On Building the Alchemical Vessel
A Farmer’s Journey Into the Mysteries of Matter and Soul.
Read the original article in Spanish here.
IKÚ is a biodynamic farm in Nayarít, Mexico, which was born seven years ago from a vision, a dream and an impulse of will to deepen in the mysteries and beauty of the natural world, and the need to be direct participants of the process we call foods and how they nourish us. We are IKÚ a family project located in the mountains of Nayarit Mexico, we like to call what we do “human scale agriculture” seeking to give back the beauty of the craft of agriculture to our will, feeling and thinking as humans, re–imagining what does it means to be a farmer in this times, we are a productive small vegetable farm, vegetables that we share with our community, exploring how healthy farm organisms revitalize not only ecosystems but also communities. IKÚ has sawed seeds in young and old, opening the farm, offering educational programs, welcoming volunteers, and social projects that reach out to the wider community.
We get inspiration from philosophies and practices of deep agriculture that seek to penetrate in the mysteries of life and at the same time regenerate and vitalize soils and ecosystems, a big influence on the work we do is the biodynamic agriculture propose by Rudolf Steiner, which places the farmer as a mediator of the process and forces of heaven and earth.
On the 17 of August of 2024 the creek that runs next to our farm overflooded like it hadn’t ever before, according to the locals in more than 20 years, washing away everything on its way, affectations were big in town and also for farmers and ranchers, including our beloved farm, the wild waters washed away our farm, crops, infrastructure, tools, irrigation system and soil with that part of our spirit. Lots of lessons have been coming to light.
One it’s the sometimes-forgotten power of nature, remained us that the earth its always moving and the other one is that resilience in farms it’s not only limited to the health of the ecosystem but also in the big communal net that productive farms that feed people and families rest on, we realized that the limbs of the project reach out far. Today we are asking for support to keep on going, to keep on farming, to bring back IKÚ our farm organism, our bigger body.
Deep gratitude.
The vessel must be made by a kind of squaring of the circle.
Gerhard Dorn.
If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents, not a compromise but something new.
Carl Gustav Jung.
Seek for the real, the practical, the material life
But seek for it thus, that it does not dull you down
Towards the Spirit, which is living in it.
Employ the old principle:-
“Spirit is never without matter”
“Matter is never without Spirit”
Rudolf Steiner.
Among all the images that inhabit the living cosmology of the Agricultural Course delivered by Rudolf Steiner 100 years ago, there is one that calls me the most. Steiner introduces it in the second lecture.
“A farm is true to its essential nature, in the best sense of the word, if it is conceived as a kind of individual entity in itself—a self-contained individuality. Every farm should approximate to this condition”.
This means that farms and agricultural spaces are in a process of becoming, constantly unifying and adjusting themselves in an organismic fashion. Following this way of thinking, we can say that we can have healthy organisms or sick ones.
Studying and meditating on this image has brought a whole different experience to my practice and how I relate to my farm, as well as the process of doing interventions and designing farm ecosystems. There is no farming without the farmer. Farming occurs inside of the human will. I know of no way that all the complex conditions that happen in a farm could appear in a “natural” way without the intervention of the human. Let’s take a moment to reflect on all that has to happen: the plowing, seed preparation, spreading of manure, plant cultivation, and so on. All of this lives inside of the human radiant expression.
Some time ago we had our family farm by the Pacific coast of Nayarit, Mexico, a subtropical region with an annual precipitation of 1227 mm (48 inches), which falls in only a period of 4 months during the warmth of the summer. In only a matter of weeks, it is possible to witness the fluid power of nature taking over. Grasses grow up to 3 meters high and all kinds of vigorous weeds cover every bit of exposed earth on the farm. So, nature by herself is always going forth to seek her own fulfillment. Only the farmer with a keen sense of observation can bring order to such a wildly generous natural landscape.
The old alchemists used to refer to their craft as an “opus contra naturam,” or a work against nature. According to their cosmological imagination, metal alchemy viewed metals as seeds of the cosmos. Fallen from the periphery to the centric realm of the earthly, these seeds where continuously evolving from the grossness and darkness of lead to the pureness and brightness of gold in a process that could take millions of years. The sacred art of the alchemist was to redeem these metals and to help them rise through very specific operations, meditations, and imaginations. In this way they helped to quicken the process of nature.
This process of “intervention” in nature, as practiced by the alchemists, is also seen in farming, as opposed to the practices of hunter-gatherers. Humans practicing hunting and gathering took from divine Nature to nourish themselves. They took not only food but also a perceptual way of life.
On the other hand, the path of the farmer seeks transformation as a form of active play with the unknown. The farmer takes an action and then awaits a response. We farmers can play with the destiny of our surroundings, from the amount of planting space we give to a head of lettuce for example. This decision influences the morphogenetic composition of the lettuce, the quality and structure of our soil, and the nourishment of our community. Elder uncle Fred Wahpepah from the Kikapu Nation told me once that on the road of life we always can choose which way we want to walk. This decision can either bring life and vitality to the human and nonhuman communities, or bring death and decline to our farms and surroundings.
So in this way we could say that farming is an “opus contra naturam.” I don’t think this means that farming causes us to enter into a fight against nature. Actually it’s the opposite. Farming takes the impulses coming from the heart of life through our bodies and farms, transforming and guiding them into the realm of living order. In this sense, the farmer becomes a binder for the opposites in the farm, in its body and its soul, uniting the sun and the earth in pursuit of fertility, reconciling the processes of the living and of death, nature, and society. In the old alchemical arts, this process was called “conjunction,” illustrated as the marriage of the opposites. In this way, the farm becomes the lab and the farmer takes the role of unifier or, in other words, assumes a mercurial form.
Coming back to the image of the individuality of the farm, for me the idea is quite amazing, and can be felt on one’s own farm with a little bit of practice. Year after year, the farm spaces start to create their own particular vibe as a multi-layered, complex entity. I have always enjoyed visiting others’ spaces, really coming to feel how they have their own personalities. As it is said, “the farms are the faces of the farmers.”
But I feel that Steiner goes a little beyond the creation of a mechanized farm that works as a machine shaped by inorganic, dead parts and processes. I feel Steiner wants us to work more toward the Goethean sense of wholeness, a living fractal organism that creates a new order in the unity of its parts, in which each part reflects and supports the whole.
No doubt this is why Steiner encouraged physicians and farmers to work together. In a way, to be in a farm is like seeing an organism from within. This has the potential to shine new light on the way we understand life, and how we design and manage our own farms.
But even going beyond that, when we talk of an agrarian individuality we are referring to a kind of perception and sensitiveness that inhabit farms. It’s an old animistic belief that the world is an animated space in which mountains and forests have this ensouled depth. Right here, with this idea, things may start to feel strange to some. This concept implies that we as farmers can create living organisms, with their own individualities. In a way, these become an extension of the “I” of the farmer. This journey takes us into the old mysteries of matter and its unknowns.
Von Franz cites Jung:
… That probably the unconscious (the part of psyche that is hidden) has a material aspect, which would be why it knows about matter—because it’s matter— it is matter which knows itself, as it were. If this were so, then there would be dim or vague phenomenon of consciousness even in inorganic matter.
This idea of sparking life from the “not living” or maybe awakening it has been around for a while. We can see it in different mythologies across the globe. For example, from the Mayan Popol Vuh:
“The humans’ flesh was made of white – that’s male – and yellow – that’s female – corn. Their arms and legs were made of corn meal. The gods ground enough corn to make enough gruel to fill NINE gourds, that gave the men muscles, strength, and power.”
In such accounts, humans were made of different materials like clay or corn meal, and the life impulse was blown in to them.
Or consider the old Homunculus from Paracelsus where the old alchemist creates an animated living being out of the not living. There is also Goethe’s Faust:
It brightens! See! – Now there’s a real chance, That, if from the hundred-fold substance, By mixing – since mixing makes it happen – The stuff of human life’s compounded, And distilled in a flask, well-founded, And in proper combination, grounded, Then the silent work is done.
Further references also can be found in fairy tales, folk stories, and modern writings. Examples are Pinocchio, Frankenstein, and others where the spark of life is brought into the realm of the “not living.”
This alchemical imagination of raising matter to living form is an old one, found as well in the practice of biodynamics, which follows Steiner´s recommendation to stay in the realm of the living.
So constituting our farms as organisms with their own spark of individuality follows this ancient stream of thought. We as farmers are constantly creating, and, in a way, midwifing the becoming of our farm beings. I find this beautiful. it changes the way each of us relate to our land and to farming as a broader, more powerful being. Indeed, when we are able to reawaken soul in our way of seeing, our will becomes alive, responsible, and possessed of a new sense of respect. When a mountain becomes fully alive in our way of seeing, then mining that leads to deforestation will make a different impression on us.
In biodynamics we use the remedies offered by Steiner in the Agricultural Course to spark this individuality and sensitiveness. We use the compost pile as the “prima materia” where the germ of being is created, in where each one of the remedies holds an archetypical force that creates a little Homunculus that can be widely spread on the farm, quickening the process just as the alchemists did with metals, resulting in the raising and vivification of matter.
Much more can be said and, certainly, this is an imaginal way of seeing what Steiner directed, but, as we say in Mexico, “the ball can be landed” in very concrete ways. One example is of the “terrua” widely known in vineyards—microbial populations specific to our farm, the mycorrhizal communities, and the farm ecosystem in general.
I have found that, as Steiner said in the Agriculture Course, it is important to develop a personal relation with manure and the other different matters on the farm. I believe that the more views or understandings that we have about one thing, the more we can have the proper ground to manage and guide its development as part of the farm. This imaginative way to approach nature in a holistic way draws us into a closer, warmer, and truly living relationship with the land.
So let’s return to wise Carl Jung in the opening quote:
“If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents, not a compromise but something new”.
In many ways we can explore biodynamic farming as a collection of alchemical operations that happen, not in a lab, but within a farm organism. For the alchemists all the different operations had a proper vessel to be cooked in. You could say the constitution of the individuality of the farm becomes the great work of the farmer. If so, this raises the question: what is the proper vessel for it; what can hold the process of becoming for this new being?
Spinning around this question has lead me to a colorful path in my years of farming. I feel that the images in Dr. Steiner’s course, much like those from many other wisdom traditions, are there to be contemplated more than grasped with the intellect. To grasp with the mind is to try to cage a wild animal. In the very moment we do this, all its beauty is completely lost, because the animal itself is part of the bigger wholeness of its environment. It becomes necessary to develop a fine sense of awareness or the beauty slips away as the old Zen poem says: “Progress is not a matter of far or near, but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.”
Images are to be related and studied in the colorful living wholeness of their own ecosystem, much like Goethe's phenomenology of nature, in an inward space. So when we read Steiner’s the Agriculture Course again, we can allow the images to flourish and to move our own soul and to speak for themselves, just as our farms can do. Dogen Zenji, founder of the Japanese Soto Zen sect, writes in Genjo Koan:
“To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.”
So it comes back to our own will as humans. This alchemical vessel is our own heart, our own love for the craft, the way we can develop a never ending personal relation with our beloved farms. Just as the alchemists themselves where another component of the operation, it’s impossible not to be deeply changed by the process, just as Goethe said that if we seek to understand nature we should follow the fluidity of nature with our own consciousness, soften it, and tune it to a more holistic way of perceiving, just as modeling with wax with our hands softens with the warmth of our approach. French alchemist Jean Dubois explains:
“If his thoughts are not well-ordered, then his substance cannot be properly manipulated; if both are in good order, he has to muster the courage to go deep within his inner resources in order to understand the relation between his own soul and the soul of the matter he is working with”
For us farmers, that matter is manure, compost, plants, animals, soil, trees, tools, and so on.
In my humble opinion that’s the great beauty about biodynamic farming. It opens up a soulful way for modern farmers to connect with nature, while, at the same time, connecting with their own depths. So in binding and uniting the opposites out there in the field, we are unifying our being. In forming and witnessing the becoming of the farm individuality, we are forming and witnessing the becoming of our own spiritual body. The process goes both ways simultaneously.
Please, if you are a farmer or a gardener and you are reading this, feel revitalized by the beauty of your craft, by the sweet, volatile smell of a harvest morning or the flowering trees, moistened by the mysterious dew that gently covers your farm or garden each night (depending on season). Allow all the beautiful colors of your fields to enter your eyes, finding the colors of your soul. There are not that many crafts that can so weave themselves into life like farming does. Good farming calls for commitment, or, as Allan Chadwick would say, it’s the ultimate practice of letting go of the ego.
To be a farmer is not only to consciously recognize that we are part of a bigger wholeness but to pulse in it, to work with it, to craft an action, and to wait for the impulse that responds back. Steiner tells us that all things physical have their spiritual counterparts. It doesn’t matter how large your farm or garden happens to be, because, when our will matches the depths of the calling of our hearts, the spaces where agriculture is practiced become sacred. These are the spaces where the big agricultural being can touch the earth and feed the human, transforming matter to revitalize the living earth.
Avalokiteshvara, the Buddhist personification of compassion, comes to my imagination. This figure is represented as a spiritual being, not male, not female, with a thousand arms and with each of its hands showing a wide-open eye that symbolizes the activity of the awakened ones. Also it usually is represented holding a different tool in each one of these hands so that it has all the “skillful means” to relieve suffering. Avalokitesvara, or the one that hears the sorrow of sentient beings, made a vow not to be liberated until the last blade of grass achieves awakening. In my imagination the big agricultural being should look like this, because what’s more compassionate that the impulse to tend the land and feed people.
We can say that farming its about growing food, but when we take a step backwards, the see the farming impulse as a very sacred one that the farmer with the maternal forces of the living heart demonstrates. It is an act of love just like the one offered by a mother breastfeeding her new born child. I imagine that each one of this agricultural being’s awakened hands represents a different approach to agriculture, a different view, methodology, and agrarian philosophy about all the ways of growing food, holding the spectrum from the more wholesome ones to the destructive ones, though all of them are a different emanation of this one force, meaning there really is only one agriculture.
So let’s keep on with the study and practice of this beautiful task that brings hope and health, not only to the community but to the whole of the living earth.
Sometimes, in inexplicable ways and for its own reasons, Nature sweeps away a soulful farm individuality. So Iku Tierra has been swept away, destroyed by a flood—no plants, no topsoil, and no tools left. If you would like to help the family begin again, donations can be made at: https://gofund.me/d5786d9e.
What’s Happening
Perennial Roots Farm (PRF) in Accomac, Virginia, will be hosting a fall workshop during JPI’s transitional stage. PRF has hosted many workshops in collaboration with FHCASA (Future Harvest Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture), the Chesapeake Biodynamic Network, Virginia State University (VSU), University of Eastern Shore Maryland (UMES), as well as in conjunction with JPI, among others. PRF has been making biodynamic preparations and burying hundreds of horns on their farm for well over a decade now. They keep their own horned cattle and supply their own manure. PRF will be donating all their manure, time, and energy to this event to produce preparations for JPI to sell.
of Perennial Roots Farm writes her own Substack, where she shares photos from the farm, writes about nature, animals, and life out in the elements. She also shares her favorite authors, poets, and reflections — as well as sumptuous seasonal recipes made from fresh ingredients that she grows on the farm. Those of you attending our workshop will appreciate getting to know Natalie a bit more, if you don’t already follow her writing. of Perennial Roots Farm is Natalie’s other side. He writes on esoteric themes, biodynamics (obviously) and is a seemingly endless stream of inspiration. Those who do not yet follow his other personal musings, might consider them as well.
Perennial Roots Farm (PRF) is a small operation, so ticket availability is limited. Sign up early to guarantee your spot. As PRF will not be making a profit off this event, for those who cannot attend but nonetheless wish to support the biodynamic work, we welcome contributions as tickets. These help significantly towards scholarships and reducing overhead costs. Tickets are sold on a sliding scale.
Sponsors of PRF:
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