broached unto them, which their ancestors were utterly strangers to” (p. 14).
Text III “produced a schism amongst the Gentoo’s, who until this period had followed one profession of faith throughout the vast empire of Indostan” (p. 14). But now the Brahmins of South India formed a scripture of their own, “the Viedam of Brummah, or divine words of the mighty spirit” (Text IV: p. 14). The southerners claimed that their Viedam ( = Veda) was based on Text I; but in reality they had, like the authors of Text III, included all kinds of new things and even “departed from that chastity of manners” still preserved in Text III.
While the southerners based their religion on the Viedam (Text IV), the northerners continued to use the Aughtorrah Bhade Shastah (Text III):
The Aughtorrah Bhade Shastah, has been invariably followed by the Gentoos inhabiting from the mouth of the Ganges to the Indus, for the last three thousand three hundred and sixty six years. This precisely fixes the commencement of the Gentoo mythology, which until the publication of that Bhade, had no existence amongst them. (p. 18)
Having read about Holwell’s “conjecture” and “belief,” the reader is astonished to find such a precisely dated genealogy of the sacred scriptures of India. To ensure that the reader understands that this is not Holwell’s personal “conjecture” and “belief,” every line of this 12-page history (pp. 9–21) begins with a quotation mark. But who said or wrote all this, including what was just quoted about the precise beginning of Gentoo mythology? Holwell calls it a “recital” that he had heard “from many of these [learned Bramins]”—which must signify that these twelve pages, in spite of no less than 329 conspicuous quotation marks, present no quotation at all but rather a kind of summary of things that Holwell had heard at various times from a variety of people.
However, in Europe, Holwell’s fake precision had a great impact. In the second volume of his Interesting historical events (1767), Holwell delivered extended “quotations” from numerous “learned among the Bramins” (p. 9) who hitherto had hardly discussed such things with foreigners; he ostensibly translated parts of the world’s most ancient book; he declared that this text was much older and more authentic than the Veda that the Europeans had coveted for so long; he explained the origin and unity of Indian religion (the religion of the Gentoos or, as we would say today, the Hindus); he furnished precise dates for a “schism” that had set the religion of the South against that of the North; and he asserted that his Shastah was the one and only original revelation that God had granted to the ancient Indians. Holwell’s “conjecture and belief” seemed to have vanished underneath a giant heap of certified facts.
Another contradiction that strikes the reader concerns the story Holwell weaves around the transmission of his Shastah text. On one hand, he claims that this text was extremely rare and hard to find; hence, the high price he had to pay for the acquisition of the two manuscripts lost in 1756, the failure of acquiring a replacement after that, and the miraculous (though unexplained) recovery of just a few fragments. On the other hand, the Shastah text seems to have been rather well transmitted. Holwell claims to have had not just one but two complete copies in the early 1750s and insisted that it was from recovered fragments of this original text that he translated the chapter on the fate of the delinquent angels (which forms 65 percent of the entire translation).16 Furthermore, Text I could not have been rare since it was also included in Text II and to some extent in Text III, which both “derive their authority and essence, in the bosom of every Gentoo, from the Chartah Bhade of Bramah” (p. 29), and could easily be consulted when the need arose:
It is no uncommon thing, for a Gentoo, upon any point of conscience, or any important emergency in his affairs or conduct, to reject the decision of the Chatah [Text II] and Aughtorrah Bhades [Text III], and to procure, no matter at what expence, the decision of the Chartah Bhade [Text I], expounded in the Sanscrît. (p. 29)
Those who included Text I in Text II, commented on it, and eventually produced Text III—“some Goseyns and Battezaaz Bramins”—obviously also had access to Text I (p. 13):
Thus the original, plain, pure, and simple tenets of the Chartah Bhade of Bramah (fifteen hundred years after its first promulgation) became by degrees utterly lost; except, to three or four Goseyn families, who at this day are only capable of reading, and expounding it, from the Sanscrît character; to these may be added a few others of the tribe of the Batteezaaz Bramins, who can read and expound from the Chatah Bhade [Text II], which still preserved the text of the original, as before remarked. (p. 15)
Also blessed with access to Text I were apparently “many of the most learned and ingenuous, amongst the laity of the Koyt, and other Casts, who are often better versed in the doctrines of their Shastah than the common run of the Bramins themselves” (p. 21). Furthermore, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Holwell reported that there existed an entire country near Calcutta whose religion had forever been based on Text I and that had preserved paradisiacal purity! And just before the end of his second volume, Holwell mentions another group who intimately knows Text I and seems also on course to paradise:
The remnant of Bramins (whom we have before excepted) who seclude themselves from the communications of the busy world, in a philosophic, and religious retirement, and strictly pursue the tenets and true spirit of the Chartah Bhade of Bramah, we may with equal truth and justice pronounce, are the purest models of genuine piety that now exist, or can be found on the face of the earth. (p. 152)
Yet another contradiction concerns the language of Text I. Holwell stated that his text first existed in the language of angels17 and was then translated and promulgated in Sanskrit. He accused missionaries as well as “modern authors . . . chiefly of the Romish communion” of having presented “the mythology of the venerable ancient Bramins on so slender a foundation as a few insignificant literal translations of the Viedam” that were not even “made from the book itself, but from unconnected scraps and bits, picked up here and there by hearsay from Hindoos, probably as ignorant as themselves” (Holwell 1765:1.6). Holwell, by contrast, was using the unadulterated original Shastah text rather than the degenerate southern “Viedam,” and his thirty-year sojourn in Bengal (p. 3) had supposedly equipped him to deal with this original text. Holwell never claimed openly to have studied Sanskrit, but the reader of his account gets the impression, as Voltaire did, that Holwell knew Sanskrit since he was able to translate the ancient text and labored for many months to produce not only a literal translation but one that even took the diction and style of the original into account. But it is evident that Holwell never studied Sanskrit and that the Indian words he quotes from Text I are not Sanskrit.
There are also many unanswered questions concerning Holwell’s recovery of some fragments of the Shastah that ought to have taken place before his return to England in 1761. A comparison of Holwell’s announcement in 1765 with the actual content of the 1767 volume seems to indicate that, in 1765, Holwell was not yet planning to include any translations from the Shastah except for the creation account. The 1765 announcement only mentioned “A summary view of the fundamental, religious tenets of the Gentoos, followers of the Shastah” and “A short account, from the Shastah, of the creation of the worlds, or universe” (p. 15). The latter became in 1767 the eighth section of the Shastah’s second book (1767:2.106–10). Why did Holwell in his first volume (on whose title page the second and third parts were already announced) not lose a single word about the literal translations he was about to publish from the world’s oldest text? Did Holwell decide around 1766 to transform his “summary view of the fundamental religious tenets of the Gentoos” into “translations”? The content of the Shastah texts as well as their style, inspired as they seem by Milton’s Paradise Lost, Salomon Gessner’s Death of Abel (1761), and James “Ossian” Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), also point in that direction. Are all those hundreds of quotation marks signs of a bad conscience?
Contradictions pertaining to Holwell’s (and Ilive’s) system will go unmentioned here, except for one related to the salvation of fish that was pointed out in a delightful passage by Julius Mickle who noted many suspicious facets of Holwell’s text:
Nature has made almost the whole creation of fishes to feed upon each other. Their purgation therefore is only a mock trial; for, according to Mr. H[olwell] whatever being destroys a mortal body must begin its transmigrations anew; and thus the spirits of the fishes would be just where they were, though millions of the four Jogues [yugas; world ages] were repeated. Mr. H. is at great pains to solve the reason why the fishes were not drowned at the general deluge, when every other species of animals suffered death. The only reason for it, he says, is that they were more favoured of God, as more innocent. Why then are these less guilty spirits united to bodies whose natural instinct precludes them the very possibility of salvation? (Mickle 1798:190)
A further contradiction concerns the discrepancy between Holwell’s and the standard Indian view of Vedas and Shastras. To contemporaries like Voltaire or Anquetil-Duperron, Holwell’s presentation of sacred Indian literature—delivered purportedly in the words of learned Indian informers—seemed impressive. Holwell apparently set the beginning of the last world age (and thus the promulgation of Text I in Sanskrit) at 3100 B.C.E.,18 but nobody knows how he came up with a 1000-year golden age until Text II and another 500 years until Text III. The descriptions of the four corpora of Indian sacred scriptures by Holwell’s “learned Bramins” seem to stem, in spite of their 329 quotation marks, from a non-Indian source since Indians of all stripes always regarded the four Vedas as their basic sacred scriptures and Shastras as commentarial literature.19 This is also what European reports since the sixteenth century had affirmed (Caland 1918), and it is why Abbé Bignon urged Father Calmette to acquire and send the four Vedas to Paris and not some Shastras. So where did Holwell get this idea that the Vedas are late and degenerated scriptures, a mere shadow of the far older Shastah of Bramah?
Holwell boasted that he had “studiously perused all that has been written of the empire of Indostan, both as to its ancient, as well as more modern state” but added that what he had read was “all very defective, fallacious, and unsatisfactory to an inquisitive searcher after truth” (Holwell 1765:1.5). However, in the meantime we may have learned not to take every word of Holwell as gospel. He occasionally cited Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus, which contained an interesting passage about Indian religion that could not fail to inspire him. Ramsay reported that the Veda states
that souls are eternal emanations from the divine Essence, or at least that they were produced long before the formation of the world; that they were originally in a state of purity, but having sinned, were thrown down into the bodies of men, or of beasts, according to their respective demerits; so that the body, where the soul resides, is a sort of dungeon or prison. (Ramsay 1814:382)
Ramsay attributed this passage to Abraham Roger’s De Open-Deure tot het verborgen Heydendom (The Open Door to the Hidden Paganism), whose French translation (1670) he had consulted. In the preface to that edition, translator Thomas La Grue particularly emphasized “what was also clearly a motif with Roger himself: that the Indians did indeed possess a pristine and natural knowledge of God, but that it had decayed almost completely into superstition as a result of moral lapses” (Halbfass 1990:46–47). But Holwell, a good reader of Dutch, could consult Roger’s original edition of 1651.20 There Roger called the Indian Dewetaes (Skt. devatas; Indian guardian spirits or protective divinities) “Engelen” or angels (Roger 1915:108). But here we are primarily interested in Roger’s description of the Vedam, which for him is the Indian’s book of laws containing “everything that they must believe as well as all the ceremonies they must perform” (p. 20).
This Vedam consists of four parts; the first part is called Roggowedam; the second Issourewedam; the third Samawedam; and the fourth Adderawanawedam. The first part deals with the first cause, the materia prima [eerste materie], the angels, the souls, the recompense of good and punishment of evil, the generation of creatures and their corruption, the nature of sin, how it can be absolved, how this can be achieved, and to what end. (p. 21)
After a brief explanation of the content of the second to fourth Vedas, Roger states that conflicts of Vedic interpretation generated a literature of commentaries called Iastra (Skt. śāstra), “that is, the explanations about the Vedam” (p. 22). As Willem Caland has shown in detail (1918),21 Roger’s source for such information was Diogo do Couto’s Decada Quinta da Asia of 1612. Couto’s account of the content of the Vedas was in turn, as Schurhammer (1977:2.612–20) proved, plagiarized from an account by the Augustinian brother Agostinho de Azevedo’s Estado da India e aonde tem o seu principio of 1603, a report prepared in the 1580s for King Philip III of Portugal, which “includes an original summary of Hindu religion, from Shaiva Sanskrit and Tamil texts” (Rubiés 2000:315). The question as to what exactly Azevedo’s sources were still awaits clarification in spite of Caland’s speculations (1918:309–10); but here we will concentrate on Couto whose report about sacred Indian literature, unlike Azevedo’s, was used by Holwell who could handle Portuguese. Couto’s report of 1612 describes Indian sacred literature as follows:
TABLE 11. DO COUTO’S VEDAS AND HOLWELL’S SACRED SCRIPTURES OF INDIA
They possess many books in their Latin, which they call Geredaom, and which contain everything they have to believe and all ceremonies they have to perform. These books are divided in bodies, members, and articulations. The fundamental texts are those they call Vedas which form four parts, and these again form fifty-two in the following manner: Six that they call Xastra which are the bodies; eighteen they call Purana which are the members; and twenty-eight called Agamon which are the articulations. (Couto 1612:125r)
The numbers four, six, and eighteen first made me think that Holwell’s weird history of Indian sacred literature might be modeled on Couto’s report. As we have seen, Holwell also mentioned four textual bodies. The number of scriptures of the first three bodies thus correspond exactly to Couto’s, as shown in Table 11.
Holwell’s wild potpourri of Bhade (which would be the Vedas), Shastah (which would be, as Roger indicates, commentaries), and Viedam has confused many readers.22 Trautmann commented that Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah “would be something like Catur Veda Śāstra in Sanskrit, an odd title since it combines two classes of Sanskrit literature that are distinct, Veda and Śāstra” (1997:68), and he complains, “Holwell does not seem to understand that his Bhade is the same word as his Viedam, the one under a Bengali pronunciation, the other a Tamil one” (p. 69). At any rate, Holwell garnished such information with a plethora of quotation marks and presented it as the opinion of knowledgeable Indians. But it is abundantly clear that no knowledgeable Indian would ever have said anything remotely similar. Rather, Holwell once again used Western information as a basis for a house of cards. Calling the Viedam“a corruption” of his Shastah, Holwell asserted that it was only used in the South “by the Gentoos of the Mallabar and Cormandel coasts: and also by those of the Island of Ceylon” (Holwell 1767:2.11–12) and claimed that only his Text I contained the genuine teaching of antiquity:
Enough has been said, to shew that the genuine tenets of Bramah, are to be found only in the Chartah Bhade [Text I]; and as all who have wrote on this subject, have received their information from crude, inconsistent reports, chiefly taken from the Aughtorrah Bhade, and the Viedam; it is no wonder that the religion of the Gentoos, has been traduced, by some, as utterly unintelligible; and by others, as monstrous, absurd, and disgraceful to humanity:—our design is to rescue these ancient people, from those imputations; in order to which we shall proceed, without further introduction or preface, to investigate the original scriptures, as contained in the Chartah Bhade. (pp. 29–30)
In particular, Holwell attacked the Dutch pastor Philip BALDAEUS (1632–72) for having “given a laborious translation of the Viedam” and having claimed that the part that “treated of God, and the origin of the universe, or visible words” was lost. Baldaeus had indeed written that “the first of these [Vedam] Books treated of God, and of the Origin and Beginning of the Universe” and that “the loss of this first Part is highly lamented by the Brahmans” (Baldaeus 1732:891. Holwell accused Baldaeus of a double error: first, of “alleging the part lost” even though “both the Viedam, and Shastah, are elaborate on the subject . . . and fix not only the period of its creation but also its precise age, and term of duration”; and second, of lamenting “a loss they never sustained” (p. 32). He must have preferred Couto’s description of the Veda’s content:
To better understand these [Vedáos] we will briefly distinguish all of them. The first part of the four fundamental texts treats of the first cause, the first matter [materia prima], the angels, the souls, the recompense of good, the punishment of evil, the generation of creatures, their corruption, what sin is, how one can attain remission and be absolved, and why. The second part treats of the regents and how they exert dominion over all things. The third part is all about moral doctrine, advice exhorting to virtue and obliging to avoid vice, and also for monastic and political life, i.e., active and contemplative life. The fourth part treats of temple ceremonies, offerings, and their festivals; and also about enchantment, witchcraft, divination, and the art of magic since they are much taken by this kind of thing. (Couto 1612:125r)
TABLE 12. CONTENTS OF DO COUTO’S FIRST VEDA AND THE FIRST BOOK OF HOLWELL’S SHASTAH
Couto’s first Veda in Decada Quinta |
|
(1612:125r) |
First book of Holwell’s Shastah (1767:30) |
first cause, materia prima |
God and his attributes |
angels |
creation of angelic beings |
souls (of angels in human bodies) |
lapse of angelic beings |
punishment / recompense |
punishment, mitigation |
remission, absolution |
final sentence leading to remission |
The comparison of this description with Holwell’s summary (1767:30) of the contents of his Shastah (see Table 12) shows that they are also quite a good match. This common inspiration may explain another contradiction in Holwell’s portrayal of Indian sacred literature, namely, why—in spite of his rantings against the Veda as a late and degenerate text—Holwell claimed that both his Shastah (Text I) and the Viedam (Text IV) were “originally one”:
Both these books [the Viedam and Shastah] contain the institutes of their respective religions and worships,23 often couched under allegory and fable; as well as the history of their ancient Rajahs and Princes—their antiquity is contended for by the partisans of each—but the similitude of their names, idols, and a great part of their worship, leaves little room to doubt, nay plainly evinces, that both these scriptures were originally one. (Holwell 1765:1.12)
If Couto’s summary of Veda content does not seem overly concerned with angels, the more detailed explanations (Couto 1612:125v) provide details that were certainly of great interest to a man so thoroughly converted to Jacob Ilive’s system as Holwell. Couto wrote that Indian manuals of theology portray God as first cause and as “a pure, incorporal, infinite spirit, endowed with all might, all knowledge, and all truth” who “is everywhere, which is why they call him Xarues Zibarú which signifies creator of all” (p. 125v). According to Couto, the first Veda then describes three kinds of angels: the good angels that remain in heaven with God; the delinquent angels who must go through rehabilitation imprisoned in human bodies on earth; and the angels shut in hell. It furthermore treats of the immortality of souls and their transmigration during the rehabilitation process on earth: “They believe that the souls are immortal; but they think that a sinner’s soul at death passes into the body of some living being where it continues purification until it merits rising to heaven” (p. 125v). Couto goes into considerable detail about the meaning of transmigration and its deep connection with the punishment of evil and recompense of good: the souls of the worst sinners transmigrate after death into the most terrible animals, and those of the good into an ever better body. In this way they can purify themselves and atone until they become ready to regain their original state before the fall (pp. 125v–126r).
One can imagine how delighted Holwell must have been to find such stunning similarities between the description of India’s ancient religious texts and Ilive’s vision. But the doctrines that had been translated or summarized from old texts by the likes of Roger, Baldaeus, and the Catholic missionaries showed little similarity with this. All of it seemed “very defective, fallacious, and unsatisfactory” to Holwell, in fact, no more than “unconnected scraps and bits, picked up here and there by hearsay” from ignorant Hindoos rather than solid “literal translations” (Holwell 1765:1.5–6). Hence the need to “rescue” this distant nation “from the gross conceptions entertained of them by the multitude” (p. 9) and “to vindicate them” by “a simple display of their primitive theology” (Holwell 1767: Dedication). Disgusted by all these misunderstandings and misrepresentations (1767.2:4), converted by Ilive’s theory of delinquent angels, and possibly already fascinated by Ramsay’s vision of Ur-tradition, Holwell collected materials about the Gentoo religion and “on his departure from Bengal in the year 1750 imagined himself well informed in the Gentoo religion” about which he had learned through “conversations with the Bramins of those Bhades who were near” (pp. 63–64). He had already thought of writing a book about this but did not find the time (p. 64). Given the fact that he already had such a plan, it is likely that during his stays in Europe he also collected relevant Western literature about India and its religions. If he was not already acquainted with Ramsay and Couto before, he must have studied them after his return to India in 1751 and as a result gained a rather precise idea of what he was looking for. If Holwell was trying to find the Vedas, he was not alone; but Couto’s description of the first Veda, which seemed so similar to Ilive’s ideas, certainly brought more motivation and focus to his search. He knew that he was looking for an extremely ancient scripture treating of God, the creation story, angels and their fall, the immortality of souls, the purification of delinquent angels in human bodies, transmigration, the punishment of evil and reward of good, and remission and salvation.
What could happen when a wealthy foreigner was trying to locate such information in old Indian texts is exemplified by the case of Francis WILFORD (1761?–1822), a respected member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal who lived in India four decades after the sack of Calcutta rang in the British Empire. Unlike Holwell, Wilford had studied Sanskrit. He was intent on proving on the basis of Indian texts that India and Egypt had from ancient times been in close contact and that their religions came from a common source. Since that source was, of course, ultimately Noah’s ark, Wilford had Indian assistants look for a precise set of topics: the deluge, the name of Noah and his sons, and so forth. Like Holwell some decades before him, Wilford had to tell a learned Indian what he was looking for “as a clue to guide him,” and for several years he faithfully translated what this Indian guru gave him. But suddenly he detected that he had fallen victim to fraud:
In order to avoid the trouble of consulting books, he conceived the idea of framing legends from what he recollected from the Puránas, and from what he had picked up in conversation with me. As he was exceedingly well read in the Puránas, and other similar books . . . it was an easy task for him; and he studied to introduce as much truth as he could, to obviate the danger of immediate detection. . . . His forgeries were of three kinds; in the first there was only a word or two altered; in the second were such legends as had undergone a more material alteration; and in the third all those which he had written from memory. (Wilford 1805:251)
The output of this Indian expert was quite astonishing, and the most famous example shows what good remuneration, a sense of what the customer is looking for, and skill in composition can achieve. The learned Indian composed a story “which in nine Sanskrit verses . . . reprises the story of Noah, his three sons, and the curse of Ham” and convinced no less a man than William Jones that Noah and his three sons figured in genuine Indian Purāṇas (Trautmann 1997:90–91). Wilford described how his Indian teacher proceeded in this case:
It is a legend of the greatest importance, and said to be extracted from the Padma. It contains the history of NOAH and his three sons, and is written in a masterly style. But unfortunately there is not a word of it to be found in that Purána. It is, however, mentioned, though in less explicit terms, in many Puránas, and the pandit took particular care in pointing out to me several passages which confirmed, more or less, this interesting legend. Of these I took little notice, as his extract appeared more explicit and satisfactory. (Wilford 1805:254)
Since Wilford had told his pandit exactly what he was looking for, the forger produced an ingenious narrative that presented elements of the story of Noah and his sons in an Indian dress and included some surprising details such as “the legend about the intoxication of NOAH” which, as Wilford now realized, “is from what my pandit picked up in conversation with me” (p. 254). In all, this man “composed no less than 12,000 brand new Puranic ślokas—about half the length of the Rāmāyaṇa!—and inserted them into manuscripts of the Skanda and Brahmānda Purāṇa” (Trautmann 1997:92). This was a fraud committed on a man who was far more learned than Holwell; the texts were in Sanskrit, not Hindi; and the source texts could be verified.
In Holwell’s case, there is always the possibility that his description of Veda content led some knowledgeable Indian to the very texts that Azevedo had used for the description that Couto plagiarized and Roger and others then used. Caland (1918:49–50) concluded on the basis of the book titles mentioned by Couto that these texts were Śaivite Agamas; but an able Indologist would need to substantiate this not just by titles but by contents. While it is possible that similar texts in Hindi were sold to Holwell, I think that the likelihood of a fraud is greater. If Holwell, ready as he was to spend almost any amount of money on this text after the 1756 loss, could not manage to recuperate more than a few fragments—or, more likely, nothing at all—one would think that the people who sold it to him in the first place had produced only two slightly different manuscripts and, having sold them to Holwell, were in no position to repeat that feat. If Holwell’s text had been available to various people, then someone would probably have sold it to him, especially given the fact that for a while he was governor of Bengal and certainly did not lack the means to get what he wanted.
But who could have forged such a text? Since Holwell remarked that members of the tribe of writers “are often better versed in the doctrines of their Shastah than the common run of the Bramin themselves” (Holwell 1767:2.21) and that “a few others of the tribe of the Batteezaaz Bramins . . . can read and expound from the Chatah Bhade [Text II], which still preserved the text of the original [Text I]” (p. 15), the culprit(s) might have come from either or both of these groups.
Whether Holwell ever recovered fragments of his text (Holwell 1765:1.4) is also subject to doubt. If in 1766 he really had parts of his text at hand, then why did he not show them to anyone or have a sample page printed in his book? And why did he not mention in 1765, when he listed the second volume’s prospective content, that it would contain genuine translations from the world’s oldest text? Faced with this golden opportunity to get more people to read and buy his work, he only announced “a summary view of the fundamental, religious tenets of the Gentoos” and “a short account, from the Shastah, of the creation of the worlds, or universe” (Holwell 1765:1.15). If one takes him at his word, then in 1765 he still planned to publish only summaries and a single “short account” drawn from the Shastah. This “account” now forms the “creation” chapter that barely amounts to four and a half small pages of “translation” (Holwell 1767:2.106–10).
But to furnish only summaries of the world’s oldest text rather than translations would have pleased neither Holwell’s publisher nor his readers. I think that this is why Holwell must have decided to recast his “summary views” of the Shastah into “translation” form framed in convincing quotation marks. This might have happened in 1766. A sign of hasty conversion are phrases that would fit a summary but sound odd in a direct quotation. For example, “a being from the first rank of angels was destined for the eastern part of this globe” (p. 11) is perfect for a summary written by a Westerner but is a strange statement for an Indian to make: “eastern” in relation to where? The same applies for the phrase that is presented as another quotation from an Indian: “This precisely fixes the commencement of the Gentoo mythology, which, until the publication of that Bhade, had no existence amongst them” (p. 18)—an odd statement coming from a “Gentoo” since he would have to say “us” rather than “them,” even assuming some self-consciousness as a “Hindu,” something likewise highly unlikely in an ancient text.
Other contradictions that were mentioned above also seem explainable by Holwellian authorship in the mid-1760s. The content of the Shastah fragments that Holwell supposedly recuperated reflect his intense interests of the period, which he embedded in the Shastah text and his comments. Both have a unitarian and anti-deist, mid-eighteenth-century flavor. The Shastah’s God needed to be one and not three-in-one or “the one that ever was.” He had to be all-creative, of course, and too just to punish innocent babies; and thoughts like “original sin” would not even cross his mind. He needed to be omniscient and equipped with perfect providence—except for those purposefully ignored free-will acts that eventually put the delinquent angels into their rehab camp on earth. He needed to be almighty yet leave a little space for angels to rebel. He needed to be so absolutely good that he created earth out of compassion for those delinquent angels whose rebellion he had allowed. And he had to refrain from eternal punishment and guarantee a good and just final outcome for everyone. The core issue was, of course, the origin of evil, and the Shastah text trumpets Jacob Ilive’s “delinquent angel” solution. As shown in the pie graph in Figure 15, even the volume of “translated” text and of Holwell’s comments reflects this agenda. Other solutions to the theodicy problem are rejected both via the Shastah text with its purported authority and by Holwell’s comments, which openly criticize and reject alternative models.
Apart from Ilive’s and Ramsay’s works, a 1762 book by Capel BERROW (1715–82) appears to have been used in the composition of the “Shastah” text and its commentary. Its title describes the author’s intention well: A Preexistent Lapse of Human Souls Demonstrated from Reason; shewn to be the Opinion of the most eminent Writers of Antiquity, Sacred and Profane: Proved to be the Ground-work likewise of the Gospel Dispensation; And the Medium through which many material Topics, relative thereto, are set in a clear, rational, and consistent Light. In 1771, Holwell wrote about this work:
An ingenious, speculative, and learned divine of our church, published, in the year 1762, a treatise, entitled, “A Pre-existent Lapse of Human Souls, &c.” This truly valuable performance relieves us from much labor in the prosecution of our work, as it confirms, from our own scriptures, many leading and essential points of the Metempsychosis, as, the existence of angels, their rebellion, their expulsion from their blessed abodes, the coeval creation of the angelic and human spirits, and the association of the latter with the former in their apostacy; that their situation on earth is a state of degradation and probation for that lapse, and that original sin is not that which is erroneously imputed to us from Adam, but springs from a much higher source, viz. the pre-existent lapse of the (human) spirit from its primeval purity. (Holwell 1771:3.37–38)
It seems to me that Holwell italicized “from our own scriptures” for a good reason: he had, as both his Shastah text and commentary show, the same objective as Berrow except for one thing: he wanted to confirm all this not from our own scriptures, that is, the Bible, but from a much older Indian Bible that he portrayed as the oldest testament of divine revelation to humanity. One cannot doubt Holwell’s conviction since he seems to have held fast to these exact beliefs until the end of his life and published about little else in the decades following his return from India. His conviction seems to have been sufficiently solid to propel the transformation of reminiscences from a lost text into oa “translation,” the invention of a suitable pedigree for this text, and its canonization as the oldest text of the world. It seems like a classic case of Ur-tradition, complete with a grossly misdated, dubious sacred text; a fake translation; an invented life of transmission; and a reform motive that is explained in Holwell’s essay on metempsychosis of 1771 and his dissertations on angels and divine providence of 1786.
But why would Holwell present his obsession with angels and their fate in the form of the world’s most ancient text? Because he intended, like other proponents of an Ur-tradition system with reform ambitions, “to revive and reestablish the primitive truths which constituted the ground-work of the first universal religion, at the period of the creation of the material worlds and man” (Holwell 1771:3.52). This restoration of Ur-religion obliged him, so he explained, to strip the religions of India as well as Judaism and Christianity “of all disguise, mystery, and fable” and to examine them not “under the guise in which they now appear before us, but as they really were at their first promulgation” (p. 52).
For of all the theologic systems that have been broached to mankind, we think we are well supported in marking these [three religions] alone as true originals; but our benevolent view extends even farther, and we flatter ourselves (however chimerical it may appear) mankind may be restored again to that one unerring original faith, from which, by undue influence in every age of the world, they have unhappily swerved: we are convinced, if they consulted their present and future felicity, they would fly to embrace a rational hypothesis, that leads to such a blessed issue. (Holwell 1771:3.52–53)
Figure 17. Genesis of Holwell’s Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah (Urs App).
The “one unerring original faith” was, of course, contained in the text that Holwell presented as the world’s oldest written document and the earliest and purest divine revelation to humanity. This is a classic case of a reformer’s Ur-tradition. Naturally, the events from before the creation of the earth and the adventures of angels could not have been communicated in any other way than by divine revelation; and God’s earliest revelation had taken place in India where “the primitive truths [were] revealed by a gracious God to man, in the early days of his creation, at a time when it may be reasonably presumed he retained a lively sense of his soul’s former transgression” (p. 5). What followed this golden age is a sad history of degeneration:
That these are the only primitive truths necessary to man’s salvation, and restoration, appears from hence, that they have, from the earliest records of time to this day, remained more or less the stock upon which the blindness, or wickedness of man has engrafted very extravagant, unprofitable, as well as unintelligible doctrines, to delude their fellow-creatures, and seduce them from a strict adherence to, and reliance on, those primitive truths only. (pp. 5–6)
Holwell’s “primitive truths” are, as we would expect, the fundamental principles shared by all peoples because they spring from a common source. The “concurring testimony of all mankind” (or universal consent) is thus an essential part of the argument, as in Ramsay; but Holwell has—partly due to his conversion to Jacob Ilive’s creed—a somewhat different set of primitive truths from Ramsay’s. He enumerates a total of thirteen of them, starting with the creator God and ending with the ministration of angels in human affairs. They can be arranged in four categories: (1) God and his attributes; (2) angels, their fall, expulsion, evil leader, and influence; (3) man, his immortal angelic soul, and his life in the rehabilitation facility earth; and (4) the existence of a golden age followed by degeneration, an intermediate state after death for punishment, the necessity of a mediator, and final restoration (pp. 4–5).
But why did this first revelation happen in India and not, say, in Judaea? Because, according to Holwell, the Gentoos of India and not the Hebrews were God’s chosen people!
If the mission of Moses contained a spiritual, as well as temporal allusion to the salvation of the Hebrews, and the spiritual sense was hidden from them, it was then indeed imperfect, and the Gentoos seem to have been the chosen people of God, in place of the Israelites; for to them was revealed by Bramah, with God’s permission, not only the real state and condition of man, but his doctrines also taught, the existence of One Eternal God, and temporal as well as future rewards and punishments. (p. 20)
But since God cannot be allowed to be so blatantly partial, he also graciously provided special revelations to two other groups:
The religions which manifestly carry the divine stamp of God, are, first, that which Bramah was appointed to declare to the ancient Hindoos; secondly that law which Moses was destined to deliver to the ancient Hebrews; and thirdly, that with Christ was delegated to preach to the latter Jews and Gentiles, or the Pagan world. These, and these only, bear the signature of divine origin. (p. 50)
Sadly, all such dispensations inevitably fall prey to degeneration through priestcraft. If in India the Brahmins had presided over a drawn-out degradation process leading to the blatant idolatry and superstition reigning there now, the Christian dispensation was also “utterly mutilated and defaced since the ascension,” so much so “that Christ himself, when he descends again on earth, will disown it” (p. 51). Like Newton, Holwell was a unitarian and deplored the trinitarian heresy promoted by Athanasius along with the perversions of genuine Christianity by the “primitive fathers of the church” who “may with more propriety be stiled the destroyers, than the fathers” of the church (p. 8). Even Moses’ dispensation needed to be reinterpreted:
When we attentively peruse Moses’s detail of the creation and fall of man, we find it clogged with too many incomprehensible difficulties to gain our belief, that that consummate legislator ever intended it should be understood in a literal sense . . . and so we hope to prove that his detail of the fall of man was typical only of the angelic fall. (p. 10)
For Holwell the basis for a correct interpretation of the Mosaic account of the fall of man was, of course, the Shastah of the Indians who are “as a nation, more ancient than any other” (p. 14). As usual, antiquity was closely linked to purity of transmission:
It has been well remarked that the nearer we approach to the origin of nations the more pure we shall find their Theology, and the reason of things speaks the justness of the remark; because the period when the angelic spirits were doomed to take upon them mortal forms was doubtless the origin of all nations; and at that time, as the nature of their transgression and the terms of their restoration, were fresh upon their memories, their Theology was pure, universal and unerring; professing one universal faith, which they had as we say from the mouth of GOD himself. (p. 44)
That there was once an age when “all nations had but one system of Theology” is proven by the “uniform concurrence of all people touching the primitive truths,” and it is an entirely “logical supposition” that there is “one faith at the origin of all nations” that reigned in the “terrestrial golden age” (p. 44). In support of his view that “the religion of Bramah is the most ancient, and consequently the most pure,” Holwell also cited the opinions of Ramsay and James Howell (p. 43). Sir James HOWELL (1594–1666) had written in a letter dated August 25, 1635, that Diodorus Siculus made Egypt “thrice older than we do” since he claimed that the Egyptians “had a Religion and Kings” as much as “eighteen thousand years” ago and deduced their philosophy and science from even older sources:
Yet for matter of Philosophy and Science, he [the Egyptian] had it from the Chaldean, he from the Gymnosophists, and Brachmans of India, which Country, as she is the next neighbour to the rising Sun, in reference to this side of the Hemisphere, so the beams of learning did first enlighten her. (Howell 1705:305).
Holwell liked to cite such support for the antiquity of the Indians. He was among the pioneers of the idea that the system “of most ancient worship” was Indian and that elements of this system were pilfered by the Egyptians:
If we grant that it is probable the rest of the world adopted the doctrine of the Metempsychosis from the Egyptians, after they had stolen it from the Gentoo Bramins, and imposed it as their own, we grant a circumstance which is not clearly proved;—but another circumstance is pretty evident; and will be subsequently proved, that, at the time they stole this doctrine, they also purloined other fundamentals of the Chartah Bhade Shastah, namely, the unity of the Godhead, the immortality of the soul, a general and particular Providence, and a future state of rewards and punishments. (Holwell 1771:3.16)
If Bishop Huët had suggested that all other peoples had plagiarized Moses, Holwell now made a similar claim in favor of the Indians: even the teachers of Moses, the ancient Egyptians, had stolen their wisdom from the Indians—and the text they used was, of course, the very Shastah whose fragments Holwell exclusively presented to the world. That Pythagoras also “took the doctrine of the Metempsychosis from the Bramins is not disputed,” and Holwell reports that when the philosopher passed through Persia, he “is said (with probability of truth) to have held many conferences with Zoroaster, on the doctrines of the Bramins” (Holwell 1767:2.27). Thus, not only the Egyptians and Jacob Ilive were inspired by the ancient teachings of the Shastah but also the Greeks and the Persians:
They had so long, and intensely thought, and reasoned on the divine nature, and the cause of evil; that the portion of divine nature they possessed, seemed utterly impaired, and bewildered, as soon as they began to form their crude principles into a system;—they appear to have preserved the basis and out-lines of Bramah’s Shastah, on which (probably in conjunction with the Persian and Egyptian Magi) they raised an aerial superstructure, wild and incomprehensible! and labored to propagate an unintelligible jargon of divinity, which neither themselves, nor any mortal since their time, could explain, or reduce to the level of human understanding. (pp. 27–28)
Old nations were thus all tributary of “the primitive truths of Bramah . . . viz. the unity of the Godhead, the Metempsychosis, and its concomitant essential doctrines, the angelic origin, and immortality of the human soul, and its present and future state of rewards and punishments, &c.” (Holwell 1771:3.14). The whole truth and all religions of remote antiquity thus seemed to rest on the single pole of the Shastah, and this pole was firmly and exclusively placed in the hand of John Zephaniah Holwell.
Holwell was an avid reader of Voltaire and knew French well. He was not only familiar with Voltaire’s attack on Bishop William Warburton (Holwell 1771:3.21) and on the credibility of Moses (pp. 21–22) but also with his mockery of angels (in the Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764) and his endeavor “to laugh religion out of countenance” (p. 32). It would be strange indeed if after his return from India Holwell had not also been reading Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs (1756/1761) or his Philosophie de l’histoire (1765) that made exactly the kind of interesting claims about Indian antiquity that Holwell was searching for in such places as Sir James Howell’s letters and Giovanni Marana et al.’s Letters writ by a Turkish spy (1723; Holwell 1771:3.156–57).
From the mid-1750s on, Voltaire’s cradle of humanity was moving with increasing fanfare from Judaea toward India. As explained in Chapter 1, from the early 1760s, Voltaire’s fight against the Hebrew antiquity and the Judeo-Christian monopoly got increasingly armed with “Indian” weaponry. Not the Jews but the far older Indians, whose sacred texts were plagiarized by Moses and the Jewish prophets, had to be consulted about origins. In spite of the fundamental differences between the two men’s outlooks and religious convictions, Voltaire’s and Holwell’s “Indian campaigns” had surprisingly similar aims that fit the “Ur-tradition” pattern. Both were trying to prod degenerate European Christians to return to a purer creed whose oldest expression was found in some grossly misdated text whose Indian origin was, to say the least, highly questionable. Both infused these texts with their particular agenda, edited them at will, and published only the parts that served their campaign. Both were ardent proponents of India as humanity’s most ancient civilization, and both fought against the notion that the Hebrews were God’s only chosen people. Both Voltaire and Holwell sought proofs for universal consent about a unitary and just creator God, the punishment of evil and reward for good, and a future state. Both were incensed about the degeneration brought about by clergy and their false conception of God as someone to be influenced and bribed; both were outraged by radical atheists and materialists; and both saw universal reason and consent as the touchstone for truth.
Voltaire, who had first touted the Ezour-vedam to some friends as the world’s oldest text, was elated to find in Holwell’s Shastah a text with a precise date of origin: 3100 B.C.E. (Holwell 1767:10)—at any rate, long before Moses. After learning about Holwell’s Shastah through Edmund Burke’s review in the Annual Register for 1766, Voltaire wrote in 1767 to a friend: “It is proven that the Indians have written books since five thousand years ago” (Hawley 1974:146). Soon afterward he encountered his third major India source, Alexander Dow’s History of Hindostan of 1768 (translated into French the following year), which also contained mostly apocryphal texts; but for Voltaire, the Ezour-vedam and Holwell’s work remained the most important Indian sources (p. 147). From the first references to Indian theology in the additions to his Essai sur les moeurs onward, Voltaire used Indian texts to suit his agenda; and this agenda happened to be congruent with the tenor of both the Ezour-vedam and Holwell’s work: all aimed at the regeneration of an ancient, purer monotheism. Thus, Voltaire teamed up with the EzourVedam’s Chumontou and the Shastah’s Brahma (and willy-nilly also with their true authors). Of course his view of Christianity and angels was very different from both, as his scathing summary of the history of Christianity in the Philosophical Dictionary shows:
The Christian religion is based on the fall of the angels. Those who revolted were precipitated from the spheres they inhabited to hell at the center of the earth and became devils. A devil tempted Eve in the form of a serpent and damned humankind. Jesus came to buy back humankind and triumph over the devil who still tempts us. However, this fundamental tradition is only found in the apocryphal book of Enoch, and even there in a manner that is very different from the received tradition. (Voltaire 1994:64–65)
Though Voltaire appreciated Holwell’s delivery of a new weapon for his Indian campaign, it is clear that he did not take it seriously. As explained at the end of Chapter 1, Voltaire laughed about the Shastah story and regarded it as one of those “novels [romans] about the origin of evil” whose “extreme merit” is that “there never was a commandment that one must believe them” (Voltaire 1894:29.203). In the Fragmens sur l’Inde of 1774 Voltaire included a chapter about “the established ancient philosophical mythology and the principal dogmas of the ancient brachmanes about the origin of evil” (Voltaire 1774:148–58) that presents Holwell’s narrative and shows how other peoples including the Jews have filched the angels, their fall, and other elements from ancient India. Angels were originally Indian deoutas; and the devil’s original name was “neither Lucifer nor Beelzebub nor satan” but rather Holwell’s “Moisasor who was the chief of a band of rebels” who was thrown with his followers in the vast ondéra prison and imprisoned “for millions of monontour . . . which are periods of 426 million years” (p. 156). Voltaire interprets Holwell’s tale of the fate of the fallen angels as the Indian invention of purgatory (which the Egyptians and Christians later imitated): “With us, God did not yet pardon the devil; but with the Indians Moisasor and his band obtained their grace after one monontour. Thus their ondéra prison was, as a matter of fact, only a purgatory” (p. 156). Then Voltaire presents a brief summary of Holwell’s narrative that is graced by the amusing title “Angels transformed into cows” in the margins. Thus, the Shastah’s elaborate cosmogony and theodicy are reduced to a few sentences delivered in Voltaire’s deadpan manner:
So God created the earth and populated it with animals. He had the delinquents brought there and lightened their punishment. They were first changed into cows. It is since then that the cows are so sacred in the Indian peninsula and that the pious of the region do not eat any animal. Afterwards the penitent angels were changed into men and divided into four castes. As culprits, they brought into this world the germ of vices; as punished ones, they brought the principle of all physical ills. There we have the origin of good and evil. (pp. 156–57)
Voltaire derided Holwell’s core arguments about the origin of evil and God’s limited liability because he gave the angels freedom of will. With regard to the latter, he remarked:
This enormous abuse of liberty, this revolt of God’s favorites against their master, has the potential to dazzle; but it does not solve the problem because one could always ask why God gave to his favorites the power to offend? Why did he not force them into a happy incapacity to do evil? It is demonstrated that this difficulty is insoluble. (p. 153)
Regarding the Shastah’s explanation of the origin of evil, Voltaire was sarcastic:
One could possibly reproach to this system that the animals who have not sinned are as unfortunate as we are, that they devour each other and are eaten by all humans except for the brahmins. This would be a feeble objection from the times when there were still Cartesians. We will not discuss here the disputes of Indian theologians about this origin of evil. Priests have disputed everywhere; but one has to admit that the quarrels of the brahmins were always peaceful. (p. 157)
The whole explanation of the origin of evil that Holwell poured into his Shastah received Voltaire’s damning praise as “ingenious” yet good only for “idiots”:
Philosophers might be surprised that geometers and inventors of so many arts concocted a system of religion that, though ingenious, is nevertheless so unreasonable. We could reply that they had to deal with idiots [imbéciles]; and that the priests of Chaldea, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome never came up with a system that was either better construed or more plausible. (p. 157)
No wonder that Voltaire did not lose as single word about the third volume of Holwell’s work that presents some of the theories behind his system and spells out some of its implications.
Michael John Franklin has called Holwell’s contrast between “contemporary, complicated and degenerated Hindu custom and ritual and the purity of an original monotheism . . . characteristic of the deistic position of many of the eighteenth-century British pioneers of Indology, including Alexander Dow and, to a lesser extent, many of the Asiatic Society members, such as Wilkins and Jones” (Holwell 2000:xv). But was Holwell a deist? He defended himself against people who, on account of his analysis of Christianity’s degeneration, “unjustly” accused him “of Deism, according to the common acceptation of the phrase” (Holwell 1771:3.90) and explained:
But as we think we have as indisputable a right as Dr. Clarke or others, to extend or give a new signification to the word Deist, so we pronounce, that a man may, with strict propriety, be an orthodox Christian Deist; that is, that he may, consistently, have a firm faith in the unity of the Godhead, and in the pure and original doctrines of Christ. In this sense alone we glory in avowing ourself—A CHRISTIAN DEIST. (p. 91)
Holwell’s “deism” is certainly of a very particular kind. While he adopted many objections against Christianity that were aired by deists, his (and Ilive’s) system was of a kind that would enrage deists, as it was completely based on events known only through revelation. The tale of the first creation, the angels, their fall, the creation of rehabilitation station earth, and so forth can only be known with divine help:
To a notion so universal in the first times, we think ourselves warranted in giving the title of a primitive truth; which must have had unerring fact, and a divine revelation for its source and foundation, as well as the other primitive truths of the rebellion, fall, and punishment of part of the angelic host, under the instigation and leading of an arch apostate of the first rank; hence the Moisasoor of the Bramins; the Arimanius of the Persians; the Typhon of the Egyptians, Greeks &c. and the Satan of the Christians. (pp. 40–41)
Though human reason can accept such explanations as more logical than alternative scenarios, one ultimately has to accept them as revealed. Deists usually rejected such special revelations, whether they were made to the Hebrews or the Indians; but for Ur-tradition movements, they are the life blood since their raison d’être is the restoration of “primitive truths” or original teachings that, to be restored, had to be known through some kind of transmission. This is exactly the role Holwell cut out for himself:
God forbid it should be thought, from the tenor of these our disquisitions, that, with Hobbes, Tindal, Bolingbroke, and others, our intent is to sap the foundation, or injure the root of Christianity. Candor and benevolence avert from us so uncharitable and ill-grounded an imputation! On the contrary, our sole aim is to restore its purity and vigor, by having those luxuriant injurious branches and shoots lopped off and pruned, which have so obviously obstructed, stinted, and prevented its natural, universal growth and progress; and as we have assumed to ourselves the title of the reformed church, by judiciously and piously abjuring some of the impious, idolatrous extravagances and tenets of the church of Rome, let us boldly, in the cause of God and his supremacy, uniformly deserve the character we have assumed.
Holwell’s reformist “Christian deism” may thus better be called an Indo-Christian Ur-tradition. Restoring Christianity’s “purity and vigor” was for Holwell tightly linked to the “primitive truths,” and these truths were only insufficiently explained in the Old Testament.
From all that has hitherto been advanced . . . three most important truths may be clearly gathered. Imprimis, that the FIRST and LAST revelation of God’s will, that is to say, the Hindoo and the Christian dispensation, are the most perfect that have been promulged to offending man; secondly, that the FIRST was to a moral certainty the original doctrines, and terms of restoration, delivered from God himself by the mouth of his first created BIRMAH to mankind at their first creation in the form of man; and that, after many successive ages in sin, and every kind of wickedness, GOD, in his tender mercy, reminded mankind of their true state and nature, of their original sin; and by the descent of BRAMAH, gave to the Hindoos the first written manifestation of his will, which (by the common fate of all oral traditions), had most probably, from various causes, been effaced from their minds and memories: Thirdly, that every intermediate system of religion in the world between that of BRAMAH and CHRIST are corruptly branched from the former, as is to demonstration evident, from their being founded on, and partaking of, with more or less purity those primitive truths. (p. 71)
With this coup de grâce the Mosaic dispensation was discarded as a corrupt derivate of the older Indian one, and as a result Holwell’s Shastah became officially the ultimate Old Testament of Christianity. This also meant that it had to form the basis for any true restoration since it alone contains “the original doctrines, and terms of restoration” that God himself revealed to the Indians and took care to preserve in Holwell’s Shastah (p. 71). Even the mission of Christ became a confirmation of the Shastah’s original doctrines:
The above, we think, will suffice to prove, that the mission of Christ is the strongest confirmation of the authenticity and divine origin of the Chartah Bhade Shastah of Bramah; and that they both contain all the great primitive truths in their original purity that constituted the first and original religion; and that the very ancient scriptures now under our consideration, exhibit also the strongest conviction of the truth of the celestial origin of Christ’s mission. (pp. 74–75)
The portrayal of the Shastah as the basis for a thorough reformation of Christianity is not simply a by-product of having found an ancient Indian text but rather a result of Holwell’s religious restoration project that included the production of an Old Testament that was more compatible with Ilive’s, Berrow’s, and Holwell’s views. It is thus a mistake to assume that Holwell first translated the Shastah and subsequently developed increasingly strange interpretations, as Franklin suggests:
In the third volume of Interesting Historical Events, published in 1771, his speculation became more confident; Hinduism encapsulated “to a moral certainty the original doctrines, and terms of restoration, delivered by God himself from the mouth of his first created Birmah to mankind at his first creation of man.” The Hindu scriptures not only completed the Biblical revelation, but eclipsed it in priority and comprehensiveness; indeed, in the words of Trautmann, “By the end of the book Holwell has completely rewritten Christianity with the help of Hinduism,” in the construction of a species of pre-Mosaic deism. (Holwell 2000:xv)
According to the scenario proposed in this chapter, the course of events was exactly inverse. Holwell’s “speculation” was present from the beginning and essentially consisted in Jacob Ilive’s new creation story (involving multiple worlds, angels, their fall, and their rehabilitation on planet earth) and his particular interpretation of Christianity. The Indian part of the story began when Holwell detected, inspired by Ilive’s theory and possibly prodded by Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus and Abraham Roger’s short version of Couto, a similar scenario in Western descriptions of the first Veda and set out to find this text. “Rewriting Christianity” was thus in my opinion not the outcome of a long process but rather its starting point; and Holwell’s “Hindu scriptures” did not result in a rewriting of Christianity, but the rewriting of Christianity resulted in the creation of Holwell’s “Hindu scriptures” that had to serve as an “improved,” “older,” “Indian” Old Testament.
In his third volume of 1771, Holwell delivered what he had already announced on the title page of the 1765 volume: his interpretation of transmigration (“A DISSERTATION on the METEMPSYCHOSIS, commonly, though erroneously, called the PYTHAGOREAN Doctrine”). In 1765 he had already announced that this volume would contain “A dissertation on the Gentoo doctrine of metempsychosis; improperly called Pythagorean, by all who have wrote on this subject, hitherto so little understood” (Holwell 1765:1.15). Ilive had not discussed delinquent angel souls in animals. But in India, transmigration or metempsychosis involves all animal bodies, and what Holwell read in Lord (1630), Roger (1651), Kircher (1667), Baldaeus (1762), and other sources about Indian religion was chock-full of transmigration stories that feature animals, for example, the famous incarnation of Vishnu into a boar (which Chumontou denounced in the Ezour-vedam). This was Holwell’s extension of Ilive’s system, and it was, of course, already firmly embedded both in Holwell’s Shastah and his commentary of 1767.
What was new in the third volume of 1771 was Holwell’s explicit identification of Christ as the Birmah—which is not at all heterodox if one accepts the congruence of the old (Indian) and new (Christian) dispensation:
This being premised, it is no violence to faith, if we believe that Birmah and Christ is one and the same individual coelestial being, the first begotten of the Father, who has most probably appeared at different periods of time, in distant parts of the earth, under various mortal forms of humanity, and denominations: thus we may very rationally conceive, that it was by the mouth of Christ (stiled Birmah by the easterns), that God delivered the great primitive truths to man at his creation, as infallible guides for his conduct and restoration: but the purity of these truths being effaced by time, and the industrious influence of Satan, assisted by the natural unhappy bent of the human soul to evil, it became necessary that they should be given on record to a nation that was most probably at that period much more extensive than we can at present form any idea of; and it appears as near to demonstration as a circumstance of this nature can admit of, that it was owing to this divine revelation delivered to them, that this people acquired so justly that early reputation for wisdom and theology, which the whole learned world has ascribed to them: but this by the bye. (pp. 80–81)
Thus, the messages of the Shastah and of Christ merge, and the task of a true reformer of Christianity is shown to consist in restoring “once more the true spirit of those primitive truths, which were, as the first and last grace of GOD, delivered . . . originally by BIRMAH, and subsequently by CHRIST, the one and the same individual, first begotten by the Father (p. 90). The “pure original doctrines of Christ” were thus first recorded in the Shastah, and it is “in this sense alone” that Holwell glories in avowing himself to be “A CHRISTIAN DEIST” (p. 91)!
Holwell’s conception of Christ is not a creation of the late 1760s or early 1770s; rather, its groundwork is carefully laid in his introduction to the Shastah (1767:2.6–8) and must have been an old conviction of his. The identity of Birmah and Christ also ensures that the creation story of the Shastah is far more divine than that of Moses: unlike the Pentateuch it is “clogged with no difficulties, no ludicrous unintelligible circumstances or inconsistencies” (p. 114)—at least, in Holwell’s eyes, who must have known it best.
Holwell’s view of metempsychosis, too, was deeply rooted in the old convictions that he had expressed in the Shastah and its commentary. He held that both animal and human bodies are prison cells for delinquent angels. The difference is that animal bodies are cells reserved for punishment, while human bodies are transition cells with the possibility of eventual release:
In the first it [the delinquent angel] may be said to be in a close prison, and in the last, a prisoner more at large, and capable of working out its full and final liberty; a privilege it cannot obtain by issuing from the mortal brute form, which is destined to be its state of punishment and purgation, as before observed, and that of man only, its state of trial and probation. (p. 142)
In support of this idea, Holwell cited Berrow’s opinion that “every organized body, as well in the brute as in the rational” can be “an allotted temporary prison for a pre-delinquent soul” and that this is “an hypothesis, than which there cannot I think be one more rational” (p. 125). In short, the souls of animals are also delinquent angels since “every brute is animated with a soul identical to his [man’s] own”; therefore, God’s command “Thou shalt do No murder” must also apply to animals (p. 148).
Since the dire state of our world could not be entirely explained by the delinquent angel story, Holwell was forced to posit another fall and degeneration, this time on earth. This fall happened when man began to slaughter and devour animals, which is “one of the great roots of physical and moral evil in the world” (p. 154). It entailed “a train of monstrous, unnatural, violent, and consequently ungovernable passions, . . . lusts of every kind and species, ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, and malice &c.” (p. 161) and was all the result of a ruse of Moisasoor or Satan (p. 162). In conjunction with the ingestion of alcohol, all kinds of moral evils came to dominate the world; and only man’s return “to his natural, primitive, simple aliments” can make his passions subside (p. 168). By contrast vegetarianism, as practiced in India, offers “a well-grounded hope of the renewal and restoration of the primitive age, of purity and holiness” (p. 169).
But Holwell also saw other problems in rehab station earth, for example, commerce, “that bane (falsely called the cement) of mankind” that leads “to invasions, fraud, and blood” (p. 169), and priests who set the example of “killing and eating the rational brute creation, and guzzling vinous, &c. potations” (p. 171). The thorough reform envisaged by Holwell was multifaceted and threatened to affect many unsuspecting citizens:
Lawyers, and their mischievous train of retainers, will have no employment.—Physicians and their coadjutors, upon the restoration of the human body to its original nature, will, in the second generation at least, have no friendly disease for their support.—Wine-merchants, distillers, brewers, vintners, dealers in spiritous liquors, cooks, (those dangerous instruments of luxury, disease and death) and butchers, &c. will all be turned a-drift, and be forced to seek for other means of subsistence. When we become, bona fide, Christians, the art and destructive practice of war would cease to be the bane of mankind, and the inoffensive brute creation; and a numerous race of able-bodied beings, who have hitherto been employed only to work out the perdition of the species, would contribute to their support and maintenance, by being employed in the cultivation of the lands of the state they belong to; a work they would most certainly prefer to the trade of spilling the blood of their fellow-creatures, they know not why, or in support of the tyranny and wanton ambition of others. (pp. 207–8)
Holwell’s mission to “rescue the originally untainted manners, and religious worship of a very ancient people from gross misrepresentation” (1767 Dedication) was thus at the same time a mission to rescue Christianity and lead it back to the pure primitive truths as formulated in the Shastah. Holwell’s third volume ends with his reform advice for Great Britain and Ireland and their “clergy of every denomination” (pp. 214ff.), his proposal for the abolition of the Athanasian and Nicene Creeds, and the correction of the Apostolic Creed (p. 221). While it remains unclear how mere “prison reforms” would affect God’s eternal jurisdiction and the restoration of angels to their original home, the Shastah-based reforms proposed by Holwell would certainly ameliorate the situation on rehabilitation station earth in general and the British Isles in particular:
On the whole, we should become a new people: by quick gradations the pure spirit of Christ’s doctrines would take root in our hearts; power would no longer constitute the rule of justice; the primitive truths and the primitive age would be restored; mankind, who has from that period hitherto been, by nature, principle, and practice, very devils, would revert to a perfect sense of their original dignity and angelic source, and no longer disgrace it; all jarring sects would be reconciled; peace and harmony would return to the earth; an effectual stop would be put to the carnage of man and brute; and all united, would produce a sure and happy transmigration to eternity.—GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND would blaze out as the torch of righteousness to all the world; her nations would prosper; her people be happy; their pious flame would be caught by their neighboring states, and from thence be spread over the face of the whole earth; and THE KINGDOM OF SATAN WOULD BE NO MORE. (pp. 222–23)
Fifteen years after the publication of the third volume of his Interesting events, Holwell gave his dwindling readership some additional advice. Although he had in his Shastah carefully formulated that God “governs creation only by a general providence resulting from first determined and fixed principles” (Holwell 1767:2.31) and had thus excluded any teaching of particular providence from the oldest divine revelation, there were still stubborn people who held this stupid opinion.
The 1786 Dissertations on the origin, nature, and pursuits of intelligent beings, and on divine providence, religion, and religious worship begins with an apology for the “variations of sentiment . . . when contrasted with earlier productions submitted to the public eye,” and these variations are explained by the “increase of years, experience, observation, and (we hope!) just reflection” (Holwell 1786:6). The most striking change is that Holwell never once mentions the Shastah by name. The first section quotes “the most ancient Scripture; at least, as far as our imperfect records tell” (p. 7).
This remark about “imperfect records” is very interesting and might confirm my hypothesis about the redaction of the text. Holwell’s quotation reproduces the beginning of the second section of the Shastah, which deals with God’s creation of the angels and features the memorable words: “These beings then, were not. The Eternal One willed, and they were; He formed them in part of his own essence capable of perfection, but with the powers of imperfection, both dependant on their voluntary election” (pp. 7–8). This was an absolutely central passage for Holwell’s theory of free will and the origin of evil, and he had quoted it many times as their textual basis and proof. From 1767 onward, this passage was always presented as a literal translation from the Shastah with quotation marks at the beginning of every line, and this is the manner in which it is also reproduced almost twenty years later in his last book. But in the entire book this is the only Shastah quotation—and it is introduced by specifying that “the words and sentiments of the most ancient Scripture” are not based on God’s Indian revelation but rather Holwell’s “imperfect records”! If this crucial Shastah passage was based on Holwell’s “imperfect records,” was there any part of his Shastah that was not based on such “imperfect records”? In his last book, Holwell avoids further quotations from the Shastah and keeps using words like “presumption,” “conviction,” and “hypothesis”:
It has been for some time evident to the reader, that our chain of reasoning [about delinquent angels on probation] is founded on the presumption and full conviction, that the souls or spirits, animating every mortal organised form, are the identical apostate angels; but should any stumble at this pleasing, flattering, comfortable hypothesis, they are at liberty to reject it; as our essential arguments are equally applicable to all, considered as rational beings only. (p. 12)
What would a Christian say if a priest said that he or she was “at liberty to reject” the Bible? It appears that toward the end of his life Holwell had more or less abandoned his Shastah. While holding fast to all essential elements of his theory, he keeps saying things like “even if we totally give up this hypothesis as merely ideal” (p. 14), “according with our hypothesis” (p. 17), and “it is most consistent with reason and probability” (p. 23). What had happened to the Shastah? Had Holwell seen a copy of the first publication of a Sanskrit classic, Wilkins’s The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon that appeared in 1785, just when Holwell was working on his last book? Or had he buckled under the weight of criticism of his theories?
At any rate, in his 1786 book Holwell once more presented an outline of his system, which had little changed since he poured it into the Shastah on the basis of his “imperfect records.” But Holwell’s reform mission, very much apparent in the Shastah and its commentary, was alive and well. He confessed that his “former labours tended to establish the sacred doctrine of the UNITY and SUPREMACY of the GODHEAD which . . . the liturgy and worship of every Christian Church palpably opposed and discountenanced” but reassured his readers that he did not “wish the abolition of churches, the priesthood, or religious worship” but rather “to see them all reduced to such as standard as may do honour to God, and be consistent with reason, true piety, and propriety” (p. 70). Claiming to be “of no particular sect whatsoever, but an adorer of One God, in spirit and truth, and an humble follower and subscriber to the unadulterated precepts and doctrines of CHRIST” (p. 72), Holwell now surprised his readers with yet another theodicy and declared “without reserve . . . that all the evils with which mankind has been pestered in all ages, sprung from an undue pre-eminence, power, and emoluments . . . granted to the priesthood” (pp. 75–76).
Accordingly, his first propositions for reform were that “the dignified Clergy under every denomination, be divested of all Rank, Precedence, and Title, in the Church and State” and that “all endowments of whatsoever kind, annexed to Cathedrals, Churches, Chapels, and Colleges, be sequestered, restored, and appropriated to the relief of the exigencies of the state, and heave burdens of the people” (pp. 79–80). All ordinations and degrees, too, should be abolished and “a considerable reduction shall be made in the number of churches” (pp. 80–81). Only one incumbent per church should remain on a fixed salary, and sacked priests should get a retirement fee (pp. 81–83). The liturgy, being “incompatible with the true Christian religion, as dictated by its founder,” should be totally reformed and no adoration whatsoever offered to Christ: adoration “is only due to his God, and our God, to his Father, and our Father, which is in heaven” (pp. 91–93). The Lord’s Supper may still be held, but all elements that “manifestly impeached the UNITY of the GODHEAD” (such as blasphemously calling Christ “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”) must be removed (pp. 98–99). Making “the innocent and immaculate Christ . . . the scape-goat for the remission of sins and salvation” would no more be permitted, and neither would spilling blood in his name (p. 100).
In this manner Holwell revised the sacraments and denounced the absurdities of established liturgies that are just more proofs that we are “the very apostate angelic beings that are transmigrating through all animated organised mortal forms” (p. 119). Holwell’s reform was designed to “work a happy change in favour of the miserable brute creation, who are looked upon and treated as mere material machines” rather than as “two children born of the same parents” (p. 120). “Sacred musick” would still be allowed in churches during Holwell’s New Liturgy “conducted in the Cathedral stile” (pp. 121–22), and the remaining clergy should receive new uniforms: “We wish to see the dismal black banished, the officiating vestments of the Doctors in Divinity sumptuously ornamented, and their common habit purple, distinguished as the uniform of the Church; which colour should be prohibited to all other ranks” (p. 123).
The last section of Holwell’s last book even proposes “A new liturgy; or, form of common prayer” in which, for example, the Lord’s Prayer is prefaced by a hymn that identifies the faithful as delinquent angels:
Belongeth mercy and forgiveness,
Although we have rebelled against him;
Neither have we obeyed
The voice of the LORD our God,
To walk in his laws, which he left before us.
Holwell also included rhymed angelic anthems and choruses, for example, the chorus:
THE Lord descended from above,
And bow’d the heavens so high;
And underneath his feet he cast
The darkness of the sky.
On cherubs and on cherubims
Full royally he rode:
And on the wings of mighty winds
Came flying all abroad.
Thus Holwell fought until the end of his life for a worthy cause: the restoration of the religion of paradise. The crusade had officially begun with the publication of the Shastah, which in more than one sense came straight from paradise. But Holwell’s mission as a reformer changed little over the years. In 1786 his aim was still identical to that which twenty years earlier he had so skillfully woven into the oldest revelation from India, the sacred scripture of his crusade:
to defend the honour and dignity of our Creator, from a fatal misconception: to expose the fallacy, inadequacy, and inconsistency, of all Christian religious worship: to extricate mankind from the superstitious, abject slavery they have for ages groaned under, to a tribe of their own species; to arraign the folly and inutility of what are called arts and sciences, and to stimulate the genius, study, and abilities of men, to more worthy and useful pursuits: to relieve the present and future exigencies of the state, and heavy burdens of the people, by a most equitable and necessary measure: and finally, to institute a form of worship more worthy of our God, and of ourselves. (pp. 147–48)
In academic circles the debate about the “invention” of “Hinduism” has been so fashionable in recent times that Donald S. Lopez found that “one of the ways that scholars of Hinduism may be distinguished from experts on other religions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is by their overdeveloped pectoral muscles, grown large from tracing quotation marks in the air whenever they have mentioned ‘Hinduism’ over the past ten years” (2000:832). One name that is remarkably absent in this discussion is that of Holwell, himself a master of quotation marks. For example, Brian K. Pennington’s 2005 book Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion postulates that “a seismic shift” in the British perception of Hindu religions traditions happened “sometime between 1789 and 1832” yet does not mention Holwell even once. Holwell’s name is equally notable for its absence in Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion of 1999. Will Sweetman’s otherwise interesting study Mapping Hinduism: “Hinduism” and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600–1776 does not even list Holwell’s three-volume Interesting historical events (1765–71) in its bibliography. However, he mentions that the Cambridge University library copy of a 1779 reedition of its second and third volumes carries on its spine the inscription “Holwell’s Gentooism” (Sweetman 2003:56); that Holwell had a role in making “Gentoo” a common term to refer to the non-Muslim population of India (p. 80); and that the concept of “a unified pan-Indian religion” was already “firmly established by the 1770s, when ‘Holwell’s Gentooism’ appeared,” whereas the word “Hindooism” was first used in 1787 (p. 163). Though Sweetman does not claim a causal connection between this “Gentooism” or “Hindooism” and the geographical “conception of India as a region,” he finds that the “concept of ‘Hinduism’ and the concept of ‘India’ in its modern sense, are coeval” (p. 163).
The question whether Hinduism was invented or discovered may posit a false alternative. R. N. Dandekar argued that
Hinduism can hardly be called a religion at all in the popularly understood sense of the term. Unlike most religions, Hinduism does not regard the concept of god as being central to it. Hinduism is not a system of theology—it does not make any dogmatic affirmation regarding the nature of god. . . . Similarly, Hinduism does not venerate any particular person as its sole prophet or as its founder. It does not also recognize any particular book as its absolutely authoritative scripture. Further, Hinduism does not insist on any particular religious practice as being obligatory, nor does it accept any doctrine as dogma. Hinduism can also not be identified with a specific moral code. Hinduism, as a religion, does not convey any definite or unitary idea. (Dandekar 1971:237; quoted in Sweetman 2003:33)
Whether one agrees with all of this or not, it is clear that at some point in history exactly these characteristics were projected on the dominant religion of the Indians and that this is how “Gentooism” or “Hinduism” as a “religion in the popularly understood sense” was invented. Its inventor, I propose, is Mr. John Zephaniah Holwell, and the year of this invention is 1766 when Holwell wrote his second volume. This was indeed a creative act and not just a discovery of something that was there for all to see and understand. In this sense—and for Holwell—it is therefore appropriate to speak of a “creation” or “invention” of Hinduism. It only was a far more creative creation than even constructivists could have dreamed.
For this kind of religion one needs, as Dandekar rightly says, an authoritative scripture—and what could be more authoritative than Holwell’s Shastah, delivered by God personally and first promulgated exactly in 3100 B.C.E.? Then one needs a god—Holwell’s creative “God is ONE” at the very beginning of the Shastah who was thoughtfully equipped with an urge to reveal himself and limited liability. Furthermore, a decent religion needs an excellent founder—Holwell’s “spirit or essence of God,” Birmah, who “descended to the delinquent angels, and made known unto them the mercy and immutable sentence, that God their creator had pronounced and registered against them” (Holwell 1767:10). This constituted another essential element, namely, that of transmission. Birmah transmitted the divine sentence to Bramah who descended to Indostan and translated it into Sanskrit to form the very text that Holwell claimed to have partially translated (p. 12). This Birmah is, nota bene, the Indian or rather Holwellian preexistent incarnation of Christ.
Dandekar also did not mention that it is absolutely crucial for such a religion to have the longest possible history. Previous researchers of Indian religion soon got so lost in the millions of years of Indian world ages and scores of unknown sacred scriptures that they were unable to find a foothold that somehow related to accepted chronology. But Holwell invented one, and we should not underestimate the impact of this invention. For decades, the date of the Shastah was a pillar of “Indian” chronology, and the neat succession of Text I (3100 B.C.E.), Text II (2100), Text III (1600) and the dating of the Veda after 1600 B.C.E. were a novelty that stunned even European specialists (for example, Anquetil-Duperron, as explained in the next chapter). Additionally, Holwell’s simple four-step genealogy of Indian sacred literature also seemed to explain important regional, doctrinal, and historical differences, for example, the variations between the North and South that were due to a schism invented by Holwell.
Then there is, of course, the dogma question for which Holwell, inspired by Ilive and Couto, found a brilliantly simple solution, namely, the delinquent angel story wedded to transmigration. This was, as we have seen in Chapter 5, already touted by Ramsay as the very essence of “pagan mythology” and a core element of God’s original revelation. Of course, this dogma needed to be revealed and transmitted, and this was the aim of Holwell’s Shastah including its “translation.” The question that bugged Ilive so much and that he did not find answered in the Old Testament, namely, who we are and why we are here, was answered in dogmatic and systematic fashion in the Shastah: we are delinquent angels incarcerated in mortal bodies and live in a giant penitentiary called earth in order to atone for our past rebellion, and as we go through countless transmigrations we might earn the right to return to our original heavenly homeland.
With regard to practice, vegetarianism and the cult of cows (which were both linked to delinquent angels and their rehabilitation on earth) were central; but the Shastah also contains other precepts such as the abstinence from alcoholic drinks that, one would assume, should promote the kind of peace and tranquility that reigns in Holwell’s idyllic Bisnapore.
Another important topic that Dandekar failed to mention is the question of origins. Any religion that hopes to give a direction to people’s lives must teach in one way or another where we come from, where we are, and where we are bound; and the answer to the first of these questions is usually decisive for the whole enterprise. S. N. Balagangadhara has defined religion as “an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos and itself” and concluded that “Indian traditions could not possibly be religions because the issue of the origin of the world cannot properly be raised there” (1994:384, 398; quoted in Sweetman 2003:37). Regardless of the validity of this definition and its application to “Hinduism,” one notes that Holwell and his Shastah delivered exactly the kind of content that would turn this “Indian tradition” into a “religion” that, in Holwell, is usually called “Gentooism” but soon became known as “Hindooism.”
Holwell’s portrait of “Gentooism” was so powerful and influential24 exactly because it was an invention, and an essentially European one at that. It did not really need to take Indian history, cultic diversity, philosophy, textual problems, and so on into account and did not get lost in details and mazes with thousands of divinities because it was built on a preconceived idea that guaranteed a unified, compact design. Everything turned around God and the creation, fall, and restoration of angels, and that is exactly what the Shastah is all about. Holwell’s influence was boosted by the free publicity that his book received courtesy of Voltaire and by its translation into French (1768) and then into German (1778). It is true that readers of Voltaire with a sense of humor will not overlook the sarcasm of some of his remarks about Holwell’s scheme; yet, as was pointed out in Chapter 1, a consensus that Voltaire had promoted the Ezour-vedam and Holwell’s Shastah in good faith reigned until today even among specialists. Now it appears that both men propagated a custom-made Hinduism to support their reformist ideology. Though their aims were at odds, Voltaire’s crusade boosted Holwell’s and vice-versa, and their exaggerated claims of Indian antiquity and portraits of “Indian” religion significantly influenced the European perception of the origin of culture and religion. An example of such influence is Herder who, dissatisfied with Dow, raved in 1772 about Holwell’s Shastah (Faust 1977:146) and soon introduced Brahmins as guides to humanity’s origins—a move that some decades later inspired a generation of German romantics. Through their inventive campaigns and sensationalist presentation of supposedly ancient “Indian” texts, Holwell and Voltaire almost single-handedly created the basis for Indomania.25
