New Book Release: Biodynamics for Beginners
Hugh J. Courtney & others: Biodynamics for Beginners
We are releasing a new title with SteinerBooks, Biodynamics for Beginners: Principles and Practice, in which the “best of” Applied Biodynamics have been collected and edited. Much of Applied Biodynamics has reached an intimate audience, but it is time for the contents to reach the wider world. As a celebration of Applied Biodynamics shifting to the digital realm, we offer a book printed on paper for your library! Below is a preview of the introduction written by Stewart Lundy. 300+ pages of biodynamics!
Many thanks go to John-Scott Legg and the Steinerbooks team for their patience and diligence. Also, we thank Mary Maruca for her ongoing hard work. This wouldn’t have happened without them.
An excerpt from Stewart Lundy's introduction to Biodynamics for Beginners: Principles and Practice by Hugh J. Courtney (and others).
“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world."
– James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
Describing the invisible world in terms of the visible requires a delicate touch. Since we can only see what’s in front of our eyes, to begin to speak of the invisible world, we must be fluent in analogies based on what we can see and be confident that the universe is a unified whole, not a mere amalgam of unrelated pieces. As the philosopher Aristotle says, we must begin with what we know. Without a unifying world conception, there is no impetus for scientific inquiry and no basis for knowledge. Life would be unlivable if everything did not always already possess an inner kinship. Just as we cannot see the wind itself but we can see what it does, we may not be able to perceive the tones of subtle “forces” but any of us can witness their effects if we put them to use. Similarly, we cannot see for ourselves the inner workings of the soil, but we can see the effects of the secrets of the soil in how the emerging plants express themselves above ground.
To journey into the realm of the invisible – which, if we’re honest, is most of the world – we must keep in mind the entire time that any analogy based on the sense-perceptible world will invariably be incomplete. Our senses are not designed to perceive most of the cosmos but, rather, are tuned to a narrow bandwidth of a mere fraction of a percent of all possible information available. As such, any analogy based on that tiny fraction of a percent will be incomplete at best. But if we approach the world with a “soft” gaze, we can allow disparate viewpoints to become a composite image of a living whole.
There is a story of blind monks grasping at different parts of an elephant: one thinks the leg is the trunk of a tree, one imagines the tail is a rope, one thinks the ear is a large leaf, and so forth. Each similarity, by itself, is incomplete, but that does not mean they are each individually false. The individual ideas of “tree” and “rope” and “leaf” are all, by themselves, correct concepts but they are all misapplied to the elephant. If each blind monk were to trade places with the others successively and try to reconcile these various perspectives, a clearer image of the whole – the elephant itself – would emerge. Each limited view is a legitimate vantage point as far as it goes – after all, there is a likeness between the elephant’s tail and a rope – but when these experiences of separate concepts are reconciled, an even greater concept of the whole emerges.
Some particularly bright stars, such as Rudolf Steiner, seem to have reached far beyond the limits of what is sense-perceptible (and therefore beyond what is externally empirical) into realms inaccessible to ordinary everyday consciousness. But if we need specialized sense organs to perceive light, there are analogous inner “organs” we require to perceive the dark light of the invisible world. If we want to glimpse the subsensible world, we might use a microscope. But if we wish to understand the meaning of the kaleidoscopic panoply of our ever-changing sense perceptions, we need to be able to intuit macrocosmic interconnections which no external technology can do for us. If we are like blind monks grasping at pieces, Steiner is like someone who could grasp the encompassing idea "elephant" while the rest of us are busy arguing from our smaller one-sided perspectives. How Steiner reached his clear-sightedness is somewhat beside the point for our current discussion of biodynamic agriculture. If I lack eyes, I cannot perceive light myself, but my blindness does not negate the empirical existence of colors for anyone else with eyesight. I may have no experiential point of reference to evaluate whether “red” or “blue” exist – or even what those terms mean – but that does not mean that colors as such have no reality merely because I personally cannot experience them. Nevertheless, Steiner did not expect blind faith in what he observed. Anything Steiner disclosed he consistently said should be tested and empirically validated.
Steiner never asked people to “believe” what he said. On the contrary, Steiner asked his audience to think what he said and also to test what he said. The trouble these days seems to be that many of us cannot even begin to entertain a new idea unless we already believe it. The result of closed-mindedness is the inability of various groups to find common ground -- blind monks insisting that an elephant is a “rope” or a “tree.” But if we dismiss out of hand a new idea merely because it seems “weird,” we will never grow outside what we already think we know. And if we do not submit an idea to empirical testing and document results, we cannot expect others to believe our claims. Funding for biodynamic research is often in short supply partly because it promises to make farmers buy less fertilizer, not more. Biodynamics, as part of the cultural sphere, aims to make farms more profitable and not extract greater profits from farmers themselves. As such, biodynamic research is nurtured primarily by the initiative of magnanimous donors seeking to help farmers worldwide become more ecologically and economically sustainable.
When the insights of Steiner drawn out of “anthroposophy” – the living consciousness of one’s humanity – are applied to agriculture, we find a distinctly humane approach to farming that we can call biodynamics. The novelty of biodynamics is not that it is sustainable. Indigenous practices worldwide – including in Europe – were long established before the industrial revolution – in many cases for millennia, as F.H. King demonstrates in Farmers of Forty Centuries, for instance. What makes biodynamics special is that it is a post-industrial attempt to return to natural wisdom. As Owen Barfield describes anthroposophy in his introduction to The Case for Anthroposophy,
“What differentiates anthroposophy from its traditional predecessors, both methodologically and in its content, is precisely its post-revolutionary status. It is, if you are that way minded, the perennial philosophy; but, if so, it is that philosophy risen again, and in a form determined by its having risen again, from the psychological and spiritual eclipse of the scientific revolution.”
What distinguishes biodynamics is that it is a return from and through a mechanized prodigal society, but not a regression — a return in a new way, like returning to your childhood home as an adult. As T.S. Eliot sings in The Four Quartets:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
Anthroposophy is coming to “know the place for the first time” and arriving where we started, albeit ourselves changed. As Steiner suggested, we should continue to farm in any way that works and, to that, add the biodynamic preparations to sustainable practices. As such, biodynamics is universally applicable wherever sound farming practices are already employed. Above all, biodynamics is a practical application of insights gleaned from anthroposophy. One might ask whether you need to believe in anthroposophy to use biodynamics, and the answer is: of course not! Steiner did not want sycophants. Steiner said we need “active fellow-workers — no mere executive organs.” It is not enough for people to follow orders from a centralized authority; we need creative co-workers who can not only fulfill tasks but add more than they are asked to give.
As a man well-versed in scientific literature, Steiner would have likely had a special place in his heart for those skeptical about the claims of biodynamics yet dare to put it to the test with objectivity. After all, science should not shy away from what is weird–superstition does that–but rather, science tests whether a hypothesis is repeatable. As the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The theoretical basis of biodynamics may be somewhat difficult to grasp, but anyone can experience its concrete results. In his Agriculture Course, Steiner advances a falsifiable (testable) claim that these biodynamic preparations, properly employed, will tend to help produce healthier crops when added to sound sustainable farming practices. Biodynamics does not aspire to replace agriculture as we know it, nor is it opposed to innovations. Biodynamics merely seeks to restore a piece of what is often neglected, though it cannot succeed without good farming practices as a rich foundation.
Despite what some might suggest, biodynamics does not need to take much time – a stir here and there amounts to a few hours in the scope of an entire year. Good farming takes a lot of time, but the addition of biodynamics is a negligible investment of time by comparison, especially given its benefits to the soil. How long do we sit in traffic throughout our brief lives? We don’t stop driving because of that. If you make your own preparations on your farm, it undoubtedly adds a few more hours of work, but you’re cultivating “indigenous microorganisms,” now popularly referred to as IMOs, in a new proactive way by making these special preparations….
To read more, buy the book!
About Biodynamics for Beginners: Principles and Practice (Portal Books, 2024)
“Biodynamics is distinguished by the fact that it is a return from and through a mechanized prodigal society, not a regression. It is a return in a new way, like returning to your childhood home as an adult.” — Stewart Lundy
This collection of articles—compiled primarily by Hugh Courtney from the periodical Applied Biodynamics—introduces the basics of making the essential biodynamic preparations. What is discussed in these articles is much more than just ways to make preparations successfully; it also represents, for the most part, Hugh’s way of doing so with lots of practical tips for success. The articles are down to earth, literally, with very little theory, and provide the technical knowhow to make the biodynamic preparations described by Rudolf Steiner in his Agriculture Course and further developed ever since by several generations of biodynamic practitioners.
“Biodynamics is a reorientation of agriculture to its primary purpose—not commerce, but life. Anthroposophy is not a fanatical movement, nor is it an iconoclastic movement. As Steiner says, we need cow horns to make the biodynamic preparations, but we do not need to be ‘bull-headed’ about it.” — Stewart Lundy
Biodynamics for Beginners, edited and introduced by Stewart Lundy and liberally illustrated throughout, is the perfect guidebook for anyone who is serious about becoming a successful, hands-on biodynamic farmer or gardener.
Contents
Introduction by Stewart Lundy
Honoring the Cow (Hugh J. Courtney)
The Scientific Basis of Biodynamics (John Bradshaw)
Sensitive Crystallization: Revealing the Life Forces behind Biodynamics (Philippe Coderey)
500: The Foundational Horn Manure Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
Further Thoughts on Making BD500 (Hugh J. Courtney)
501: Horn Silica Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
502: How to Make the Yarrow Preparation (Patricia Smith)
Achillea millefolium Esoterica (Hugh J. Courtney)
503: Chamomile: The Healer for People and Plants (Hugh J. Courtney)
504: The Stinging Nettle Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
505: How to Make the Oak Bark Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
506: Dandelion: Messenger of Heaven (Abigail Porter)
506: Dandelion Compost Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
507: How to Make the Valerian Preparation (Patricia Smith & Hugh J. Courtney)
The Valerian Preparation: Additional Perspectives (Hugh J. Courtney)
508 Revealing the Hidden Forces of Equisetum arvense (Hugh J. Courtney)
Pest “Peppers” and Homeopathic Dilution (Hugh J. Courtney)
The Three Kings Preparation (Hugh J. Courtney)
Preparations as Beings: The Three Kings Preparation of Hugo Erbe (German-Michael Hahn)
Expanding the Biodynamic Preparations (Hugh J. Courtney)
Amethyst 501 (Dennis Klocek)
Cited Works
Further Reading