Steiner explicitly connects each of the preparations (except Horn Manure) with a specific mineral, or combination of minerals e.g. Yarrow and sulphur, or Chamomile and sulphur/calcium, or Nettle and sulphur/calcium/iron(ish). He does not correlate planets with the preparations because the use of preps is a subsidiary stage that precede planetary effects, much like the smelting of steel preceeds the installation of girders in a skyscraper. In terms of preps, minerals in a manure pile are brought by heat into a state of chaos for a transmutation process guided by preps into compost. Now Valerian, for instance, regulates the creation and maintenance of phosphorus. Steiner instructs the application of Valerian specifically to the stage of finished compost, before turning it into the soil. That is to say, Valerian is not a compost prep. It is a field spray, like the other liquid preps (Horn Manure. Horn Silica, Horn Clay, Equisitum), and requires a living structure such as humus or topsoil to transmit its effect. Valerian has no impact applied to a raw manure pile. This is quite obvious in Koliskos dramatic Agriculture of Tomorrow chromatography pictures of Valerian, as compared to her picture of compost made by spraying Valerian over a covered manure pile. The picture of this compost is in fact indistinguishable from the picture she gives of raw cow manure. The powerful structuring force of the Valerian image is nowhere to be found in the image of compost made by application to a raw manure pile. Why is this?
The force of Valerian, like the force of compost preps, resides in the essential oil of the blossoms that, as in all field sprays, is diluted and potentized in hot water before use. The compost preps on the other hand are solidified essential oils crystallized by exposure to the winter earth process. They release and radiate their force from inside the warmth of the pile. A liquid prep inserted in the pile at this stage will just evaporate, as there is no living structure to absorb it. The solidified radiant oils in the pile are present long enough to influence the transformation of raw manure into humus. Whereas chemical mineral fertilizers are water based solvents, the minerals in the essential oils permeate the living earthy element, or humus, which resists water dissolution (which is why heating the spray stirring water is necessary, to overcome the resistance of the substance to siphoning its force). Homeopathic minerals worked into the soil stream upward from the plant roots and build out the aboveground stem and leaves, flowers and fruit, drawn out and shaped by the light brought to the Earth, as modified by the planets, functioning more like valves or condensers than gods.
Phosphorus is found in the cell wall of plants, in the cell membrane of animals, and in the myelin sheathing of the human nerve system. If you wish to correlate this to resonance with the rings of Saturn I have no objection. Phosphorus is also found in the skull, in the pineal 'brain sand', and is the intergrity of the DNA spiral helix, joining all four corners together, as well as constituting the form of energy the body uses, as ATP, stored in the mitochondria, reduced 18 to 1 from dietary sugar. Again, no objection to bringing Saturn in here if you can.
What's important is to have a clear step by step view of what preparations are, and what they do, and why. There is an order inside the details of prep making and prep use that is key to obtaining the results Steiner indicated to Pfeiffer were necessary and possible for the success of the Agriculture Course: '...to bridge the gap between thinking and willing'.
P.S. Thanks to your reminder, today spreading Johnson-Su manure compost, I took our farm-grown Valerian, stirred it in rain water and watered in the new beds. We'll see how they compare to the others which received the same amount of compost -- minus the final Valerian treatment!
Let's briefly review the directions for Valerian in the Agriculture Course, using Creeger/Gardner, pg. 104
'...you should try to produce fertilizer by enriching the manure with these five ingredients-or appropriate substitutes-in the way I have suggested...yarrow, chamomole, nettle, oak back and dandelion. A fertilizer of this kind will in fact contain very much of what is actually needed.'
These are the 5 compost preps that replace what is depleted in the soil from harvesting crops.
'(One more thing)...before using this treated manure...'
Notice that you can't use manure as fertilizer until it becomes compost, ie a finished product. The German word 'dunger', here translated as 'manure', means 'fertilizer'. 'Dung' is the German for raw manure. (You will see 'dunger' rendered as 'manuring' through out this English version.) Translators tend not to be farmers and don't know to distinguish manure from fertilizer.
Spraying Valerian over the pile seems to originate with Lily Kolisko. But Steiner never says to do this. Nor does he say to add Valerian to the pile. What he says is that Valerian is prepared 'in einer ganz feinen weise', 'in a very fine manner'. This refers to the (homeopathic) dilution of the juice, not to the method of application. 'Spritzen' describes the field spray application given in lecture 4.
Again, quite right! I've worked through the German text of GA327 in its entirety, incidentally, in order to have "wrestled" through the text myself. I believe Podolinsky took the "...enriching the manure with these five ingredients..." to make 500P (horn manure aged together with all the compost preparations) with some rather good results.
There are some key misundertandings in translation for exactly what you've said -- translators not being farmers -- including various references to agricultural applications as well as a rather important misunderstanding about horse manure for making "horn manure" (the hair should not be wrapped around the horn but combined with the manure). What the animal separates (manure and keratin) should be recombined. The horn manure in particular is a natural spagyric process, in my humble opinion. Even the salt element is added back because the female cow tends to urinate into the manure.
Wallerius would distill different manures to determine their oil content -- this was what he measured as the valuable enlivening element (what Steiner would call the etheric oil content). But how to make it settle down? Yes, compost. Steiner does speak of liquid manures as carriers of astrality, but that's another story for another time perhaps!
The only pause I have about Valerian is that Steiner's use of various mineral labels often strays into alchemical categories (Salt, Merc, Sulf) and he does not carefully distinguish which he's talking about. With Valerian, whose folk etmology has it come from Baldrian (the god of light), places Valerian closely with Sulfur. Sulphur (with a ph) is from another folk etymology which, mistakenly, saw root link to -PHOR. The poetic image style rhymes, nonetheless.
Here's a passage that confirms what you suggest about the preps and essential oils, but perhaps hints that we might need a soft gaze when it comes to the term 'phosophorus': “The root is rich in salts, the flower in light. People knew much more of this in the past. This is why they called the principle to be found in the flower ‘phosphorus’.... But the flower is the true bearer of light. The flower is phosphorus.” – R. Steiner, From Elephants to Einstein, February 9, 1924, GA325, pp. 84-85.
By comparison: "That which burns is sulphur, that which evaporates is mercurius, and that which remains in the ash is salt.” - Paracelsus, Von der Bergsucht; Sudhoff, Paracelsus Werke, I/9:476
The minerals mentioned by Steiner belong in the salts category. All important, but only one-third of the alchemical picture.
Nonetheless, I completely agree with you that what the BD preps are doing is capturing a reproductive impulse that normally would disperse as nectar and aromatic oils, retaining this libidinous impulse, and introducing it to the root/head of a plant. To me, this is analogous to Kundalini processes within the human organism (as seen in kriya yoga practices).
I'm not too hung up on whether Steiner says to do it or not, if only for the fact that Steiner says to keep fertilizing as usual and not to stop anything that works. I'd suggest that the potential error of spraying a compost pile with Valerian only amounts to harm if applying Valerian is therefore NEGLECTED when applying finished manure compost to the fields.
Hi Joe, I don't think we're fundamentally in disagreement here. The spirit works in matter, but it is the spirit that generates matter in the first place. We're looking at two sides of the same broach. The fact that the material planets (or organ sheaths) coalesce at specific bandwidths is hardly contrary to the specific elements that are at work in them.
As for the Valerian preparation, there are varied results using it as a spray when applying to soil versus on the compost pile itself, though I'm inclined to agree with you: that it primes the soil by supplying it with the fatty element necessary to jumpstart LIFE in the soil. As Paracelsian alchemist (and the father of agricultural chemistry) Wallerius indicates, the purpose of fertilizing is "pinguefaction" -- fattening the earth -- which corresponds directly to the use of Valerian when applying to the soil. When Steiner says that the purpose of manuring is "enlivening" the soil, he's not far off from this. Adding an essential oil like Valerian is almost like adding a flash of lighter fluid to the fire of life in the soil. Pfeiffer would add Valerian INTO the compost pile by the end, for much the same reason I believe as adding Valerian to aged compost for delivery to the soil -- namely, to jumpstart the biological process with volatile essential oils. Whether spraying on the outside of the pile makes any sense is something that could use some more research. Kolisko's experiments should be repeated, and you've given me a good idea of something to trial at JPI. With your permission, if we are able to make some trial compost piles this year, I'd like to credit you with the benevolent provocation and see how the chromas fair.
If you consider Corey Eichman's observation of the biodynamic preparations, each corresponds to one of Steiner's Seven Life Processes which he marks, for shorthand, as planets. These are not the "planets" as we think of them -- this is not astrology. But the principle that formed a specific planet is also at work in specific plants and sheaths, even working now on this stage working with specific mineral elements.
The Agriculture Course itself is incomplete, composed from partial notes. By the accounts of those who were in attendance, much was left out. We can only say what was not included -- we have a harder time saying what Steiner didn't say. But without the greater body of Steiner's work, he describes specific formative processes that once formed the planets as still being at work here on earth producing specific shapes (and even colors).
I'd humbly suggest that something analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies here: we are either tracing the formation tendency of organs, OR observing their specific elemental constituents. But, ultimately, we can only articulate with specificity one of these two at a time even though they are not separate. It may be two temperaments, one more guided by Goethean observation of forms (as Steiner recommended the study of skeletons to farmers in GA327) and another more focused on the periodic table of elements. And yet, there is no skeleton without those periodic elements -- and, one could argue -- there are no periodic elements except as the byproduct of living spiritual processes.
I completely agree that much of the value of these preparations is in their specially contained and settled essential oils of various plants. We take what belongs to something that, by nature, radiates up and outward and instead age it so it moves down and inward. Valerian doesn't wish to do this because it has not gone through any such aging process.
Our chief disagreement would primarily be over the use of Valerian, though there I have to concede your point. While I'm not inclined to forego using it on compost (anymore than I would suggest the evaporating essential oils of flowers are useless in the economy of nature), I do think it is probably advisable to use Valerian when applying finished compost to jumpstart its life. Your own correspondences do not in themselves negate other "planetary" correspondences. But the difference is whether we're looking at the world as if matter is the source of spiritual form or spiritual form the source of matter. These are two sides of the same coin.
Steiner gave the Course in June 1924 and passed in March 1925. Since they take a full year , no one ever saw him making or using them, and the Circle was left to decipher what he meant by what he said. Steiner is faulted for being 'vague' but he is always exact and precise in his use of language. The 'vagueness' is rather in us.
Koliskos discusses 'vital force' vs 'formative force' in relation to raw manure and Valerian pictures, remarking on its extraordinary formative power. The Horn Manure picture possesses the same form building effect as Valerian, and putting them together would seem to be a logical step for Podolinsky, who studied with Kolisko in England and republished Agriculture of Tomorrow in 1978, as you likely know. But he wouldn't acknowledge this as the cause for his results in creating some 4 ft of topsoil from Australian desert sand in 6 years just using the preps, insisting on fracture plowing and rock dust among other good farm practice. But go to pg 228 in Creeger/Gardner, and you find:
Valeriana off essential oil
Winter kill, storage
Exposed to frost, lack of water
Both drought and snow/ice are conditions lacking water. And in fact Podolinskys Prepared 500 applies Valerian to the layers of Horn Manure, a finished humus product, in the barrel he makes it in. Does he not know? Or have reasons not to say what Valerian does with Horn Manure. There are questions surrounding even the most skilled and successful BD practitioners.
I think Steiner's handwritten notes are a more accurate picture of what he intended to deliver than the notes that were taken. As with any student taking notes, it's all new information and it's very easy to miss key things. The "vagueness" of Steiner is how much of what he delivered was transcribed by someone who didn't understand what he was saying. There are countless holes in his lectures, unlike his carefully edited books! Some of his best lectures are his medical lectures, where the stenographer clearly was verses in medicine AND anthroposophical concepts.
I've had good results with deep ripping in combination with the preps. You are right about freezing: that is a common method to remove excess water from distillates in alchemy. If you freeze a distillate, the watery fraction will float to the top as ice, leaving behind the distilled spirits and essential oils.
There is a medical lecture from 1920 in which Steiner describes a clinic that grows herbs to make remedies and fertilizes (again the 'manuring' translation) each type of plant with a dilution made from the blossoms of that type plant, so as to increase over several seasons the potency of the harvested remedy herb. Steiner also says to find out which specific minerals each type of plant takes up, and add those minerals to the soil, combining mineral salts fertilizing with the essential oils potentizing.
In conversation with Streicher ( also 1920) Steiner remedies an exhausted soil with sulphur/potassium/magnesium salts and a 'very strong' (10%) foxglove blossom extract dilution. Valerian as it happens is also diluted 'very strong' (sehr stark). Astral attachment of minerals by a poison plant juice compensates for the weakened etheric forces overpowered by chemically fertilized soils. Steiner also describes the compost preps as compensation for soils exploited by harvesting crops. This suggests Valerian is a kind of poison that brings the astrality necessary for plants to take up minerals at the last stage before planting. As if the too stable finished compost needs a wakeup call.
Steiner here is of course describing field sprays without specifically mentioning stirring and spraying but the overlapping pictures from 1920 to 1924 are consistent, whether in private interviews or lecture notes written by himself or taken in dictation by others. It's clear that Valerian is made and used according to the field spray principle.
Applying the sulphur/mercury/salt process as a template description of the mineral forming process is distinct from the minerals created in that process.
If the sulphur based compost preps Yarrow Chamomile Nettle turn manure phosphorus into fertilizer phosphorus, then Valerian brings fertilizer phosphorus 'uberwindet', or higher yet.
Steiner has virtually identical things to say about Chicory as he does Dandelion (in terms of it mineral relationships) in the medical lectures. Additionally, he recommends Oak Bark or Willlow (Salix spp.) as treatment for asthma. Though a lot of people make a big deal about the calcium content of oak bark, most barks are more than 50% calcium by ash content, and willow bark is up there near oak bark. Lots of possibilities, so few explored properly!
It seems like few people use Valerian correctly, by your estimation, is that correct?
Steiner describes the Form of calcium in Oak Bark as ideal, not the mineral per se. Also Yarrow with a perfect sulphur/ potassium ratio, and the accept-no-substitute sulf/Kali/calc/Ferrum in Nettle.
Valerian as a compost prep has been an idee fixe for a hundred years. There's not a shred of evidence to support this. If you say 'Steiner says to do it this way. Why are we doing it that way?', they say 'Because that's the way it's always been done.' (Hugh Courtney) Podolinsky applied Valerian to Horn Manure only because the desert didn't generate enough material to make a compost pile. The Zimmer farm in East Troy applies Valerian in the spring to the finished pile only because it was convenient just then to use with the manure spreader. (Valerian is only as good as the compost you make. Using the horn guarantees a good colloid/crystalloid product) The Biggest Little Farm added Valerian to all the other ingredients Alan York put together in his sprays, with a comparable result in a comparable time period to Podolinsky. These are the only three right uses of Valerian I know of. Two of them produce the kind of seemingly miraculous Garden of Eden results Steiner expects, that no one gets, which discourages newbies. (Possibly also the grower at Trump vineyards.)
Valerian use is a blind spot in BD, hidden in plain sight. But the thread on Valerian and phosphorus is phenomenal.
A pamphlet from an 1850s Ohio study I saw some years ago. That statistic caught my eye. It probably includes the bone core now that I think about it. Calcium phosphate congregates in the head, Calc carb in the long bones. In humans. Otherwise I couldn't say.
Another observation from that time period: wild deer bred in captivity reproduce wild generations vs captured elk offspring are tame in the 1st generation. Which suggests that elk and cow are both domestic animals, so that using deer instead of elk bladder may result in a different Yarrow prep, as Steiner specifies using the red deer. What do you think?
The form of hydrogen in the horn is different than lets say the stomach, where you would find soluble HCL. Sense organs being transformed or withered digestive organs, they process the radiant stream of impressions rather than physical food and water to build out the form of the organism. Preps arouse transformation forces held in manure by the radiance concentrated inside the horn (or hollow organ) from the surrounding winter earth light, and released by warmth.
"'How can it happen that the spiritual impulse, and especially the inner schooling, for which you are constantly providing stimulus and guidance bear so little fruit?...Why, worst of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these spiritual impulses, so weak?' I was particularly anxious to get an answer to the question as to how one could build a bridge to active participation and the carrying out of spiritual intentions without being pulled off the right path by personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies; for these were the negative qualities Rudolf Steiner had named as the main inner hindrances.'"
Steiner explicitly connects each of the preparations (except Horn Manure) with a specific mineral, or combination of minerals e.g. Yarrow and sulphur, or Chamomile and sulphur/calcium, or Nettle and sulphur/calcium/iron(ish). He does not correlate planets with the preparations because the use of preps is a subsidiary stage that precede planetary effects, much like the smelting of steel preceeds the installation of girders in a skyscraper. In terms of preps, minerals in a manure pile are brought by heat into a state of chaos for a transmutation process guided by preps into compost. Now Valerian, for instance, regulates the creation and maintenance of phosphorus. Steiner instructs the application of Valerian specifically to the stage of finished compost, before turning it into the soil. That is to say, Valerian is not a compost prep. It is a field spray, like the other liquid preps (Horn Manure. Horn Silica, Horn Clay, Equisitum), and requires a living structure such as humus or topsoil to transmit its effect. Valerian has no impact applied to a raw manure pile. This is quite obvious in Koliskos dramatic Agriculture of Tomorrow chromatography pictures of Valerian, as compared to her picture of compost made by spraying Valerian over a covered manure pile. The picture of this compost is in fact indistinguishable from the picture she gives of raw cow manure. The powerful structuring force of the Valerian image is nowhere to be found in the image of compost made by application to a raw manure pile. Why is this?
The force of Valerian, like the force of compost preps, resides in the essential oil of the blossoms that, as in all field sprays, is diluted and potentized in hot water before use. The compost preps on the other hand are solidified essential oils crystallized by exposure to the winter earth process. They release and radiate their force from inside the warmth of the pile. A liquid prep inserted in the pile at this stage will just evaporate, as there is no living structure to absorb it. The solidified radiant oils in the pile are present long enough to influence the transformation of raw manure into humus. Whereas chemical mineral fertilizers are water based solvents, the minerals in the essential oils permeate the living earthy element, or humus, which resists water dissolution (which is why heating the spray stirring water is necessary, to overcome the resistance of the substance to siphoning its force). Homeopathic minerals worked into the soil stream upward from the plant roots and build out the aboveground stem and leaves, flowers and fruit, drawn out and shaped by the light brought to the Earth, as modified by the planets, functioning more like valves or condensers than gods.
Phosphorus is found in the cell wall of plants, in the cell membrane of animals, and in the myelin sheathing of the human nerve system. If you wish to correlate this to resonance with the rings of Saturn I have no objection. Phosphorus is also found in the skull, in the pineal 'brain sand', and is the intergrity of the DNA spiral helix, joining all four corners together, as well as constituting the form of energy the body uses, as ATP, stored in the mitochondria, reduced 18 to 1 from dietary sugar. Again, no objection to bringing Saturn in here if you can.
What's important is to have a clear step by step view of what preparations are, and what they do, and why. There is an order inside the details of prep making and prep use that is key to obtaining the results Steiner indicated to Pfeiffer were necessary and possible for the success of the Agriculture Course: '...to bridge the gap between thinking and willing'.
P.S. Thanks to your reminder, today spreading Johnson-Su manure compost, I took our farm-grown Valerian, stirred it in rain water and watered in the new beds. We'll see how they compare to the others which received the same amount of compost -- minus the final Valerian treatment!
Let's briefly review the directions for Valerian in the Agriculture Course, using Creeger/Gardner, pg. 104
'...you should try to produce fertilizer by enriching the manure with these five ingredients-or appropriate substitutes-in the way I have suggested...yarrow, chamomole, nettle, oak back and dandelion. A fertilizer of this kind will in fact contain very much of what is actually needed.'
These are the 5 compost preps that replace what is depleted in the soil from harvesting crops.
'(One more thing)...before using this treated manure...'
Notice that you can't use manure as fertilizer until it becomes compost, ie a finished product. The German word 'dunger', here translated as 'manure', means 'fertilizer'. 'Dung' is the German for raw manure. (You will see 'dunger' rendered as 'manuring' through out this English version.) Translators tend not to be farmers and don't know to distinguish manure from fertilizer.
Spraying Valerian over the pile seems to originate with Lily Kolisko. But Steiner never says to do this. Nor does he say to add Valerian to the pile. What he says is that Valerian is prepared 'in einer ganz feinen weise', 'in a very fine manner'. This refers to the (homeopathic) dilution of the juice, not to the method of application. 'Spritzen' describes the field spray application given in lecture 4.
Again, quite right! I've worked through the German text of GA327 in its entirety, incidentally, in order to have "wrestled" through the text myself. I believe Podolinsky took the "...enriching the manure with these five ingredients..." to make 500P (horn manure aged together with all the compost preparations) with some rather good results.
There are some key misundertandings in translation for exactly what you've said -- translators not being farmers -- including various references to agricultural applications as well as a rather important misunderstanding about horse manure for making "horn manure" (the hair should not be wrapped around the horn but combined with the manure). What the animal separates (manure and keratin) should be recombined. The horn manure in particular is a natural spagyric process, in my humble opinion. Even the salt element is added back because the female cow tends to urinate into the manure.
Wallerius would distill different manures to determine their oil content -- this was what he measured as the valuable enlivening element (what Steiner would call the etheric oil content). But how to make it settle down? Yes, compost. Steiner does speak of liquid manures as carriers of astrality, but that's another story for another time perhaps!
The only pause I have about Valerian is that Steiner's use of various mineral labels often strays into alchemical categories (Salt, Merc, Sulf) and he does not carefully distinguish which he's talking about. With Valerian, whose folk etmology has it come from Baldrian (the god of light), places Valerian closely with Sulfur. Sulphur (with a ph) is from another folk etymology which, mistakenly, saw root link to -PHOR. The poetic image style rhymes, nonetheless.
Here's a passage that confirms what you suggest about the preps and essential oils, but perhaps hints that we might need a soft gaze when it comes to the term 'phosophorus': “The root is rich in salts, the flower in light. People knew much more of this in the past. This is why they called the principle to be found in the flower ‘phosphorus’.... But the flower is the true bearer of light. The flower is phosphorus.” – R. Steiner, From Elephants to Einstein, February 9, 1924, GA325, pp. 84-85.
By comparison: "That which burns is sulphur, that which evaporates is mercurius, and that which remains in the ash is salt.” - Paracelsus, Von der Bergsucht; Sudhoff, Paracelsus Werke, I/9:476
The minerals mentioned by Steiner belong in the salts category. All important, but only one-third of the alchemical picture.
Nonetheless, I completely agree with you that what the BD preps are doing is capturing a reproductive impulse that normally would disperse as nectar and aromatic oils, retaining this libidinous impulse, and introducing it to the root/head of a plant. To me, this is analogous to Kundalini processes within the human organism (as seen in kriya yoga practices).
I'm not too hung up on whether Steiner says to do it or not, if only for the fact that Steiner says to keep fertilizing as usual and not to stop anything that works. I'd suggest that the potential error of spraying a compost pile with Valerian only amounts to harm if applying Valerian is therefore NEGLECTED when applying finished manure compost to the fields.
Hi Joe, I don't think we're fundamentally in disagreement here. The spirit works in matter, but it is the spirit that generates matter in the first place. We're looking at two sides of the same broach. The fact that the material planets (or organ sheaths) coalesce at specific bandwidths is hardly contrary to the specific elements that are at work in them.
As for the Valerian preparation, there are varied results using it as a spray when applying to soil versus on the compost pile itself, though I'm inclined to agree with you: that it primes the soil by supplying it with the fatty element necessary to jumpstart LIFE in the soil. As Paracelsian alchemist (and the father of agricultural chemistry) Wallerius indicates, the purpose of fertilizing is "pinguefaction" -- fattening the earth -- which corresponds directly to the use of Valerian when applying to the soil. When Steiner says that the purpose of manuring is "enlivening" the soil, he's not far off from this. Adding an essential oil like Valerian is almost like adding a flash of lighter fluid to the fire of life in the soil. Pfeiffer would add Valerian INTO the compost pile by the end, for much the same reason I believe as adding Valerian to aged compost for delivery to the soil -- namely, to jumpstart the biological process with volatile essential oils. Whether spraying on the outside of the pile makes any sense is something that could use some more research. Kolisko's experiments should be repeated, and you've given me a good idea of something to trial at JPI. With your permission, if we are able to make some trial compost piles this year, I'd like to credit you with the benevolent provocation and see how the chromas fair.
If you consider Corey Eichman's observation of the biodynamic preparations, each corresponds to one of Steiner's Seven Life Processes which he marks, for shorthand, as planets. These are not the "planets" as we think of them -- this is not astrology. But the principle that formed a specific planet is also at work in specific plants and sheaths, even working now on this stage working with specific mineral elements.
The Agriculture Course itself is incomplete, composed from partial notes. By the accounts of those who were in attendance, much was left out. We can only say what was not included -- we have a harder time saying what Steiner didn't say. But without the greater body of Steiner's work, he describes specific formative processes that once formed the planets as still being at work here on earth producing specific shapes (and even colors).
I'd humbly suggest that something analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies here: we are either tracing the formation tendency of organs, OR observing their specific elemental constituents. But, ultimately, we can only articulate with specificity one of these two at a time even though they are not separate. It may be two temperaments, one more guided by Goethean observation of forms (as Steiner recommended the study of skeletons to farmers in GA327) and another more focused on the periodic table of elements. And yet, there is no skeleton without those periodic elements -- and, one could argue -- there are no periodic elements except as the byproduct of living spiritual processes.
I completely agree that much of the value of these preparations is in their specially contained and settled essential oils of various plants. We take what belongs to something that, by nature, radiates up and outward and instead age it so it moves down and inward. Valerian doesn't wish to do this because it has not gone through any such aging process.
Our chief disagreement would primarily be over the use of Valerian, though there I have to concede your point. While I'm not inclined to forego using it on compost (anymore than I would suggest the evaporating essential oils of flowers are useless in the economy of nature), I do think it is probably advisable to use Valerian when applying finished compost to jumpstart its life. Your own correspondences do not in themselves negate other "planetary" correspondences. But the difference is whether we're looking at the world as if matter is the source of spiritual form or spiritual form the source of matter. These are two sides of the same coin.
Thank you for your comment.
Am I correct to take it that the comments by THE JOSEPHINE PORTER INSTITUTE are from Mr Lundy?
Usually, yes!
Steiner gave the Course in June 1924 and passed in March 1925. Since they take a full year , no one ever saw him making or using them, and the Circle was left to decipher what he meant by what he said. Steiner is faulted for being 'vague' but he is always exact and precise in his use of language. The 'vagueness' is rather in us.
Koliskos discusses 'vital force' vs 'formative force' in relation to raw manure and Valerian pictures, remarking on its extraordinary formative power. The Horn Manure picture possesses the same form building effect as Valerian, and putting them together would seem to be a logical step for Podolinsky, who studied with Kolisko in England and republished Agriculture of Tomorrow in 1978, as you likely know. But he wouldn't acknowledge this as the cause for his results in creating some 4 ft of topsoil from Australian desert sand in 6 years just using the preps, insisting on fracture plowing and rock dust among other good farm practice. But go to pg 228 in Creeger/Gardner, and you find:
Valeriana off essential oil
Winter kill, storage
Exposed to frost, lack of water
Both drought and snow/ice are conditions lacking water. And in fact Podolinskys Prepared 500 applies Valerian to the layers of Horn Manure, a finished humus product, in the barrel he makes it in. Does he not know? Or have reasons not to say what Valerian does with Horn Manure. There are questions surrounding even the most skilled and successful BD practitioners.
I think Steiner's handwritten notes are a more accurate picture of what he intended to deliver than the notes that were taken. As with any student taking notes, it's all new information and it's very easy to miss key things. The "vagueness" of Steiner is how much of what he delivered was transcribed by someone who didn't understand what he was saying. There are countless holes in his lectures, unlike his carefully edited books! Some of his best lectures are his medical lectures, where the stenographer clearly was verses in medicine AND anthroposophical concepts.
I've had good results with deep ripping in combination with the preps. You are right about freezing: that is a common method to remove excess water from distillates in alchemy. If you freeze a distillate, the watery fraction will float to the top as ice, leaving behind the distilled spirits and essential oils.
There is a medical lecture from 1920 in which Steiner describes a clinic that grows herbs to make remedies and fertilizes (again the 'manuring' translation) each type of plant with a dilution made from the blossoms of that type plant, so as to increase over several seasons the potency of the harvested remedy herb. Steiner also says to find out which specific minerals each type of plant takes up, and add those minerals to the soil, combining mineral salts fertilizing with the essential oils potentizing.
In conversation with Streicher ( also 1920) Steiner remedies an exhausted soil with sulphur/potassium/magnesium salts and a 'very strong' (10%) foxglove blossom extract dilution. Valerian as it happens is also diluted 'very strong' (sehr stark). Astral attachment of minerals by a poison plant juice compensates for the weakened etheric forces overpowered by chemically fertilized soils. Steiner also describes the compost preps as compensation for soils exploited by harvesting crops. This suggests Valerian is a kind of poison that brings the astrality necessary for plants to take up minerals at the last stage before planting. As if the too stable finished compost needs a wakeup call.
Steiner here is of course describing field sprays without specifically mentioning stirring and spraying but the overlapping pictures from 1920 to 1924 are consistent, whether in private interviews or lecture notes written by himself or taken in dictation by others. It's clear that Valerian is made and used according to the field spray principle.
Applying the sulphur/mercury/salt process as a template description of the mineral forming process is distinct from the minerals created in that process.
If the sulphur based compost preps Yarrow Chamomile Nettle turn manure phosphorus into fertilizer phosphorus, then Valerian brings fertilizer phosphorus 'uberwindet', or higher yet.
Steiner has virtually identical things to say about Chicory as he does Dandelion (in terms of it mineral relationships) in the medical lectures. Additionally, he recommends Oak Bark or Willlow (Salix spp.) as treatment for asthma. Though a lot of people make a big deal about the calcium content of oak bark, most barks are more than 50% calcium by ash content, and willow bark is up there near oak bark. Lots of possibilities, so few explored properly!
It seems like few people use Valerian correctly, by your estimation, is that correct?
Steiner describes the Form of calcium in Oak Bark as ideal, not the mineral per se. Also Yarrow with a perfect sulphur/ potassium ratio, and the accept-no-substitute sulf/Kali/calc/Ferrum in Nettle.
Have you seen the uberwindet post?
Valerian as a compost prep has been an idee fixe for a hundred years. There's not a shred of evidence to support this. If you say 'Steiner says to do it this way. Why are we doing it that way?', they say 'Because that's the way it's always been done.' (Hugh Courtney) Podolinsky applied Valerian to Horn Manure only because the desert didn't generate enough material to make a compost pile. The Zimmer farm in East Troy applies Valerian in the spring to the finished pile only because it was convenient just then to use with the manure spreader. (Valerian is only as good as the compost you make. Using the horn guarantees a good colloid/crystalloid product) The Biggest Little Farm added Valerian to all the other ingredients Alan York put together in his sprays, with a comparable result in a comparable time period to Podolinsky. These are the only three right uses of Valerian I know of. Two of them produce the kind of seemingly miraculous Garden of Eden results Steiner expects, that no one gets, which discourages newbies. (Possibly also the grower at Trump vineyards.)
Valerian use is a blind spot in BD, hidden in plain sight. But the thread on Valerian and phosphorus is phenomenal.
Given that unroasted cow horn is a source of hydrogen.
It seems that phosphorus is a form of hydrogen.
A cow horn is 40% phosphorus.
Where are you getting that? The horn sheath is keratin, which is protein....
Carbon: 50%
Hydrogen: 7%
Nitrogen: 18%
Oxygen: 22%
https://lucaviano.com/en/products/natural-crushed-hooves-and-horns/
A pamphlet from an 1850s Ohio study I saw some years ago. That statistic caught my eye. It probably includes the bone core now that I think about it. Calcium phosphate congregates in the head, Calc carb in the long bones. In humans. Otherwise I couldn't say.
Another observation from that time period: wild deer bred in captivity reproduce wild generations vs captured elk offspring are tame in the 1st generation. Which suggests that elk and cow are both domestic animals, so that using deer instead of elk bladder may result in a different Yarrow prep, as Steiner specifies using the red deer. What do you think?
Or not
Hydrogen formed in darkness (hydrogen sulfide) is a deadly poison (swamp gas). Hydrogen formed in light is fertilizing, life-giving.
What is a cowhorn made of,?
?
I don't see my reply here either.
Or seeing my post.
I'm not seeing a reply to my last post. Did you receive it?
The form of hydrogen in the horn is different than lets say the stomach, where you would find soluble HCL. Sense organs being transformed or withered digestive organs, they process the radiant stream of impressions rather than physical food and water to build out the form of the organism. Preps arouse transformation forces held in manure by the radiance concentrated inside the horn (or hollow organ) from the surrounding winter earth light, and released by warmth.
Forgive the delay in my reply. It's the peak of our season just now.
Ph is not responsible for the 'hidden alchemy' in 'properly functioning' organic processes. Transmutation is acheived by radiation, by light.
"'How can it happen that the spiritual impulse, and especially the inner schooling, for which you are constantly providing stimulus and guidance bear so little fruit?...Why, worst of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these spiritual impulses, so weak?' I was particularly anxious to get an answer to the question as to how one could build a bridge to active participation and the carrying out of spiritual intentions without being pulled off the right path by personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies; for these were the negative qualities Rudolf Steiner had named as the main inner hindrances.'"
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Adams trans. Pg 7