“The Brahman” deals with the theme of self-sacrificial suicide in hopes of salvation through two lenses: first, she writes of two pagan examples of the virtuous who immolated themselves to escape mortal pains, Calanus and the phoenix; second, she contrasts her pagan examples with the death of Aaron, who, in her reading, accepts his death when it is God’s will, rather than seeking it out. Although Pulter seems to admire her pagan models, in this poem, her Christian faith means that she “cannot” and “dare[s] not” (ln. 20; 21) take their route away from the pain of mortal life; instead of suicide, she ultimately places her trust in the knowledge that, eventually, she will die by God’s will and rejoin Christ in heaven.
Pulter begins the poem by describing the death of Calanus, the titular Brahman, from Plutarch’s “Life of Alexander the Great.” Although Pulter, on the grounds of Christian piety, rejects the actions of Calanus and the phoenix (her second example, introduced at line 9) in deliberately immolating themselves, she clearly sympathizes with the desire to be rid of the pains and impurities of the mortal body. After these two classical examples, Pulter turns to the death of the biblical Aaron, using it to express a desire to be permitted by God to die, so that she may be a spirit in Heaven until the resurrection at the end of days. In the Old Testament, after God tells Aaron and Moses that they will not see the Promised Land because they expressed doubt that God could bring forth the waters of Meribah, God tells Moses that Aaron will die:
“And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in mount Hor, by the coast of the land of Edom, saying, Aaron shall be gathered unto his people: for he shall not enter into the land which I have given to the people of Israel, because ye rebelled against my word at the water of Meribah. Take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up unto mount Hor: And strip Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his son: and Aaron shall be gathered unto his people, and shall die there. And Moses did as the Lord commanded: and they went up into mount Hor in the sight of all the congregation. And Moses stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his son; and Aaron died there in the top of the mount: and Moses and Eleazar came down from the mount.”
(KJV Numbers 20.23–28)
This passage presents Aaron as knowing his death is coming and, because it is a calling from God, he therefore willingly allows himself to die. By using Aaron as her Christian counter-example, Pulter returns to the image of deliberately removing one’s mortal life—the literal body, in the case of Calanus and the phoenix, and his priestly robes in the case of Aaron—in order to reveal the inner spirit in death. Although the biblical passage emphasizes Aaron’s passivity, as Moses is the one who removes Aaron’s clothes and gives them to Eleazar, Pulter gives Aaron some agency in his death, writing that “old Aaron did put of his Cloaths” (ln. 11), implying his active participation in accepting God’s will, and therefore in his death. Despite this agency, however, Aaron’s death is not a suicide; he accepts his death, rather than causing it.
The tension shown in this poem, between Pulter’s admiration of pagan models and her Christian faith, is present elsewhere in Pulter’s poetry. In particular, another of Pulter’s classical emblems, Old Aeschylus (Emblem 31)96, has a similar structure of enumerating several classical examples of her theme and then embracing the proper Christian response, using an example from the Old Testament. In this emblem, Pulter explores the idea of trying to know or avoid one’s fate, offering King Hezekiah’s successful prayer for reprieve from a fatal plague as an alternative to pagan attempts to either avoid or ignore one’s fate, such as those of Aeschylus and Caesar (Old Aeschylus (Emblem 31)96, ln. 13–16). She concludes by rejecting both foreknowledge of death and even the desire to avoid death, writing:
Then let me never Know my Destiny,
But every day So live that when I die,
I may with comfort lay these Ruins down
In dust; ’tis softer far than finest Down,
Nor is that Pillow Stuffed with Cares or fears,
Nor Shall I wake as now to Sighs and tears.
(ln. 25–30)
Here, like in “The Brahman,” Pulter finds solace in the eventual peace of death and the promise of resurrection. By embracing death as the release from life’s hardships and the first step of heaven’s reward for good Christians in both of these poems, Pulter distances her emblems’ morals from her emblems’ pagan subjects and demonstrates her own deeply Christian piety.
However, Pulter does not always reject pagan examples in her poetry; nor, indeed, does she always reject suicide, as demonstrated in Of a Young Lady at Oxford, 1646 (Poem 43)43. In this poem, Pulter recounts the story of a young woman who commits suicide after the death of her royalist lover in battle. She then compares this young woman to pagan examples of suicide driven by honour (Lucrece) and love (Thisbe). Instead of going on to reject their examples, however, Pulter concludes by begging her soul to emulate their heroic suicides and leave her body so that she may rejoin Christ in Heaven:
Thus do these stories and these fables teach
And show to us how far our love may reach;
But He (my soul) His precious blood did lose
For us (ay me), for us: His curséd foes.
Considering this, my soul, how canst thou stay?
(ln. 67–71)
Furthermore, in this poem, Pulter even applauds the actions of the titular “young lady” who commits suicide after the death of her royalist lover, and writes that “As this declares a magnanimous spirit, / So she the glory of it doth inherit” (ln. 30–31). Nowhere in this poem does Pulter state or imply that suicide is impious or will lead to damnation. As Lara Dodds notes in her Curation for “Of a Young Lady,” this poem engages with the Stoic idea of heroic suicide (Dodds Heroic Suicide and Women’s Writing), which experienced a revival during the early modern period (Hunter 242). However, in “The Brahman,” Pulter explicitly rejects “Stoicall tricks” (ln. 22) like Calanus’s heroic suicide. It is difficult to reconcile the opposing portrayals of suicide in “Of a Young Lady” and “The Brahman,” but it is worth noting that what Pulter wishes for herself in both poems is, in fact, quite similar: she seeks a natural death. Even in “Of a Young Lady,” Pulter begs her soul to follow Christ’s to heaven, like the souls of newborn infants that “Do often fly to their eternal rest” (ln. 76).
Although there are similarities in how Pulter expresses her own desire for death in these two poems, the opposition in their portrayal of heroic suicide, and Pulter’s use of classical figures in exploring both sides of it, reflect a broader conversation and anxiety about suicide during the early modern period. John Donne’s Christian defense of suicide, Biathanatos, written in 1608 but published in 1647, draws more on Catholic and Protestant theology than classical philosophy (including Stoic philosophy) in its justification of suicide (Rudick and Battin xxi-xxiv), but, as Elizabeth Hunter argues, the revival of Stoicism in this period also played a role in the conversation surrounding suicide. According to Hunter, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although many of the Neo-stoics themselves rejected the concept, the revival of the Stoic idea of heroic or honourable suicide, including in the context of early Christian martyrs, provoked counterarguments from more orthodox Protestant English clergy (Hunter 242–45). In “The Brahman,” therefore, Pulter is engaging with this conversation through the contradiction between heroic suicide and conventional Christian doctrine. In fact, Pulter’s use of Calanus in a poem arguing against suicide has an analogue in Thomas Philipot’s treatise Self-Homicide-Murther, or, Some Antidotes and Arguments Gleaned out of the Treasuries of Our Modern Casuists and Divines against That Horrid and Reigning Sin of Self-Murther by T.P., Esq (1674), in which he uses Calanus as an example of Greek authors condemning suicide: “[a]nd Strabo informs us, that the Indian Priests and Wise men, blam’d the Fact of Calanus, and that they resented with Regret and Hatred the hasty Deaths of Proud and Impatient Persons” (24). Philipot, like Pulter in “The Brahman,” rejects suicide as a sin to be avoided through faith in God (Philipot 22–23), and, by speaking against pagan examples of supposedly righteous suicide, both authors participate in their culture’s anxiety over how to incorporate un-Christian aspects of ancient writings.
In reading “The Brahman,” therefore, we see Pulter exploring the disjunction between her use of classical models and her own religious values as well as between Christianity’s rejection of suicide and its portrayal of the ecstasy of righteous souls after death. Although Pulter clearly desires her pagan examples’ purifying deaths, her Christian faith keeps her from deliberate self-destruction, leaving her to instead place her hope for heaven’s bliss following a natural death.
Works Cited
Holy Bible, King James Version. Bible Gateway, Accessed 10 Apr. 2023.
Hunter, Elizabeth K. “‘Between the Bridge and the Brook’: Suicide and Salvation in England, c.1550–1650.” Reformation & Renaissance Review, vol. 15, no. 3, Nov. 2013, pp. 237–57. Taylor and Francis+NEJM.
Philipot, Thomas. Self-Homicide-Murther, or, Some Antidotes and Arguments Gleaned out of the Treasuries of Our Modern Casuists and Divines against That Horrid and Reigning Sin of Self-Murther by T.P., Esq. London, 1674, Early English Books Online.
Rudick, Michael, and M. Pabst Battin. “Introduction.” Biathanatos, by John Donne, edited by Michael Rudick and M. Pabst Battin, Garland, 1982.