Priscillian and Vegetarianism: A Critical Study in Light of the Sources

Abstract

There is a certain historiographic consensus that attributes the adoption of a vegetarian diet to the Priscillianists without a doubt. However, we only have five explicit, exogenous and post-execution sources that sustain such a statement. It is obvious that the articles of the Catholic faith condemned at the end of the fourth century and at the beginning of the fifth century the abstinence of the meat of birds or animals as long as it was not simply a practice of mortification and asceticism. Augustine of Hippo assured that the Priscillianists avoided eating meat by associating it with evil angels, based on the first-hand information that he had received from Ceretius, Consentius and Orosius. The Pope Vigilius denounced the same situation a long time later, like the First Council of Braga. Thus, the present article is constituted with the objective of deepening the alleged vegetarianism of the Priscillianists through a critical analysis of these scarce sources.