Beyond Biodynamics: Renewing the Doctrine of Signatures

a simple but universal key

“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.” - George Washington Carver in The Man Who Talks with Flowers by Glenn Clark

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What if you could read what plants mean? What would they tell you about their secrets?

In traditional herbalism, the “doctrine of signatures” suggested that if something looked like a particular human organ or body part, it was medicine for its lookalike. While this may have been a useful way of remembering specific remedies, not all heart-shaped leaves are necessarily effective cardiovascular remedies. For our times, another look at this may be useful.

If we consider the antifungal remedy proposed by Rudolf Steiner in the Agriculture Course, horsetail (Equisetum arvense), it is a plant that has no fruits, no leaves, no true seeds (it produces spores), and even its rhizomes are not fully formed roots. Gerbert Grohmann describes in The Plant, vol 1 that horsetail as a plant is virtually “all stem.” You could almost say that horsetail is a living crystal. When this is given to another plant, everything about its striving becomes stemmier. It rays out in all directions, overcoming water-logged conditions.

I was once asked at a presentation in New Mexico what might be suitable remedy for a desert climate where fungal diseases were not as prevalent. Horsetail (Equisetum arvense) is recommended where too much water accumulates. I suggested that the opposite might be necessary in a desert: something that remains green, succulent, and full of water in spite of its environment. I suggested a plant Steiner himself references in the Agriculture Course: the cactus.

My friend Joseluis Ortiz confirmed that, in fact, the use of cactus in the ground is an established practice in the arid southwest to help keep plants hydrated and tender. If you wish plants to remain succulent in a desert, the easiest way to help them is to draw on the powerful medicine of wild plants that already know how to stay green and full of water even in droughts.

Of all the reading I’ve done, one principle stands out as having nearly universal application. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a desert or in a swamp. Look out into nature for plants thriving the way you wish your own garden plants to behave. This principle is so simple it’s easy to overlook, so I suggest reading it again.

Consider your garden. In it many things grow, but sometimes what grows best is not what you planted. Sometimes weeds grow with such tenacity and vigor, you wonder how you’ll ever keep up with them! These “enemies” in the garden hold a great secret. After all, wouldn’t you wish your own garden plants were as vibrant and grew as fast as your weeds?

Collect your weeds. These uninvited guests are more precious than the plants you sowed. Take these weeds carefully to your compost pile and always cover them with a layer of soil. Or, if you wish to give a more immediate remedy, collect your most ostentatious weeds and soak them in water, letting them rot. This will create an unpleasant odor, but Steiner reminds us that “a living organism and particularly the plant organism (apart from the flower) is designed not to give out scent but to take it in.”¹ While our goal is always odorless compost, when we wish to transpose the powers of one plant directly to another, the quickest way is to rot them. Take the fermented plant juice (FPJ) and dilute it in nine parts water (1 part FPJ, 9 parts water), then use this as a foliar spray or soil stimulant around your plants. Always be sure to dilute your fermented plant juices. Failure to do so can burn your plants. Begin by applying a 10% solution once a week to your plants and see how they respond. Experience will dictate what works best for your unique situation.

Plants each strive, and have their own meaning and purpose. Plants wish to be in a particular way. They each love a specific star. When plants are fermented, they release their cosmic organizing principle and leave behind all their qualities. It is as if the noun has vanished, and only the adjectives remain. If the original weed grows tall, proud, green, spiny — now you can take these qualities and apply them to another plant. Here we are working with the grammar of the cosmic word, each species its own utterance.

The true form of reading script of the cosmic word is in the plant forms all around us.

In Virginia, Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) grows voluptuously. Its fleshy stalks and perkiness in the middle of summer betray a deep spiritual affinity for potassium. You’ll notice this plant is one of the last to wilt in the summer heat. Therefore, if you ferment this plant and feed it to your squash, your squash quickly becomes prouder, perkier, fleshier, and is disinclined to wilt. You don’t even need to know about potassium or other elements to use this principle, as it is everywhere. You don’t even need to be literate. You just need to see. The true form of reading the script of the cosmic word is observing the forms of life all around us.

When your squash is suffering and wilting in the summer heat, look for the plant that rarely wilts like pokeweed, chop it into small pieces, and make a decoction by simmering the plant material in a covered pot for 45 minutes. Strain the plant material out. Let the decoction cool. Water your suffering plants and they will usually begin to recover quickly.

If you let this decoction ferment first, it will work better, but usually, if you’re making a remedy it is often time-sensitive. If you plan for the next year and make a large batch, the weeds that thrive in your garden are often candidates for this. If you wish to make a long-term ferment, you can submerge entire plants in crocks and use a 3.5 percent sea salt solution, as if you were making sauerkraut. You can age this almost indefinitely, but all plant material should be kept submerged under the water. Even without clairvoyance, a gardener with clear eyes can easily find candidates for such remedies amongst everyday weeds. We are not what we eat; we are the qualities of what we eat. If we eat unhealthy food, we are likely to become unhealthy. So, we look out in nature and identify suitable healthy examples of the qualities we want our garden plants to exemplify.

A plant is an expression of what is in the soil, but a plant is also a way of overcoming those geological conditions. You could almost say plants really come from outer space, and their growth is a return to their celestial origin. When pokeweed rises tall, we see not just an affinity for particular elements, but a vitality that is able to rise above the parent material of the soil and overcome geological conditions. In a sense, every green plant is a dynamic picture of life overcoming the sleep of the inherited conditions in the soil.

Owen Barfield refers to light as “the etheric in the etheric”² which requires much contemplation in itself. But we also have “the plant in the plant”: the flower. As the leaf overcomes the root, the flower overcomes the leaf. The properties of the leaf relate to the soil with an impulse that overcomes that weightiness. But in the flower we have a subtle process that is as different from the leaf as the leaf is from the root.

In the flower we have another kind of “grasping” — not of the same order as the root, but on another octave. In the case of cactus, the green fleshy aspect helps overcome conditions of dryness. The cactus flower offers a gentle impulse of overcoming the retention of too much water (e.g., edema). Paradoxically, the root has more kinship with the flower than either do with the leaf. But if every plant were seen clearly, at least three impulses strive within most plants — root, leaf, and flower — remedies may be made for the garden from each aspect.

Another example of such an image is elderberries, who naturally grow wild in mucky riparian zones without succumbing to diseases. In fact, elders produce warm berries. Here you see remedies emerging out of the cosmic spaces in which we already live. The stems and leaves of elders suggest the power of overcoming stagnant mucky conditions, whereas the flowers suggest a mild moistening. In plants that produce fruits, we witness the fullness of what Goethe called the “greatest expansion” of the plant’s striving whereas the seed contains its “greatest contraction.” In a plant that produces seeds and fruits, we see the widest expression of this polar dynamic. We have the contrast of root and leaf, leaf and flower, and seed and fruit. A wiser person would be able to see not merely three different remedies in every plant (root, leaf, and flower), but at least four primary aspects as well as varied combinations — and all from a single plant.

I’m most interested in what you find as local remedies. What wild plants help you according to this image?

1. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture IV (GA327, 12 June 1924, Koberwitz)

2. Owen Barfield, “The Light of the World”