Upside Down Biodynamics

Restoring Ardent Desire to the Earth

“[T]he fragrant flowers of a large number of plants are really organs of smell; they’re vegetable organs of smell which are extraordinarily sensitive. And what do they smell? They smell the omnipresent world’s aroma.” - R. Steiner¹

“Nor could Light shine, unless there was something in Nature thicker than itself, to receive and reflect it: and therefore, Thickness or Darkness is, and must be, as eternal as the visible or shining Light, Darkness is so far from being a mere Negation, or only an Absence, of the Light, that it is the first and only Substance, and the Ground of all possible Substantiality in Nature, and the substantial Manifester of Light itself, which could have no Visibility, Shine, or Colour, but in and through, and by the Substantiality of Darkness or Thickness.” - William Law²

---

At Michael Judge’s invitation — on behalf of the Chesapeake Biodynamic Network (CBDN) — I recently gave a talk in College Park, Maryland, discussing anthroposophical medicine and biodynamics. We explored, among other things, how a single plant, properly understood, is an entire apothecary in itself. But I've been thinking of something else that crystallized at this talk. Thoughts do not belong to us — they are visitors. We are just soil where an idea germinates, blossoms, and travels afar. Some soils are receptive, others unreceptive, but germinal ideas belong to the cosmos.

Maestro Lloyd Nelson elaborating on the extraterrestrial implications of Valerian at Gaia Herbs in Brevard, North Carolina

In his medical lectures, Steiner describes the gut as a “root” and the head as a “flower,” which is the exact opposite of what is offered in the Agriculture Course. Lloyd Nelson described how Anthroposophical physicians are sometimes confounded by this apparent contradiction. This is even more of a paradox when we recall that Rudolf Steiner asked Dr. Ita Wegman to include biodynamic agriculture under the Medical Section at the Goetheanum.³ Steiner had the idea that physicians should work directly with farms. Rather than relying on vivisection, on a farm doctors can actually immerse inside a living organism and feel what a healthy (or unhealthy) organism is like from inside it. The partnership between farmers and physicians is one that should be cultivated.

According to Steiner, all nutrition is essentially homeopathic. Most of what we eat leaves our bodies — the bulk of the physical substances and nutrients do not enter our bloodstream at all. In one sense, we carry around a sort of “compost pile” in our guts, and the highest flowering of the human organism is in the head, which is the center of contemplation and higher cognitive functions. What we live off in food is not substances as building blocks but rather the dynamic quality of life in the food — or the “forces” in the food. No amount of minerals will do my body any good if I don’t have an energy source. A battery may be full of lithium, but it is of no particular use without being charged. How do we reconcile this with the idea of the human being as an upside-down plant?

The human being as an upside-down plant, as described in the Agriculture Course. The opposite configuration is depicted in the Medical Lectures.

The human organism as described in Rudolf Steiner’s Medical Lectures given to physicians. In this sense, the gut is the “root” of the human plant, and the head is the blossoming of spiritual insight (e.g., the crown chakra)

When we submit a living substance to a kind of “combustion”⁴ (which does not quite occur in digestion, but nonetheless destruction of food is attained) it becomes its opposite. When we eat root vegetables, their form is destroyed, and it is as if they become a sort of “photonegative” — therefore, roots nourish the head. Considered practically, when stinky manure is aged long enough, it not only loses all of its offensive odor, but it also develops (a bit like plants) the tendency to absorb aromas. “A living organism and particularly the plant organism (apart from the flower) is designed not to give out scent but to take it in.”⁵ Manure, aged long enough, almost becomes its opposite. Similarly, vinegar becomes sour, but as it ages, it becomes sweet again, as in the syrupy aged balsamic vinegars that are so sweet they are paired with desserts. In spiritual life, the muck of worldly experience transforms into a hunger for its opposite: devotion to the spiritual world. Paradoxically, it is after descending that we can further ascend.

Moreover, Steiner suggests that there is no contradiction between allopathic medicine and homeopathic medicine, but rather that the metabolic system is more easily treated allopathically whereas the head is treated more efficiently in a sort of “homeopathic” way. This principle is already alive in herbalism, where wortcunning is still practiced. Many medicines in herbalism center around roots (“wort” meaning root). If you ingest a root vegetable, it can have a direct “allopathic” effect on metabolism and then, after its destruction, an indirect inverse effect on the head. We must remember that imaginations, particularly “aphoristic”⁶ recommendations as delivered in the Agriculture Course, must be taken with a grain of salt. Steiner explicitly warns about taking things too seriously in a one-sided way:

“Kräht der Hahn auf dem Mist,
So regnet es, oder es bleibt wie es ist.

If the cock crows on the dunghill,
It’ll rain—or it’ll stay still.”⁷

There are other instances where the man Steiner showed his sense of humor: writing serious poems about each planet and then turning around and reciting nonsensical poems about the same planets! If we cannot entertain how something can be seen to be true and how the opposite view might be considered true in another sense, we are liable to slip into dogmatism. Steiner gives clearly stated ideas, not so this can be systematized, but because hemming and hawing just muddies the message. The truth itself must be born in each individual soul. Many proverbs have a paradoxical structure of saying one thing and then immediately saying the opposite:

“Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own eyes.”⁸

These days, people tend only to be able to think what they already believe. This leads to extreme factionalism because people can’t think through how someone else’s view might be true. It is important that we learn to think through something first to find the ways in which it can be seen to be (at least partially) true, and only after that can we seek out its internal contradictions. If we start with criticism, we will simply throw out the baby with the bathwater. For example, there are various planetary attributions for the biodynamic preparation herbs. Culpeper has one configuration, Hugh Courtney has his own, you might have another. Before we begin arguing about such things, it’s important to determine what criteria precisely we are using to classify which herb belongs to which planet. If we haven’t established the criteria, the argument is irrelevant. Many people are quite right based on the criteria that they identify, and that should be our starting point. Moreover, it is a great crime to rob anyone of their enthusiasm. It is important to offer people your own vision, but if criticizing their own view will simply make them feel disheartened, it is best to keep your mouth shut. Enthusiasm is worth far more than any theory.

When dealing with an irrational person, it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of situation. The important thing with Steiner is to read what he says with the words “it is as if” before he gives a picture. Remember that you are entering an imaginal space — an approximate communication of incommunicable insights — not the Akashic record itself. Moreover, Steiner warns his audience not to believe what he says but to think what he says. Suspend disbelief, try the thought on for size, and see how it grows. Steiner was not infallible and never claimed to be. He even went so far as to say that a normal, rational person can correct a clairvoyant. Why? Because the fragmentary insights that someone with supersensible perception receives must be interpreted and thereafter translated into suitable analogies to communicate these insights to others. Remembering that (for most of us) in the Agriculture Course we are holding the expanded shorthand notes that have been translated into English — setting aside Steiner’s own human capability of making his own mistakes — we cannot afford to be doctrinaire about biodynamics. In his own words, we need cow horns to do this work, but we need not be bull-headed about it!

In biodynamics, we use flowers to enhance the development of roots — the staging ground of all unfoldment for the rest of the plant. Valerian as a root medicine has a direct allopathic effect on the limb-metabolic system, while the fresh flower would have an effect on the opposite pole; but if allowed to ferment, the juice of valerian flowers becomes an enormous enhancement to rootedness. With Valerian — the folk etymology of which traces the word to Baldrian, the god of light — when we ferment it with “ahrimanic” bacilli, we create a particular kind of darkness hungry for the light. With fermented Valerian flowers, we awaken in plants, a dark hunger to become filled with ever more light.

As William Law, the great English expositor of the anti-sectarian mystic Jacob Boehme, writes, “For nothing works either in God, or Nature, or Creature, but Desire…. For Hunger does all in all Worlds, and finds all that it wants, and hungers after. Every Thing had its Beginning in it, and from it; and every Thing is led by it to all its Happiness.”⁹ When a body dies, its desire to be vacates, leaving behind something that immediately starts to decay. Likewise, a soil that loses its hunger for the cosmos is on the way to dying completely. It is our task to restore this primal hunger for the cosmos to the soil.

Using another image, you could almost say that it is as if the “dew” of the stars settled on Earth, becoming the living soils that took millennia to create. But we’ve mostly used up the cosmic vitality of the soil through exploitative agricultural practices over the centuries. We have almost reduced soil to dead dust.

Because we do not have time to wait for eons to pass for this celestial nectar to restore itself naturally, we must bring into the soil something that allows plants to accumulate the formative “dew” of the cosmos all the more efficiently. It matters very little if ethericity streams in from the cosmos if nothing can receive and contain it. A dead soil cannot hear the cosmos any more than a corpse can hear what you’re saying. The first step is restoring the germ of the organs of perception for plant life, and we do so with the “eyes” of plants: their flowers. “We gaze, as it were—just as we gaze into the eyes of another person—into the soul of the earth, if we understand how it manifests its soul in the blossoms and leaves of the plant world.”¹⁰

In the biodynamic preparations, we take various herbs and carefully destroy them. A lovely dandelion flower with all its Jupiter power becomes destroyed. None of the original flower can be seen anymore. What happens here is not far removed from what Steiner suggests for “peppering” — the Jupiter force becomes the exact opposite: a Jupiter-negative energy. By making the dandelion preparation, we carefully create a hunger for Jupiter qualities, which we can impart to the compost pile, soil, and plants. Without this hunger for Jupiter forces, plants remain “dull” and insensitive to the full effects of the cosmos. The difference between plants awake to the cosmos and “dull” plants is between an alert person taking a walk and a sleepwalker — or between a lucid dreamer and someone unaware that they are dreaming. The biodynamic preparations help plants (and humans) participate more consciously in the dynamics of the great cosmic imagination of the universe. Not only are sleepers unaware of what is happening around them, but their freedom is further restricted if they believe their slumber is the fullness of reality. This is the crisis of materialism: people believe that there is nothing but surfaces upon surfaces, veil upon veil, with no unifying spiritual ideas — no Dreamer. However, a sleeper cannot be convinced they are sleeping with logical proofs — you cannot reason with an unconscious person — and they must be awakened by other stimuli.

But the fruits of Anthroposophy are never extreme. We don’t seek to wake everyone up by banging a gong or dumping ice-cold water on them. Instead, we start preparing a meal in the other room, and the radiating scent tingles their senses, and they begin to dream of food — until they stir themselves to wakefulness. This is what biodynamic food offers: an enhanced “aroma” of the supersensible world. Through biodynamics, it is as if the soul catches a “whiff” of its true nourishment, which is not merely bodily nutrition. It’s disguised as food, but biodynamics is really about restoring our appetite for the unifying cosmic Word. No one needs to be convinced of anything. You simply need to let them experience the food you grow. Even if they don’t consciously notice the difference, their innermost souls do. Taste and see!

Left: the radiant colors of Jupiter; Right: decomposed, it becomes its antithesis, hungering to absorb more Jupiter qualities to itself.

Dandelion, with radiant yellow “Jupiter” blossoms

Wrapping dandelion blossoms in mesentery.

Hanging mesentery in morning light for spring and summer before winter burial.

Transformed dandelion blossoms (506). Photo credit: Ben Nommay

This principle extends to all the preparations. Cows perform relatively little thinking with their heads, but they engage in an extravagant metabolic contemplation in their bellies — they have more neurons in their digestive tract than they do in their heads, and their salivary glands are bigger than their brains! When cow manure exits the animal, it is full of the forces that she herself did not use: I-forces. That is an especially precious quality, but when we carefully destroy the manure through a further aging process, we create an anti-I-force. The Asuras oppose human individuality but by their opposition strengthen the human I.¹¹ As Mephistopheles says: ‘I am an aspect of the power that always intends evil, and always creates good.’”¹² It is a well-known principle that what we resist, we strengthen. The biodynamic preparations offer this kind of splendid spiritual resistance that provokes plants to even more resilient growth.

We can only perceive what we can resist. If we are overwhelmed by an emotion, we cannot perceive it objectively — we are simply drowning in the experience. The biodynamic preparations provide the necessary “resistance” to cosmic influences so they don’t just radiate through the soil and back out again immediately. The paradox of the horn silica preparation is that we take transparent quartz crystals that have “come to rest in itself” and destroy them. As a result, we generate an anti-transparent impulse in horn silica that enables plants to resist the light and, therefore, to photosynthesize more efficiently. If you look at the clear quartz before crushing it and the opaque chalky powder that is made by pulverizing it, you can see light being blocked in these destroyed crystals. We create something opaque, paradoxically, out of a translucent substance — but all for the proper unfolding of the dynamic plant. If light passed straight through a plant without any obstruction, no light would be transformed into sugar. Similarly, the raying-out impulse of stinging nettles, when composted and made into a biodynamic preparation, becomes a raying-in impulse that empowers a plant to accumulate more of what it needs in order to ray out all the more vibrantly.

The first step in digestion is a kind of poisoning: we take in a foreign substance and are suddenly flooded with all sorts of things that do not belong to us. What is needed must be retained, but what is not needed must be expelled. The human organism must generate a sort of “photonegative” of each substance it consumes so that foreign byproducts do not accumulate in it. If you were to eat food and stray bits of undigested food were to amass in your joints, this would soon become problematic. Due to heredity and lifestyle, some of us become unable to create specific “photonegatives” of certain foods and must avoid them. In the case of biodynamics, we are creating a kind of benevolent poison for the Earth so that she might be stimulated to greater health. This is a strange idea, but it is no more extreme than someone working out in a gym: the resistance of the weights tears muscles, but it is precisely these microscopic ruptures that build stronger muscles. As the alchemist Paracelsus would say: “The dose is the poison.” Even water in excess is toxic. And even poisons in tiny doses can be therapeutic. Everything about biodynamics is about healing.

If the spiritual qualities of the planetary bodies are to be considered like chakras, they weigh virtually nothing at all. But at the center of each lotus is a dark, hungry germ. The lotus of enlightenment does not grow as an “air plant” floating above the soil but out of the mud and muck of lived experience. The first form of love that must arise is selfish love. Our expansion of love to others grows in greater concentric circles, always including ourselves but redefining my “self” to include ever more sentient beings — until it includes All. Without this germ of selfish love, life putters along without enthusiasm. The Luciferic outrage about injustice done to me must be transformed into outrage at any injustice done to anyone, but our feeling for justice tends to begin with an awareness of an injustice done to ourselves. Likewise, we must begin with darkening the soil and making plants a little more greedy than they might naturally be so that they learn to hunger for the great Cosmic world of ideas again — so that they waken to the sound of the Cosmic Word once more and the harmony of the spheres.

The purpose of biodynamics is not merely to produce healthier plants or even to produce healthier human beings — though it does both of these things. Irreducible to nutrient density — though it also includes this — the spiritual significance of biodynamics is about restoring an appropriate appetite for the spiritual spheres and reawakening within individuals the capacity for freedom from bodily prejudices and to the fullness of spiritual activity. Biodynamics is about gently inducing our fellow human beings to fuller spiritual freedom. May we all wake to live lucidly in this great cosmic dream together.

1. R. Steiner, Lectures to Priests: The Apocalypse (GA346, Dornach, 9 September 1924)

2. William Law, The Complete Works of William Law (17-in-11), pg. 757.

3. She refused, being both too busy but also having an independent mind of her own.

4. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, (GA327, 16 June, 1924, Koberwitz)

5. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course (GA327, 12 June 1924, Koberwitz)

6. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course (GA327, 14 June 1924, Koberwitz)

7. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course (GA327, 7 June 1924, Koberwitz)

8. Proverbs 26:4-5

9. William Law, Ibid., 771.

10. R. Steiner, The Spirit in the Realm of Plants (GA60, 8 December 1910, Berlin)

11. Here we glimpse the esoteric purpose of the spiritual dark age of materialism: by resisting the world of the spirit, it reawakens a heartfelt desire for spiritual worlds.

12. R. Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge (GA55, 22 November 1906, Berlin)