Introductory Chromatography

Making Visible the Invisible

“She is whole and yet never finished. As she works now, so can she work for ever.

To every one she appears in a form of his own. She hides herself in a thousand names and terms, and is always the same.”

― Goethe, Aphorisms on Nature

In biodynamics, we strive to remain “within the realm of the living” as Rudolf Steiner puts it.¹ This means that for the creation of fertilizers, we focus on things that were quite recently participating in a living organism and try to retain that liveliness so we can impart it into the soil.

Unfortunately, “life” as a quality is invisible: you know it when you see it, but it can’t be quantified. How do we make the subtle qualities of life something we can see with our own eyes?

Image: unfinished 500 horn manure ripening in a root cellar

As a way to lift the veil of Nature, “picture-forming” methods are emphasized within the worlds surrounding biodynamic agriculture. Chromatography, growing out of the foundational work of Lili Kolisko and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer (among others) is a way to develop a sort of “photograph” of the living activities within the soil. 

Filter paper is prepared with silver nitrate, which is a photo-reactive element that displays different colors when it interacts with compounds from the soil and is also exposed to light. Chromatography is an affordable low-tech method that does not require a dark room to develop these images.

As a very brief overview, these images created by chromatography are called “chromas.” Chromatography is an aesthetic approach to perceiving qualities. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests in his magnum opus Truth and Method, there is a larger chasm between people who have no taste at all and those who have any taste than there is between anyone who has bad taste and anyone who has good taste. Alan Chadwick liked to quote Robert Graves saying, “The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people's wills.”

The goal of biodynamics, and anthroposophy in general, is not any kind of depersonalization devoid of personal taste. As Valentin Tomberg notes, when Jesus says “All who came before me were thieves and robbers.” (John 10:8) this remark is meant to say that before the time of Christ, spiritual paths required the surrendering of the personality to a collective — whether a tribe, nation, or guru. But since that time, the impersonal equanimity of the soul has blossomed into the emerging possibility of a magnanimous social Christic impulse where personality and taste are maintained while compassion is simultaneously employed impartially. This is exemplified in the saying of St. Augustine: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

While chromatography is designed to reveal the subtle qualities normally invisible to the naked eye, this does not contradict any conventional quantitative soil test. The two, side by side — quantity and quality — will tend to reveal more than either alone. Given the overabundant emphasis on quantity over quality², biodynamics attempts to bring balance by emphasizing quality. Flavor-forward food is at the heart of biodynamics. If it tastes better, there’s likely something better to it.

Image: unfinished 500 horn manure buried in autumn 2022

As Alan Chadwick would remind us, “We need to create the beauty and the quality first. The quantity will follow.” Chromatography is part of how we ensure quality of biodynamic preparations and produce on biodynamic farms. But learning to “read” chromas is not something that tends to happen overnight.

The development of a discriminating inner aesthetic eye does not mean merely judging one soil as “bad” and another as “good” but rather recognizing that one is fertile and another is barren. The ancient Chinese, as noted in the book Farmers of Forty Centuries, would categorize soil not by good or bad but by how much labor would be required to make it fruitful: when everything must be utilized, discrimination works freely without the tinge condemnation.

But this eye for quality cannot be learned from a book, though there are many useful pointers that can be gleaned. An aesthetic eye – taste – must be cultivated. As a child we dislike various foods, but find them delicious as an adult. If we simply avoided what is displeasing to our childhood habits, we will not develop taste with challenging new sensations. In the garden, this might look like developing Goethean observation like in Thinking Like a Plant by Craig Holdredge. Why do we want to do this? To become better caretakers of the cosmos.

To develop a personal relationship with manure and ways of manuring, we must both be able to suspend our subjective antipathies towards the stink of manure and also be able to discriminate between compost that is odorless and compost that is not. Here we enter the realm where sensory impressions stimulate our feelings, but our feelings themselves become a kind of sensory information, and our identity is not submerged under their influence. As Steiner suggests, only that which we can resist can we sense. 

Merely despising manure because it smells bad shows only a lack of equanimity, but the inability to distinguish between qualities is a kind of soul blindness that Rudolf Steiner’s mission sought to overcome. If we cannot distinguish between fertile soil and infertile soil, we will not be able to do much good with either kind of soil because we won’t know how to treat either to bring them to their full potential.

Chromatography is about practicing an inner aesthetic mode of perception. Once it is developed, a mere glance can tell you more than a book, because a picture is worth a thousand words. Interpreting chromas is like interpreting works of art. We look for the subtle variations, the diversity of strokes, the contrast between the inner and outer, how the total image is framed, and so forth. How do we learn to see the activities of the hidden artist?

To experience inwardly what phenomena have to disclose to us, we must first set aside our own wishes and our own feelings. As Goethe says, “If we want to approach a living perception (Anschauung) of nature, we must become as mobile and flexible as nature herself.”³ This means finding a nearly buddha-like equipoise and allowing the external phenomenon to be reflected clearly as exact sensorial imagination within our souls and then, without any ulterior motive, allow an objective feeling to arise from that picture.

What does this image have to say to us? It can only speak if our inner monologue first finds silence.

Image: finished Barrel Compound (BC)

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For those interested in exploring more about Chromatography and quality assessment, The Agriculture Section at the Goetheanum in conjunction with the Demeter Biodynamic Federation is presenting a colloquium entitled “The Essence and Quality of Biodynamic Preparations.”

The colloquium is free, but registration is required.

In this session experienced BD practitioners from across the world will exchange knowledge and experiences around the foundations of Biodynamic preparations, their understanding of quality in preparations and how they enhanced it. 

JPI board member Barbara Shinn will be presenting on behalf of the Fellowship of Preparation Makers (FOPM) from U.S and will finalize the session discussing how they assess and perceive quality through their chromatography work. 

This session will be a great opportunity to meet biodynamic practitioners from different countries of the world and to learn and exchange on your mutual path in biodynamics. 

1. Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture V.

2. See René Guénon’s Reign of Quantity.

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