Adapting Biodynamics Worldwide

life means evolution

“Love is always ‘love of the not-yet.’ To love is to create; it is to selflessly enter the current of time that flows toward us from the future.”¹ - R. Steiner

“For [Goethe], a flower which pushes forth from the soil, and a poem which ‘pushes forth’ from the ‘soil’ of the soul of a poet, are only two particular manifestations of the same creative magical-artistic force.”²

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Imagining in one language is not the same as imagining in another language. Louis-Marie Chauvet writes, “[T]he ordering of the world varies according to languages and cultures.”³ When the ideas of biodynamics are “transplanted” from Europe, one cannot expect its expression to remain rigidly the same. The geology, climate and people are all different. A singular spiritual idea takes on the form of the formative forces at work in each bioregion and within each culture. We are not transplanting biodynamics in greenhouses but into real-world conditions. As such, biodynamics must evolve in order to live.

As Okakura Kakuzo writes in the Book of Tea, “Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.”⁴ There is an element of truth to this. And yet, we must translate to communicate. In a way, thought as intuition is something more than one’s language. The experience of arriving at the epiphanic “Eureka!” moment of understanding a new idea is itself often speechless in its wonder. But as soon as we wish to think about it or communicate an intuitive flash to others, it must find its way into words.

Rudolf Steiner did not particularly appreciate his lectures being recorded but nonetheless conceded to the demands of the day. The philosopher Plato warned through the voice of Socrates that in writing, a conversation undergoes a kind of death. To a degree, these claims are true. If I have a conversation with you in person, my facial expressions, the tone of my voice, the movements of my hands — all of this will communicate to you far more than the written word. To read these words and revivify them is the only way to do them justice. In a sense, every time a work is read, it must be reassembled and grown anew within your own imagination. But this takes effort, and not everyone wishes to give of themselves when reading. To take “dead” text and animate it with colorful feeling takes a lot of energy and creativity. You can tell when an idea has germinated in someone else: it invariably leads to extensions of the same idea. Just as you can tell, when a strawberry plant has taken root in the soil, it sends off runners in all directions. Just because someone protects a treasure trove of dormant seeds does not mean any of them have germinated in their soul. As soon as a living idea sprouts in the soul, it takes on a new form.

Because we, as individuals, have such unique inner lives, what applies to the variations between cultures also applies to the differences between individuals. We each experience life through our own biographies, through our own experiences, and what conceptual framework of language we have to put it all into context. Everything we experience is mediated by language. If we don’t have a term for it, the experience slips through our fingertips. We wish for a languageless perception, but clairvoyance has always been literacy in the language of forms. The entire universe is a symphony of the cosmic word — which is not a metaphor. The world is all language, all poetry, and all music. It is our task, if not to become poets ourselves, to develop a rich aesthetic appreciation for the magnificent performance at work around us.

“[W]hat seems to be hidden here is human beings’ desire, largely unbeknownst to themselves, that reality be transparent and they be fully present to themselves by evading the contingency of the sensible, bodily, social, historical mediations.

With regard to language, it is remarkable that the metaphysical tradition has unrelentingly tried to minimize its mediational value by favoring the speaking voice. Indeed, verbal signifiers, that is, the sounds produced by the voice, vanish as soon as they are uttered.”⁵

A stinging nettle plant grown in a humid climate or at low altitude grows one way, while the exact same plant grown at high altitude or in an arid region behaves another way. We would never expect it to be otherwise, yet we often have the expectation that the dynamics of life should follow an abstract formula regardless of regional differences. Imagine an heirloom tomato. It is luxurious, red, and full of moisture. The goal for growing such a tomato is the same regardless of climatic differences, but the path to attaining the goal is different in each place. If I am in a cold, northerly climate with a short growing season, I may need to employ season extension measures like a hoophouse but, in doing so, also introduce new problems of restricted airflow. If I am in a humid area, ventilation and spacing become more important. While the aspirations of a tomato grown in each place are identical, the techniques for realizing this dream are particular to each place.

Consider the idea of freedom. Each language has its own term for this concept but it has its own cultural connotations that make translation difficult. Yes, we can use an online translating tool, but all that does is find the nearest approximate term — as language models, artificial intelligence cannot translate ideas for the simple reason that it has no capacity to understand ideas in the first place.

Each culture, like each ecosystem, has its own particular likes and dislikes, just as individuals have their own elective affinities. An idea is like a seed but if you plant it in a different cultural soil, it necessarily matures in a different way. To expect otherwise would be an abstraction divorced from the concrete conditions of practical reality. No vineyard would imagine that the soil and climate are irrelevant to how a grape will grow in its region. Sometimes, we come to precisely such a conception, though, about biodynamics. It is easy to imagine that we have been given immutable sacred recipes from which no variation is allowed to unfold. But this would miss the point. Our goals aspire in each case toward healthy plant growth, but healthy plant growth requires different things in each region. Yes, a general tonic will offer many benefits, but a custom-tailored remedy will perform better for particular conditions. Health in each place is a dynamic phenomenon onto which we cannot merely project abstract ideas without familiarity with the facts on the ground. If someone were to decide what grape varietal they wanted without taking into account the soil or climate, the results would be chaotic. Rudolf Steiner goes so far as to suggest there are as many kinds of health as there are individuals.

The potential for development in biodynamics is not first inventing new recipes or finding substitute herbs for preparations. Instead, the first step is to study the climate and region for which Steiner offered these preparations: Silesia, which is now part of Poland. Knowing what plants must overcome in Europe to be healthy is markedly different from the conditions plants must overcome in the Americas to attain a similar healthy expression. The obstacles of each region are different and, as Paracelsus suggests, “the dose is the poison.” The correct medicine for one person is toxic to another person. Medicine for a sick person is therapeutic, but medicine for a healthy person can be poisonous.

In the Agriculture Course, Steiner recommends that the farmers go to museums and study the skeletons on display, particularly the pelvis and contrast to the skull — the head and metabolic-limb polarity. As the head expands, the pelvis has a tendency to contract and vice versa. As the brain cavity shrinks, the metabolic-limb pole tends to become enhanced. How many farmers follow this instruction from Rudolf Steiner to enhance their imagination according to the laws of life? A similar phenomenon occurs within plants between the root and the flower.

Moreover, in the spirit of Goethe, Oken writes, “The skeleton is only a fully grown, articulated, repetitive vertebra, and the vertebra is the preformed germ [Keim] of the skeleton. The entire human being is only a vertebra.”⁶ If only Doctor Lydgate in Middlemarch had been able to read Oken, he’d have spared himself his failed attempt to discover the archetypal animal “organ,” as Goethe discovered that every aspect of a plant is a metamorphosized leaf. A remarkable book that explores comparative morphology in plants and animals is Metamorphosis: Evolution in Action by Andreas Suchantke and the work of the Nature Institute.

Comparative osteology is a field ripe with possibilities for Goethean observation.

The first step for adapting biodynamics to each climate is comparing and contrasting how plants grow in two different places. For example, how a plant grows in a region of Mexico versus how the same plant grows in Poland. Recognizing these fundamental differences, we will begin to glimpse that geographic medicine is never the same. As each individual person is a sort of species onto themselves, each microclimate has its own distinct requirements. What I suggest here is not trying to invent alternatives but rather studying the variations of plant growth. In order to develop a sensitivity for how we might change and select an appropriate substitute, we must practice observation attentively. Selecting actual substitutes is a question for another day. If we do not know how to compare plant growth of one region to another, any attempt at substituting an herb in a biodynamic preparation will have to be based on conjecture. The first step is developing a greater sensitivity to the variations of plant growth in different soils and in different climates. Without a familiarity with how plants individualize in each climate, it is virtually impossible to make an appropriate alternate suggestion. This requires both a supple imagination and the experience with different bioregions, which most of us do not possess.

If our imagination is to become a living representation of what lives around us, it must become formless, dynamic, and radically open. To see Nature accurately, we must become her. Goethe says, “If we want to approach a living perception (Anschauung) of nature, we must become as mobile and flexible as nature herself.”⁷ Such an imagination cannot be simplistic. For example, we know for a fact that a sandy soil has a different silica effect than a clay soil, but we cannot, therefore, jump to the conclusion that a sandy soil requires less horn silica (501). As Ehrenfried Pfeiffer observes in his lecture series, more silicic acid is retained by heavier clay soils than sandy soils. The low cation exchange capacity of sandy soils means that what silicic acid is produced tends to wash out with the rain.

A region in which dandelion refuses to grow may, in fact, not be lacking in that particular Jupiter force. Imagine that someone has an overactive liver: the solution isn’t adding more of a liver stimulant but perhaps something from an equal and opposite impulse to provide balance. But such balance cannot even begin to be approached if we imagine that there is a one-size-fits-all formula for each situation.

One of the principal reasons why biodynamics does not consistently provide the kind of results one might hope for is that we are applying the same medicine to each geographical situation regardless of what the patient might need in each case. Imagine a physician who prescribed the same drug for each patient without examining the patient to see what disease they had! We would find this to be absurd. Fortunately, in the case of the biodynamic preparations, these embody in their very being the powers that created the planets in our sky before they hardened into what we see now. These same “planetary” powers are at work here on earth in plants, animals, minerals, and humans. However, the concentration of these forces has been depleted through consistent extraction from the soil. Unfortunately, within the biodynamic view, these forces cannot spontaneously restore themselves. No, that would take aeons, and while this planet would be fine, humanity does not have the luxury of waiting that long. The biodynamic preparations, as such, are concentrations of herbs with particular relationships to each planetary process, restoring to the “battery” of the soil much-needed energy for healthy plant growth. Without such forces, plants are “deaf” to the music of the cosmos. They can photosynthesize, yes, but superficially. Imagine someone who can’t read — to such a person, books just seem like they take up space instead of being portals to entire worlds and instructions for how to make real things happen. Biodynamics is about restoring these forces to plants and human beings so that the capacities of ordinary people are opened up again to perceive the music of the cosmos.

Fortunately, all of these biodynamic plants are tonic herbs and safe for virtually any farm. Nonetheless, there are likely plants that are better suited merely if they grow in the region. The etheric body of plants in each region is tied to the angle of light and the dynamics of day and night in that specific spot. A plant that goes through the same cycles as you do will likely have a greater therapeutic effect than one brought from far away. This is not because it contains a greater quantity of medicinal compounds but because its etheric body resonates with your own. When I consume food from all over the world, it is as if I have to adjust for the time zone of each different food source. This requires considerably more energy than food grown in my own garden. To put it rather simplistically, I need fewer calories when they are grown near me. But it takes considerably more energy for my body to assimilate and adjust for conflicts in what comes from abroad. This is the significance of making biodynamic preparations nearby. It is not that they necessarily have more of the quantifiable compounds that are valued in medicine but rather that they belong to that place. The alchemist Paracelsus writes, “They want medicine from overseas, though better medicine grows in the garden right in front of their homes.” 

As biodynamics is an individual practice, biodynamics will inevitably tend towards individuation in each place. It should still be recognizable but orchestrating the dynamics of one bioregion is always different than the process of directing another climate. After all, “tradition lives only when it is elevated and increased in size. Conservation alone does not suffice at all. It is only a corpse which lends itself to conservation by means of mummification.”⁸ It doesn’t matter how well we preserve dusty texts if the spiritual ideas don’t live in us and extend outward in new pioneering shoots. It doesn’t matter what battles we get into if we are only defending a mausoleum. Why do you seek him among the dead? He is risen! Steiner says: “Love is always ‘love of the not-yet.’ To love is to create; it is to selflessly enter the current of time that flows toward us from the future.”⁹ If we truly love the biodynamic impulse, we will prove it with our fruits.

When bringing in a new impulse, there are rival temptations. On the one hand, “a luciferic time-shift goes backwards; an ahrimanic one is the opposite.”¹⁰ Put quite plainly, a plant overfed manure develops leaves that are a suitable substrate for pathogenic fungi. What belongs in the past is not able to be overcome, and the plant suffers. In such a plant, seeds rot, assuming the plant even reaches that stage at all. In a human being, this can be seen when an adult fails to mature but remains childish. By contrast, if a plant is starved of enough nourishment or undergoes the shock of an extreme heat wave, the plant bolts, rushing to flower. But if a plant produces flowers prematurely, they fail to produce sweet fruits and the seeds they generate are hollow. An overfed lower organism inhibits consciousness.

Steiner explains this dynamic clearly: “Were only the etheric body to work, then the plant would unfold endlessly leaf by leaf; this is brought to a conclusion by the astral body. The etheric body is muted by the astral.”¹¹ It is the using-up of vitality that liberates the astral body. As wind dries up moist soil, so the astral body “uses up” the etheric. Where we read “etheric formative forces” we should really read etheric-and-astral-forces-working-together. Or rather, when the astral world stimulates the etheric, the result is “etheric formative forces.” Try growing a tomato without light. The etheric potential is all there, but the formative process is obstructed without the intervention of astral influences, including air, light, and warmth. The etheric by itself would not rise into articulated plant form but would grow horizontally as a kind of blob. But the astral by itself would not even enter into incarnation.

If the soul is artificially or abruptly starved, this is like the extremes of asceticism some yogis employ.¹² The ability to blossom is one thing, but the ability to propagate spiritual life is quite another. In the garden, we are seeking neither the extreme of over indulgence nor asceticism. In fact, the middle path is much closer to asceticism than it is to indulgence. After all, the human heart which is the center of our being is slightly off center. The middle is never quite in the middle. Unprincipled compromise does not arrive at living truth but rather at lukewarmness. The philosopher Aristotle refers to virtue as a “mean between extremes,” but it is important that this is not a mere average between excesses. For example, rashness is closer to courage than cowardice is to courage. A rash person may act inappropriately, but it can at least appear courageous. But a coward cannot even begin to act. In this sense, Ahriman is to be overcome, while Lucifer is to be “redeemed.” This is to say, the cleverness of the serpent must be kept underfoot and submitted to the highest ideals, as in the case of the medicinal sign of the rod of Asclepius. The world is better for having a dragon in it, but the dragon must be kept in its place. More concretely, the ideal drinking temperature for tea is neither frigid nor scalding but rather warm. In this sense, excessive heat merely needs to be cooled off whereas cold must be warmed.

The same ideas apply to adapting biodynamics worldwide. If there is too much attachment merely to recipes from the past, there is nothing but the mummification of old ideas and the preservation of seeds without new life. On the other hand, if there are so many fiery changes made with no consideration for continuity with the past, the image becomes distorted. But it is better to have a lively imagination — even if it must be reined in a bit — than dead loyalties to the fossils of other people’s experiences. Each idea must be experienced inwardly, grown in one’s own soul, and there attain a new organic expression. Because Steiner says that each individual is a species unto themselves, we can’t aspire to anything less than a fully individuated expression of biodynamics in each place. I would hope sincerely that no one copies what I do but rather plants it within their own imagination and allows it to grow there as a guest. The fact is that each attentive farmer or gardener knows better their own practical reality than I can from afar.

The danger of incorrect imaginations about practical reality in the garden is self-pruning: what doesn’t work is quickly abandoned by the observant gardener. But rigid attachment to unchangeable forms is ossification — in evolution, this always precedes extinction events. Too flexible, and a thing loses its identity, too rigid, and it dies off. This is the creative juncture in which we always find ourselves: what must change so that life may continue to unfold?

1. Steiner, Rudolf. Love and Its Meaning in the World. United States: Anthroposophic Press, 1998.

2. Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XXII, The World, pg. 627.

3. Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments, pg. 6.

4. Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea, pg. 42.

5. Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments, pg. 4.

6. Oken’s Lecture on the Vertebral Construction of the Skull

7. Goethe, 1807; translation by CH; in Miller p. 64.

8. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XXI, The Fool, pg 608.

9. Steiner, Rudolf. Love and Its Meaning in the World. United States: Anthroposophic Press, 1998.

10. R. Steiner, The Karma of Untruthfulness, Lecture XIII, (GA173, 21 December 1916, Basel)

11. R. Steiner, Stuttgart, February 8, 1909, GA98

12. As an irregular practitioner of kriya-yoga, this is no condemnation in principle against yoga but rather against extremism within yogic practices.