Biodynamic Digest #26
“A lot of things have diminished in their nutritive value simply because people no longer understand the more subtle influences at work in the universe.”1
In this piece, we explore the simple polarity of what Steiner puts before us: what is earthly and what is cosmic? This is like asking: what a vowel is and what is a consonant? The grammar of Nature is our chief concern in biodynamics, so the most practical thing we can often do is take an enormous step back so that what we’re working with in the garden becomes a legible, understandable experience. In traditional education, one always begins with grammar and only then adds logic. Who can think logically if they cannot first put a sentence together? So we begin with the grammar of creation. The first task is learning to read our farms and gardens. Today, our first “letters” are the dynamic contrast of what can be called cosmic and what is called earthly. We could call this something else, such as Father Sky and Mother Earth, but to discuss it we have to call it something.
Biodynamics always works, seeking a harmonious, creative balance of Life. One of the simplest ways to work beneficially with Biodynamics is to attempt to feel the polarity of Earth and Cosmos, of Chaos and Order. In the old gnostic conception of the world, matter deprived of life was considered “evil” which was easily misunderstood by the institutional norms of the time, but it still fits with the concept that St. Augustine used, namely, that evil is a privation of the good. Matter, when it falls out of the realm of life, is the least alive – and therefore the least good. But since evil does not really exist, matter is therefore also not evil, but relatively speaking the least good until it can be incorporated into Life. Nonetheless, matter itself is good, except when it is in the wrong place. When matter solidifies where it shouldn’t, we get problems like arteriosclerosis, where part of the body “dies” too much and becomes least alive where it shouldn’t. By contrast, in cases of necrosis, parts become too alive. These extremes are what we might call “Ahriman” and “Lucifer” respectively – and we can’t live without them, but they must be kept from incarnating, and that is the perpetual activity of Christ, Life at the heart of all things. To imagine healthy arteries one must have both hardness and softness, where neither wins out. We see these dynamics in gardening and in human health every day. Steiner himself reminds us in his medical lectures that even illness is an otherwise healthy process occurring in the wrong place. This is all evil: the good, used in the wrong ways. If we keep this in mind, that “evil” is not a postive reality at all, but rather a void deprived of good, we can understand how it is essential to keep processes active where they should be for any living organism to remain healthy.
Rudolf Steiner tells us in the very first lecture of the Agriculture course, “Plant life as we know it can thrive only when these two forces — the forces of substances like lime and like silica — are in equilibrium and are working together properly.”2
What does this mean? We have water and soluble elements which include carbonates and related salts, exemplified by calcium carbonate (lime). On the other side of things, we have a complete different impulse, one that not only resists becoming soluble but has a tendency to precipitate out of solution, to crystallize – in this we have silica. On the one hand we have water and what it wishes to dissolve into itself, on the other, we have the exact opposite: what wishes to evaporate into the air and warmth, what seeks to dry out.
All of biodynamics can be summarized in a single paragraph from Goethe, whom Steiner held in extremely high esteem:
“It has been found that frequent nourishment hampers the flowering of a plant, whereas scant nourishment accelerates it. This is an even clearer indication of the effect of the stem leaves discussed above. As long as it remains necessary to draw off coarser juices, the potential organs of the plant must continue to develop as instruments for this need. With excessive nourishment this process must be repeated over and over; flowering is rendered impossible, as it were. When the plant is deprived of nourishment, nature can affect it more quickly and easily: the organs of the nodes are refined, the uncontaminated juices work with greater purity and strength, the transformation of the parts becomes possible, and the process takes place unhindered.”3
Put simply, the more we give plants fertilizers, irrigation, or other manures, the more we inhibit flowering and encourage vegetative growth. By contrast, if we can deprive a plant of soluble nutrients, water, and organic matter, we encourage the plant to rush to flowering. Managing this polarity is the essence of all gardening and farming.
This dynamic can be rephrased, as Steiner puts it, as a polarity between chaos and cosmos. This can be somewhat confusing but chaos means the fertile potentiality that must “die” into form. If everything were chaos, there would be no life as we know it, but if everything were rigid forms, there would also be no unfolding life. It’s easy to imagine a soil with too little chaotic organic matter, but it’s also possible for there to be too much organic matter – believe it or not. This is not a common problem these days, but results in excessive watery growth. Steiner says:
“Chaos is at the same time the essential reason of the constant and ever-present fertility in nature. Let us take a simple example: the working of Chaos appears wherever animal excrements occur…. Chaos is working in manure, in all that is cast out; and unless, at some time or other, you mingle Chaos with the Cosmos, further evolution is never possible.”4
This is true of the human soul as much as it is about plants: if we overfeed the body, the flowers of the soul do not open, or if they do, they are covered by fungal growths. There is a concrete reason that spiritual traditions invariably involve the “lightening” of diet and even the restriction of meals: Lent and Ramadan being two examples right now. Materialism is a byproduct–the inability to connect with the heavens–of imbalance nutrition: taking in too much by means of the sensual physical body which leads to nominalism, the belief that words are merely arbitrary labels.
Nutrients derived from synthetic substances binds the nutritive powers to the Earth because they introduce an artificial heaviness. If you eat too much salt, you retain water weight – the same thing happens with synthetic fertilizers and plants where you get more agitated watery growth but without proper structure or nutrition. Steiner shares, “Were only the etheric body to work, then the plant would unfold endlessly leaf by leaf; this is brought to a conclusion by the astral body. The etheric body is muted by the astral.”5
With too much “dead weight” in our bodies, the etheric body remains bound to the physical world, and consciousness is not able to wake up fully – we live in a dull dreamlike state, believing the illusion that only the physical world is real.
Growing new nutrition is what sets biodynamics apart, new forces from a developing cosmos in evolutionary process made anew yearly–with each season a preparation is made something totally new is given over to the earth to “work on” during the cold winter months. By using the biodynamic preparations we consciously we prepare the Earth for receiving new forces in an evolutionary way. The alchemist Basilius Valentinus noted, “The earth is not a dead body, but is inhabited by a spirit that is its life and soul. All created things, minerals included, draw their strength from the earth spirit. The spirit is life, it is nourished by the stars, and it gives nourishment to all the living things it shelters in its womb. Through the spirit received from on high, the earth hatches the minerals in her womb as the mother her unborn child.” If we take this seriously, then we need to feed the earth living things just as an infant needs milk, not just minerals.
The Biodynamic preparations were first made a mere hundred years ago, but they have been continuously made ever since–organically spreading to all corners of the globe. With each making of the preparations a new impulse is planted in the Earth.
Reproduction and Growth
The forces of growth and reproduction is associated with the “inner planets” closest to Earth, specifically Moon, Venus, and Mercury. One would consider these as embodied in the reproductive cycle (Moon), the kidneys (Venus) and the digestive tract with its polar relationship to the brain (Mercury).
“What makes a plant capable of reproduction is taken up from the spheres of Moon, Venus, and Mercury.”6
The problem with Moon, Venus, and Mercury is that these are not nutritive for us. During the Irish Potato Famine, people died with stomachs bloated with grass and teeth stained green. We humans cannot live off the power contained in the inner planets. Nutritive power comes from somewhere else: the ripening power of the cosmos, particularly in collaboration with the Sun. This is why ruminants are so special: they have the power of the Sun inside themselves, able to ripen grass into something closer to a sweet fruit ripened in the air. It is almost unthinkable to imagine an Ireland without these little radiant solar bundles of wool transforming Moon, Venus, and Mercury into the sweet nutritive energy of “distant planets” Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
As Steiner says: “Take for example the flesh of fruit—an apple or a plum—which we can break off and eat; all this is due to the workings from the distant planets.”7
Similarly, when one eats cheese from sheep or consumes lamb, one is absorbing these nutritive powers that keep us alive. But something very special happens in the sacred alchemy of ruminants: they bring the outer planetary powers of ripening fruit into the Earth.
Concretely, one side has to do with water and soluble earth elements necessary for facilitating watery green growth, the other side has to do with the dynamics of ripening and drying out. Stewart had the opportunity to visit two completely different sides of the world: Baja California Sur in Mexico, where there is almost no rainfall but everything strives towards becoming barklike and sweet fruit, and, by contrast Ireland, where it often rains several times a day and the predominant influence is green growth and moss and lichen, but a very week sweetening impulse. These dynamics are alive everywhere, but rarely in perfect balance. If we are in a cold-moist area, we must consider the drying-ripening impulse – and vice versa.
One can finally glimpse something of what Steiner calls the “backwards time spirit” of the Americas, and why the Aztec temples were not oriented towards the rising Sun, but towards the west – towards the setting Sun: in dry areas it is the Moon and water that is naturally revered – water is life. If you could make it through the dangerous heat, the cool of the evening means rejuvenation and life. In wet areas, the cult of the Sun emerges as seen in the solar celtic crosses of Ireland and the temples to the Sun there. By contrast, the Sun emerging sporadically from the clouds in Ireland is a rare delight and regularly brings with it bright rainbows. The rainbow which always emerges between rain and the sun is a symbol of how the plant is a child of the Earth and the Cosmos. After all, Steiner says cryptically that “rain is the absence of the Sun” – by which, of course, he means, the absence of the intense evaporative activity of the Sun.
As Owen Barfield writes:
“Now look at a tree. It is very different from a rainbow. If you approach it, it will still be ‘there’. Moreover, in this case, you can do more than look at it. You can hear the noise its leaves make in the wind. You can perhaps smell it. You can certainly touch it. Your senses combine to assure you that it is composed of what is called solid matter. Accord to the tree the same treatment that you accord to the rainbow. Recollect all you have been told about matter and its ultimate structure and ask yourself if the tree is ‘really there’. I am far from affirming dogmatically that the atoms, electrons, nuclei, etc., of which wood, and all matter, is said to be composed, are particular and identifiable objects like drops of rain. But if the ‘particles’ (as I will here call them for convenience) are there, and are all that is there, then, since the ‘particles’ are no more like the thing I call a tree than the raindrops are like the thing I call a rainbow, it follows, I think, that - just as a rainbow is the outcome of the raindrops and my vision - so, a tree is the outcome of the particles and my vision and my other sense-perceptions. Whatever the particles themselves may be thought to be, the tree, as such, is a representation. And the difference, for me, between a tree and a complete hallucination of a tree is the same as the difference between a rainbow and an hallucination of a rainbow. In other words, a tree which is ‘really there’ is a collective representation. The fact that a dream tree differs in kind from a real tree, and that it is just silly to try and mix them up, is indeed rather literally a matter of ‘common sense’.”8
The ancient Romans named Ireland “Hibernia” – meaning the land of perpetual winter – because the Moon forces predominate there. Barley stands out, as a moisture-loving grass, and mushrooms grow freely. Corn does poorly there, because of its intimate relationship with the Sun.
Ripening and Sweetening
At Palma Serena in Todos Santos, everything strives rapidly towards ripening because of the “silicious” atmosphere: everything is always tending towards exhalation. The winter inhalation is very shallow there. By contrast, in Ireland, there is relatively little exhalation because of limited sunny days. What happens when something breathes out a lot? It dries out. Corn thrives, while water-hungry barley barely knows what to do with itself.
“Everything active in silica-like substances contain forces that do not originate with the Earth, but rather with the so-called distant planets— Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. These forces affect plant by way of silica and similar substances.”9
When we prune trees, we are “fertilizing” with the outer planets, particularly with Saturn who is depicted as an old man, often missing a limb. Without proper thinning of fruit and removing of excess branches, fruits remain small and bitter (see Moon fruits in picture below) versus ones that get enough air, light, and warmth (see Sun fruits below):
Alchemical image by Michael Maier. Ripe fruits are depicted as suns, and unripe fruits in the shade are depicted as moons. The crippled (pruned) old Saturn fertilizes a young tree to produce more ripe fruit. The unpruned tree does not produce ripe fruit.
We are always working with the dynamics of balancing the absorption of water and its exhalation in farming. Where the “silica” forces predominate, you get exhalation, drainage, and ripening. Where the “lime” forces predominate, you get inhalation, accumulation, and green growth. As Alan Chadwick says, “But you see here’s the very identity of our whole procedure in the garden: that we water not really to make wet. To wet just temporarily, so that it should dry, so that we can water again. And the watering is so that it should dry, and the drying is so that we should water. Here you’ve got this metamorphosis change, going through the area of discontinuity.”10
In Biodynamics, we can intervene in targeted ways with two key preparations: the horn manure (500) and the horn silica (501). The horn manure is the earthiest of preparations, and belongs intimately to the restoration of the anonymous chaotic potential energy of the soil, something one needs considerably more of in areas with low levels of organic matter. By contrast, the horn silica brings the influence of air, light, and warmth – particularly the tendency to crystallize into dry forms – which is something that one needs considerably less of in an arid environment. Ireland, for example, might need much more horn silica – Grianchloch Gree-an-klokh, the term for quartz in Irish Gaelic, means “sun stone” – to bring the influence of the sun and the outer planets more into play in spite of the overcast sky. By contrast, the overwhelming solar influence in Mexico may require much more of the restoration of the dynamics of Mother Earth.
“Don’t knock on the doors of ordinary houses.
Your arms are long enough to knock on Heaven’s door.” ~Rumi
One plant that strikes a harmonious balance between the cosmos and terrestrial forces is the Equisetum: this plant is as close as possible to a photosynthesizing crystal. It contains an enormous concentration of silica and is the only known plant that absolutely requires measurable amounts of silica, without which it cannot live. Using this single medicinal herb significantly boosts the overall performance of plants by strengthening the cell walls with available silica in ways that plants left to themselves would not naturally be able to achieve. Silica is rarely noticed because most of our soils are made out of some form of silica, so we largely ignore it for agriculture. “Strangely enough, so little notice is taken of silica today that it is still virtually excluded even from those areas that could have an extremely beneficial effect.”11 Fortunately, this is not so much the case anymore, where there are entire conferences dedicated to silicon in agriculture now. But, as with many things, Steiner seems to have gotten there first!
Equisetum is one of the most beneficial biodynamic preparations to use because of its strong relationship with living silica. The Equisetum arvens plant (and its cousins) embody an intermediate state between crystals and plants. Overemphasis on the Earthly side of agriculture binds us towards Earth-centered materialism, so the onus is on us to enhance the cosmic side of things, to open the doorways to the heavens’ energies particularly with the use of Horn Silica and Equisetum. Now is an excellent time to boost your gardens with an application of Equisetum tea! It is as if Equisetum reopens the dialogue in the plant and soil on Earth with the energies from the planetary spheres.
We have the tools and capabilities to create healthy soils and gardens through creating a harmonious dialogue with the world of the starry heavens and our patch of Earth we tend. The conscious use of the biodynamic preparations is one of the best ways awaken the forces of renewal and health in our gardens. Can we reach out to our planetary neighbors for support in this process? Our flexibility in thinking and action will determine our reach.
Reach Farther
Go Biodynamic!
For Life!
Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture Course, pg 26, Creeger-Gardner trans
Ibid., pg 22.
Goethe, Metamorphosis of Plants, P30
Rudolf Steiner (Berlin, October 19th, 1907)
R. Steiner, Stuttgart, February 8, 1909, GA98
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, pg 21.
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VI
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, pg 21.
http://www.alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/lectures/virginia_lectures/chadwick-lecture-virginia-4-3.html Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, pg 21.
