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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9

Manfred Klett

From Agrarian Technology to the Art of Farming

Essential Features of Biodynamic Agriculture

An Agriculture of the Future

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Cover design: Wolfram Schildt, Editorial assistance: Hans-Christian Zehnter, Claus Jahncke, Image concepts: Manfred Klett, Realisation: Mathias Buess and Ivana Suppan, unless otherwise indicated, Typesetting: Atelier Doppelpunkt, Johannes Onneken, Münchenstein, Printing: Beltz, Grafische Betriebe, Bad Langensalza

Print version available from Verlag am Goetheanum, 2021, ISBN 978-3-7235-1668-3 www.goetheanum-verlag.ch

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Dedicated to the co-founders of the Betriebsgemeinschaft Dottenfelderhof (1968)

and to those who, out of their own capacity for judgment, likewise seek

a new culture of agriculture and social life.

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In pain has our

mother earth hardened.

Our mission is

to spiritualise her again,

by reshaping her through

the force of our hands

into a

spirit-filled work of art.

Rudolf Steiner^[1]

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Foreword

The present book, From Agrarian Technology to the Art of Farming, may rightly be called the summation of Manfred Klett's life's work.

Manfred Klett, born in 1933, is the doyen of the biodynamic movement. Having spent decades travelling the world — alongside his practical work and responsibilities — as a speaker, lecturer and conversation partner, one might now imagine him settled into a tranquil retirement. This picture deceives, for out of that outward stillness Manfred Klett steps once more before the public with a comprehensive work. And anyone who knows him will sense at once what he is placing in our hands: the quintessence of a lifetime's engagement on behalf of an agriculture of the future. Looking back, the fruits of a life are surveyed and ordered — a structured reckoning of what agriculture was and is. Looking forward, there stands before us a summons to the generations that follow, in the sense of directions for work, toward taking hold of what agriculture carries within itself as future potential.

The first subtitle, Essential Features of Biodynamic Agriculture, can be understood as a condensed statement of contents. Yes, the concern here is biodynamic agriculture — but not in the sense of an inward view, an internal conversation of the biodynamic community with itself. Is it then an outward view? That too falls short, for nothing in this writing is regarded from the outside. One might say, rather, that it is a view outward. A view in which what we call 'biodynamic' is investigated beyond the movement and its self-understanding, in order to find in its essential features something of what agriculture is according to its very nature and calling. That is a large claim, and it demands a solid grounding. The present work may be read as that grounding — and I believe the author himself wishes it to be read in this way, both in content and in style. In terms of content it contains, among other things,

a history of agriculture in its relationship to the cultural and consciousness-development of Western humanity
a socio-economic study of the relationship between industry and agriculture
a doctrine of the agricultural organism in its three- and fourfold articulation

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an investigation into the 'Farm Individuality'
within the framework of the three pillars of arable farming — soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring — a detailed account of the biodynamic preparations
a textbook for biodynamic farmers
a textbook for farm communities and associative initiatives in the orbit of farms

In terms of style, the grounding can be called Goetheanistic in the best sense. That is to say, it is not abstract-logical and systematic, but orients itself by the phenomenon. The biography of the author is a life *for* and *with* the biodynamic impulse. The concrete working-experiences and the foundational thought-discoveries belong together. The life that has been lived is the weaving of both into one another, and the present work remains faithful to this language of life. Concrete practical experiences — whether in the field, in the barn, or at a working meeting — and archetypal-phenomenal formulations about soil, domestic animals, or collaboration stand close to one another. This is intentional. The style can be described as 'real-ideal.' And it is the carrying-out of what Manfred Klett calls, in his title, *the art of farming*. The real does not lose itself atomistically in the particulars of data and facts, nor does the ideal lose itself in the abstractness of the general; they seek each other out and fertilize each other into a higher unity — this art may rightly be called the art of farming.

\***

Of the many themes, two are treated with remarkable thoroughness. The first complex of themes is the socio-economic analysis of the present situation of agriculture. Put briefly: agriculture has industrialized itself, without ever being able to *be* an industry. Capital formation and return on capital are alien to the nature of agriculture, insofar as it still has anything to do with 'land.' What belongs to it instead — and what industry does not know — is this: it does not consume its means of production — soil, plants, animals — in the production process, but rather preserves or improves them. This positive accounting in the sense of the living household of the earth, including its water and climate household, is agriculture's actual contribution to the economy as a whole; and the author conducts the entire consideration in such a way that this perspective receives an illumination from the future. For through this, biodynamic agriculture grows into a social-formative task that has not yet been recognized and taken hold of to the degree portrayed in this work. All

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The world is searching for a sustainable balance within the global economy — here a starting point is indicated, and with it the call is sounded to develop it and bring it into conversation.

The second complex of themes is the biodynamic preparations. With this the author gives expression to his view that these inconspicuous manure supplements are of the highest importance. If one brings this into connection with the title of the book, one can formulate it thus: the preparations are, in particular, the *art of farming* — they are *the being* of biodynamic agriculture, and it is the preparations in particular that make possible an *agriculture of the future*. How must one direct one's gaze in order that this deliberate foregrounding of the preparations becomes comprehensible? Manfred Klett's direction of gaze is the fundamental relationship between the human being and nature. In this relationship, something is enacted in and through the preparations: a reversal of poles between taking and giving. The human being today — as an individual human being — can draw from the resources of his *spirit-soul* and work creatively into the inner fabric of nature, as an artist works; and nature — which has always borne the human being, from whose womb he sprang as an earthly creature — can and will entrust itself to this further cultivation through the human being's handwork. This wide gaze upon the preparations belongs to the agricultural legacy that lies before us here. Nothing less is said than this: that the millennia-old *agri-culture* receives, through the biodynamic preparations, the impulse of renewal that alone opens the future to it.

\***

attempts to think through agriculture in all its aspects consistently from the standpoint of the human being. The paradigmatic sentence from Rudolf Steiner's Agriculture Course, "the human being is made the foundation," becomes for the author a source through which much that is long familiar appears in a new light. But the book is equally the harvest of a life that has always stood in the practice of active, entrepreneurial agriculture, and can thereby serve as example and source of inspiration for many farmers — men and women alike — to understand and conduct themselves as practical researchers.

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The Art of Farming* stands as the direction and aim in the title of the book, and one may ask: is this meant to provide the solution to the challenges of climate change, soil erosion, world nutrition? The answer can be: yes — for art, the art of farming, means this: every person, with his and her individual engagement, at his and her very particular place, lives an irreplaceable contribution. Every farm, every place where work is carried out in the spirit of this book, is a representative of the earth entrusted to us for cultivation.

The book appears in 2021. I take the liberty of recommending it to its readers and of understanding it as a prelude to the centenary events of Rudolf Steiner's Agriculture Course of 1924 in Koberwitz. We stand at the end of the first century of biodynamic agriculture. And with this arises the question: what is now to be done, moving toward a second century of the working of the biodynamic impulse? We stand today before realities that are in part difficult — on the farms and in marketing. But we also know the principles and fundamental thoughts from Anthroposophy out of which we may hope not to founder upon these realities. We have the possibility of developing ourselves and agriculture out of the future — and in doing so not merely to bring the problems of agriculture toward resolution and open its future, but also to gain impulses for the future in regard to the natural side of the world and the social shaping of human life. To this Manfred Klett calls us.

Für die Sektion für Landwirtschaft am Goetheanum

Ueli Hurter

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Vorwort

Keine Friedenszeit der jüngeren Geschichte hat es, wie die gegenwärtige, den Menschen so schwer gemacht, einen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieb aus seinen ureigenen, irdisch-kosmischen Lebensgesetzen heraus zukunftsfähig zu gestalten. Diese Aussage lässt erstaunen, gibt es doch Subventionen und einen wachstumsfreudigen Biomarkt. Und sind nicht die Biobetriebe zu Einkaufsund Begegnungsorten geworden? Ja, gewiss! Alles dies täuscht aber über ein umfassendes, das soziale Leben beherrschendes Defizit hinweg. Auf drei Gebieten ist dieses existenziell erlebbar:

Trotz aller großartigen Erkenntnisse über die Natur und die Fülle ihrer Erscheinungen lebt der Mensch heutzutage in einem so nie dagewesenen abgekoppelten, emanzipierten Verhältnis zu ihr. Die vor Augen liegenden Phänomene der Herrlichkeit der Schöpfung geraten außer Sicht. Das wird erst so recht deutlich, wenn man aus dem Wissensstand, den man heute haben kann, das Stück Erde eines landwirtschaftlichen Betriebes zu einer lebendigen Ganzheit zu gestalten sucht. Man bemerkt, die Begriffe decken sich nicht mit der Wirklichkeit, in die man hineinarbeitet. Sie sind dieser gegenüber tot, da sie nur Beziehung zum Physisch-Anorganischen haben. Was man mit diesen Begriffen machen kann, ist, ein Reich neben der Natur zu begründen, das Reich der Technologien. Mit diesen droht sich der Mensch vollends aus der Natur auszuschließen; er stellt sich als Zuschauer neben sie, steuert von außen und ist auf dem Weg, seine Steuerfunktion ganz und gar an ein «intelligentes», sich selbst steuerndes digitales System abzugeben. Durch seine Begriffswelt schafft er geistig-seelisch in sich selbst und in der Natur um sich herum eine Wüste. Da dürstet es ihn und es kann die Frage aufdämmern, wie man die eigenen Gedanken so beleben kann, dass sie nicht nur totes Abbild des Sinnesfälligen bleiben, sondern zu geistdurchdrungenen gelebten Ideen werden, die zu dem wesenhaften Sein um uns herum Bezug haben. Welchen Übungsweg muss man im Denken, Fühlen und Wollen beschreiten, um die Kluft zwischen dem Erleben des Eigenseins und der Natur, dem Weltsein, mit vollem Bewusstsein überbrücken zu können? Wo sind die Menschen, die sich um ein solches Ideenvermögen bemühen, wo die vielen Hände, die aus diesen Ideen heraus ein Stück Erde zu einem kleinen Universum, zum Organismus eines landwirtschaftlichen Hofes gestalten wollen? Dies zu leisten ist ein künstlerischer Akt, und zwar im doppelten Sinn: Des Geistes bewusst werden, der zum Kunstwerk der Natur geronnen ist, und aus dieser
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Geistgesinnung Menschen zu Initiativgemeinschaften zusammenführen, die aus eigener Kraft landwirtschaftliche Betriebe zu Kunstwerken neuer, zukunftsoffener Art gestalten. Wo solches auch nur ansatzweise geschieht, fallen zivilisatorische Mauern.
Die Landwirtschaft wird förmlich durch eine Flut von Gesetzen, Verordnungen, Auflagen, Regulierungen, Kontrollen erdrückt. Dieses Rechtsgestrüpp knüpft sich immer enger und wirrer mit jeder Katastrophe, die ein Fehlverhalten im industrialisierten Intensivanbau (Biozide)^[2] oder in der Massentierhaltung (z.B. BSE)^[3] auslöst. Dieser Zwang zu einem überbordenden Bürokratismus, der dann alle betrifft, bremst die Eigeninitiative, Recht-gestaltend zu wirken. Er lässt das Vertrauen, die geistige Substanz des von Mensch zu Mensch gelebten Rechts, nicht aufkommen. Man hat nur sich im Blick, und lebt am anderen vorbei. Das Recht wird zu einer Art «Technologie der Vormundschaft». Gelingt es aber, vor Ort durch gemeinsam gepflegte Ideenbildung den Willen zur Tat zu erwecken, bekommt das Rechtsgefühl Nahrung. Man lernt fühlen, was in der konkreten Zusammenarbeit einer Hofgemeinschaft rechtens ist, wie je nach Fähigkeit sich die Arbeit gliedert, wie die Eigentümerschaft bezüglich Boden und Kapital, wie die Einkommens- und Wohnrechte etc. sich gestalten. Wieder tut sich ein Übungsfeld auf, jetzt ein solches des Fühlens, durch welches die Gemeinschaft das soziale Kunstwerk selbstloser, vertrauensvoller aufbauen lernt. In Entwicklungsschritten strahlt es aus und erfüllt das Rechtsempfinden der Menschen auch im Umkreis eines landwirtschaftlichen Betriebes mit Leben.
Auf wirtschaftlichem Feld steht die Landwirtschaft unter dem Druck anonymer, preisdiktierender Märkte, einer Technologie des berechnenden Egoismus. Ihr, ihrem Wesen nach fremder, enorm hoher Kapitalbedarf hinsichtlich des Zukaufs von Produktionsmitteln (wie Maschinen, Dünger-, Futter-, Pflanzen- und Tierbehandlungsmittel, Biozide, Energie etc.) zwingt sie zu einseitiger, umweltbelastender Massenproduktion, die ihrerseits die Preise verbilligt, weltweit Verdrängungswettbewerb auslöst, der Globalisierung der Agrarmärkte Vorschub leistet und in den Drittländern für Hungersnöte verantwortlich zeichnet. Die Landwirtschaft, am
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Gängelband der Kapitalinteressen hängend, ist ihrer selbst entfremdet; sie ist durch und durch kommerzialisiert. Wege und Mittel zu finden, um aus diesem Gefängnis auszubrechen, stellt heute für jeden landwirtschaftlichen Betrieb die größte Herausforderung dar. Diese Mauern zu überwinden, kann dann gelingen, wenn der Hof sich mit Weiterverarbeitung, Handel und Verbraucherschaft in der Region wirtschaftlich assoziiert. Hier eröffnet sich ein drittes, ganz und gar in die Zukunft gerichtetes Übungsfeld im Sozialen. Der Blick weitet sich über die Hofgrenzen hinaus in das soziale Umfeld. Man sucht und findet die Wirtschaftspartner, die willens sind, ihre wirtschaftende Tätigkeit in den Dienst eines assoziativen Miteinanders zu stellen und auf die Wohlfahrt aller Beteiligten auszurichten. Das Strebensziel ist, mit der Assoziation ein Kunstwerk der «Geschwisterlichkeit» zunächst vom Hof ausgehend und im regionalen Rahmen unter den Wirtschaftspartnern zu schaffen. Es handelt sich um die Kunst, in Gemeinschaft in der Heranbildung eines Gemeinsinns die wirtschaftlichen Tatbestände bildhaft in ihren Zusammenhängen denken zu lernen. Sie findet ihren Ausdruck in einer Kultur von Vereinbarungen des selbstlosen Umgangs in Hinblick auf regionale Bedarfsdeckung und die Findung eines wertgerechten Preises.

The agriculture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries becomes increasingly an ecological question and, going beyond this, a question of the formation of the Earth, in the sense of Novalis's "To the formation of the Earth we are called."^[4] At the same time, however — and still little recognised in its immense import — it presents itself today, reaching across the whole of civilised life, as a social question. It is this that calls out loudly for a change of mind in human consciousness toward the things and beings of nature. The human being has risen from creation into an independent, free creativeness. Does he want to "own this" and act accordingly? Does he want, instead of serving only himself, to throw himself selflessly and courageously into the breach for others and for other things? Agriculture, as it has become under the dominance of rational technology and promises increasingly to become under the trend toward digital control, is bereft of culture-renewing impulses. But those who have the courage to farm biodynamically, following their own insights, will notice that before long, from germinal beginnings, a new culture blossoms forth in island-like fashion and radiates outward. They will then be filled with the certainty that the path they have taken, however many obstacles

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they may encounter —

however many may place themselves in the way — perhaps from nothing more than bourgeois timidity and backward-lookingness — the path is walkable, here and now.

Dottenfelderhof, Autumn 2020

Manfred Klett

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Part One

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The Polarity of Industry and Agriculture

If one looks at the situation of agriculture not only across Europe, where Western-Christian farming once bore culture, but around the earth as a whole, one does not err in the judgment that it has lost its former cultural significance and has ultimately become a kind of burden upon civilizational development. An overabundance of facts bears witness to this. Agriculture, as a culture-bearing impulse that spread and lived itself forth across lands and peoples of the earth in the greatest diversity, has yielded to a civilizational uniformity. As a carrying element of culture for humanity, it has fallen subject to death. Whenever something dies, a call goes out to those who are contemporaries, to become conscious of such a death — of its circumstances, and of the possibilities of development that can emerge from this death as new seeds of life. The human being who has awakened to self-consciousness needs the experience of the threshold to death. Death alone wakens and frees the cognizing gaze for questions of what insights must be won, what conditions must be created, so that a new life and becoming — a resurrection, as it were, to a new culture-bearing — can arise.

These questions have been taken up by the sciences, though to a very limited degree and with the omission of the human being who is, after all, the one who first poses these questions. From the investigation of the purely physical, calculable part of the reality of nature as a whole — pursued to the outermost detail — there have arisen immense material-economic successes that have drawn human beings ever deeper into the spell of scientifically grounded technological modes of production. Unawares, peasant farming fell — in a silent social revolution, at first slowly and then since the 1960s with giant strides — into industrialization, and therewith into its cultural death.

In a forefeeling of this development, at the beginning of the 20th century, there stirred in a few scattered individuals the will to seek paths by which agriculture might be reformed out of the sources of its own life-lawfulness, out of its own ethical-moral ground. The Church was still in the village, yet its strength was waning — waning to the point where it could no longer be a spiritual-moral companion on the way for the farmer entering modernity, entering free self-determination, and thereby in the handling of new technical possibilities. Among the few were those still fewer who, out of their professional practice, had arrived at concrete questions about a metamorphosis

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of the old into the new, the yet-to-come. With these questions they turned to Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the founder of anthroposophical spiritual science, with the request for guidance toward a renewal of agriculture into the future. This request was met around the time of Whitsun 1924 with the Agriculture Course, which in the framework of the Rudolf Steiner Collected Works bears the title Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture.^[5] The course was held at the estate of Schloss Koberwitz (today Kobierzyce) near Breslau (today Wrocław in Poland) in Silesia.^[6] In eight lectures the gaze is directed toward idea-contexts that call forth human creative power in two directions. Inward, first — by endeavouring to think these ideas of spiritual research in living pictures, and to let that thinking become experience. And outward — by striving, out of this living experience of ideas, to shape the nature of a particular place on earth beyond its given natural being into the wholeness of a farm organism. This approach presupposes a spirit of inquiry directed both toward what presents itself to the senses as the natural foundation of the farm, and toward what reveals itself to thinking consciousness as the findings of spiritual research. This scientific disposition opens up a world of facts of a sense-perceptible and supersensible nature, and at the same time the context of their relationships to one another. In the contemplation of such relational contexts — between sun and leaf-green, lunar rhythms and weather phenomena, blossom and pollinating insect, earthworm and humus formation, and so on — the ground is prepared for an inner experience out of which every action, sprouting forth, can become an artistic act. In this sense the practice of a biodynamic farming is a through-and-through artistic happening: an inwardly wrought experience of ideas comes to outward expression across the bridge of work. What is set out in Rudolf Steiner's Art and Knowledge of Art^[7] can be condensed into the following form: Art is when a sense-perceptible living in intuitive beholding — and, concealed within it, a supersensible — inwardizes itself in the depths of the soul into an experience, and out of this experience represents itself in something outward. Art sprouts in this way

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out of the human soul. "Through this, human beings will become capable of creating something that enriches the earth, something new upon the earth, something that without your capacity [of the artist; author's note] would not have been there, something that is like a seed of the future upon the earth."^[8]

Soil fertility, for example, is a mirror of how detailed and at the same time how comprehensive the ideas that constitute the three pillars of a true soil culture are alive within me — namely: soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring.^[9] This example can be extended to the wholeness of the farm. It is a mirror of what is alive as the formative image of the farm within the working community active there — and equally it can be made specific right down to every individual gesture in the handling of enlivened and ensouled nature.

From the implementation of the findings of the natural sciences, technology arises. It is the product of the human spirit of invention and the handling of laws, substances, and forces that are active in unliving — that is to say, purely physical — nature. The merely technical approach interrupts the relational nexus that one has in working, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, to the things and beings; the operational sequence of the machine is fixed and, within its set limits, universally valid. It withdraws itself from human experience and thereby shuts the door to the exercise and practice of a craft-art that forms the bridge to enlivened and ensouled nature.

As much as technology separates, reduces, and raises the claim of universal validity — just so much does art connect, attends to the manifoldness of contexts, and is more truthful and more productive the more individually it goes about its work.

The introduction of technology into agriculture since the nineteenth century has brought with it social upheavals of the greatest magnitude. It has relieved human beings of heavy labor — but through this has also rationalized a large portion of the rural population out of the work process. It has increased productivity through the one-sided narrowing of cropping and animal husbandry systems and, as a lasting side-effect, called the global environmental problematic onto the scene; in short, technology, following its own momentum, has lent impetus to the global industrialization of agriculture and to international competition and with that to the decline of agricultural prices. The costs of the immense worldwide environmental damage,

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The costs of the immense worldwide environmental damage that arise in this process are not imposed on those who caused them, but on the general public; they are socialized.

The peasant culture still rooted in the folk heritage awakened, with a delay of almost a hundred years behind the urban population, gradually to self-consciousness and thereby to self-determination — for example in the choice of career paths.

The rural population followed the drive toward freedom — to disentangle itself from its bondage to nature and from the guidance of the folk spirit (which had expressed itself in the folk heritages and in the artistic imprint of the folk souls) — in order, in the labor-divided modern world, to set out — as the proletariat had done before it — on the laborious path of self-discovery. It exchanged the former sense of shelter in the stream of tradition of the folk heritages and folk souls for the challenging and at the same time enticing offers of the labor-divided modern world. Into the spiritual vacuum on the land that had come about in this way, agrarian industrialism broke — with the force of a flash flood — over the remainder of the rural population in the second half of the twentieth century, with the unavoidable consequence of bringing agricultural methods into line with those of industrial production. Through this leveling, facts have been created that can lead every farmer, given some self-reflection, to experiences at the boundary — to an experience of self-created contradictions that give occasion for questions of cognition. One such question of cognition, arising freshly out of the sheer dividedness of the practice of life, runs: Are the conditions of production in agriculture the same as those in industry, or does a fundamental difference exist here? The answer to this question can only be found by characterizing the factors of industrial production in comparison with the agricultural mode.

At the starting point of industrial value creation stands the human spirit of invention. It is ideas sprung from thinking that bring the laws of nature, substances and forces of inorganic nature — isolated from their natural context — into interaction through human labor, such that products arise outside of created nature (machines, fertilizers, biocides) that then flow as commodities into the economic cycle.

The prospect of success of an invention moves a bank to make credit available for the establishment of a production facility. That is: the spirit of the human being (idea) creates capital, and this congeals, by way of labor, into buildings, means of production, raw materials, energy, and so forth. Max Weber — German political economist and sociologist (1864–1920) — observed: "A lifeless machine is congealed spirit."^[10] The spirit now presses further toward the realization of the invention; it impels toward work. Only through work does the production plant come into being, and within it, in various stages of labor, the manufacture of the product. What characterizes the industrial production process is that values arise purely by virtue of the fact that the spirit of invention determines the course of human labor and modifies it in manifold ways — whereby the outward expression of this spirit must be sought in the manifold configuration of capital.^[11] Nature in the form of raw materials and energy recedes proportionally into the background the more human intelligence flows into the production process — that is, the more it articulates itself in a labor-divided manner. Labor division, moreover, has a cost-reducing effect on the production of commodities and thereby promotes all the more powerfully the expansionary drive of industry and commerce, right up to the commercialization of all services. Capital arises, on the one hand, through the human spirit of invention and through labor division; on the other hand, it ensures that labor division overflows into the boundless. As a consequence, the industrial production process threatens to emancipate itself entirely from nature and, by way of digitization, from the laboring human being. It becomes the overpowering counterpole of agriculture and threatens to burst the two barriers that are meant to hold it within reasonable bounds — namely, nature and the legal order.

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The production process ends with the manufacture of the commodity, into which have entered the founding idea of the inventor as well as the knowledge and capacities of many human beings in what is today a world-spanning labor division. The labor directed by capital — that is, the congealed idea — has materialized in the end product and has conferred upon it a value that receives a price in the exchange of values on the market. When one takes into account the value-forming factors — in the final analysis it is spirit-guided labor — the price is not calculable. Its emergence is subject to imponderables and falsifications that have their cause above all in the fact that land, capital, and human labor are regarded as tradeable commodities and thereby as

Der Produktionsprozess endet mit der Warenerzeugung, in welche die Ausgangsidee des Erfinders sowie die Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten vieler Menschen in heutzutage weltumspannender Arbeitsteilung eingegangen sind. Die vom Kapital, das ist die geronnene Idee, dirigierte Arbeit hat sich im Endprodukt materialisiert und diesem einen Wert verliehen, der im Wertetausch am Markt einen Preis erhält. Zieht man die wertbildenden Faktoren in Betracht – letztlich ist es die geistgeführte Arbeit –, ist der Preis nicht kalkulierbar. Seine Entstehung unterliegt Unwägbarkeiten und Verfälschungen, die insbesondere ihre Ursache darin haben, dass Grund und Boden, Kapital sowie die menschliche Arbeit als handelbare Ware gesehen und damit als

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For industry, it holds that the means of production does not renew itself. The place of its manufacture is separate from the place of its performance. The industrial production process consumes finite raw-material and energy resources; it generates waste, and the means of production themselves are subject to wear and decay. Refuse arises which, insofar as it cannot be returned at great cost to the energy and raw-material cycle, accumulates as a mortgage upon distant future times on earth (nuclear waste, for example), burdens water and air, and throws the heat balance out of true. Industry's production is bounded by limits of growth; its energy and raw-material balance is negative. The less nature participates in industrial manufacture — the more, therefore, human intelligence dominates the production process, as in the case of computer-chip fabrication — the more does it proceed by way of labor division and the more site-independent does production become. In theory, high-technology products could be manufactured at any arbitrary location on earth — on an artificial island in the sea, for example — and from there the worldwide demand for these products could be met.

Agriculture is embedded, polar to industry, in the whole household of nature, the *Oikos*. Value-creation is the achievement of nature. Out of the reciprocal relational nexus of non-living (physical), living, and ensouled nature, and under the influences of the cosmos in all rhythmic happening, there arises as nature's generative achievement the grain of wheat, the carrot, the milk — and all of this in strict site-boundness. Nature is the producer; the human being steps in alongside and, through his labor, guides her bringing-forth force. The means of production are not the machines — the tractor, the combine harvester, and so forth; these only replace and enhance the performances of the human hand and of animal traction — but rather the fertile soil, the fruit-forming, nourishment-giving plants, and the domestic animals with their each different contribution to the yield. In a transferred sense, these constitute the productive capital of agriculture.

Die Landwirtschaft ist polar zur Industrie in den ganzen Naturhaushalt, das «Oikos» eingebettet. Die Wertschöpfung ist die Leistung der Natur. Aus dem wechselseitigen Beziehungsverhältnis von unbelebter (physischer), belebter und beseelter Natur und unter den Einwirkungen des Kosmos in allem rhythmischen Geschehen entsteht als ihre Erzeugungsleistung das Getreidekorn, die Möhre, die Milch etc. und das in strenger Standortgebundenheit. Die Natur ist die Produzierende, der Mensch tritt hinzu und lenkt durch seine Arbeit ihre Hervorbringungskraft. Die Produktionsmittel sind nicht die Maschinen, der Traktor, der Mähdrescher etc. – diese ersetzen nur und steigern die Leistungen der menschlichen Hand und der tierischen Zugkraft –, sondern der fruchtbare Boden, die fruchtbildenden, nahrungsspendenden Pflanzen und die Haustiere mit ihrem je verschiedenen Leistungsbeitrag. Im übertragenen Sinne bilden diese das Produktionskapital der Landwirtschaft.

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They are the more productive, quantitatively and qualitatively, the more they stand at each farm site in a mutually enhancing relationship of reciprocal interaction. In their natural disposition they close themselves together into biocoenoses, into smaller and larger biotopes.

It is reserved for the labor and spirit-achievement of the human being to shape what nature has laid down into a higher wholeness, into the organism that is as self-contained as possible — into the agricultural operation. With a view to the cosmic-terrestrial conditions of production in agriculture, there arises from these necessarily the formative principle of the manifoldly articulated organism. This, taken as a whole, constitutes the means of production of agriculture and stands, in polar contrast to this, over against the means of production of industry — the mechanism. The mechanism rests on one-sidedness; the organism, on all-sidedness.

If one recognizes and appreciates the full weight of the polarity between the conditions of production in industry — which spring from the spirit of the human being — and those in agriculture — which are inherent in nature — then, strictly speaking, no capital can be formed in agriculture. For what is expended in labor through human spirit-force upon nature does not congeal into a means of production that sets itself beside nature the way a machine does; raw materials, energies, and laws of nature are not isolated out of the natural nexus and recombined anew. The spirit-achievement consists, on the contrary, in *thinking* the concept of the self-containedness of the organismic whole, and the labor-achievement in ordering the productive forces active in nature accordingly and bringing them into reciprocal interaction with one another. When an agricultural operation takes shape in faithful accordance with its conditions of production, it is an ever-becoming wholeness that includes the acting human being within itself and that reproduces itself in the very process of production. The formation of capital in agriculture — speaking in the transferred sense — is therefore to be sought above all in a time-event: in the preservation and development of the means of production, the cultivated soils, the cultivated plants, and the domestic animals, within the context of the superordinate wholeness of the farm organism.

Industry and agriculture stand to one another as technology stands to art. The merely technological approach strives toward automation, toward rule-based technique. The human being stands outside the production-process or makes himself altogether superfluous. Agriculture is, in its deepest essential nature, an art — and precisely through this: that the working human being, as a whole human being, brings the full force of his spirit-soul into the service of

Industrie und Landwirtschaft verhalten sich zueinander wie die Technologie zur Kunst. Das bloß technologische Vorgehen strebt zur Regeltechnik, zur Automation. Der Mensch steht außerhalb des Produktionsgeschehens oder macht sich ganz und gar überflüssig. Die Landwirtschaft ist, ihrem tiefsten Wesen nach, aber gerade dadurch eine Kunst, als der arbeitende Mensch vollmenschlich mit der ganzen Kraft seiner Geistseele sich in den Dienst der

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Agriculture needs the working hand, indeed many hands; industry needs the spirit of invention and the capital that organizes human labor-power in a division of labor or makes it superfluous altogether.

From agriculture come products, preeminently foodstuffs, for which every human being has daily need. They enter the market in a value-relationship with industrial goods — that is, goods produced through division of labor — a relationship that comes to expression in price. The price of the industrial product is subject, with advancing division of labor, to cheapening. Where the price of agricultural products is already incalculable owing to fluctuating environmental conditions, pest calamities, and the like, the whole process of price formation remains altogether in the dark. For the productive endowment — the generative power — of each individual farm organism is different from every other. Without a price equalization within the framework of economically associative groupings, in which "the value of the commodity is determined by its mutual relationship,"¹² each farm would then have to carry its own market prices. In practice, this is approximated in the CSA movement.¹³

It must be said at the outset: agriculture, compared with industrial enterprise, necessarily produces at higher cost, because the cheapening principle of division of labor contradicts its conditions of production — the manifold within the whole. One seeks to escape this by going over to the industrial mode of production. The wholeness of the farm organism is for this purpose taken apart, broken down into its pieces. Each piece becomes, for itself, with considerable capital expenditure, an industrial-agricultural single enterprise that produces masses under apparently calculable framework conditions in a highly specialized way and dominates the market at an incomparably cheap price. But this cheapening is a deception — because the consequential costs, arising from environmental destruction and from the impairment of the nutritive value of the products, as well as from the costs of subsidies — of subsidized unreason — are loaded onto the general public, passing the market by. Were these hidden costs to be added to the producer price of the industrial¹²¹³

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farming added to it, it would lose its dominance over the market; the fact of its production of phantom values would come to light.

How price forms in agriculture is an occult phenomenon, one that begins to shed a little light on itself through endeavors such as "free-trade" — not to be confused with free-trade agreements — or again in the case of producer and consumer communities. The price of primary production as such is not calculable; the value-determining factors for the prices of agricultural primary production are:

The natural endowment with respect to the interactions of the site factors earth, water, air and warmth, as well as the geomorphological configuration of the landscape.
The natural endowment with respect to the creative forces that dwell within natural beings (plants, animals, etc.) and their working within the rhythms of the course of the year.
The idea-guided work of the human being.
The measured attunement of all the organs to the whole of the farm organism by the human being.

Through the working-together of these factors there arises — polar to value-formation in industry — an objective value of the products: that of wheat, of milk, of bread, of cheese, and so on. The price would be just if it corresponded to this objective value, or at least approached it. But how is this price to be grasped?

Beyond this, the value-formation of agricultural primary production is determined by two properties: first, by the capacity to reproduce itself again within the production process itself; and second, to become food for human being and animal. The grain of wheat, for example, together with the soil into which it is sown, is a means of production for the next harvest, and at the same time it is bread grain. The cow reproduces herself in the calf, and bound up with this process is her capacity to give more milk than is required for rearing the calf. The means of production of agriculture have the property of being able to reproduce themselves within the production process and at the same time become food for human being and animal. It falls to the farmer to so shape the conditions of cultivation and husbandry that both capacities sustain themselves at a high level within the production process — lastingly, in balance with one another. That means: he must cultivate the wheat and so on here and now, must keep, feed, tend and breed the cow and so on, in such a way that these means of production of the living preserve their distinctive properties into the far future

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or even acquire new ones, in keeping with the changing nutritional needs.

This fact above all grounds the fundamentally polar mode of production in industry and agriculture. It also expresses itself in the fact that the agricultural means of production — soil, plants, animals — are not subject to depreciation, owing to their capacity for self-renewal. What depreciation as capital reserve is in industry, that is in agriculture the value-preserving and value-developing force of the farm organism as a wholeness. The replacement of human labour-power and animal traction by the machine has nonetheless brought agriculture substantial depreciation charges that do not relate to the means of production as such. But it is not the combine harvester that produces the grain, not the milking machine that produces the milk — it is life, the relationship-creating world of forces that has its origin in the essential being of enlivened and ensouled nature.

So the price for agricultural products would be appropriate only when it corresponded to their objective value. A measure for this could be: when the price structure of the primary production of the agricultural farm organism — that is, without further processing — covers the operating costs as well as the livelihood of all co-workers and their families from one harvest year to the next.¹⁴

This presupposes marketing structures that bring together farmers, processors, wholesale and retail traders, and consumers who wish to participate in shaping things in this sense, in a regional round. In contrast to industry, agriculture is oriented toward regional economics. In accordance with its conditions of production, it produces in all its diversity wherever people live and wherever these conditions permit. It is therefore only natural that the shortest path from producer to consumer is the least costly and at the same time the most quality-preserving.

Agriculture too produces — where the pure cosmic-earthly production process is concerned — waste, but not rubbish. The waste stems from enlivened and ensouled nature, from the plant and animal residues that return to the lap of nature and transform themselves into humus, the^[12]

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The fertility-bearer of the soil, transforming themselves. With proper husbandry, in the sense of the organism principle, the material and force-household of the farm regenerates itself largely from within. Against industry's consumption of energy and raw materials stands the building up, the self-generated manure, and the new formation of humus. The pure primary production of agriculture, when all the measures serving soil-building are taken into account — manuring, crop rotation, soil cultivation — carries a positive energy balance. This fact is today reversed into its opposite by the heavy deployment of capital in the form of nitrogen fertilizers, biocides, imported feedstuffs, and energy. The erosion-related soil loss, even on only gently sloping land in industrially operated agriculture — above all in maize cultivation — must also be named here. Considered in terms of the overall economy and looking to the future, however, agriculture has the task of providing the compensation for industry's negative energy balance.

We see: the polarity of industry and agriculture must be thought through radically, and the consequences for the whole of cultural life must be faced with full seriousness. Without the balancing of this immense field of tension, no healing of economic life is possible. The finding of the price of agricultural products in the regional character of the market — and through the associative connection with the downstream processing and trade — alone can give the right orientation to price formation in the labour-divided economy. The proportional relationship to prices in industry and trade must in future be determined by reference to agriculture's primary production.

Even a consideration of the disparity between the conditions of production in industry and agriculture alone points to the fact that for the latter the organism is, in the first instance, the formative principle appropriate to its being and to its value-creation. The organism principle has always been immanent to the development of agriculture — even if under quite differently constituted cultural conditions in every case. What today must become a matter of scientifically grounded, conscious understanding of the organism arose in earlier times from a folk-rooted, instinctive, wisdom-filled action. The evolution of consciousness of humanity — and with it the history of agriculture — mirrors itself, in broad outline, in the way in which human beings have gradually made the organism principle immanent to nature, drawn from the ever more conscious experience of their own bodily organism, the foundation of a true art of farming.

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The origins of agriculture reach far back into prehistoric times. Humanity lived in the early age still in quite different states of consciousness and of earthly conditions. Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of these early states of the evolution of the human being and the Earth give illumination here. In the times of the last continental shaping and the great mountain-formations of the Earth — the so-called "Atlantean age" — there lived a humanity that did not yet think in concepts, but that in a pronounced, spirit-inspired instinctive life co-experienced the living weaving of nature and of the creative spirit, and that was able to preserve what was thus experienced with well-nigh unlimited forces of memory.

If one follows Rudolf Steiner's descriptions in his An Outline of Esoteric Science and the Akasha Chronicle,^[13] then the formerly dreaming consciousness of Atlantean humanity — which experienced the spirit-cosmos in a being-way — has developed, through the epochs of the post-Atlantean great ancient civilizations up to the present, into the self-consciousness that turns toward the Earth. If one seeks a correspondence here to the ages as geology describes them, one can equate this roughly with the period designated as the Neozoic or the Tertiary and Quaternary.

From the instinctive interweaving of Atlantean humanity with the things and beings of nature and the spirituality of the cosmos, it is understandable that human beings — under the guidance of spiritual beings standing above them — disposed of capacities to exert influence upon the life of plants (grasses, herbs, trees) and animals (mammals, birds, insects), which, like themselves, still found themselves in a formative condition. The Atlanteans carried within them the heritage of the last period of the Lemurian epoch — geologically approximately the *Mesozoic* — in which these early proto-human beings were endowed with the I, the individual kernel of being.^[14] The mission of this I was then, in the subsequent Atlantean cultural ages, to shape the form of the physical body of the human being, and thereby to lay the germ for the

Folgt man den Schilderungen Rudolf Steiners in seiner «Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss» und der «Akasha-Chronik»,^[15] so hat sich das ehemals den Geistkosmos wesenhaft erlebende, traumhafte Bewusstsein der atlantischen Menschheit in den Epochen der nachatlantischen Hochkulturen bis zur Gegenwart zu dem der Erde sich zuwendenden Selbstbewusstsein entwickelt. Sucht man hier eine Zuordnung zu den Zeitaltern, wie sie die Geologie beschreibt, so kann man diese etwa mit dem Zeitraum gleichsetzen, der mit dem Neozoikum oder dem Tertiär und Quartär umschrieben ist.

Aus dem instinktiven Verwobensein der atlantischen Menschheit mit den Dingen und Wesen der Natur und der Geistigkeit des Kosmos ist es verständlich, dass die Menschen unter der Führung geistig über ihnen stehender Wesenheiten über Fähigkeiten verfügten, auf das Leben der Pflanzen (Gräser, Kräuter, Bäume) und Tiere (Säugetiere, Vögel, Insekten), die sich, wie sie selbst noch in einem bildsamen Zustand befanden, Einfluss zu nehmen. Die Atlantier trugen in sich das Erbe der letzten Periode der lemurischen Epoche – geologisch etwa das Mesozoikum–, in welcher diese frühen Vormenschen mit dem Ich, dem individuellen Wesenskern, begabt wurden.^[16] Die Mission dieses Ich war es dann in den folgenden atlantischen Kulturzeitaltern, die Form des physischen Leibes des Menschen auszugestalten und damit den Keim zur

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development of higher levels of consciousness up to the awakening of self-consciousness.^[17] This development came to an end with the great ice ages.

The Ancient Indian Culture

The so-called "post-Atlantean cultural epochs" — geologically: the *Holocene* — began after the retreat of the ice coverings in Europe and the mountain ranges of central Asia, leaving behind vast deposits of rubble and loess that have each become, down to the present day, the parent material of soil formation. The Old Testament as well as the myths of the peoples make reference to the "great flood," to the Deluge. In this mythic image, the passing of the legendary continent of Atlantis at the end of the Atlantean period — geologically the *Tertiary* and *Quaternary* — was recorded both in terms of the history of the Earth and of consciousness. The first of the post-Atlantean cultural epochs to unfold was the "ancient Indian culture," flourishing in the eighth to sixth millennia B.C.^[18] The great ancient civilizations that followed upon this one

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from east to west along a belt that forms the transitional zone between the former northern glacial and southern pluvial zones. The latter once harboured a rich plant and animal world; today deserts spread across them.

No outward documents surviving from this prehistoric time bear witness to the high culture of primordial India. Within it a step of consciousness was accomplished toward a contemplative experience of a divine wisdom, into which the ancient Indian felt himself woven as into his spiritual home. It shone through all earthly existence as a being-reality. It was reserved for a later time — toward the transition into the third pre-Christian millennium — that with the loss of the former immediacy of spirit the feeling arose that the sense-world was mere semblance, was Maya. In this awakening to a twilight-cosmic consciousness, the ancient Indian stood under the guidance of a priesthood and was led by the high wisdom of the seven great teachers of ancient India. These primordial teachers were called the seven holy Rishis; through them spoke "the greatest secrets of our solar system, of the world altogether."^[19]

Faint echoes of this intimate spirit-directedness, working on through long ages, appear only in a third cultural stage of India, in the second pre-Christian millennium, in the wisdom-books of the Indians, the holy scriptures of the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita. This dreamlike awakening to a higher level of consciousness in the experience of the force-rhythms and the beings of the planetary cosmos — this the ancient Indian owes to the I's descent into the second member of the human being, into the etheric body. Only now did the sharp boundary arise between the unconsciousness of night and the waking of day.

The primordial Indian cultural age unfolded itself — as did the two that followed it — in regions where nature, with its forces and substances, created for itself the soil of its own fertility, shaped itself into an "organism in

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natural growth." This was the case in the regions sheltered by an overabundant plant and animal life — the regions of the rivers Brahmaputra, Ganges, and Indus, emerging from the Himalaya. The working-together of the four elements, earth, water, air, and warmth, was of such juvenile, self-renewing force in the rhythms of the course of the year, that only a little tending was needed to make them serviceable to the needs of the people of that time. The ancient Indian was given over to contemplation. The physical-sensory world was foreign to him; he sought to maintain his relationship to his home in the spirit.

The Ancient Persian Culture

The old Iranian high culture followed upon that of ancient India in time as well as geographically, in an east-to-west progression.^[20] As with the latter, a precise geographical delimitation is difficult; there are no contemporary finds that would allow us to infer the height and uniqueness of this culture — or rather, the actual testimonies are not recognized as such. If one surveys what is known together with indications from the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, one will not go wrong in placing it across the region stretching from the western Himalaya (the Pamir range) through the Hindu Kush, with its centre in Afghanistan, as far as Bactria in eastern Iran. Toward the north, the ancient Persian cultural region opened out across the small and larger river valleys of the foothill landscapes into the steppes and deserts lying before them. Two of the rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya (in antiquity: the Oxus and the Jaxartes), subdue the steppe and empty into the Aral Sea. The polarity between desert-steppe and high mountain, between the nomadic Turanian aboriginal population and the settled, earth-capable ancient Persians, could not have been more pronounced. The aspiring, future-directed cultural people of the ancient Persians had to defend themselves in many warlike encounters against the surging Turanians, who preserved older levels of consciousness. And yet the myth speaks of a king of the Turanians, "Dschemschid," who led his peoples down from the north into Iran. He received from the sun-god Ahura Mazdao a golden dagger — the archetypal image of the

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The remodelling plough, the dagger "that gives men the force to work their way into the outer sensory world."^[21] The same solar deity Ahura Mazdao is also the great inspirer of Zarathustra, the leader of the Iranian peoples, already shortly after the Atlantean catastrophe.^[22] This high individuality is not to be confused with the historical Zarathustra or Nazaratos so closely related to him in being — the Zarathustra of the 6th/7th century B.C., teacher of Pythagoras. It is to the primal Zarathustra, founder of the ancient Persian culture in the sixth pre-Christian millennium, that the ancient Persian Mysteries also trace back, whose teachings echo faintly and distantly in the Zoroastrian Avesta. The Avesta, which only received its written form around the Turning Point of Time, is traced back to the historical Zarathustra of the Persian Achaemenid period (around 600 B.C.).^[23] Yet texts of the Avestan songs (the Gathas) point toward far older traditions reaching back to the Mystery wisdom of the primal Zarathustra. Ancient sources from the Platonic school point, alongside the historical, to the primal Zarathustra, who is said to have lived 6,000 years before the death of Plato, or 5,000 years before the Trojan War.^[24]

In place of the priestly rule of ancient India and the working of the seven holy Rishis, there now stepped priest-kings, whose first was the pre-historical Zarathustra.^[25] The teaching of the elder Zarathustra proclaimed the primal polarity of light and darkness, of good and evil, of the high solar being Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd and the spirit of darkness, Ahriman or Angra Mainyu, ruler of the depths of the earth. Zarathustra directed men not to turn in veneration alone toward the high solar being, but to seek it actively through the maya, through the outer world of the senses — to work the earth, to light it through, to transform the plants in their organs into nourishing fruit, and to reshape the wildness of the animal into a soul-openness toward the human being. A great portion of the cultivated plants that to this day constitute the basic foodstuffs of humanity — above all the cereals (wheat and barley), but also vegetable and fruit species — have their origin in the

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ancient Persian cultural epoch, in the time between the 7th and 4th pre-Christian millennia.^[26] It is precisely these, not the stone tools of the *Neolithic*, that represent the great artistic creations of this culture.

In the ancient Persian epoch the I awakened within the sentient body, the as-yet undifferentiated third member of the human being, the astral body.^[27] At this stage of advancing consciousness the force of the old instinctive clairvoyance dimmed, and there grew in its place the capacity — under the guidance of the Mysteries and out of the living experience of cosmic-earthly relationships — to work upon earth, plants, and animals in a transforming way. The sacral-magical relationship of the Atlanteans to the active spiritual creative forces in earth and cosmos transformed itself into a sacral-artistic one. It was the high art of the ancient Persians, building upon the cultural achievements that had gone before, to work — out of an instinctive directness with the spirit, in the process of becoming settled — upon the soul-nature of certain animal species in such a way that this soul-nature opened itself toward the human being. But in doing so the entire physical-bodily organisation of the animals was transformed in its depths. In their turning toward the animal, human beings shaped out of their inner experience, in the outer world, a work of art: the domestic animal. From the very beginning, domestic animals appeared alongside their wild kindred in an extraordinary abundance of forms. The natural disposition of the animal organism was reshaped as a whole toward particular metabolic capacities, as a rule at the expense of nerve-sense activity. The becoming-domestic-animal consisted in the art of maintaining embryonic plasticity throughout the whole of life. Domestic animals do not flee from the human being — on the contrary, they seek his attention and are in need of it.

It is telling that for the Turanians the wild wolf was the heraldic animal — the ancestor of all dogs. The ancient Iranian, by contrast, bore in his coat of arms the artistic transformation of that same creature: the dog, the oldest of all domestic animals.^[28] Just as the ancient Persian was able, building upon prior cultural achievements, to work transformingly upon the bodily formation of animals through their soul-nature, so equally could he work upon the form and fruit formation of plants through the living. The latter is his greatest sacral-artistic deed. In living experience of the supersensible cosmic-planetary rhythms and the life-secrets revealing themselves therein, he worked through the life organisation of the plant all the way down into the configuration of the physical organisation. Like the cast of a shadow

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the genome preserves this former imprinting. What came into being through an artistic act is made today the object of arbitrary manipulation. The great plant breeders of primordial Persia were sculptors of the formative forces of the living. They had the capacity to reshape the naturally given type of a plant species — in form and in fruit — into a food plant. Under the guidance of the Mysteries, their ability consisted in bringing the forces leading to fructification and maturity to efficacy in all the organs of the plant: in the root (e.g. carrot), in the stem (e.g. kohlrabi), in the bud (e.g. Brussels sprouts), in the leaf (e.g. lettuce, spinach), in the blossom (fruit trees), in the seed (cereals). In the case of cereals, for instance, the reproductive power is reduced in comparison to the kindred wild grasses — measured by the number of seeds — in favour of an enhanced nutritive force of the full-swelling flour-bodies (endosperm) of the grain kernels. Yet this fructification process permeates the whole cereal plant, recognisable in the thickening and colouring of the stem. Here too it holds that the embryonic flexibility of the formative forces of the plant is redirected into fruit formation and maintained there for a longer time. The emergence of the food plants named falls before the beginning of the third millennium, and thereby into the time of the cultural circles given their impulse by the ancient Persians.

This sacral-artistic capacity of the ancient Persians did not exhaust itself only in the development of domestic animals and cultivated plants, but related equally — and precisely — to the working of the earth. Soil cultivation developed there where the «organism in natural growth» offered the ideal conditions for its unfolding. It was the mountain valleys and river regions of the Afghan and east-Iranian highlands mentioned above, which trailed away to the south-west into desert regions and to the north into the Turanian steppe territories. Here the active human being was called upon. Through ingenious irrigation systems — among others through spring catchments in tunnels driven deep into the valley slopes — the soil was on the one hand enlivened through water and on the other hand brought partially to dying through the scratch plough and the hoe. Here the handling of the interplay of death and life, of die-and-become, rises to an art. Every mechanical intervention in the soil means the stimulation of breakdown processes. Here, then, is founded the high art of arable farming, which, in connection with the cultivation of cultivated plants, rests upon the mastery of the life-bearing cosmic forces and the death-bringing earthly forces.

With his I — sensing dully in the sentient body — the ancient Persian experiences himself as held taut within the duality of light and darkness. Guided

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Through the Zarathustrian teachings, and continuing to work through the Inspirations that flowed into the Mysteries, the ancient Persian raised himself to a level of consciousness in which the sun-like spirit disclosed itself to him through the maya of the sense world in its working upon the earth. In the ancient Persian culture the human being begins to develop, in his relationship to himself and to the world, the middle between the cosmic heights and the depths of the earth.

The Cultures of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

Advancing from east to west, the second cultural age of ancient Persia is followed by the third post-Atlantean cultural epoch, which extends to the south-west into the cultural sphere of ancient Egypt and, in the west, through the land between the two rivers, articulates itself into the successive cultures of Babylonia, Chaldea, and Assyria. This third epoch unfolds from the beginning of the third millennium down into the eighth century before Christ. Within it, the humanity of that time steps — without transition — out of the mythological prehistory of the Neolithic into an outwardly historically graspable development of the Bronze Age. In ancient India it was the seven holy Rishis who inspired the course of culture from oracle-sites assigned to the individual planets. Upon the holy Rishis followed Zarathustra, who inaugurated the ancient Persian culture and its Mysteries. The founders of ancient Egyptian culture and its Mysteries were Thoth or Hermes Trismegistos; and those of ancient Mesopotamia, of the ancient Babylonian/Chaldean culture and its Mysteries, were Gilgamesh and the initiate Eabani who belonged with him.^[29] In place of the priestly kingship of ancient Persia stepped kingship proper — in Egypt the Pharaohs — which nevertheless stood in close relationship to the Mysteries. In this cultural age humanity advanced, largely with the loss of the old instinctive clairvoyance, to the development of the sentient soul.^[30] Under the guidance of the kings and the Mysteries working in the background, the sentient soul developed, through the progressive awakening of the I, into an independent soul-member. This step toward a further illumination of consciousness appears openly from the very outset in the most monumental sacral artistic creations of humanity: in the pyramids of Saqqara and Giza in Egypt, and, in Sumer — early Babylonia — in the founding of cities that set themselves apart from surrounding nature with mighty walls. Here, as in the following times and especially in the Egyptian

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In the Egyptian culture, humanity won for itself a consciousness of inorganic-dead, of physically-mineral nature. The high capacities of those belonging to the ancient Persian culture and to preceding times — to intervene transformingly into the soul-nature of the animal and then into the living nature of the plant, down into the physical organism, and to give artistic expression to this in the creations of domestic animals and cultivated plants — had been extinguished. Human beings had descended fully from instinctive spirit-borne levels of consciousness into earthly existence. They awoke to what presented itself to the senses as the world of outer appearances, and sought within its revelations the spirit working creatively. They developed out of this a consciousness that lived itself forth in pure spirit-borne feeling. Into this forming sentient soul there flowed at the same time, however, the Inspirations and wisdom-gifts of the Mysteries. No longer the soul-nature of the animal, no longer the living quality of the plant spoke to human beings in instinctive directness of spirit — what spoke now was the substance and form of dead existence. In stone — in Babylonia and Chaldea in fired brick — they sought to give expression to their feeling-life in monumental, geometrical and plastically severe, elevated forms. In Egypt this artistic-sacral feeling bore particularly upon perceptions of the spiritual working in the cosmos and in the human being. Outer life shaped itself largely as an image of the royal and priestly mystery-guidance. In the Mesopotamian cultural sphere, by contrast, this identity of inner and outer fell more apart. Here the impulses of Gilgamesh worked into the outer culture, and the initiates of the Mysteries exerted upon it less influence.^[31]

The third post-Atlantean age, too, unfolded there where nature offered the fitting conditions — where the interplay of the elements, earth, water, air and warmth, formed itself in the rhythms of the yearly round into "organisms in natural growth." The contrasts between these could scarcely have been greater: on the one side the life-artery of the Nile, cutting deep through the Nubian-Egyptian desert regions, and on the other the wide fertile plains of Mesopotamia between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris.

To a higher degree than in the ancient Persian culture, it is water — the yearly floodings and sedimentations of humus, clay and fine sands — that kept the soils young, like a manuring. What in all

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What variety of plant species was cultivated, what variety of domestic animal species was kept, was already there — was the cultural heritage of ancient Persia. Now, however, consciousness turns more toward the spatial dimension of the earth. It made possible the taking of exact measure, the shaping of stone with chisel and hammer, and the joining of one stone to another, surface to surface, in a hairline seam — in short: the exercise of the high art of craftsmanship, the impressing of form upon dead stone with every hammer blow out of the force of one's own feeling-life. This capacity determined also the refinement in the working of the soils, in the cultivation of plants, and in the keeping of animals. The natural conditions, however, held the upper hand; one need only think of the seven fat and seven lean years in Egypt mentioned in the Bible. And yet the people were able, through the most elaborately developed irrigation and drainage systems, to master the forces of nature and to hold their ground in the building up of their high civilization. A unique example of such an artful achievement is the Joseph Canal (Arab.: Bahr Yussuf), which branches off from the Nile in central Egypt, runs approximately 350 km along the western bank of the Nile, and at the entrance to the Fayum Oasis overcomes the threshold of the valley-edge depression. From there it feeds, through an ingeniously devised system of irrigation and drainage, the wide basin of the oasis and makes it to this day one of the most fertile garden landscapes of Egypt. On account of the fact that to this day the canal bears the name "Joseph," and — following Emil Bock^[32] — no doubt can exist that behind this name the biblical Joseph stands concealed, it may be assumed that he was the builder of the canal system. Joseph, who was active in Egypt around 1750 BC, unites in himself the mystery-culture of Babylonia and ancient Egypt.^[33]

In the parallel cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt — as also in the preceding cultures of ancient Persia and ancient India — the untameable water was the dominant factor in the "organism of natural growth." Now, however, the water-forces of the rivers were mastered through embankments, far-reaching canal and ditch systems, sluices, and the like. To the furthest-reaching degree this held for Egypt, where year upon year, anew, after the retreat of the water-masses flooding the valley, the soils freshly manured by Nile silt had to be drained, thereafter irrigated again, and harvested quickly before the next inundation. Year upon year anew

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Year upon year anew, the people transformed an extreme natural biotope into a culture-biotope — into a garden landscape.

The sentient soul of the people who were the bearers of this cultural epoch formed itself, on the one hand, through the word of the gods, which spoke to the people from the Mysteries through the mouth of kings and priests, and on the other hand, through their own experiences in working with inorganic nature, with stone and water. Out of this soul-bearing, spirit-permeated, and at the same time earth-capable soul-disposition there sprang the tremendous artistic creations of stone chiselled into form, of cultic engravings, of tomb-paintings, of shaped and fired clay bricks, of inscription-tablets and ornamented clay vessels, as well as the plastic formation of "organisms in natural growth" in garden landscapes.

The Greco-Roman Culture

The fourth post-Atlantean epoch, following the preceding Creto-Mycenaean transitional culture, begins in the eighth century BC and ends at the beginning of the modern era, at the start of the fifteenth century AD. Here the gaze shall first be confined to the transformation of the evolution of consciousness up to the Turning Point of Time. This is the period of the rise of ancient Greece to its cultural flowering — and to its dissolution. Spiritual leadership proceeded from the two spiritual streams, the Apollinian and Dionysian Mysteries,^[34] the Apollinian, which through the veil of sense-appearance beheld the spirit active in nature and cosmos, the Dionysian, which brought this spirit to experience from out of the depths of the soul's interior, through the veil of soul-movements. No longer, as in the preceding times, were it the kings who, together with the priesthood of the Mystery-sites, gave direction to the communal life of the peoples in a culture-shaping way; now it was the people itself — indeed, the individual human being — who, guided by the word of the Mysteries, sought out his destiny. This is the birth-hour of democracy, a new step in consciousness, which had its place of cultivation, as if in a focal point, in the Apollinian Oracle of Delphi. Here above all — from its flowering to its gradual dying-away toward the Turning Point of Time — the high significance becomes clear that the Mystery-life held through all the preceding cultural epochs: namely, from the sources of wisdom that opened themselves to the gaze of the

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the initiates into the higher spiritual worlds, to educate the members of the human being into bearers of the advancing I-consciousness. In the Greco-Latin epoch this concerned the entry of the I into the intellectual soul or mind soul — after the sentient soul, the second modification of the astral body.^[35] The I comes to appearance first in the intellectual soul or mind soul.^[36] The I was already thinking out of itself, yet was still in search of itself. Socrates, in the fifth century BC, did not yet say: "I tell myself," but rather: "my daimon tells me." The I lived, even in language, still concealed — as an active agent integrated into the verb: for example, in Greek: *paideuo* = I educate; in Latin: *cogito* = I think.

The oracle-site at Delphi, open to all, addressed the intellectual soul. It educated toward independent thinking. The one who came seeking counsel had to be capable of bringing forward a question out of the inner empowerment of thinking, and the answer of the Delphic Pythia, in its ambiguity, summoned the individual to thinking once more. Hellenism bore within itself, inwardly absorbed, the entire Mystery-wisdom of the past in lingering echoes. The ancient Greek, however, step by step departed from the Mystery-guidance of former times; he grasped himself as a whole human being, as a thinking personality who, in perfect harmony — seeking the middle in all things — lived himself forth between the Apollinian experience of the world and the Dionysian experience of his own soul-depths. Out of these two spirit-real sources the Greek created his high works of art; he shaped the physically-material dead substance and impressed upon it, in the giving of form, his spirit. Out of the evening-glow of the Mysteries arose the morning-glow of Greek artistic creation. Whether in sculpture, architecture, music, painting, poetry or philosophy — in all of it the human being stands at the centre as image of the Divine. Out of the experience of his own bodily form he creates sculptures that, purely in the formal gestalt, lift the human being beyond himself into the Divine; and he builds temples whose spatial form is fashioned after the measure of the human being. "The Greek temple represents the realization of a built organism."^[37] And yet — however unattainably high the Greek sculpture and architecture in particular

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stands before us, it is nevertheless cast, as it were, in the shadow of a certain tragedy. What had its beginnings in ancient Egypt reaches in classical Greece its highest perfection — the working, that is to say, and the giving of form to dead stone. The Greek succeeds in breathing into stone, purely through form, a kind of life, a semblance of life. He impresses upon the form from without the spirit that fills his inner being with plastic vitality; yet he cannot impress this spirit upon the substance itself, so that it might become a living, form-creating substance in its own right. The human beings of the first, and above all the second, post-Atlantean cultural epoch — the ancient Persian cultural epoch — possessed, by virtue of their spiritual-soul and bodily constitution and under the mystery-guidance of Zarathustra, the capacity to bring forth artistic creations by substantially transforming, through plastic metamorphosis, the soul-nature of domestic animals and the living substance of cultivated plants. But the purely physical-material in stone is dead. Thus the Greek stood before the insolubility of the riddle: how can stone be awakened to life? He could only help stone to a semblance of life through form. This is what makes the greatness and at the same time the tragedy of Greek art. Out of the depths of his soul he created, in his human striving, an art which, outwardly beheld, brings a mystery-past into image, and inwardly becomes the germ of a future hope — namely, to be able to enliven the earthy-material as such. Against the background described, the organism principle reappears in manifoldly transformed gestalt. It begins now, quite germinal-ly, to permeate the entire cultural space of Greece, in social respects as well. The landscapes of Greece themselves bear a divine, an Apollinian character — wholly in contrast to the Egyptian. As though it were the gods who had created for themselves, in the diversity of landscape-characters, an image of their own being. The gaze of the wanderer, roaming across the expanse of the landscape spread before him, soon finds a pole of rest, a temple radiant in beauty and harmony, which benevolently bounds the space of beholding. Thus we encounter the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi in a difficult rocky mountain landscape; different again is the temple consecrated to Athena — it stands on rocky hills and catches the eye already from far off, as the Acropolis in Athens; or we find the temple of Hera in the midst of fertile plains.

Unlike the earlier great ancient civilizations, in which the organism in natural growth was shaped by the great river-territories, the landscapes of Greece, in their heroic, god-like character, are

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a unique composition of the interweaving and again dissolving interplay of the four elements — earth, water, air and warmth — and of light. The earth: mighty upthrusting rocks, mountains piling upon mountains; the water: it releases itself as spring from the rock and strives by the shortest path, in brooks or small rivers, toward the nearby shore of the sea. The air and warmth currents, flooded through with light, mingle at sunrise into the indescribable colour-veils of "rosy-fingered Eos",^[38] only to unmingle again at once, to dwell for a time in their separate existence as element, and presently to come together into new colour-composition.

The ancient Greek did not experience nature as something external, severed from himself; rather, mountain and valley, hill and plain, spring and watercourse, lapped round by water-vapours, by air and warmth and flooding light — all this he experienced as permeated by the same spirituality he found living and weaving within himself and impulsing him soul-spiritually. This sensing, permeated by the awakening intellectual soul or mind soul, constituted his artistic being; out of this sensing the Greek shaped the landscape: the shepherd the open mountain heights with their herds; the vine- and fruit-grower the terracing of the steep slopes; the farmer cultivated the plains with grain; and close by the settlements a garden landscape flourished. Throughout the entire Greco-Latin cultural space, the organism in natural growth, grown out of primordial times, transformed itself — preserving its respective type — into small-scale, articulated orchard and garden landscapes, a mirror, as it were, of the intellectual soul or mind soul in the process of forming itself.

The organism principle found its way into ancient Greece not only germinally into the shaping of the landscape, not only in artistic completion as expression in sculpture and temple-building, but equally in the social realm — in the Polis. The Greek experienced himself as a personality belonging to a city-community; he felt himself as Athenian, Theban, Spartan, and so forth. The Polis, however, was an open city, reaching out and drawing in the surrounding landscapes; the sacrificial altars stood in the sacred grove, outside the temples in the open field. In the Polis there was laid as disposition an organism of a higher order — a unity of city and surrounding landscape.

In Roman and Greek culture the intellectual soul or mind soul developed in a polar manner. In Greece it entered into a relationship with the old mystery-wisdom, with that which from the innermost life of the spirit

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had its life in the old Hellenistic mysteries, and from which it could be outwardly formed into art. "The Roman [...] shaped not only stone and bronze, but the entire great commonwealth of human beings according to his spirit."^[39] "Republican Rome is nothing other than human wisdom taking the place of the old priestly wisdom."^[40] Here it is human cleverness that now regulates the relationship of person to person; this is the birth-hour of jurisprudence. It is built purely upon the feeling of personality, upon the I revealing itself in the intellectual soul or mind soul. The sense of right awakens, and out of this arise legal concepts that honour the principle of equality and find expression in universally valid law. Law relates primarily to the objects of this earthly world — and thus also to personal disposability over land. Property, and with it the law of inheritance, the disposability reaching beyond death, has its origin there. In the Roman, the human being becomes wholly personality. His consciousness turns toward a counterpart — toward the other human being and toward the nature surrounding him. Out of this arises a relationship that, in contrast to the ancient Greek, lives itself forth in a more distanced, conceptual manner; he thinks rationally out of himself, and thereby makes himself capable for the earth. The organisms in natural growth of Italy and Sicily, geomorphologically kindred to the Greek, are no longer a spirit-permeated exterior that sounds together with the inner life of spirit. The Roman's gaze is directed more strongly toward geopolitical interests, toward the utility of natural resources under imperial considerations — in military as well as in agricultural respects.

How strongly human ratio gradually begins to alter and articulate the given conditions of nature, Virgil's poetry reveals in his Georgics.^[41] He — the Roman from Mantua, still breathing thoroughly the Greek spirit — gives there in poetic word a comprehensive view of agricultural practices in the century before the Turning Point of Time: in arable farming, the ploughing, hoeing, sowing, harvesting and threshing; the significance of fallow and crop rotation; soil irrigation; the overgrazing of too-luxuriantly proliferating grain; seed care; weather observation; and attention to the course of the stars, and more besides — in fruit-growing, vegetative propagation and the technique of grafting, of pruning, which tree species

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The soil suits in which landscape; in viticulture, the winter-kill of the ploughed clod, the planting and manuring of the seedlings, the erection of the stake-frame, pruning, and more; in animal husbandry, the wandering shepherd with his flocks of sheep, goats, swine, and cattle, breeding and feeding according to the kind of use. An entire chapter, finally, he dedicates to the keeping and breeding of bees. In the Roman cultural sphere, a net of ownership and tenancy rights spreads itself across the lands. As starting-point and reference-point of rational management, country estates and stabling arise (horse-breeding), together with provision-keeping.

What had flowed through millennia of advancing evolution of consciousness out of the Mysteries as wisdom into the shaping of everyday life bore ripe fruits in the artistic creations: on the level of ensouled nature with the cultivation toward the domestic animal, in living nature with the development of the cultivated plants, in dead nature with the plastic forming of stone into a semblance of life. With the gradual falling silent of the Mysteries toward the Turning Point of Time, this source of Inspiration for artistic creating was extinguished as well. What had once been culture-bearing congealed now into mere cultural heritage. In his *Georgics*, Virgil allows this cultural heritage to come alive once more in poetic poetry, out of the force of the intellectual soul or mind soul.

The Culture of the Modern Era

With the beginning of the fifteenth century, the fifth post-Atlantean age breaks in, in which the I enters into the third of the three soul-members, into the consciousness soul.^[42] The human being awakens, over against the objectively sensed world, to himself, to self-consciousness. There arises, for the time being, an unbridgeable gulf between the becoming-self-conscious and that which produces the world of appearances. In his self-knowing I, however, the human being can find within himself the source of spirit, the "I am," which on the one side sets itself over against the world in perception, and on the other can unite itself in cognition with the spiritual-essential being concealed within the sense-appearances. What once flowed instinctively into the experience of the soul, now it can be consciously known in its essential being and united with the being-substance of the I. Thus it lies in the power of the consciousness soul, in its thinking and doing, to transcend itself

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and grow beyond itself, becoming conscious of the spiritual origin of the human being and of the world.

The consciousness soul lives itself forth at first with a Janus face. Turned backward, it seeks to prop itself up on the seemingly secure foundation of the general conceptual framework worked out by the intellectual soul or mind soul in the sciences — yet in doing so it runs the risk of falling, through an atrophying of the mind soul, into cold intellectualism, into arrogance, and into unbridled egoism. But if it looks forward, in self-knowledge and world-knowledge, into the future, it warms itself at ideas that become ideals — for example, the realization, in agricultural practice, of the organism principle grasped in thought. It strives to transform the past, within the present, into something future. The consciousness soul strives to place all initiative force in the service of fulfilling the idea of development. But that means laying the artistic sense at the foundation of all doing. The task is to enliven ideas from the future in thought and, with them, to plunge willingly into all the challenges of reality in such a way that, out of the inner empowerment of experience within the I, every action becomes a free one, an artistic one.

The nourishment of the consciousness soul is ideas that shine into it out of the future. Such ideas are the contents of anthroposophical spiritual science. The essential nature and significance of these contents reveal themselves only through vigorous thinking. In imaginatively thinking intuitive beholding they enliven feeling and give impulse to willing. Just as sense-perception does, so too do the results of spiritual research stimulate thinking. But in the conscious activity of thinking, the I lives — the kernel of being of the human being. The I can decide in freedom whether it will make the idea-forms of spiritual research its own, or whether it will remain in mere confrontation with the world of appearances. The consciousness soul opens the path to an experience of spirit-contents in freedom. Out of this fully human experience there grows a new artistic creative force, which can prove fruitful — and thereby true — in all spheres of life: in medicine, for instance, as the art of healing; in education as the art of upbringing; in human community life as the art of social living; in agriculture as the art of farming.

The I-activity within the consciousness soul hovers, as it were, between heaven and hell. If it slackens, the soul, forgetting itself, plunges into the abyss. Evil in its twofold form — in ahrimanic banalization and luciferic indifference — gains power over it. But if the I strengthens itself within itself, it builds a bridge across the abyss, is

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capable of recognising other beings within itself, and wins for itself the capacity to transform what has become into a becoming.

The Age of the Consciousness Soul in its course thus far has led human beings to self-consciousness, has awakened in them the urge toward free self-determination, has let them plumb the depths of the abyss and opened to them paths toward true knowledge of the spirit. Humanity has emancipated itself from nature, and — fallen, as it were, into a forgetting of itself — thinks itself, despite its own spiritual origin, to be the work of a merely natural creation. In doing so it has lost itself, broadly, in the banality of a purely materialistic view of existence, and finds itself threatened by a technology that springs from precisely this view. The organism principle in agriculture has been extinguished by this mode of thinking. On the other hand, in the face of this descending development, the consciousness soul can be fired by ideas won from the cognition of the essential being of lifeless, living, and ensouled nature. These idea-impulses no longer arise from the once spirit-guided instincts, but are themselves wrought. In the awakening I-activity the idea of development comes alive — and with it, in a new way, the idea of the organism, and, as its extension, the idea of individuality. Both united can become the formative principle of an agriculture that works into the future in a culture-founding way.

In what symptomatic steps this has prepared itself up to the Turning Point of Time, and from there into the modern era, and then on through the course of the Age of the Consciousness Soul — this is elaborated in the chapters that follow.

The cultural streams of agriculture up to the Turning Point of Time

In the Old Testament, a primal polarity in the becoming of humanity is pointed to in mythological image: Cain and Abel. The one, Abel, is the shepherd, who tends his flock and offers his animal sacrifices to the gods. In the care and keeping of the animal world entrusted to him, he follows the will of the creator-powers; his offering is received by the gods. His half-brother Cain is another matter — he works the field and cultivates plants that he himself breeds out of his own intelligence and his sense of his own capacities. His plant-offering is not received by the gods. Here, archetypally, the moment of origin of the two polar streams is pointed to —

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the settled, arable-farming peoples and the nomadic pastoral peoples. The farmer trusts promethean^[43]-apollonian in his own spirit of invention; he works the earth with the plough, he wounds it, and in doing so stimulates the fruiting of the plants that he steadily cultivates into crop-plants, developing crafts of all kinds, in which he gives expression to a consciousness turned toward the future. The pastoral peoples are otherwise — in soul-surrender, epimethean-dionysian, they fit themselves into the given creation, seek to preserve it, and tend their more backward-turned consciousness, still bound to the remnants of old clairvoyance, in the cult of the ancestors.

These two streams did not flow into general cultural life until post-Christian times. Yet here and there they long maintained themselves in time-displaced cultures with the purest contrariety. A personal experience can illuminate this: in the Africa of the 1930s, in what is today Tanzania in the Kilimanjaro region, the tribal peoples of the Bantu and the Maasai lived in close spatial proximity to one another, each preserving their tribal customs. The latter, a Hamitic people, lived nomadically with their Zebu herds amid the wilderness, neighbours to lion, elephant, buffalo and the rest. Protection for man and herd was provided at night by encampments surrounded with thorn-brush — so-called *kraals*; their nourishment consisted of the milk and blood of Zebu cattle, along with the roots of certain wild-growing plants as dietetics. There he stood, the shepherd — a cloth thrown over the shoulder, lightly resting on the spear, the buffalo-hide shield leaned against him, tall, with noble features, resting like a column in the full blaze of the sun, his grave and dreaming gaze directed toward the distance, the herd gathered around him — turning toward the stranger, a fleeting greeting, otherwise no question, no word. The Maasai of that time rejected every form of civilisation, every schooling. They lived interwoven into nature, with a consciousness reaching back into the chain of ancestors.

In complete contrast, the Bantu lived settled lives, in loose village settlements. When one approached, the curtained doorways of the round straw-and-clay huts flew open, young and old streamed out with laughing faces, greeted joyfully and asked: what is new in the world? Eager to learn, in the joy of imitation and with craft-skill, they are wholly turned toward the achievements of civilisation. Their nourishment consisted predominantly of the fruits of the

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Fields they cultivated without a plough, bending their backs, driving the hand-hoe. Out of the natural biotope of the wilderness, the disposition toward a culture-biotope created by human labour grew up around the villages.

The farming peoples and the pastoral peoples lived spatially and ethnically in strict separation — frequently at feud, elsewhere in peaceful coexistence. In ancient Egypt, for example, the herdsmen drove their flocks along both banks above the Nile valley, from Nubia down into the delta and back. From them the Nile farmers borrowed their draft animals to cultivate the fields during the intervals between the annual floods.

Since the times of ancient Persia, two sub-currents have differentiated themselves out of the farming peoples: the garden-cultivators and the fruit-growers. The former bred and cultivated vegetable plants and grew medicinal herbs and flowers. The craft knowledge and skill lived on within the hereditary stream of tribe and family. So there were still, into the 1960s and 70s, in Tehran, the so-called Zarathustrians, who continued this tradition reaching far back into prehistoric times. The fruit-growers understood the breeding, cultivation and care of fruit trees. Columella (†c. 70 AD) reports on the art of fruit-tree pruning, which was still passed down in the generational stream in ancient Rome.^[44] These four streams of farming — including fruit- and garden-culture — existed alongside one another, or in loose relation within village settlements, without interpenetrating one another in mutual support to form an organismic whole. Thus, for example, among Hindus in India — partly to this day — the dung of animals is not used as manure in arable or garden farming, but as fuel.

By the Turning Point of Time — and simultaneously as a fruit of the Mystery-culture — all the elements of agricultural culture that had grown over millennia, such as arable farming, garden- and fruit-culture, and livestock husbandry, were fully formed in advance (see Figure 2, p. 66). Must not people have felt themselves arrived at the end of a development? Had not the language of the Gnostics fallen silent as well, the pagan altars grown desolate?^[45] Had not the culture-inspiring force of the Mysteries — save for remnants such as the Mithraic service — gone out? What their wisdom-teachings had been lived on only as tradition, or in a few human beings as a living spirit-heritage. Where, then, was there at the

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Threshold of the Turning Point of Time any developmental perspective at all, any hope for a future? Humanity had descended fully into earthly existence. Consciousness was substantially shaped by what presented itself to the senses and to active engagement with the physically earthly world. In this God-forsakenness, humanity had stepped up to a threshold and had ripened to the point of opening itself to a thoroughly new impulse of development.

The Event of the Turning Point of Time, the Mystery of Golgotha

The ancient Mysteries had fulfilled their mission. A new Mystery — pointing toward the future, encompassing all of humanity — accomplished itself on the hill of Golgotha in Jerusalem. What had once been venerated as the lofty Sun-being, what among the ancient Indians was called Vischvakarman, among the ancient Persians under Zarathustra the Ahura Mazdao, among the Egyptians Osiris, and among the early Greeks could be seen in the divine being of Apollo — now it has, as was foretold, descended to the earth and incarnated in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.^[46] So it was that «all religious proclamation before the appearance of Christ Jesus was a pre-proclamation of Christ Jesus».^[47] In the Old Testament, Moses receives, in answer to the question in whose name he has been sent, the reply: «Say, the ‹I am› has sent you.»^[48] The Gnosis pointed toward the divinity of the Christ, toward his coming in the spirit, yet not toward his appearance in the flesh.^[49] The Gnostic philosophers of Greece — Rudolf Steiner mentions among them Thales, Heraclitus, Empedocles — developed in the language of concepts,

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what was once beheld by the initiates. In their conceptual logic they "thirsted" for new fulfillment. They were forerunners of a philosophy of the Mystery of Golgotha.^[50] In post-Christian times, Augustine (354–430 AD) countered the earlier orthodox view that the people of the pre-Christian age were radically different from those of the post-Christian age with the words: "What is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients and was not absent from the beginning of the human race; when Christ appeared in the flesh, the true religion that was already there received the name Christian."^[51]

The Christ Event, the Mystery of death and Resurrection, has taken place for all human beings on earth. This is the esoteric fact of an exoteric-esoteric happening bound to a particular time and a particular place. Humanity had advanced, in varying degrees, far enough in its I-development that the hidden holy of holies of the soul — the I, the kernel of being of every human being — stood in need of an impulse, in order to find itself within itself and, in self-knowledge, to determine itself in freedom. This impulse embodied itself during the Baptism in the Jordan with the indwelling of the Christ-I — the sun being filled with spirit in highest perfection — in the body of the human being Jesus of Nazareth. For three years the divine being worked in this chosen human body. It was the force of this divine I which, through death on the cross, spiritualized the substance-bound earthly body. The Resurrection in the spirit took place; it stands henceforth before humanity as the great world-goal. The path to this goal gives all future development its direction and content. With the awakening to consciousness of the "I am," every human being finds within himself "the way, the truth and the life."^[52] This finding means having to pass through abysses of spiritless nothingness; but it also means working to earn spiritual fruits that rise in resurrection into the eternal body of the I. Advancing since the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity finds itself placed into conscious confrontation with evil, with what brings death, with the spirit-power that resists all development. To recognize evil breaks its power and lends the I its strength. Thus in the place of the old Mystery-nature there steps

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and its mission of the gradual education of the I through the cultural epochs — the ever-working Mystery of Golgotha, which points humanity toward the paths of self-education, toward the recognition of its spiritual origin, and toward active love out of the force of the "I am." The casually spoken concept of the Turning Point of Time receives meaning and significance only through this historical process of inversion that the Mystery of Golgotha sets in motion. Only through this event of humanity can the idea of development light up in every human being in its full weight and bearing, and point the way to the force of initiative. Up until the Turning Point of Time, it was the stream of wisdom flowing out of the Mysteries that led the human being toward the awakening of the I. Since the Christ Event, the human soul — through the inner empowerment of thinking — can transform this wisdom into active love: into that force which is able to invert what has become out of spirit into a becoming within spirit. This metamorphosis cannot be thought large enough or far enough. It is wholly open toward the future and at the same time has direction and goal. This appears a contradiction, and so it remains for as long as the human being acts out of illusion and self-seeking. The contradiction collapses in upon itself to the degree that the wisdom underlying all things transforms itself, in free deed, into love. Both perspectives — the turning away from spirit, or in free self-determination the turning toward it — shape, in the post-Christian era, the course of humanity's development and its relationship to nature, and with that to the handling of the organism principle in agriculture.

The Christ impulse, in the primordial Christianity of the first centuries, seized and permeated the intellectual soul or mind soul of those human beings in Greco-Roman culture who were receptive to it. The sense of personality filled itself, in strong I-empowerment, with a warming inwardness. Among the early Christians, the cultivation of a growing awareness of the indwelling of the Christ impulse in the human soul stood in the foreground. This impulse meant a jolt in the I-awakening. In this germinal condition of the soul, the inner disposition with regard to the manner of individual devotion to plant and animal, earth and cosmos may certainly have undergone a transformation. Seen as a whole, however, agriculture continued on its accustomed course. Only after the decline of the Imperium Romanum, and after the streams of the Migration of Peoples, had the Christian impulse lived itself so deeply into individual human beings that they began to plant it into the earth through the work of their

hands. Benedict of Nursia (480–547 AD) was the representative of this development. His biography shows symptomatic traits in this regard: first, during his student years, he fled from his dissolute surroundings in Rome into a hermit's existence, into a cave in the Sabine Hills. There, in three years of ascetic solitude, he received the Christ impulse — through rigorous soul-exercise — into his I resting in the will. With this Christ-permeated I-will he then stepped out into the world, became the reformer of monasticism, founded in 529 the monastery and the Order of the Benedictines on Monte Cassino — twelve further communities followed in his lifetime. On account of his culture-creating achievements he was later called the "Father of Europe." To him belongs, among other things, the monastic rule of *ora et labora* — of prayer and work — the motto to which monasticism paid homage throughout the whole of the Middle Ages and which lifted it to its high cultural creations. The "working" of Benedict of Nursia, born out of the deepest depths of the soul and bound into strict rules, directed itself toward the reworking of the earth. Just as the I permeates the whole human being and is able to rework him toward higher development, so Benedict gathered the whole agricultural cultural heritage of humanity of that time, reworked it into a higher wholeness, and created — in metamorphosis of the "organism in natural growth" that had shaped the pre-Christian cultural epochs — the disposition toward the arising of the agricultural culture-organism. Within this, the Christ-permeated human soul began to create for itself an image in I-inspired and I-willed work. In the world-turned, past-into-future-transforming deed-force of Benedict of Nursia we encounter an outstanding representative of exoteric Christianity — a Christianity that creates outer forms of life. This exoteric-Christian stream pressed northward from the south across the Alps into the Lake Constance region (Chur became a bishop's seat in the fifth century), and there, at the beginning of the seventh century, it met the stream of esoteric Christianity coming out of the west, from Ireland — bringing with it a purely spirit-experienced, cosmic Christianity. This became spiritual nourishment for the I-awakening of human beings. The representative of this stream is Columban the Younger (c. 530–615 AD). Legend tells that when he, making his way up the Rhine in the year 610, set foot on the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance, his first deed was to banish the whole brood of serpents — in the form of wild boars — from the island, so that they drowned wretchedly in the lake. In this image there lies hidden the far-reaching transformation that had taken place. One can

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Hände Arbeit der Erde einzupflanzen. Benedikt von Nursia (480–547 n.Chr.) war der Repräsentant dieser Entwicklung. Seine Biografie weist diesbezüglich symptomatische Züge auf: Erst floh er in seiner Studienzeit aus seiner sittenlosen Umgebung in Rom in ein Einsiedlerdasein, in eine Höhle in den Sabiner Bergen. Dort, in dreijähriger asketischer Einsamkeit, nahm er in strenger Seelenübung den Christusimpuls in sein im Willen ruhendes Ich auf. Mit diesem durchchristeten Ich-Willen trat er dann heraus in die Welt, ward zum Reformator des Mönchtums, gründete 529 das Kloster und den Orden der Benediktiner auf dem Monte Cassino – zu seinen Lebzeiten folgten zwölf weitere Niederlassungen. Er wurde aufgrund seiner kulturschöpferischen Leistungen später der «Vater Europas» genannt. Auf ihn geht u.a. als klösterliche Regel das Prinzip von «ora et labora», von Beten und Arbeiten, zurück, der Wahlspruch, dem fortan das Mönchstum durch das ganze Mittelalter hindurch huldigte und der es zu seinen hohen Kulturschöpfungen emporhob. Das aus innersten Seelentiefen geborene, in strenge Regeln eingebundene «Arbeiten» des Benedikt von Nursia bezog sich auf die Umarbeitung der Erde. Wie das Ich den ganzen Menschen durchdringt und ihn zu höherer Entwicklung umzuarbeiten vermag, so vereinigte Benedikt das ganze landwirtschaftliche Kulturerbe der Menschheit der damaligen Zeit, arbeitete es um zu einer höheren Ganzheit und schuf – in Metamorphose des die vorchristlichen Kulturzeitalter prägenden «Organismus im Naturwachstum» – die Anlage zum Entstehen des landwirtschaftlichen Kulturorganismus. In diesem begann sich die durchchristete Menschenseele in Ich-inspirierter und Ich-gewollter Arbeit ein Abbild zu schaffen. In der weltzugewandten, das Vergangene in das Zukünftige wandelnden Tatkraft des Benedikt von Nursia begegnen wir einem herausragenden Repräsentanten des exoterischen, äußere Lebensformen schaffenden Christentums. Diese exoterisch-christliche Strömung drang von Süden über die Alpen in das Bodenseegebiet vor (Chur wurde im fünften Jahrhundert Bischofssitz) und begegnete dort Anfang des siebenten Jahrhunderts der Strömung des esoterischen Christentums, die aus dem Westen, aus Irland kommend, das rein im Geist erlebte, kosmische Christentum brachte. Dieses wurde zur Geistesnahrung für das Ich-Erwachen der Menschen. Der Repräsentant dieser Strömung ist Columban der Jüngere (um 530–615 n. Chr.). Die Legende erzählt, dass, als dieser den Rhein heraufziehend im Jahr 610 den Fuß auf die Insel Reichenau im Bodensee setzte, es seine erste Tat war, das ganze Schlangengezücht in Wildschweingestalt von der Insel zu bannen, dass es jämmerlich im See ersoff. In diesem Bild verbirgt sich der tiefgreifende Wandel, der sich vollzogen hat. Man kann

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One might interpret it in roughly the following sense: a human being such as Columban, who in a purified soul and in I-empowerment bore the Christ-impulse within him, cannot tolerate wildness reigning around him. The outer must be brought into a harmonious consonance with the inner — an artistic act. The Christ-permeated I, becoming conscious of itself, expands and actively lays hold of its surroundings; it experiences itself in these surroundings and, in the mirroring-back of this experience, becomes inwardly conscious of them.

The encounter and interpenetration of the two streams of Christianity — the exoteric and the esoteric — created, over two hundred years from the seventh to the ninth century AD, a cultural site on the Reichenau that sent its light across all of Europe. The Benedictine abbey became the "school of diplomacy" of Europe, cultivated relations among others with the court of Charlemagne, and stood in connection with the Grail-stream. Around the shores of Lake Constance, settlements of the most varied monastic orders arose in great density. In the High Middle Ages the landscapes around the Lake Constance region were called "the garden of God in the heart of Christendom." Here arose the archetypal image of the cultural landscape.

Point and Periphery

At the root of the becoming of European cultural landscapes lies an eminently Christian impulse — the artistic reshaping, namely, of wild nature into cultivated nature according to the principle of point and periphery. This is the formative principle of all organism formation — for example, cell nucleus–*cytoplasm*, or *embryoblast–trophoblast* in embryonic development. The arising of the village and its village land shall serve to make this concrete: if we transpose ourselves into the time after the Migration of Peoples and before the first great clearing period of the seventh and eighth centuries, wide stretches of Europe were forest-and-marsh landscapes, thinly settled by peoples who, for the most part, had no share in the ennobling through-forming of body and soul as the members of the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations had. As with the primordial force of nature, there dwelt in these early peoples an untamed power, a tempestuous strength of courage — an unformed, combative soul-nature strongly bound to blood forces. The I, however — the eternal kernel of the human being — was, like a bud opening itself to a sunbeam, receptive to spiritual impulses pointing toward the future. This unformed and at the same time spirit-open disposition of soul was met by the one who wandered in solitude through the elemental wildness of the forest landscapes

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The wandering monk, bearing the Christ impulse in his purified soul. One sees him perhaps pausing at a spring — an ancient, sacred, pagan site; he clears a small opening in the darkness of the forest and carpenters himself roughly a chapel, whose inner space shelters the altar. One sees how people step forth from the forest and receive instruction that they experience as a spiritual nourishment for their I, that awakens in them the I-will to work, that makes them helpers of the one — the monk. They begin, together with him, to clear the forest further, to drain the nearby marsh, and to cultivate on the now sun-brightened clearing plants from seeds that they receive as a foreign cultural gift from the hands of the monk. One sees how presently the timber-built chapel gives way to a Romanesque stone structure that shelters itself protectively behind its defiant, massive masonry and its narrow window-openings against the still unquieted forces of nature all around. And at last one becomes aware that around this consecrated and name-baptised midpoint farmsteads and craft workshops arise. The village is born — with the chapel or church at its centre and the village land as its periphery.

In the period that followed, up into the ninth and tenth centuries, the soul-formation of human beings was transformed under this ascending cultural impulse. The untamed, tempestuous strength of courage became inward, and transformed itself into the soul-force of humility. And from the I — which, in penetrating and ennobling body and soul, became aware of itself in ever further degrees — the "question" wrested itself toward human being and world alike. The Parzival story depicts this turning. The young Parzival enters the world as a "guileless fool." With tempestuous courage he takes up combat with every adversary without knowing who it is. Only after the fight do victor and vanquished lift their visors and make themselves known. The action preceded the knowing. The wandering of Parzival leads through misconduct, doubt, and suffering to the awakening of the I, to the question: "Who am I — what ails thee?" The soul's opening toward the question, at the right place and the right time, raises Parzival to Grail King — to the I that, filled with spirit, masters itself. Just as in Hellenism the inexorability of the fate of Orestes or Oedipus announces the tragedy of an age coming to its close, so in the unfolding of the Parzival-destiny — in complete metamorphosis — there reveals itself the future path toward free self-determination.

Between the monasteries — Benedictine monasticism — and the imperial palaces — the kingship — the village-organisms now arose. In them there appears, in transformed form and on a higher level, the entire agricultural

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The pre-Christian cultural epochs. At the centre of the village land, rising high above the gabled rooftops, stands the church with its tower and nave — a work of art in a double sense: vertically aspiring, the tower stands as an outwardly shaped image of inner I-experience; horizontally extending, the nave is a projection of soul-experience in community. This setting of a centre-point is the constructive achievement of the entire village community. What arises here, as it were as a baptismal act of an earthly place amid a wild nature, is the complete inversion of the perfected work of art from pre-Christian times — the Greek temple. Just as the temple presented its high aesthetic outward, pre-eminently in the composition of its columns, while the interior — the cella, the dwelling of the deity — was withdrawn from profane view behind nearly hermetic walls, so in the Romanesque basilica the exterior is firmly walled, the columns have been taken inward, and the inner space is opened to the congregation. The artistic force of the mind soul of each individual within the village community was permeated by the image-filled experience of the esoteric folk Christianity working beneath the surface, and was supported and carried by the institutionally exoteric Christianity working pre-eminently in monasticism and among the nobility. Both modes of experience united and concentrated themselves inward upon the centre-point of the village land, and fashioned for the congregation and the cultic happening at the altar an enclosing form-sheath in artistic configuration.

Yet it was this same artistic force that turned itself toward the periphery — toward the village precincts. Here too an inversion takes place. It concerns the mutually polar streams of herding and arable farming, as well as the loosely networked streams of horticulture and fruit growing from pre-Christian times — streams not fixed upon any centre.

We see how now the farmsteads group themselves around the church, which forms the centre-point. The former nomadism does not continue into Christianity. The wandering herdsman becomes settled with his cattle, as had already been the case with the semi-nomadic Celts and Germanic peoples in their loose hamlets. From this point on, the cattle live under one roof with the human being. Animal husbandry enters, within the enclosure of the field precincts, into relationship with arable farming, meadow and pasture husbandry. Under the guidance of one and the same human being, the union — indeed the "marriage" — of arable farming and animal husbandry is accomplished. The opposition of the hostile brothers Cain and Abel is overcome. And now horticulture, in the post-Christian era, joins itself into the arising village organism —

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The peasant gardens lay themselves, adjoining the farmsteads, like a hem around the village. Here, in the enclosed plot, gathered the inherited cultural stock of vegetable kinds, flowers, medicinal herbs and berry fruits; here was the site of beekeeping; from here the bees swarmed out into the surrounding village land, attended to pollination and brought in the honey.

As animal husbandry and horticulture formed themselves, in passing through the Turning Point of Time, into organs of a becoming organism of a higher order, so too did fruit growing. It laid itself, adjoining the gardens as a further hem in species-rich standard-tree culture, in the form of orchard meadows around the village. In proximity to the stalls, the orchard meadows furnished at the same time the fresh greenery for feeding the young animals.

Beyond the orchard meadows the village land opened itself into the open fieldscape, into the meadows and pastures, in the low-lying grounds, floodplains, or in the fringes accompanying streams and rivers. These grasslands, as also the cultivated fields of the arable land, articulate themselves — mediated through the Benedictines — as organs into the village organism. Quickened by the impulse of Christianity, arable farming and animal husbandry, fruit growing and horticulture, meadow and pasture husbandry, hedge and silviculture, as well as water management, close themselves into

Jenseits der Obstwiesen öffnete sich die Dorfgemarkung in die Feldflur, in die Wiesen und Weiden, in den Niederungen, Auen oder in Säumen, die Bäche und Flüsse begleitend. Diese Grünländereien, wie auch die Kulturen des Ackerlandes, gliedern sich, vermittelt durch die Benediktiner, als Organe dem Dorforganismus ein. Befruchtet durch den Impuls des Christentums schließen sich Ackerbau und Viehzucht, Obst- und Gartenbau, Wiesen- und Weidewirtschaft, Hecken- und Waldbau sowie die Gewässerwirtschaft zu

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a whole, into the self-enclosed organism of agriculture. The "outer skin" of this organism toward the bordering forest or the neighboring village lands is marked by boundary stones, and where a free view opens from a hilltop, the church towers of neighboring village communities greet from the distance.

Out of the consciousness-force of the Christianized intellectual soul or mind soul, the elements of pre-Christian agriculture are lifted to a higher level of culture. They enter, in the village organism or the individual farm, into a mutually furthering reciprocal relationship. Most visibly, this concerns the once-primordial opposition of arable farming and animal husbandry. The domestic animals are attuned in kind and number to the available fodder base. They furnish the manure which, together with the three-field crop rotation — winter crop, spring-sown crop and fallow — supported by the turning plough-working, provides for the enduring soil-born fertility. Everything stands, in space and time, in a reciprocal relationship to everything else: on the rotation member of the fallow — which signifies a year of rest for the soil — there grows, after a pass of the harrow in spring, a wild growth of herbs, grasses, clover, and so forth, which is grazed down over the summer by sheep and cattle and manured in the process. This arable pasture receives, before the ploughing-in and the sowing of the winter crop in autumn, additional manure from the stall-keeping of the preceding autumn-winter period. In the second year stand the winter cereals as bread-grain, which at the same time furnish principally the straw for the bedding litter in the stall; and, in the third year, stand as "exhausting crops" the spring-sown cereals as well as legumes, flax, linseed, and so forth. The arable land as a whole is divided into roughly three equal areas, on which the crops stand alongside one another, each being cultivated in turn on one of the three portions at intervals of three years (Figure 2). The three-field system was, right into the modern era, the guarantor of a soil fertility renewing itself from year to year, transcending the mere level of nature. The meadows, which furnished the hay for winter feeding in the stall and through which dung for the arable land came into being, were called "the mother of the arable land."

As living cells with nucleus and enveloping plasma close themselves together into higher wholenesses — into a plant, for instance — so the village communities close themselves into the higher unity of the cultural landscape. All European landscapes have received their own distinctive cultural character imprinted upon them under the influence of Christianity. They constitute a tissue of cells created by human spirit and human hand through centuries, of

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From single farm and village organisms. Their birth-hour was the seventh to the tenth century; in the forest landscapes of central Europe, the twelfth century.

The village organism — or, where farms lie scattered, the parish — thus has an inside and an outside. Living this polarity shaped the daily work in the stall and on the field. In complete surrender of the mind soul, the work formed a bridge between this inside and outside. The same hands that skilfully dressed the stone for the church building, that painted the frescoes, that created the stained windows, were the same that outside tended the livestock, worked the arable, and shaped cultural landscapes with equal artistry. It was the same consciousness that grasped the church building as centre, the village land as periphery, and bound both poles through the work, through the *ora et labora*, into the wholeness of the village organism. What the individual soul, what the whole community of the village experienced as a holy act at the altar — this streamed into the work and lent it on farm and field a spiritual impulse-force and the sense to arrange the web of relationships among arable farming, animal husbandry, garden, fruit and forest husbandry as well as meadow and pasture management, measure by measure, in harmony and beauty.

What the farmer, conversely, experienced outside through spring, summer, autumn and winter in the elemental forces of nature, in wind and weather — what sun, moon and stars spoke to him — this condensed in him, without being "thought to pieces," into a wisdom in instinct-sure working. The wealth of this living from work under the open sky he carried back, as an inwardly received possession, to the altar, and there he received once more an impulsing from the spirit. This rhythmic being-woven into an inner and an outer experiencing in the spirit of Christianity, intensified by the celebrating of the festivals of the year, schooled the whole human being in his relationship to work, to nature, and to community. It inscribed itself into the soul of the human being just as it inscribed itself into the outer face of nature. It is from this, one may well suppose, that from every place within the European cultural landscapes there speaks, for the finer feeling, a *spiritus loci*. How strongly a likeness of the folk soul reveals itself therein — or in landscape character: of the folk spirit — shows itself when one compares the finer nuances of the artistic creations growing out of the folk traditions with the landscapes in which they arose. One can speak in this sense of a landscape type corresponding to the English folk soul, and equally of a Dutch, Swedish, Italian, and so forth, type of landscape. From the early Middle Ages onward, the landscapes bear

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From this point forward, the landscapes bear, in a progressively advancing individualization of the particular village-organisms, the hallmark of the folk spirit, the folk soul, and the folk heritage respectively holding sway there.

The Migration of Peoples had brought about, north of the Alps, the decline and destruction of all the cities founded by the Romans: the new settlement form arising from the Christianized soul-disposition of *ora et labora* became the village. Only later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, were individual village-organisms raised to the status of cities — bound up with the seats of nobility, with monasteries, with central trading places, and equipped with particular privileges. The beginning was made by the setting of a chapel as the central point and the taking-into-culture of a piece of wild nature round about, followed by the building of a Romanesque basilica and the settling of farmsteads oriented towards it, together with the surrounding, outwardly bounded land. In the measure in which the centre — the church — with tower and nave raised itself up and formed itself out in plastic-artistic configuration, in just that measure did the once rank-growing wild nature of the village land take on form and articulation, becoming cultivated nature. This development of progressive artistic harmonizing and ennobling reached its height in the rising of the Gothic. In the Romanesque there appears in germinal traits, in the artistic image, what had gradually unveiled and interiorized itself in the souls of human beings as the deepest being of Christianity — in humility and devotion. The Grail impulse, stepped forth from the stream of esoteric Christianity in the eighth and ninth centuries, permeated the souls of human beings and awakened in them to high degrees the force of interiorization. In the Gothic there blossoms from this inwardness of soul-life an extraordinary artistic formative force. The tower strives still higher, filigree into the heights; the long, high, many-aisled nave spreading wide, with transept and choir, encloses a vast inner space flooded with coloured light that streams in through the biblical scenes and the figures of the saints in the glass windows — as though from a higher world. How must the peasant human being have experienced himself, who dwelt there in simple, earth-pressed habitation at the foot of the mighty building? Outward his gaze fell upon nature formed by the work of his hands, in its shapes and colours; stepping into the inner space of the lofty structure, he beheld shapes and colours of quite another kind. His intuitive beholding was offered, in high artistic configuration, an image of his own soul-tinged spiritual-soul experience.

In the Gothic, the shaping of the centre within the periphery of the belonging village land reaches its high point. Out of the purely inward

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Out of the purely inward experience of human beings, the building rises in artistic transcendence above the surrounding landscape. The Gothic cathedrals, domes, minsters and village churches — as well as the Romanesque structures that preceded them — do not close off a landscape-space the way the Greek temple does; in a higher sense they are the central organ of a total organism that includes the surrounding earthly nature. This can strike the eye with particular force when one walks toward such structures from a distance — Chartres, say, or the Strasbourg or Ulm Minster — thinking away the urban surroundings of today — or toward any village church at all.

In the Gothic of the High Middle Ages, even the last remnants of rampant wild nature had been tamed and through I-willed labour refined into a "garden of God." Faced with the abundance of sculptures in the portals and niches, the living beings stepping forth from the capitals, the plant-like ornamentation adorning the outer skin of the buildings in so many places, one can gain the impression that the surplus living formative forces — released and purified from the surrounding nature — had flowed into the building, into the sculpting and painting hands of the artists. As these buildings themselves, so too the cultural landscape is now with them completed. Just as in the Gothic the soaring pointed vaults have a keystone — while in the Romanesque the round arch carries as a whole — so the Gothic as a whole forms the keystone in the development of the organism principle as the foundational formative element of Western cultural landscapes, and at the same time the keystone of the Age of the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul.

The organism principle in the modern era

Tremendous upheavals mark the threshold passage into the modern era, into the Age of the Consciousness Soul. Europe begins to articulate itself into nation-states. The deed of the Maid of Orleans (1412–1431) initiates the process of territorial separation of France and England; the seafarers from the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal open up the sea-routes to distant lands; from abstracting thought the newer sciences establish themselves; Copernicus (1473–1543) "sets the earth turning around the sun"; Church and aristocracy fall into orthodoxy; both insist on their privileges and contend for power; the cities grow and with them the bourgeoisie. The arts mirror the shift in consciousness most plainly — as when, for instance, the gold-ground painting, an image of the eternal breaking into the temporal, is displaced by the

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spatial perspective. Empiricism, sense-perception, sets out on its triumphal march. The peasantry seeks to free itself from the hegemony of Church and aristocracy, in order — while preserving its folk heritage and the folk Christianity inspired from esoteric sources — to find its own paths of free self-determination. The age breaks in upon us in which the human being sees himself placed ever more consciously in the confrontation with evil, in the opposition between the forces that further development and those that retard and negate it.

This opposition becomes manifest with regard to the organism principle right at the beginning of the fifteenth century. On the one side we see how Spaniards and Portuguese, out beyond the already long-familiar Canary Islands, draw ever larger arcs into the Atlantic with their great sailing ships, and it was the Portuguese who in 1425 discovered the island of Madeira. It was uninhabited and bore a species-rich mantle of primeval forests, an "organism in natural growth" grown since primordial times. A little later, from 1426 to 1428, the first settler-farmers from Portugal burned off the island's unique natural biotope, brought over the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, the Guanche, made them into slaves, had them lay a network of irrigation canals and plant sugarcane as a monoculture over the whole island — which, processed into raw cane sugar, found a ready export market on the mainland and above all in England.^[53] Here, as in a seedbed, what then played out in the following centuries on a grand scale in the New World — land seizure, large-scale clearing, monoculture, enslavement, the slave trade, and export markets for foodstuffs — enacts itself symptomatically: an early form of agrarian industrialism and, in decadence, a repetition of culturally grounded pre-Christian streams of development.

On the other side we see how, above all in Central Europe, the peasants struggled for their freedom against the hegemony of Church and aristocracy and sought to carry their cultural achievements across the threshold into the modern era. From the village communities that had set the tone in the early Middle Ages, cities crystallized out here and there from the ninth and tenth century onward. In these there unfolded — with the bourgeoisie, with the entry of Roman law, and from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward with the founding of universities — a cultural life emancipated from nature, different from the one that lived on creatively in the village communities as

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Figure 3: The Natural and Social Order of the Free Economic Village Communities.

lived on as a force out of the folk heritage. This sought, in the transition into the Age of the Consciousness Soul, another way of cultural unfolding and found its proper, Central European expression in the "free economic village communities."^[54] These had freed themselves from the foreign determination of the hegemonic powers and are the fruit of village development since the end of the Migration of Peoples.

In the free economic village communities there came, in the fifteenth century, out of the forces of the folk heritage, a mutually sustaining natural and social order — briefly — to flowering.

Alongside the already-described organismic natural order with its centre and articulated periphery of the village land, a threefold social order had taken shape by disposition. Beneath the surface of historically graspable Catholic — Petrine — Christianity there lived a folk Christianity, from whose springs the folk soul cultivated a spiritual-cultural life that went from mouth to ear, that lived itself forth in pictorial narratives, spiritual experiences and intimations, in sagas and legends, in folk poetry and music and so forth. From this very same spring there arose a rights-life rooted in the sense of right of each individual, unwritten, going from mouth to ear, and determined anew — or confirmed — each year. It

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in the depths of the esoteric stream. It goes without saying that from the side of the monasteries, the landed lords and the rising towns, Roman — written — law more and more undermined this lived sense of right. Against the background of a spiritual and rights-life growing out of the folk heritage, economic life took shape instinctively in associations. The village communities grouped themselves at such a distance around the central market that the carters could drive there and back in a single day. The people in the villages stood with one another and with the central market in such an economic relationship that the exchange of goods covered need at prices that secured the livelihood of peasant and craftsman families for as long as it took to bring forth the same product again.

The "free economic village communities" of the early modern era carry within themselves the germ for the shaping of social life into the future in the sense of the "Threefold Social Order."^[55] This blossoming of an independent, folk-rooted spirituality of social life in the village communities was laid out to inaugurate a grass-roots democratic development in Central Europe, similar to that which formed itself in Switzerland. The noblest figures of the age — among them Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528), Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531), Paracelsus (1493–1541) and many others — made common cause with the peasants. Against this, however, stood the retarding forces in Church and nobility. The conflict discharged itself in the Peasants' Wars of 1524 to 1525. What as a germinal, culture-renewing impulse could have placed itself at the side of the rising towns was drowned in blood. The Counter-Reformation did its part to stifle all further strivings for independence at the root. Roman law took up its dominion over the countryside as well. Land became, within the prevailing legal understanding, private-law property — and with that, by degrees, a purchasable commodity.

Then, however, around the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth century, a socially reforming impulse breaks open once more. The writing of Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), "The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz," circulates from around 1604 from hand to hand. It was published in 1616 in Strasbourg.^[56] It takes up Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484) and his initiation

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1459. At the same time, the "Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross" was founded. This united a small number of individuals who remained unknown and who — unlike, for example, Paracelsus (1493–1541) — did not come forward through a teaching presented to the outside world, but placed themselves selflessly in the service of their fellow human beings, working hidden from view out of spiritual inspirations. Further Rosicrucian writings, presumably by the same author, Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), now appeared: in 1614 the Fama Fraternitatis (addressed to the "heads, estates and scholars of Europe"), in 1615 the Confessio, and in 1617 the General and Universal Reformation of the Whole World. In this "General Reformation" from the spirit of Rosicrucianism, there emerged again from concealment those impulses that had worked underground in the fifteenth century, laying the germ for the threefoldness of social life in the free economic village communities.

What from Rosicrucianism could have become ground-breaking for the seventeenth century — spiritual impulses that grasped the effective spirit in nature and in social life with equal reach — was brought to nothing by the tremendous catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War and its aftermath. This war devastated Central Europe by the strategy of the scorched earth. Many villages were permanently turned into wasteland; forty percent of the rural population^[57] and thirty-three percent of the urban population had fallen victim to the horrors of famine, plague and the conduct of war. Seed-grain and bread-grain stores were plundered repeatedly or destroyed by pillage and burning; livestock was driven off by marching armies; wells were poisoned by the carcasses of animals thrown into them. Right up to the end of the century — fifty years after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 — famines prevailed in many places. The Thirty Years' War broke, physically, the backbone of the inherited agrarian culture of Central Europe. Much folk wisdom was lost, and only with great difficulty could the organism principle in the villages and individual farms be roused again to new life, drawing on what remained of practical experience. The Dottenfelderhof, for example — ten kilometres from the city centre of Frankfurt am Main, belonging as a dairy farm to the Premonstratensian monastery of Ilbenstadt — was razed to the ground. Not until 1707 did the rebuilding of the main house with its living quarters and granary begin, and in 1742, nearly a hundred years after the war, the complex of buildings was finally restored as a hermetically self-contained fortified farm.

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After the deep disruptions of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century brought, with the Enlightenment, an awakening in agriculture as well. In its first half there flourished the so-called *Hausväter* literature, which — looking back on the lost *Weistümer* — still sought to grasp agriculture as an organismic, ethically grounded whole. In the second half of the eighteenth century, experimental economics^[58] moved to the fore. One held to what proved empirically reasonable within the framework of organismic self-containedness, and this in turn prepared the ground for the emerging agricultural sciences of the nineteenth century. After the long-lasting depression that followed the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, agriculture took an upswing as the eighteenth century advanced. Apart from the management of a more rational, more thought-permeated practice, the improvement of living conditions was owed chiefly to the "summering of the fallow." Within the framework of the three-field system as it continued to be practiced, the fallow strips were sown with root crops (potatoes) and, above all, with clover. Through the cultivation of arable fodder crops, soil fertility rose, yields increased, and hardship gave way to a modest prosperity.

Into the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century there pressed upward, out of the hidden depths of Rosicrucianism and other kindred spiritual currents — representative of which one may name the theologian and "theosophist" Friedrich Oetinger (1702–1782)^[59] — into the social consciousness of the age. German Idealism drew, in philosophy, poetry, science and the arts, from these spiritual undercurrents. From these very same undercurrents rose the ideals that stood at the origin of the French Revolution — the calls for liberty, equality and fraternity. These are, in transformed shape, the same ideals that were already laid down in the threefoldness of the free economic village communities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the same that at the beginning of the seventeenth century gave impulse to the Rosicrucian strivings toward a "general reformation";^[60] the same that Goethe (1749–1832) shaped into poetry in his *Wilhelm Meister*, in *Hermann und Dorothea* and elsewhere. These calls, which flowed through the centuries from the stream of an esoteric knowledge — they too foundered on the retarding

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forces; they too faded away in bloody struggles and ended once more with the victory of Restoration.

What development did agriculture undergo against the background of this historical process? Its foundation, the organism principle, persisted. But without a continuing spiritual impulse-force it became tradition: the cultural landscapes that had grown out of peasant working had to be maintained, in the advancing course of the centuries, with the same laborious effort as the buildings of the Romanesque churches and Gothic cathedrals that had once formed a unity with them. At first, drop by drop, individual courageous men and women tied up their bundle and moved away to the rising cities. Then, from the seventeenth century onward, they followed in waves of migration the call "city air makes free." They accepted the loss of village shelter and peace; they pressed out from the confinement and unfreedom of life bound to nature and sought, in existential insecurity, free self-determination in newly emerging occupations. Exemplary in its telling and close to the heart is the account of this solitary way into the unknown given by the later ophthalmologist and poet Jung-Stilling (1740–1812),^[61] whom Goethe helped out of many an existential hardship by resolute intervention. More and more the cities sucked the people out of agriculture; academic life, the natural sciences blossomed — and with them the technical application of the recognized laws of inorganic nature. Over against the fully human, universal orientation of work in agriculture, people now plunged into the labor-divided world of industry. They, who were still entirely bound to folk consciousness, found themselves challenged, in existential insecurity, to an individual awakening of self-consciousness. Out of the peasant grew the modern, emancipated human being — the proletarian. He could gain nothing from the labor-divided process beyond his wage; humanistic education could give him no answer to his life-questions, nor could the natural sciences, which, on the question of his humanness, derived him from the ape. As the modern era advanced, peasant culture sank into an inherited tradition from which no impulses for renewal could any longer arise. This tragedy marks the course of development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Already the summering of the fallow with clover in the eighteenth century was an impulse coming from outside, one that met with resistance — not least on account of the fact that the

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once flexible three-field system had become rigidified from within by the Roman law of property.

An example of how thoroughly the power of inertia was the enemy of every innovation is shown, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the attempt to introduce the seed drill into the highly developed agricultural culture of Flanders. This attempt failed at first; the farmers felt instinctively that this proposal was a breach in the spiritual-moral self-understanding of the farmer, who entrusted the seed to the broken-open earth with measured step and rhythmic swing, and who at the same time gave this event his blessing in bearing of soul and spirit. How different the designer of the seed drill, who, coming from outside, from the city, takes the act of sowing apart into its functions by way of conceptual abstraction. Out of this he constructs a machine that must fulfill the following functions: to deposit a definite quantity of seed of a definite grain size, in a definite unit of time, at a definite depth in the soil, and to cover it with earth.

In the nineteenth century, the natural sciences and technology gradually took over the direction of an agriculture estranged from its spiritual impulses. From the very outset, one agricultural faculty after another was founded. In the foreground stood the question of what had been called the "old strength of the soil," and from this the question of manuring. People wanted to understand what had given the soils their enduring fertility across the ages. They had lost sight of the wholeness of the organism of agriculture and the interworking of its members, and sought instead for individual factors. They recognized the significance of humus as the bearer of fertility. In order to pursue this question of sustained soil fertility experimentally, the Rothamsted long-term manuring trial was laid out in Kent, England, in 1853. In a plot with farmyard manure dressing, this dressing was discontinued after a time, and after fifty years the after-effects of that former manuring were still to be observed.^[62] This, together with later long-term trials carried out elsewhere,^[63] confirmed that the "old strength" was essentially to be credited to the keeping of cattle within the organism of agriculture.

Through the researches of the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1870), attention in the question of manuring was directed toward the significance of individual substances. From his analyses of the harvested produce he concluded that the soils

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of a farm lose as many nutrients as are contained in the produce sold off it.^[64] From this conclusion he developed his mineral fertilization theory, according to which the nutrient present in minimum quantity limits the yield. Liebig, who stood with one foot still in German Idealism and the other in the rising materialism of the second half of the nineteenth century, was convinced that the loss of the soil-bound core nutrients — phosphorus, potassium, and others — must be made good to the soil through manuring. He judged otherwise, however, contrary to the prevailing doctrine, in the matter of nitrogen. For this, he held, nature itself would provide. Ranged against him stood his opponents, the advocates of nitrogen fertilization, who in the course of time gained the upper hand. A posthumous vindication for Liebig came with the implementation and confirmation of his theses by the farmer Schultz-Lupitz (1831–1899),^[65] who after decades of effort succeeded in markedly improving the yield level of the extremely poor sandy soils of Lupitz by deepening the humus profile.

The beneficial preceding-crop effect of legumes remained a riddle until the end of the nineteenth century, until in 1886 Hellriegel (1831–1895) published his discovery of the nitrogen-fixing nodule bacteria living in symbiosis with the roots of leguminous plants. Despite these findings from science and practice concerning the binding of nitrogen from the air as something occurring within the living, all zeal concentrated on the question of how the nitrogen of the air might be converted by technical means, bypassing the living altogether, into the form of a salt. For the goal was not merely to secure this most coveted of all fertilizing substances for agriculture, but equally for the manufacture of explosives. The world's sole deposit of nitrogen salts in workable quantities — in the form of sodium nitrate — lies in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a remote and exceedingly costly source for the growing demand of the nineteenth century.

Thus natural science and technology had been working their way into agriculture from outside since the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century became the pathbreakers of agriculture's estrangement from its own most proper developmental impulses and conditions of production — and ultimately the cause of its downfall into agrarian industrialism. The agent on this path is

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nitrogen, which was later followed, from the 1960s onward, by synthetic herbicides, pesticides, stem-shortening agents, and the like, as well as by genetic engineering.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, atmospheric nitrogen was oxidized in electric furnaces in Norway by the Birkeland-Eyde process. It proved too costly. The chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) worked from 1905 to 1910 at BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein to establish the scientific foundations of ammonia synthesis from atmospheric nitrogen; his partner, the engineer Carl Bosch, created the large-scale industrial plant for this synthesis by 1913. In the Haber-Bosch process named after them, atmospheric nitrogen is reacted with hydrogen gas in contact furnaces at a pressure of 200 bar and temperatures of 500 to 600°C in the presence of catalysts. One can see how the extraordinarily inert nitrogen of the air — which the legumes, in a quiet, gentle way, activate within the cosmic-terrestrial rhythms of the solar year as a life process of protein formation — is here, on the inorganic-technical level, forced with great expenditure of energy and independently of place and time, by sheer violence, into a highly reactive compound. This invention, like the later one of the unleashing of nuclear energy, opens forces of sub-nature to human arbitrariness — forces whose handling henceforth leaves traces of destruction in the work of creation that is nature.

The ammonia synthesis had reached full productive maturity just before the outbreak of the First World War, thereby making the Central Powers independent of imports of Chilean saltpeter and rendering obsolete the Atlantic blockade the English had mounted to prevent these imports. It was only through ammonia synthesis that the First World War became conductible for the Central Powers as an artillery and bombing war on the devastating scale and of such duration. In the course of the war the Western Allies too came to possess this technology. After the war's end, the nitrogen industry faced the question: if there is to be no more war, where does the nitrogen go? Among victors and vanquished alike, agreement came swiftly; the European Nitrogen Syndicate was founded and agriculture was declared the new market. With enormous advertising and industry-promoted research closely tied to practice, nitrogen production passed seamlessly from the manufacture of explosives for bombs and shells into the production of synthetic fertilizers for agriculture. Once again the truth of Heraclitus's saying proved itself — that war is "the father of all things."^[66] The same happened after

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The same happened after the Second World War in the United States, where it was only after the war's end that nitrogen fertilization gained widespread application. In the period that followed, nitrogen — in conjunction with irrigation technology in arid regions — became globally the driving force of an agrarian industrialism producing in monocultures.

In Central Europe, the organism principle held out against this turbulent development for a long time still. Friedrich Aereboe (1865–1942), the founder of the modern science of agricultural farm management,^[67] describes around 1917 an agricultural operation as a coherent organic whole: "I [...] conceive of the landed estate as an inseparable, organic whole and show how this whole takes on and must take on different form under the changing influence of external and internal conditions of life." He compares "the organic essential nature of landed-estate management" with regard to its articulation into operational branches with "the animal body, which has heart, lung, liver and other organs." Just as these — each according to its own tasks — stand in relation to a superordinate whole of the animal, so do the individual branches of agriculture to the wholeness of the farm organism. Aereboe grasps the economic web of relationships of a landed estate — just as this had come into being from intuitively instinctive substrata of consciousness — for the first time in clear, lucid thoughts. The relational fabric he encountered was for him an inviolable fact, one that had to be illuminated in thought and optimized accordingly in terms of farm economics. The fact itself, the essential being of the whole, he did not call into question.

The principle of the farm organism was upheld by the representatives of agricultural farm management science in Germany right into the 1950s. This happened with the inclusion of all the technological achievements of that time, above all "mineral fertilization" — and here with particular emphasis on the targeted application of synthetically produced nitrogen salts. But then the red thread of Western-Christian farming finally snapped. From the beginning of the 1960s the concept of the farm organism faded away, and in its place stepped the concept of system. This is open on all sides and is conceived as a system of interconnections, without reference to an "essential nature" — that is, to a wholeness grounded in itself. With that, all the sluice-gates to the fragmentation of agriculture into agrarian industrialism were thrown open. A decisive trigger was

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The coming of the synthetic herbicides in the 1960s was a decisive trigger. These are growth substances that intervene as "total herbicides" systemically in the life-activity of plants in such a way that the plants grow themselves to death or perish by other physiological means. The deployment of systemic herbicides, followed by synthetic fungicides and insecticides, transformed overnight the classical variety of farm organisation. From one year to the next, a family farm could double — or, where the market allowed it, multiply several times over — its planted areas of sugar beets, potatoes, or field vegetables. It could specialise at will on only a few or even a single crop, and equip itself accordingly, in a more targeted and cost-efficient way, with machinery. In arable and garden farming the mutually conditioning relationship of the threefold of soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring dissolved. Monocultures took dominion over the arable landscapes. What over more than a millennium had grown ecologically and socially as a living inheritance of Western-Christian farming culture — steadily developing — the organism of village communities and individual farms, fell apart into specialised individual enterprises, whose capital requirements in respect of purchased inputs compelled ever higher turnovers and thus the industrial mode of production with its division of labour and capital formation. (Figure 4).

Already in the preceding decades the centre — the Church — had forfeited more and more its spiritual-moral as well as its social leading role, in favour of the awakening to individual self-determination. Concurrent with the advancing industrialisation of agriculture since the 1960s of the twentieth century, it was this fact that unleashed the last great wave of departure from the land. Whereas around 1800 still 62% of the working population were active in agriculture, around 1875 49%, around 1950 25%, today it is only 2%.^[68] In the place of the peasant stepped the agrotechnician, whose point of orientation lies no longer at the centre of the village but peripherally — in the educational centres of the city, in agrotechnological innovations, and in the supra-regional markets. In the globally networked agrarian industrialism a mighty wall builds itself up around agriculture, an intelligence apparatus of detail knowledge fragmented into specialist domains. The farmer becomes the "executive organ" of an intelligence that determines him from outside. In the course of this creeping intellectual dispossession, horticulture was the first to detach itself gradually from the village and individual-farm precincts and specialise in monocultures under glass — a first step in the dismemberment of the organismic wholeness. In arable farming too, very early in the USA, cereal growing became autonomous, followed by soil loss through wind and water erosion. Today a monotonous pattern of monocultures dominates the landscape image across the entire globe. In Central Europe this second step in the dismemberment of the wholeness was accomplished — after some persistence — only towards the end of the twentieth century. Then, in a third step of dismemberment, fruit growing too lost its organ-function within the agricultural organism. In the 1970s premiums were paid for grubbing up standard-tree orchards; today their ecological value is once more appreciated. Production, however, concentrates itself on intensive installations in monoculture in climatically favoured regions. Finally, in a fourth step of dismemberment, the keeping of domestic animals — bound to the operational fodder-base — was also abandoned, with the consequence on the one hand of the emergence of stock-free farms and on the other of the concentration into factory farming. In the place of the concept "domestic animal" stepped the concept "useful animal." It began with poultry in year-round stall or cage keeping, followed by pig-keeping concentrated in large-scale fattening units, and finally — who

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Schon während der vorausgehenden Jahrzehnte hatte das Zentrum, die Kirche, mehr und mehr ihre geistig-moralische sowie soziale Führungsrolle eingebüßt, zugunsten des Erwachens zur individuellen Selbstbestimmung. Einhergehend mit der zunehmenden Industrialisierung der Landwirtschaft seit den 60er-Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts war es diese Tatsache, welche die letzte große Abwanderungswelle auslöste. Waren noch um 1800 62% der arbeitenden Bevölkerung in der Landwirtschaft tätig, um 1875 49%, um 1950 25%, so sind es heute nur noch 2%.^[69] An die Stelle des Bauern trat der Agrotechniker, dessen Orientierungspunkt nicht mehr im Zentrum des Dorfes liegt, sondern peripher in den Bildungszentren der Stadt, in den agrartechnologischen Innovationen und in den überregionalen Märkten. In dem global vernetzten Agrarindustrialismus baut sich um die Landwirtschaft herum ein mächtiger Wall auf, ein Intelligenzapparat eines in Fachgebiete zersplitterten Detailwissens. Der Landwirt wird zum «Exekutivorgan» einer ihn fremd bestimmenden Intelligenz. Im Zuge dieser schleichenden geistigen Entmündigung hat sich nach und nach der Gartenbau als Erster aus den Dorf- und Einzelhofgemarkungen herausgelöst und sich auf Monokulturen unter Glas spezialisiert, ein erster Schritt der Zerstückelung der organismischen Ganzheit. Auch im Ackerbau hat sich, in den USA schon sehr früh, der Getreidebau verselbständigt, gefolgt von Bodenabtrag durch Wind- und Wassererosion. Heute beherrscht weltweit flächendeckend ein eintöniges Muster an Monokulturen das Landschaftsbild. In Mitteleuropa hat sich dieser zweite Schritt der Zerstückelung der Ganzheit nach einigem Beharrungsvermögen erst gegen Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts vollzogen. Schließlich, in einem dritten Schritt der Zerstückelung, verlor auch der Obstbau seine Organfunktion im landwirtschaftlichen Organismus. In den 70er-Jahren wurden Prämien für die Rodung von Hochstammkulturen gezahlt; heute wird ihr ökologischer Wert wieder geschätzt. Die Produktion allerdings konzentriert sich auf Intensivanlagen in Monokultur in klimatisch bevorzugten Gebieten. Zuletzt, in einem vierten Schritt der Zerstückelung, wurde auch die an die betriebliche Futtergrundlage gebundene Haustierhaltung aufgegeben, mit der Folge einerseits der Entstehung viehloser Betriebe und andererseits der Konzen-tration auf Massentierhaltung. An die Stelle des Begriffes «Haustier» trat der Begriff «Nutztier». Es begann mit dem Geflügel in ganzjähriger Stall- bzw. Käfighaltung, gefolgt von der Schweinehaltung, konzentriert in Großmästereien, und schließlich – wer

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What could ever have been thought possible for that grazing animal, the cattle beast, the domestic animal par excellence — the herding together of dehorned animals in year-round stall-keeping with silage feed or high-performance-calculated concentrated feed mixtures.

What had taken shape in the times of Gnosis, what in times reaching far back before that had formed, under the guidance of the Mysteries, bound to the constitution of consciousness of particular peoples, in a loose coexistence as the four streams of livestock farming, arable, horticulture and fruit-growing — what under the influence of Christianity had fused together in mutual interpenetration into the higher unity of the organism of agriculture — now, in agnostic dismemberment, it has fallen back once more into the four primal states.

Despite all the thoroughly admirable achievements of modernity, we must not close our eyes to the fact: we are standing on a rubble-heap of the Western-Christian agricultural culture. The usurpation by industrial methods of production has broken its culture-bearing force and, since the 1960s of the twentieth century, dug its grave. Yet every death also bears within itself the germ of new becoming. This can be grasped when one becomes conscious of the deeper becoming-impulses of the past. A pronouncement of the *Doctor Angelicus*, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), runs: past and future has time — present, it has not.^[70] — One can sound this pronouncement further in thought. In the present, both streams of time encounter one another and extinguish themselves. The stream of the past dies into form, into the sense-perceptible event. In this form, however, the stream of time from out of the future awakens as germ. The plant seed makes the event visible to the senses. It bears within itself, congealed into the form of the genome, the imprint-stamp of the past. This "imprinted form, developing in life,"^[71] contains a germ that holds the potency to open itself to the stream of time from out of the future. Thus one can say: in the objectification of what appears to the senses lies the moment of death, in which the time of the past turns into the future. Future is past in transformation.

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The New Germs

The anthroposophical spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner furnishes cognitions in the form of ideas that, in the forceful thinking of wide-ranging spiritual relational contexts, vouch for their own truth — and that prove themselves in the doing as germs which, in their growing and bearing fruit, make this same truth experienceable as the driving force of an ever-new becoming. Two idea-germs of Rudolf Steiner's are the ones which, taking hold of what is past and transforming it, point the way for agriculture toward a new culture-bearing capacity:

The first of these idea-germs takes up the significance of agriculture with respect to the social question: The First World War brought about the collapse of the old world order. In the social chaos that followed, Rudolf Steiner inaugurated the "Threefold Social Order." In this vast nexus of ideas, that impulse which since the modern era had pressed to the surface in successive centuries — only to founder against the retarding power-structures and sink back again into concealment — reappeared from the underground depths of historical becoming, now in transformed form. Prepared through his *The Threefold Commonwealth*^[72], Rudolf Steiner began — together with people who stood actively in life — to undertake concrete steps toward a reshaping of social life, in the sense of:

a "Free Spiritual-Cultural Life" that is, autonomously, the creator and bearer of initiative of all spiritual impulses that permeate and fertilize social existence,
a rights-life that is, autonomously, the creator and bearer of what, in equality in the relationship of human being to human being, is lawful and attains validity in the form of law,
an economic life that acts autonomously and, on the basis of contract, in consciously shaped economic associations takes up — in "brotherly/sisterly" fashion — the covering of human needs.

In each of these three members of social life, every human being stands — consciously or unconsciously. Each of these three members receives its own proper autonomous life-reality through what every human being impresses into it from his three soul-activities: through his willing into the spiritual-cultural life, through his feeling into the rights-life, and through his thinking into the economic life. Just as these three soul-activities, as autonomous members of the soul, work into one another within the human

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being and light up in self-consciousness — held together, and in reciprocal interaction, by the force of the I — so too do the three members of the social work into one another toward the wholeness of the social organism, through the awakening I-consciousness of each individual human being. In this reciprocal relationship of conscious inner experience and outward shaping, social artistry comes into being. Thus the shaping of the threefold social organism is the touchstone for the unfolding and revelation of the consciousness soul. The very nearly superhuman efforts Rudolf Steiner undertook from 1919 onward to call the movement of the Threefold Social Order into life foundered in 1922.^[73] He himself made the decision to bring this first large-scale attempt to an end. The outward occasion for this was above all the galloping devaluation of money, together with the small number of people who were equal to this overwhelming challenge. Rudolf Steiner had also counted on the understanding of the proletarians, many of whom had been lost in the war — and who were drawn away by the propaganda of the communist-leaning workers' leaders. Yet the germ had been laid into the soil of historical becoming. Throughout the twentieth century it was tended — partially, in concrete approaches to action — in the continual transformation of a dying-and-becoming. Above all, however, Rudolf Steiner's expositions on the social question were worked through in terms of cognitive science, in the context of the demands of the time, and made accessible to a wider public. The impulse toward social threefolding continues to await a thoroughly new attempt at realization.

This new attempt grows from the second seed-idea laid into the *Agriculture Course* of Rudolf Steiner — the *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*^[74]. This course for farmers took place at Whitsun 1924 on the Koberwitz estate near Breslau, in what is today Poland — two years after the dissolution of "Der Kommende Tag," the organ of the Threefold Social Order movement in Germany. At that time in agriculture "the church was still in the village," the practice of the organism principle still largely intact in the traditional sense. The agricultural mode of production still formed a counterpole to the division-of-labour mode in industry. The ecological question — and, inseparably bound up with it, the social

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question — had not yet become acute in agriculture. But threatening signs, such as the effects of fertilizing with synthetically produced nitrogen salts, the loss of variety stability and of animal health, sensitized individual farmers and agriculturalists. From 1920 onward they approached Rudolf Steiner with the request that he give them, out of anthroposophical spiritual science, cognitive foundations and practical indications for the renewal of agriculture into the future. What the questioners were after were ideas — spiritual true-images that could give agricultural work a meaning again, beyond mere procedural technique, and, if these ideas were taken hold of, could once more build a spiritual-moral bridge to the things and beings in nature and in the cosmos. The Agriculture Course contains the seed-laying for the development of an agriculture of the future, in which the hidden stream of the impulses of Christian-Occidental farming rises in thoroughgoing metamorphosis to the surface of the age of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner connected directly with the questions of people who stood within the old, death-consecrated farming culture and who were seeking approaches to its renewal. He connected with a just-still-existing past in order to transform it into a future. In doing so he appealed to the thinking consciousness of the active human being standing in practice.

The point of departure of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical spiritual science is "the human being." To his essential nature in the context of the world, these questions are directed: What is the development out of his essential origin in the spirit — what are the idea-contexts that make him capable of acting in accordance with his nature across all spheres of life — what are the paths toward self-knowledge and knowledge of the world into the future? Once, human beings were not yet so "clever" as they are today, but they were wise. They experienced themselves as a microcosm, bearing within themselves in the small everything that in the large spiritually and essentially fills the macrocosm. The scientific intellectualism of the modern era places itself over against the sense-perceptible world, dissects it into parts, reflects these in representations — and in doing so excludes the very one who asks, thinks, feels, and wills: the human being himself. The gaze of the spiritual researcher, by contrast, is directed toward the one who knows, toward the essential nature of the human being. What reveals itself to him there in supersensible cognition throws a clear light on what, in the macrocosmic sense, underlies nature and the cosmic periphery as a being-effective principle — sense-perceptible in the widest sense. The findings of spiritual-scientific research presented in the Agriculture Course connect with the natural-scientific

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concepts — with respect, for example, to the inorganic world of substance — and characterize their elements as bearers of specific formative forces, which, out of their physical nature, they raise into the processual activity of enlivened and ensouled nature.

Thus the methodical path of the Agriculture Course is marked out with the core statement: "The point of departure is the human being; the human being is made the foundation."^[75] Under this perspective the gaze focuses on the conception and shaping of the agricultural operation, in these words: "An agriculture fulfils its essential nature, in the best sense of the word, when it can be grasped as a kind of individuality unto itself, a truly self-contained individuality — and every agriculture ought really to approach — it cannot be fully achieved, but it ought to approach — this condition of being a self-contained individuality."^[76] Further it is said: "These things cannot be carried through with such strictness, but one must nonetheless have a concept of the necessary self-containedness of an agricultural operation […]."^[77]

These statements appeal to individual powers of judgment. Out of a striving cast of mind, the person active in agriculture must endeavour to work out in concepts a thought-picture of the essential nature of the human being as microcosm. This thought-picture becomes the key to an understanding of the macrocosm and, concretely, to an understanding of a portion of it: the agricultural operation. It furnishes the ideas according to which this macrocosmic portion can be shaped into a self-contained whole, into an organism — into the body of "a kind of farm individuality." The ideational foundation for this takes form when the sense-perceptible and natural-scientific facts are raised in thought into the meaning-giving context of the findings of supersensible anthroposophical spiritual research. It is the thinking-pictorial grasp of this context of meaning that is at issue. Within it rests the germ of a new becoming of agriculture. This becoming unfolds under the "idea-sun" of the human spirit growing aware of itself; it is this spirit that guides the active hand toward meaning-filled work.

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The organism — with centre and periphery — as the foundational formative principle in agriculture had grown, since the seventh century of the Christian era, out of the naturally given biotopes, the "organisms in natural growth." It bore an altogether individual character from place to place. It was an instinctively inspired growing out of the Christianised folk-peoples. With their fading in the course of the Age of the Consciousness Soul, the spiritually impelling force faded with them. The agricultural science of the twentieth century did indeed recognise the meaningful interplay of the farm's branches into a whole and called it the farm organism. What the "essential nature" of this whole might be was not enquired into. The concept was too enfeebled to arrest the cultural decline of agriculture. Even the ecological movement arising since the seventies, and with it ecological farming, could not call the concept of the farm organism back to new life. A key to the understanding of the organism can only be sought in the being-like agent that brings it to appearance in bodily self-containedness and lives itself forth within this self-containedness. In the animal this agent is the animal soul; in the human being, the spirit-soul. The animal soul is body-bound; the spirit-soul of the human being has the power, through the three soul-activities of thinking, feeling and willing, to raise itself more and more out of this boundness, to free itself from it. With this there grows in it the capacity to become conscious of itself, to grasp itself in self-knowledge as a spiritually creative being, as the self-realising I. In the I the human being, as microcosm, bears the spirit-germ within himself. Through this he can not only know himself and the essential nature of his bodily organism, but can know himself in this cognition as standing in connection with what is active supersensibly in nature and cosmos as essential being.

On the path of the schooling of the spirit-soul, this germ can unfold into soul organs. As the sense organs open themselves to the world given through the senses, so can these soul organs disclose the spiritually supersensible reality to perception. Out of the I awakening in self-consciousness, the human being in the Age of the Consciousness Soul can again become consciously aware, in an ascending movement, of his spiritual origin — the very origin from which, in a descending movement, he had released himself along the path of self-conscious becoming. What once accompanied the descent from the Mysteries as teachings of wisdom, but then since the

Auf dem Wege der Schulung der Geistseele kann sich dieser Keim zu Seelenorganen entfalten. Wie die Sinnesorgane sich der sinnlich gegebenen Welt öffnen, so können diese Seelenorgane die geistig-übersinnliche Wirklichkeit der Wahrnehmung erschließen. Aus dem im Selbstbewusstsein erwachenden Ich kann der Mensch im Zeitalter der Bewusstseinsseele wieder seines geistigen Ursprungs, aufsteigend, bewusst werden, aus dem er herabsteigend sich auf dem Weg der Selbstbewusstwerdung gelöst hat. Was einst aus den Mysterien an Weisheitslehren den Herabstieg begleitete, dann aber seit der

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What had accompanied the descent from the Mysteries as teachings of wisdom, but had then gradually been extinguished since the Turning Point of Time, can henceforth be newly won, in a consciously ascending movement, through anthroposophical spiritual science, accessible to every human being. The spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner yields results that, in all fields of human activity — whether in the scientific, artistic, religious, medical, pedagogical, social sphere, and so also in the field of agriculture — point in germinal form to new, old-transforming paths of action.

If one wishes to orient oneself to the idea-connections that can help agriculture, out of what has become, toward new becoming in the future, then the methodical path is clearly marked out: in order to reach a deeper understanding of the essential reality of the organism-idea and the individuality-idea, one must necessarily take as the starting point the human being — the microcosm. From spiritual research there emerges, in bodily-physical and spiritual-soul respects, in broad outline, the following (Figure 5, p. 90):^[78]

In beholding the human form, one is first struck by the polarity of head and limbs: the head as a largely self-contained spherical form, the limbs radiating outward and reaching into the world. Morphologically, the principle of form governs the head-region; and polar to this, physiologically, the principle of substance governs: the metabolic-limb region.

The encasing of the head consists predominantly of the hard, heavily mineralised cranial bones. These enclose the cranial cavity, which is filled by the cerebrospinal fluid — a water-clear, cell-free and protein-free liquid — and, floating within it, by the brain itself. Beyond this, the sense organs serving waking consciousness are concentrated in the head. In them, as in the head as a whole, life recedes far behind the prevailing rule of the physical. This is shown impressively in the anatomical structure of the eye — with, among other things, the light-refracting lens — or of the ear, with its tympanic membrane, the chain of ossicles, and the bony labyrinth. The head pole stands closer to what is purely physical, to death, than to life. Morphologically, the head is an image of congealed life processes. Even the brain, in its physiological activity as the organ that produces consciousness, is quietly traversed by processes of dying. Nerve and brain are, after injury, no longer capable of regeneration after a short time. The process that governs them is of a breakdown nature. Of this speaks the high respiratory activity of the brain and the necessity of intensive oxygen supply through the blood. The

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The breakdown activity leads physically to lifeless substance (CO₂) and spiritually, in the mirroring of a life process — namely the activity of thinking — to the becoming-conscious of thoughts. The head is the pole of rest and the bearer of waking consciousness, which connects the human being with the world in a spiritual way.

How profoundly the human being carries within his head the mineral-dead that has fallen out of life is shown also by the appearance of brain sand, predominantly in the pineal gland (*epiphysis*). These are lemon-yellow little stones consisting of calcium and magnesium crystals. Rudolf Steiner observes on this: "Every human being must have a little brain sand within him" — but not as a permanent deposit; rather: "It must arise, the brain sand, and it must be dissolved again and again."^[79] This process of the formation of the crystals and their repeated dissolution Rudolf Steiner describes as the foundation of I-consciousness: "If we were unable to dissolve ourselves, we would not be able to think, we would not arrive at I-consciousness. In this dissolving consists what we call our I-consciousness."^[80] In the head, the activity of thinking fulfils itself.

Figure 5: The essential relationship between the human being and the farm individuality. The threefoldness of both in vertical orientation: Agriculture is the human being stood on his head.

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The brain does not bring to everyday consciousness this activity itself, but only its image — the thought.

The form pole of the head, centred in the brain, differentiates itself throughout the whole bodily organism into the nervous system. In the upper human being it serves conscious perception; in the lower, it mediates the spirit-soul activity into the vegetative life processes.

The form pole stands in polar opposition to the substance pole. This encompasses, below the diaphragm, the world of the metabolic organs and the limbs. Soul activity reaches there into the life processes, directing the transformations of substance, mobilising the forces which the will can then draw upon in order to set the limbs — and bodily activity as a whole — into motion and keep them there. All organic processes underlying the unfolding of will, all processes of breakdown, transformation and build-up, fulfil themselves in deep unconsciousness, in a sleep-consciousness. They run partly in counter-directions simultaneously, partly in flowing, streaming temporal succession. Over against the strict, self-contained ordering of the nerve-sense system, the metabolic pole is governed by a constant change and flux; limbs included, everything is in motion; nothing remains the same for a single moment. Just as the soul connects itself with the world spiritually through the senses in the head pole — in sensations and in thoughts — so it enters into relationship with its surroundings physically through nutrition and through the activity of the limbs.

The essential revelation of will is movement: whether space-seizing in the limbs, processual in metabolism, in growth and regeneration, in the streaming blood, or quietly rising into consciousness in breathing — and finally in the activity of thinking.

The processes holding sway in the metabolic-limb pole likewise permeate, in corresponding metamorphosis, the whole body — in the head, for instance, in the secretions of the salivary glands and mucous membranes, or in the chewing activity of the articulately-set lower jaw.

The polarity of the head system and the metabolic-limb system finds its equilibration in the organ system that inserts itself between them: the two rhythmically breathing lung-lobes, the rhythmically pulsating heart, and the diaphragm. In its movements the latter follows the breathing rhythm passively — but can also support it through its own active engagement. Morphologically, the rhythmic middle expresses itself in the succession of the ribs, which close off the thorax upward toward the head, while opening and widening it downward toward the abdominal cavity spanned by the diaphragm. Physiologically, the blood streams from and to the heart through the whole body and

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unites both poles into a higher unity. In the rhythmic middle the human being experiences himself in feeling; feeling-dreaming, he sinks into the sphere of unconsciousness, into the will; feeling-waking, he reaches upward into the region of thinking. In feeling, the human being experiences himself in the most pronounced sense as this and only this particular spirit-soul. Rhythm is the sounding body of feeling. It swings back and forth between the repose of the head and the movement of the limbs. It unites rest and movement and is both at once. Into the rhythmic middle there descends from above the clarity of thought into the depths — and from below, striving upward out of the darkness of the will, answers the force of initiative.

In his uprightness and threefold bodily nature, the human being stands in the world as an individuality filled with essential being. In the consonance of his thinking and willing within feeling, he experiences himself in the process of becoming self-conscious; he finds himself on the path toward free self-determination. Out of this experience there lights up within him the reality of being of the idea of development — this calls for elaboration:

Once the principle of development lived instinctively, dreaming, hidden in the sources of primordial wisdom, as an effective force of spiritual guidance within humanity. In the advancing awakening to self-consciousness, this inheritance faded. Very young still — first in the time of German Idealism, in the researches of a Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), and comprehensively in anthroposophical spiritual science — the principle of development emerges in a new way within thinking. Related to the threefoldness of the human soul faculties, we experience this today in thinking above all as a forward-looking idea, in feeling as a joyfully stirring impulse, and in willing as a spirit-borne force of initiative. On the paths of this threefoldness the human being grasps himself, in spiritual fulfilment of his being, as the I — and makes himself the initiator and bearer of development into the future. In his striving toward freedom he lives forth the principle of development.

Through the becoming-conscious of the principle of development, the human being passes from creature to creator. And so the question arises: Is he henceforth called to implant the idea of development into the world that has come into being, out of free willing? Or can this creative power refer only to his own development and to human development? Must he leave all else behind and condemn it to mere use and exploitation — namely plants, animals, the earth as a whole, which had and has so deep a share in his own development? The awakening to ecological consciousness generally reaches only so far as to want to preserve the accomplished work of creation as it has become,

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and even wanting to keep the human being as destroyer of this work of creation out of nature altogether. But this restriction means a standstill of development. Only in connection with the advancing development of the human being, and only through him as initiator, can what has become of the world be transformed into a new becoming. Should the human being of the present — whose spirit of invention holds in his hands, with atomic fission, all means to bring the manifold "overkill" upon life on earth — not also be capable, in an expansion of himself, of implanting the principle of development into the earth congealed into a work, into nature? How can he make the force of becoming that he carries within him fruitful for new processes of becoming that lead nature out of its having-become? This latter question stands at the beginning of an agricultural culture of the future. It answers itself first with Rudolf Steiner's methodological indication:^[81] "To proceed from the human being" and to grasp a farm, if it is to "fulfil its being," as "a kind of individuality."

Let us take our way out onto a field and seek, in inner stillness, to bring before ourselves all the activity accessible to feeling and thinking perception — what plays out above the earth in light, air and warmth, and below the earth in the darkness of the moisture-filled, crystalline depths, and between them in the skin of the enlivened soil — then there reveals itself to the feeling senses the deep kinship with the threefold bodily nature of the human being (Figure 5, p. 90).

Beneath the earth we meet the hard, solid world of rock that has fallen out of life and is therefore dead, and likewise the water element of the depths. The solid element of the earth rests in stillness, preserving its crystalline structure — which in summer finds itself more exposed to the weathering processes toward the earth's surface, while in winter it lives itself forth in its pure crystal nature under the crystal-forming formative forces of the sphere of the fixed stars — the Greeks called this the "crystal heaven."^[82] Just as the brain is the consciousness-making mirror of concealed thinking activity, so is the crystal nature of the silica-related rocks — quartz, silicates — which, like sense organs, reflect back in indirect working the crystal-forming formative forces of the most distant cosmic periphery, as well as the forces of the planets remote from the sun: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. In polar fashion this holds for limestone and the limestone-related rocks, which in their affinity to the planetary,

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in particular to the working of the planets near the sun — Moon, Venus, Mercury — drawing their forces into themselves.^[83] Mediating within this polarity stand the clay minerals, which in their way of working — unusual for the mineral kingdom of the earth — conduct both force-qualities through the roots to the growth and form-building of the plant. Thus in what extends beneath the soil into the depths we behold the head pole of this "farm individuality" as Rudolf Steiner named it.

When we try to think the indications of spiritual science into connection with the scientifically graspable facts of the mineral subsoil, a further phenomenon points to the fact that the head pole of the "farm individuality" is to be found beneath the earth. Just as in the pineal gland the formation and dissolution of crystals arises as the physical basis of I-consciousness, so in the weathering zone of the soil the finest hexagonal crystal-platelets form themselves. They crystallize out of the amorphous colloids of aluminium hydroxide and silica into what are called "secondary clay minerals." Yet these can also dissolve themselves again into the colloidal state.^[84]

Polar to the head pole beneath the earth, the "belly"^[85] of the farm individuality opens out above the earth. Here, under the direct working of the cosmos, life arises — as it were in the sense of a kind of "outer digestion" of light, warmth, air and watery vapours. Here everything coming into being steps into outer appearance in form and colour, and everything that passes away draws appearance back again into the invisible inner world. Everything is in motion — the sprouting plant, the freely moving animal, the active human being; the clouds draw past, the vapours rise, the rain falls, the wind moves every single leaf, surges through the grain, the lightning flashes and splits the oak, the thunder rolls, the wandering stars trace their paths and the sun brings day and night over the earth. Here, at the metabolic pole of the farm individuality, everything is subject to ceaseless transformation. While beneath the earth the spiritually living, released from the material, pervades the earth as inward stirring — as thoughts pervade the head —^[86] so above the earth this life shapes itself in form and colour within the material. The

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only supersensibly graspable life finally dies into form and brings itself forth anew in the seed through this dying.

Between the poles of Below and Above there stretches, spread out horizontally, a paper-thin skin — the soil, forming the germinal middle. This middle has in its processes no independence, as does the rhythmic system of the human being. One cannot therefore say that the soil has a lung, a heart. In this connection it is worth noting that the earth's soil has its tides just as water does, rising and falling on average by 80 cm each day in Central Europe.^[87] And yet the soil breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide, as do animal and human being. Only this breathing does not come about through an inwardly autonomous impulse but is the result of the exogenous interworking of the forces of the poles of Below and Above within the soil. In the dynamics of the clay minerals, a kind of heart-function can be discerned. But this too is stimulated from without and follows a rhythm impulsed by the sun, which regulates and harmonises the processes of dissolution and binding of substances in the soil according to the seasons. From this one can begin to understand why Rudolf Steiner characterized the soil as the "diaphragm" of the individuality in question here.^[88] This diaphragm-skin mirrors in its functions the interplay of the elements of earth, water, air and warmth in the rhythms of the solar year. The cultivated soil is therefore characterized by having received, through centuries of arable and horticultural measures — above all through manuring with cattle dung — beyond its "natural endowment," the disposition toward developing an independent rhythmic organ: the disposition toward the equilibrating and developable "middle."

In the profile-structure of this diaphragm organ of the middle — the soil — the threefold verticality of the farm individuality repeats itself in miniature. We find in the topsoil, the so-called A-horizon, a darker, airily structured, humus-bearing layer permeated with plant residues — a precipitate of the metabolic activity above the soil, which breathes into it through bacterial and other transformations a kind of life of its own. Polar to this enlivened layer, we find in the subsoil the exposed, unweathered, dead rock — the head pole reaching up into the soil from below, the C-horizon. At its boundary the rock exposes itself to the

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degrading, crystal-structure-dissolving weathering forces. Between the A- and C-horizons, the weathering or B-horizon articulates itself, in which primary (through weathering) and secondary (through new crystallisation) clay formation takes place. The clay-enriched B-horizon constitutes the true middle member in the soil. Its dynamics mirror the rhythms of the course of the year: downward, toward the head side, it holds the enlivened atmospheric water and with it the substances dissolved in it against gravity; upward, it enters into connections with the humus (clay-humus complex) and provides for the processual continuity in the building up of soil fertility.

The diaphragm organ of the soil seems, measured against the dimensions of the heights extending above it and the depths concealing themselves from view below, to be sheer nothingness. And yet it is everything! From it springs the higher plant nature that forms the foundation of life for the existence of animal and man on earth. It is the root of the plant that strives vertically downward in the direction of the earth's centre, and it is the shoot that strives vertically upward toward the sun from the vegetative point of the seedling in rhythmic leaf sequence — and, encompassed by the metabolic activity in light, air and warmth, prepares in blossom, fruit and seed formation the foodstuffs for animal and man in living composition. In the flowering plant and the tree-nature, the agricultural individuality creates for itself, in a nature-way and graspable only in spirit, an image. The spiritual staff that supersensibly connects the depths of the earth with the heights of the sun, that unites in threefold disposition the forces of heaviness and lightness into verticality, embodies itself imagewise each year in the sprouting and shooting of the plants.

The plants, and with them the agricultural individuality, stand in relation to the threefoldness of the human being on their head. How deeply a kinship-relation to man and animal exists here becomes apparent in the following: The root feels its way, like a sense organ of the plant, into the substances of the earth's depths. When the fructifying process of the plant shifts all the way down into the root — as in the carrot, for example — the root thickens and colours itself into a luminous reddish-yellow, and a delicate sweetness and aromatic quality permeates its fine tissue. A foodstuff is formed that nourishes the head, the nerve-sense organisation as a whole, in an excellent way (Figure 5, p. 90). When, conversely, the plant fruits in connection with seed formation high above the earth — as is the case with the cereals, for example — then as a foodstuff there arises

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a substance-and-force composition that nourishes the metabolic-limb organisation in man and animal. Everything that grows between these poles in stem and leaf into food-crop — such as kohlrabi (stem), Brussels sprouts (bud), or leafy vegetables (lettuce, cabbage, spinach, etc.) — nourishes and strengthens the rhythmic middle. In biodynamic farming it is common practice to follow this rule: to stimulate sense activity in calves and give them a gleaming coat, the feed carrot helps; for cows, the fodder beet; conversely, to stimulate their metabolic activity, to make them lively and eager to move, feeding with linseed is called for; for the unfolding of strength in horses it is "the oat that stings." Everything that in the vegetative realm develops as stem and leaf — in herbs, grass, clover, etc. — is the basic fodder for the cow living in strict rhythm, giving milk.^[89]

The idea of the farm individuality, graspable in spirit and real in spirit, opens to the understanding gaze the gates into all domains of agriculture; it gathers them into organs of a being-like whole — this will be illustrated by way of example in the chapter on the question of manuring. This requires a change of mind from the ground up. The dual relationship of man and world in the sciences, which methodically excludes the spiritual-soul of the knowing and morally acting human being, can be overcome. This is all the more the case when one allows this great nexus of ideas, derived from the human being, to become deed in thinking. In the doing, its fruitfulness proves itself, and through this fruitfulness, its truth.

The Fourfold Nature of the Human Being and the Self-Containedness of the Farm Organism

The bodily organism of man gathers within itself, in microcosmic concentration, all that spreads macrocosmically as the world of the kingdoms of nature. There exists here a close relationship of kinship, which reveals itself when one sets the threefoldness of nature — the kingdom of the inorganic-physical, that of the living plant world, and that of the ensouled animal world — in relation to the bodily organisation of man. Thus in the human body all the substances, forces and laws are active that the inorganic-dead mineral kingdom

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The trabecular structure in the inner architecture of the femur at the transition to the angled hip joint is such that a minimum of mineral substance (predominantly calcium phosphate) achieves a maximum of structural support. Similar principles govern the supportive tissues, the construction of the skeleton as a whole. The entire body — in the architecture and function of all its organs, in their solid supportive tissues, in their fluid and warmth household — is pervaded and interwoven throughout by a purely physical, wisdom-filled lawfulness. This lawfulness, bounded within the bodily form, constitutes the physical body: the most evolutively perfected member of the human being.^[90] It finds its most incisive expression in the structure and function of the sense system. The being of the physical body is supersensible and reveals itself in everything visible (Figure 6).

What appears in the mineral kingdom, then, separately as "dead" nature — in purely physical organisation — weaves itself functionally together with the higher members of the human being in the plant, the animal, and the human being. One such member is first of all the etheric, life, or time body, which endows the world of plants with life through the etheric forces working in from all sides out of the cosmos. It is in itself streaming life, which — differing according to plant species — demarcates itself supersensibly into a "body," specifically appropriating for itself the substances of the earth against the force of gravity, as well as

Was also im Mineralreich gesondert als «tote» Natur, in rein physischer Organisation erscheint, verwebt sich in Pflanze, Tier und Mensch funktionell mit den höheren Wesensgliedern. Ein solches ist zunächst der Äther-, Lebens- oder Zeitleib, der die Welt der Pflanzen durch die allseitig aus dem Kosmos hereinwirkenden Ätherkräfte mit Leben begabt. Er ist in sich strömendes Leben, das sich je nach Pflanzenart übersinnlich in einen «Leib» abgrenzt, sich je spezifisch die Stoffe der Erde entgegen der Schwere sowie

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whose forces it appropriates and out of which it builds up the corresponding physical body. As architect of the physical, the life body does not come to expression as such, but rather in the forms of the plant. This is why, for Goethe, form and its metamorphosis — for example in the leaf sequence — was the starting point of his research into the being of the living.

Everything that is spread out in the plant kingdom as the essential nature of the living is found, united at a higher level, in the life body of the human being, and reveals itself in the streaming bodily fluids: the blood, the lymph, and the secretions of the glandular system that regulate all life processes (Figure 6). The etheric body is the source of health. Illnesses have their origin in the soul. For their healing, the etheric body finds support in that which conforms to its essential nature in each specific way — and that is the world of medicinal plants. Paracelsus says, in effect: there is no illness that could not be healed by some "herb" to be found in the plant kingdom.^[91]

Just as the human being carries within himself — transformed to a higher level — the mineral and plant kingdoms in his bodily constitution, so too is he related, in his third member of the being, the soul or astral body, to the soul-nature spread out in the animal kingdom (Figure 6). The animal organisation is completed with the animal soul, which permeates the physical and life bodies. This soul-member has passed over into the animal body in form and function. In this way each animal species is articulated, morphologically and physiologically, into a highly differentiated inside and outside, and possesses an equally species-specific limb system through which the animal can move freely in those elements that have predominantly brought about its formation. Above all, however, the animal soul expresses itself in the "how and what" of the activities that the animal carries out, bound to its body, within its living space — so the worm in the earth, the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the insect in warmth. It was on account of this soul-nature of the animal, bound into its organ activity, that Goethe could say: "The animal is instructed by its organs. The human being instructs his and masters them."^[92] The soul or astral body is the source of consciousness; its physical foundation is the nervous and sense organisation.

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In the human being too, a part of the soul-nature lives submerged in the life processes — the drives, desires and passions, the feelings of hunger and thirst, and so forth. In its body-free part, the soul lives within itself and becomes aware of its purely soul-borne experience: what it perceives as true, beautiful and good, and likewise what it experiences as the power of aberration toward evil. It is through this soul-member, freeing itself from the body, that the human being lifts himself out of bondage to nature.

In conscious soul-life the human being feels himself permeated by something that reveals itself to him only on the path of self-knowledge as his own most essential being, as his I (Figure 6, p. 98). The physical foundation of the I's working in the body — the I-organisation — is the blood. "Blood is the central organ of the organism."^[93] It is this I-hood of the human being, resting within itself, that has the power and force to irradiate, transform and individualize the three members of the being described above. It imprints the I-organisation upon the soul body, life body and physical body. In this I-activity of transforming and assimilating the members of the being toward the height of his spirit being lies the source of all future development of the human being and the earth.

As the threefoldness does, so too does the fourfoldness lead to a grasp of the concept of individuality. In the I-endowment of the human being this concept is fulfilled. The concept of the organism, however — of being closed within itself — is already fulfilled in the animal kingdom, but not in the plant, which is endowed with life alone. The plant would present itself as a complete organism only if one were to add in thought, to the shoot, the earth in which it is rooted, and to leaf and blossom, the cosmic periphery into which it unfolds.

The concept of the organism is fulfilled when one attempts to think the working-together of the three members of the being — physical body, life or etheric body, soul or astral body — as a whole. What supersensible cognition alone opens to thinking as reality, the contemplation of the animal can teach. Only with the endowment of an astral body — that is, of a soul-nature penetrating earthly substance, as is the case in all animal life — does an outside and inside come into being: "In the astral body, the animal form arises outwardly as total form and inwardly as the forming of the organs [...] When this forming is carried to its conclusion, the animal nature takes shape."^[94]

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With this characterization, the key is given to a deepened, imaginatively conceptual elaboration of the concept of the organism — or of "closedness." With an eye to agriculture, this concept opens the possibility of allowing an agricultural operation to arise anew out of the force of the consciousness soul and in conscious metamorphosis of the past. Were one to stop there, it would be only a — though conscious — repetition of what once was the peripheral shaping-through of farm and village bounds. But how does it stand with the metamorphosis of the former spiritual centre, the church? This centre shifts, in the course of the becoming self-aware of the human being, into the human being himself. He must learn, through the inner empowerment of his I-individuality, to awaken self-creatively the moral impulses that guide him in his work so that the macrocosmically given site-specificity of the farm develops essentially into the "farm individuality." Just as the threefold nature of the human being directs the gaze toward the vertical articulation of the farm, toward the Earth-Sun axis, so does the fourfoldness direct it toward the spatially horizontal orientation of the village bounds — the body of this individuality. The former opens the spiritual conception of the farm individuality; the latter, the paths of practice, of its realization, of the fulfilment of its essential being.

The Image of the Fourfoldness of the Farm Individuality

The Physical Organisation

From its early medieval origins, the village bounds of a village or of an individual farm in scattered settlement formed an enclosed areal unit. It is the site at which the workings of forces and substances of cosmos and earth interact with one another in each case specifically, and bring themselves to appearance in the image of cultivated nature.

The physical foundation is formed by the relational nexus of the "elements" — earth, water, air and warmth — transforming itself in the rhythms of the course of the year (Figure 7, p. 102).

The earthy-solid, crystalline foundation of the village bounds is built up from the rock formations of the earth's crust. These emerge at the boundary to the airy periphery in a many-formed relief — valleys and heights, exposures

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Figure 7: The physical organisation or the physical body of the agricultural organism.

and orientations toward the compass points, and so on — which in turn modifies the rhythmic interplay of the four elements. The surface form of any given village bounds speaks in this way of its earth and landscape history. Through weathering — that is, the working of the elements water, air and warmth upon the element of the earthy-solid — the mineral framework of the soil comes into being, composed, depending on the parent rock, of finer or coarser grain from quartz-silica and its silicate kindred, from lime and its lime-kindred, and from clays. This purely mineral substance composition proves the more significant for soil fertility the more balanced and deep-reaching it is in its formation.

The element of water permeates the soil in manifold ways. In part it appears in colloidal form bound to the finest clay minerals, in part as hydration sheaths around soil particles, in part as pore water, in part as seepage and groundwater. Loosed from the earth element it reveals its coherent, inwardly mobile nature in the raindrop, in flowing watercourses, ponds and lakes. By way of evaporation it becomes at last one with the

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air element, forms itself in mist into the finest droplets, in clouds into coarser ones, releases itself finally in streaming rain from the airy periphery, to unite once more with the earth element. Every farm may count itself fortunate if the village bounds border on a watercourse or lake, or are traversed by a brook — fed perhaps by a spring — or if it harbours a wetland biotope with a high water table or a pond. As with the relief, so too with the water balance: it is this, according to the quantity and distribution of precipitation through the course of the year, that lends the farm or village bounds an unmistakably individual character.

The element of air rests now still over the village bounds, now sweeps gently, now stormily across the land. Just as the precipitation does, so do the air currents in wind and weather, reaching across lands and seas, yet at every earthly place where obstacles bar the way — be it a ridge of hills, be it trees, hedges and the like — become eddied, moderated, or brought to rest altogether. Above all the near-ground air layer persists longer under the plant cover and stands in constant exchange with the soil air that dwells for shorter or longer periods in the cracks and pores of the living topsoil. The purely physical, inorganically lifeless character of the air element shows itself in its substance composition. The chief constituents, oxygen and nitrogen — in living things highly active substances — enter in the outside air only into compounds with themselves and are therefore in the highest degree sluggish in their reactions. The air element behaves otherwise in the soil. There it enters into relationship with the elements of earth and water, enlivens itself to its full reactive force, entering into new compounds. Another mode of appearance of air in motion is the pressure it exerts when, in wind and storm, it drives water into waves, makes the grain undulate, sets the leaves of the poplar trembling, and brings whole forests down.

Warmth appears as element most purely as radiant warmth. In general, however, it reveals itself indirectly in and through the elements earth, water and air. It lends to each its own particular dynamic in the processual activity of becoming. Only through warmth do their respective specific physical properties reveal themselves. Its absence in winter lets the soil freeze, congeal into the element of the earthy-solid; in the heat of summer it gains the upper hand together with the air; in spring it permeates its sister elements, wakes their reciprocal dynamic, enlivens the soils and renders them receptive to the sowings; in autumn likewise, but then it withdraws against winter from this interweaving, and each of the elements enters into its separate being. Depending on exposure

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Through warmth, force-relationships arise between the elements. This physical-inorganic web of relationships shifts from place to place. The more, however, the organism principle comes into its own in the shaping of the farm through an artful approach, the more the elemental activity closes itself into an individual whole. There arises a composition, suited to the type of the site, of the physical laws, forces and substances working in the four elements. This composition may be called the physical organisation of the "farm individuality," analogous to the "physical body" of the human being. This physical organisation of the farm or village precincts is of a supersensible essential nature. It appears sense-perceptibly in the world of substance congealed into the form of a site, and as such is evolutively given out of the past. It delivers the facts which the farmer must know — indeed, with which he must, in respect of a competent practice, have grown together — regarding the geological structure, the soil types, the hydrogeological as well as the small- and large-scale climatic conditions. The possibilities of optimising, in this given world of facts, the interplay of the four elements in favour of the cultivation of crops are limited to interventions in the outermost skin of the earth's crust, in the soils — the "diaphragm organ" between the "heights" and the "depths" of the landscape. What is involved here is the exercise of the art of soil cultivation, irrigation and drainage, land reclamation, terracing, dyking, and wind protection, and so forth.

Durch die Wärme entstehen Kräftebeziehungen zwischen den Elementen. Dieses physisch-anorganische Beziehungsgefüge wechselt von Ort zu Ort. Je mehr aber in der Hofgestaltung in kunstvoller Annäherung das Organismusprinzip zur Geltung kommt, desto mehr schließt sich das elementarische Geschehen zu einem individuellen Ganzen zusammen. Es entsteht eine dem Typus des Standorts gemäße Komposition der in den vier Elementen wirksamen physischen Gesetze, Kräfte und Substanzen. Diese Komposition kann die physische Organisation der «landwirtschaftlichen Individualität» genannt werden, analog dem «physischen Leib» des Menschen. Diese physische Organisation der Hof- oder Dorfgemarkung ist von übersinnlicher Wesensart. Sie tritt sinnlich in der in die Form geronnenen Stoffeswelt eines Standortes in Erscheinung und ist als solche evolutiv aus der Vergangenheit vorgegeben. Sie liefert die Tatsachen, welche der Landwirt hinsichtlich des geologischen Aufbaus, der Bodentypen, der hydrogeologischen sowie klein- und großklimatischen Verhältnisse kennen, ja mehr noch, mit welchen er hinsichtlich einer fachgerechten Praxis verwachsen sein muss. Die Möglichkeiten, in dieser vorgegebenen Tatsachenwelt das Zusammenspiel der vier Elemente zugunsten des Anbaus der Kulturen zu optimieren, beschränken sich auf Eingriffe in die äußerste Haut der Erdkruste, auf die Böden, das «Zwerchfellorgan» zwischen den «Höhen» und den «Tiefen» der Landschaft. Es handelt sich dabei um die Ausübung der Kunst der Bodenbearbeitung, Be- und Entwässerung, Trockenlegung, Terrassierung, Eindeichung sowie des Windschutzes etc.

The Life Organisation

Like plant, animal and human being, the agricultural organism — which one may understand as the body of the "farm individuality" — also has a life organisation, an "etheric body or life body," which incorporates into itself a "physical body" suited to its essential nature (Fig. 8, p. 106). One is inclined to equate this life body with the sum of the life that sprouts forth year by year in plant growth. But where does this life — which appears in the forms of plants — remain when the plants shed their leaves in autumn or die back altogether? One might answer: the life withdraws into the seed, into the humus, or into the cambium. Yet these too are only forms of appearance of the living

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in the stream of arising and passing away. Life itself is supersensible. The organisation of the farm's etheric formative forces passes through changing states of its sense-perceptible appearance in the rhythm of the solar year. From autumn through winter it lives withdrawn into the earth in purely spiritual activity, "in the head pole of the farm individuality." In the sprouting and ripening of plants from spring through summer it lifts itself upward into the "belly of the farm individuality." It impresses itself upon the life of every plant form taking shape, and upon its substance compositions in root, stem, leaf and blossom, and dissolves again when the plants die back toward autumn.

The etheric body or life body of the farm individuality reveals itself in the ascending year in the sum of life's manifestations; it recedes again in the descending year and is then perceptible only to the opened eye of spirit. The discontinuity is only an apparent one.

All that lives stands in its very being in relationship to the elements. The more balanced earth, water, air and warmth are in their relation to one another, the more manifoldly can life bring itself to appearance. This fact speaks itself out clearly in the contrast between tropical rainforest and sandy desert. In the former case the diversity of plant species, compressed into the smallest space, reaches a maximum — in the tropical primeval forest of Brazil, for instance, over a hundred tree species per hectare — while in the latter, sparse or no plant growth comes forth at all.

Underlying all that lives is a life organisation, composed of a multiplicity of formative forces that ray in with the light of the sun. Within it as a wholeness, the life processes accomplish themselves in a mutually furthering interplay; they are the originators and bearers of health. The self-regulation and sustainability of a natural biotope bears witness to this. The life organisation of a farm organism is therefore the healthier, the more manysidedly it is formed through according to the site conditions. To bring about this condition of enduring health is the ongoing cultural task of the human being. Upon it depends the constellation of formative forces of the living, according to which the cultivated plant is able to develop itself true to its type. The nutritive value of food crops and the healing force of medicinal herbs — as well as the quality of the humus, and of soil fertility altogether — rest upon this farm-related constellation of formative forces. Every plant species thus contributes to the fact that, out of the fullness of the cosmic peripheral forces, a life organisation proper to the farm or village organism can take form — one that stands toward the physical organisation as its formative architect

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Figure 8: The life organisation, or life body, of the agricultural organism.

is superordinate to it. It is the bearer of the life-activity that becomes perceptible image in the forms of plants, yet lives itself forth supersensibly as a «time-body, or body of formative forces» working effectually in time. In all that lives, it is the bearer of development. It is toward this time-body-activity that the term «biodynamic» wishes to point.

Nature organizes itself in diversity according to the necessity of its own lawfulness, in its own way; in the agricultural organism, this task falls to the artistry of the human being. In the conscious shaping-forth of the etheric organisation of a farm or village precinct, the farmer becomes — as was once the case in the old peasant culture — the creator of the cultural landscape in a new way. Through the cultivation of cultivated plants he destroys the grown wild nature, yet he builds it up anew as cultivated nature. While on the physical level his formative force is confined within narrow limits, in the shaping-forth of the life organisation of the farm organism he is challenged to the highest artistry. He must seek to overcome the contradiction of one-sidedness in cultivation and manysidedness as the principle of healthy

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vitality through the means of art. He must, out of the ideal experience of the total context of the farm organism, seize upon the measures that transform the natural biotope into a cultural biotope. In conscious new creation, the organism of agriculture must be re-sculpted, as if from a primordial cell, out of the devastated wastelands of monoculture. With regard to the artful shaping-through of the farm-individual life organisation, the following measures come into consideration (Figure 8, p. 106):

Crop Rotation in Arable Farming and Market Gardening:

The available arable land is divided in such a way that the various cereals, root crops, and fodder plants — in market gardening, the various vegetable species — which stand side by side on individual plots in any given year, are grown in succession on one and the same plot across the sequence of years. The art lies in arranging the individual field crops — according to whether they build humus or deplete it, whether they root shallowly or deeply, whether they are demanding of manure or less exacting — so that diseases are avoided, vigour of growth and fructification (nutritive value) are encouraged, and soil fertility is on the whole maintained or, better still, increased. Of great significance here is that seed stock be kept within the farm operation itself — that is, sourced from one's own seed-saving or plant-breeding work. The culture of arable farming works above all with the forces of the cosmos, which act on plant growth indirectly from below upward, through the earth — silica and lime, mediated through clay. This finds its particular expression in cereal cultivation, where, in comparison to wild grass, the whole plant — in stem, leaf, and seed — is pervaded by the process of fructification.^[95]

The Re-integration of Market Gardening into the Farm and Village Organism:

This is accomplished partly through the enrichment of the arable crop rotation by means of field vegetable cultivation, partly through the growing of fine vegetables, flowers, and herbs in an enclosed area, as well as through cultivation under glass. Here, close to the farmstead, is also the appropriate site for the beehive. The integration of a many-sided market garden provides for blossoming and fruiting from early spring through into late autumn. Supplemented by flowering strips within the arable land, the species diversity of the annual flora thus enriches itself to a high degree, reaching out to the very bounds of the village land.

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The Re-integration of Fruit Growing into the Farm and Village Organism:

Standard trees in the greatest possible variety of species have their place along field paths, field boundaries, on terraced slopes, or in orchards close to the farmstead. The beneficial effect of tree-fruit culture — enriching the landscape image through all the seasons — should permeate the whole farm and village precincts. Half-standard and low-growing intensive orchards should stand in a measured proportion to the other cultivated areas.

The Integration and Preservation of Meadows and Pastures:

Their place is in rainfall-rich areas, on slopes endangered by erosion, on only extensively usable, shallow grazings and dry sites — but above all wherever groundwater rises close to the surface: along both banks of streams and watercourses, in low-lying ground, at boggy hollows, or in fenland. The breaking up of permanent grassland — through drainage or the lowering of the water table, for maize cultivation — should be avoided wherever possible. Permanent grassland is resistant to flooding and, as a standing culture, acts through the long absorbing roots of the grasses to purify the groundwater flowing toward the watercourse, drawing from it the nitrates that originate in the more distant arable regions. Permanent grassland, by virtue of grazing and hay-cutting, remains perpetually in a vegetative state of growth. It therefore requires abundant water — or more precisely: the etheric formative forces that work through the element of water; water, that is, which is exposed to the working of forces of the metabolic pole of the farm individuality. This is the case when the water table stands near the surface (40 cm below ground level), or in the case of water meadows, or in irrigated cultivation on the slope.

The perfected form of the water meadow was still to be found, up until the middle of the twentieth century, in the upland regions of central Germany. The author was able to marvel at the last remnants of the so-called *Buckelwiesen* — raised ridged meadows — in the Rhön, shortly before the destruction of these artful formations. To lay them out, to «fertilise» them with clear water, to tend them, to mow them for hay, and to bring in the hay shouldered in large cloths — this was exclusively the most laborious hand-work. It was rewarded with up to five hay-cuts a year. From a millrace set higher up the valley slope, one earth mound was built beside the next down the slope, each with roof-like lateral flanks. Along the ridge of these mound-roofs, running at right angles from the mill-stream, ran a narrow trench — less than a spade's width — with zero gradient. At the time of irrigation, governed by the phases of the moon, the water flowed broadly over both sides of the trench edge, trickled

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quickly through the turf and gathered again in the eave-ditch between two mounds. This continued on and became the ridge of the following row of hill-roofs descending the valley — and so it went, step by step, down to the valley floor.

With this kind of irrigation art, the concern was not primarily with saturating the subsoil, but with the swiftly pearling movement of the water — usually poor in minerals and above all in nitrogen — through the turf. One may surmise that the water here fulfils a manuring effect. Through the uptake of oxygen by the moving, trickling water — oxygen as the bearer of life^[96] — the water appears to enliven the growth of grasses and herbs in such a way that on these mostly mineral-poor soils, peak yields were achieved, both in quality and in quantity.

The water meadows as a landscape-forming and landscape-enlivening element, in the form of the rückbau or *Buckelwiesen*, fell victim to the age of technology. This branch of what was once a high art of farming had no further continuation.

The planting of hedgerows, copses and tree islands:

Here the opportunity is given to assign a place in the village precincts — in hedgerows and copse islands — to all species of shrub and tree native to the surrounding landscape, and in this way to create sheltered areas with their own microclimate in the open fieldscape, and to allow the village precincts themselves to become a harmoniously formative member of the cultural landscape. In open country, such plantings serve as a kind of substitute for forest. The greatest floristic and at the same time faunistic density in the cultural landscape is found at the woodland margins — the transitional and simultaneously interpenetrating zones between open field-and-meadow land and forest. Here, arranged in tiers one above the other, a species-rich flora of grasses and herbs builds itself up, then the lower and higher growing shrub-growth, and finally the tall, wide-spreading tree crowns. The same structure and the same ecological function belong to the hedgerows. Toward two sides of the field boundary, they are, as it were, two woodland margins fastened together, grown into one another — as are the copses and tree islands too.

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The forest:

It must be seen together with agriculture as a single whole. Indeed, strictly speaking, it belongs to agriculture, as do all the functional members of the life organisation named above. The forest surrounds the farm and village precincts on many sides; it connects and networks them. Within the cultural landscapes, the forest fulfils a superordinate, enlivening function. It also works to equalise the climate, and together with the farm and village precincts it preserves and stamps — across the ages — the character of the cultural landscape in its larger form.

The forest cannot be the object of mere silviculture, nor yet of mere nature conservation. Its use is, like that of every field precinct, a task of culture, one that fulfils itself in the shaping toward the "permanent forest",^[97] whose aim is a site-specific diversity of tree species. The permanent forest becomes a culture-forest only through continuous tending and use. Being left to nature in nature conservation reserves leads back into an anthropogenically conditioned wilderness through neglect.

Each of the life-organs named is already, in itself, a work of art that goes beyond the natural biotope. This holds all the more with regard to the composition of these life-members into the whole of the life organisation of the farm or village organism. All the workings of the sphere of the fixed stars, of the planets, of the sun, of the moon, and of the earth have impressed themselves upon it through the course of the year and flow into the "seed-state" of the "universal plant" — into the life-preserving humus. The Rosicrucian alchemists therefore called it the "universal seed of the earth" (mother-soil),^[98] in contrast to the "individual seed" which, formed by the individual plant, falls down upon the mother-soil. Humus carries the life of previous years — life that has become earthly — into the present. It can therefore also be addressed, structurally and substantively, as the "memory of the earth." One can say: in it, congealed into earthly-material form, lives the principle of the universal plant.

It is necessary to distinguish the living force-streams — those that constitute the life of the plants and that in their totality form their etheric or life body — from those that ray in as forces of a higher order from the astral world of the cosmos. These are forces that in the animal

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The soul body has been interiorized, leading to the experience of hunger and thirst, of pain-sensations and so forth. Upon the streaming life-processes of the plants these astral forces work from without — forming, shaping, configuring, damming. They form and dam the streaming life into the shape of the root differently than into the shapes of the stem, the leaf, the blossom. The formative forces unite with the streaming life and create for themselves an image in every manifest form of a plant species, modified through the site-specifically varying interplay of the forces of earth and cosmos. When one looks at the species diversity of the grasses and cereals, the herbaceous, perennial, shrubby, and arboreal life of a farm and their overall composition, there reveals itself in their sense-perceptible forms what works in concealment as formative-force-bearing streaming — living itself forth as the etheric organisation of the farm organism as a wholeness.

The Soul Organisation, or the Astral Body of the Agricultural Organism

From that same supersensible region from which radiate the forces that touch the plant, as it were, only from without — forming it in its growth and letting it die into form — there originates the soul or astral body of the animals, which embodies itself in the body of the animals and irradiates it from within as its soul. This soul element, revealing its being, delimits the animal outwardly in its gestalt and articulates it inwardly into the succession of its organs. The soul organisation of the animal stands over its life body, and this stands over its physical organisation (Figure 9, p. 115). As already mentioned, in every animal species a particular soul-quality is embodied — a different one in the worm than in the fish or bird or insect or in the sequence of the mammals. The animal soul creates for itself in the shaping of the body an image, and it expresses itself in what the animal does. A multiplicity of animals populates a site. It is the more numerous, the more many-sidedly the life organisation of the farm or village precincts has been configured throughout. Articulated into species, families, and genera, they form in their totality the fauna of the site and stand in the most manifold, wisdom-filled relationship to the four elements, to living nature, and to one another. One can regard the animal world of a farm in its appearance and behaviour as organs of the "soul or astral body" of the farm as a whole. This

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soul element that dwells within the animals derives from past evolutionary stages of the Earth.^[99]

The soul body of the farm or village precincts constitutes itself beyond this through astral forces that ray in from the present cosmos with the sunlight.^[100] These are what give form to the plants from without — compare the fine or broad leafing of plants grown in light or shade — what lets them ripen, what structures the build-up of substance, protein for example, and thereby conditions the nutritive value of food crops. How far the soul organisation configures itself in intensity depends essentially on the physical and life organisation — and on how far the precincts of a farm or village delimit themselves into a self-enclosed organism and articulate inwardly into organs.

To understand the highly differentiated contribution of the animal world to the formation of the soul organisation of the farm or village organism, two groups essentially different in nature must be treated at greater length: wild fauna and domestic animals (Figure 9, p. 115).

The Wild Animal Species — Organs of the Farm-and-Landscape Organism

The culture-creating achievement of agriculture was the transformation of wild nature into cultivated nature; it remains agriculture's ongoing task to provide for the care and further development of that cultivated nature. This step of transformation meant, among other things, either banishing the large wild animal world entirely from the landscapes — as with the predators: wolf, bear, lynx, as well as the ungulates such as aurochs, elk, bison, wild boar, and so on — and replacing them with domestic animals, or taking them under stewardship and care, as with noble game: red deer, roe deer, and reindeer, or small game: hare, fox, and the like. Wild-living mammals are shy of human beings and predominantly nocturnal. Their excellent sense faculties — smell, hearing, and sight — point to the alertness of a more conscious inner life. With their senses they plunge into the outer world, scenting, listening, watching — as, for example, noble game does when it steps out of the forest darkness into the open fieldscape to graze. The soul's instinctive life is stirred by these perceptions, and at the same time

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the soul element and becomes one with what is perceived. This relationship of an inside and outside reveals itself to intuitive beholding in the aesthetics of behaviour — in the fleeing roe deer, the hare doubling back on its tracks, or the proud stag that lifts its antlers in noble bearing into the airy periphery. With this bony scaffolding growing out of the frontal bone, the stag captures cosmic-astral forces that work formatively on its inner world of organs.^[101]

In wild-living animals, what constitutes their soul-nature has passed entirely into the formation of the body. This soul element lives itself forth in and through the body. And so the animals, guided by their instincts — that is, out of inner necessity — imprint their own being on their habitat; extending themselves, they enliven and ensoul this habitat through their activity and make it their territory: "The plant gives, the animal takes in the household of nature."^[102] The animal satisfies its desire-and-drive nature through what it takes from its surroundings. In this satisfaction it finds its ease, which it joyfully announces to the world in its movements and sounds.

Wild fauna is attracting ever greater attention with regard to the interlocking conditions of its existence. One recognises how the life cycle of animals fits wisdom-filled into a larger whole — indeed, how they are collectively in their activity the organs of execution in the development of organismic wholeness. It is therefore the farmer's task to give wild fauna in the broadest sense the same attentive care and stewardship as domestic animals. In the case of mammals this happens, among other things, through hunting — though self-interested motives play their part here just as frequently as, in another way, does the combating of so-called pests through biocides. Each of the various animal species contributes something to the enrichment and strengthening of the soul organisation of the farm or village organism. Any thoughtless intervention in this complex web of relationships makes it fall ill and weakens its powers of self-healing.^[103]

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Vier Gruppen innerhalb der Wildfauna

Apart from mammals and reptiles, four great groups of the animal kingdom are of eminent significance — groups whose existence permeates the village lands in a more hidden, soul-like activity. In their bodily formation they each show, in different ways, a kinship with the functional and morphological threefold nature of the human being — that is, with the head, chest, and metabolic-limb system. These four groups are worms, fishes, birds, and insects.

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They form, supersensibly, the complement to the four groups of animals that find their physical conditions of life in these elements through a one-sided narrowing. The world of elemental beings is present everywhere in the earthly. Their efficacy, reaching from the unmanifest into the manifest, cannot escape an artistically feeling intuitive beholding. It spreads over nature and especially over the animal world — which enlivens the four elements each in its specific way — a delicate veil of wisdom-filled sense and soulfulness.

In what follows, attention shall be directed to the nature and significance of the four groups of the animal kingdom already mentioned (Figure 9):

1. The group of the invertebrate-vermiform, those connected with the element of the earthy-solid, using the earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris) as example:

Figure 9: The soul organization or soul body of the agricultural organism.

The earthworm lacks a formed head. It is, as it were, an independently-become segmented intestinal tube — a wholly and entirely metabolically active animal, whose sense organization directed outward

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is reduced to the sense of touch, to point-senses distributed across the body. The activity of this delicate, slimy-watery animal is the working of the soil. It is a sculptor of the solid-earthy. It lives in the darkness of the earth, pressing itself in search of food through the loose living topsoil after the remains of dead plant matter, and eats its way into the depths of the dense mineral subsoil, forming its vertical tubes, which serve it as a kind of outer skeleton and lend it the vertical upright in its movements up and downward. Its mineral-permeated excrement it carries against gravity upward to the surface of the earth (up to 100 t/ha/year), and so rejuvenates the soil year by year. It actively promotes soil breathing, drawing oxygen-rich outside air behind it as it glides downward through its tubes — like a pump — and as it glides upward again, thrusting out CO₂-enriched soil air. Its food is dead, bacterially decomposing organic substance, which it takes into its interior together with clay, silt, and fine sand. Outwardly it secretes slime; inwardly its soul organization «thinks through» the ingested stream of nourishment and guides a host of bacterial symbionts that break the food down, and — in connection with the mineral clay constituents of the food — initiates the formation of stable humus, the formation of the crumb-stable clay-humus complexes.

The earthworm is by its nature a being of renunciation. The thesis be permitted: it has evolutively foregone the full metamorphosis through pupation to the imago. This metamorphosis — as a butterfly, say — would reveal in beauty of form and colour what, held back within the worm, proves to be its beneficent capacity: to be a sculptor of the earth's soil.

The consciousness of the earthworm is sleeping-dreaming, and yet it has the power to create a coherent whole full of relationship. In this its work there appears, as image, what — in complement to its metabolism-emphasised nature — is its higher sense and intellectual nature. What the earthworm lacks, what the vermiform animal world as a whole lacks, is the polar elaboration of the head in relation to the metabolic system. What is absent — the complement to the head — is nevertheless present functionally wherever earthworms etc. are found: precisely as a spiritually supersensible reality of being, separated from the physically appearing body, yet standing in soul-relation to it. What is involved here is a specific group of elemental beings — the Gnomes, as they have been called since ancient times — whose substance of being is «sense and understanding in a

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The earthworm takes earthly matter into its very digestive tract; not so the fish, which in its forward movement lets water stream through its gills.

is».^[104] They unfold their efficacy in the earthy-solid and form the soul-astral link to the world of invertebrates.

It belongs to the art of farming to create, for this so ceaselessly active and beneficent group of animals, a living space of abundance. For wherever the earthworm unfolds its activity — in field, meadow and pasture, in the dung heap and compost pile — its spiritual correlate is present too: the elemental beings of the earthy-solid. Without the earthworm the soil would gradually compact and harden, falling, one might say, into a kind of death-rigidity. The earthworm enlivens the soil.

2. The group of animals connected with the element of water — the fishes. As the earthworm is a sculptor of the earthy-solid, so the fish is a sculptor of the water element. The head of the fish, with its differentiated sense organization, is clearly marked; yet it passes without transition into the trunk and metabolic member. All-predominating is the middle part, the trunk — a fine, rhythmically richly articulated, cartilaginous-ossified skeletal system. The vertebral chain traverses the body from tail fin to head, metamorphosing in the head into the cranial bones. To either side the rib arches curve outward — the fish-bones — which also envelop the abdominal organs. Externally they are overlaid by a layer of muscle that, in connection with the fins, lends the fish an extraordinary nimbleness and speed of movement. The earthworm takes earthly matter into its very digestive tract; not so the fish, which in its forward movement lets water stream through its gills. The water thereby enters, via the head, into direct relationship with the rhythmic trunk system; the fish provides itself with oxygen, which it draws from the water through the gills. The outer skin densifies into the coat of scales, through which the fish's form-gestalt delimits itself against the formless water, and through which it makes known its inner soul-nature outwardly in manifold coloration. The fish does not nourish itself, as the earthworm does, from dying life, but preferably from what unfolds in the water as plant and animal life. The fish extends its soul-nature beyond its bodily form out into the surrounding water. On the one hand it senses in its gliding passage the water streaming along its body, and on the other it generates through its movements the finest currents and eddies. Just as the fish owes its streamlined form to the element of water,

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so it enlivens and ensoul this element through what of soulful stir continues into the sequences of movement. These sequences differ in a still body of water, a pond, from those in a powerfully flowing stream or river. The tench, for instance, a member of the carp family, is compact in form, darker in coloration, unhurried in movement, and likes at times to burrow down into the mud at the bottom of the pond. In complete contrast, the slender trout — a member of the salmon family — is found in flowing, crystal-clear water streaming over stones. Like a shadow it darts swiftly through the light-permeated, moving water, over pebbly ground, now seeking shelter at the bank of the stream, now actively holding still against the current, sensing the warmth released by the movement of the water flowing past.

In fishes, it is above all their rhythmic middle part — the trunk — that achieves a certain completeness, not yet the head with its sense system. Their consciousness is muted down to a dull dreaming. What they lack in bodily terms remains as a being-force in the supersensible; it weaves and lives as a further group of relationship-creating elemental beings, the undines. They have water as their element and mediate the spiritual archetypes to the bodily and organ forms developing in the watery realm.^[105]

3. The group of the bird world living in the element of air.

Birds sculpt, enliven and ensoul the element of air in the powerful beat of wings, in sweeping arcs or in sublime gliding at great heights. More than any other animal that can rise into the aerial space, birds are the rulers of the skies. As the earthworm, as a being of metabolism, is earth-born — drawing the earth into itself — and the fish, as a being of rhythm, is water-born — allowing the water to stream through it — so the bird is air-born. Its entire body is

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re-formed into a head, into one great sense organ. Not only is its head ventilated from without, and its plumage likewise, not only is it carried by the air on outstretched wings, but the element of air permeates its entire interior (see below).

Among the groups named, the evolutionary current of head-formation reaches its completion in the birds; it takes hold of the whole animal, including breast and metabolism. From this arises the question: is there not something prefigured in an earlier stage of evolution — in the invertebrate-worm-like animals, in the fishes and birds and in the fourth group, the insects — something brought to premature completion, that is spoken of in the progress of evolution in the Apocalypse of John^[106] as the «threefold animal» of eagle, lion, bull and a fourth that bears a human countenance? Rudolf Steiner characterises the three animals — eagle (head), lion (breast), bull (metabolism) — as representatives of three streams of development out of spirit, which come together in the human being into a higher whole.^[107] And is there not in the strict, morphological and functional threefoldness of the insect form — a threefoldness that has, admittedly, congealed prematurely into form — a gathering of the evolutionary streams of the invertebrates, the fishes and the birds, such as shows itself in future-open developmental capacity in the confluence of the eagle, lion and bull streams within the form of the human being?

Birds extract oxygen from the air both in inhaling and in exhaling. On inhalation, the air enters partly into the lungs and, unused, partly into the air sacs distributed throughout the body and into the partly hollow bones. On exhalation, this stored air passes through the lungs — an open tube system, not the blind-alley-like pulmonary alveoli — from inside outward. Heaviness is transformed in the bird's body into lightness: the skull, streamed through for the most part directly by the outer air; the body ventilated by the air sacs; the air-filled cavities that penetrate large portions of the skeleton, especially in the great bird species; and finally the mobile, ventilated plumage. The lightness is further underscored by the fact that the highly concentrated food — whether of plant or animal origin — undergoes rapid digestion and is excreted again after only a brief sojourn.

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"The bird is … in the whole essentially a head."^[108] The outward appearance of a tit, a robin or a wren and so on confirms this statement directly. The metabolic tract and chest are shortened and appear as if drawn inward toward the head pole. The physiognomy is governed by beak and eyes; but it closes up, in the form, colour and patterning of the plumage, into the head-gestalt of the bird as a whole. The rigid union of the cranial bones continues through the jointed middle cervical vertebrae into the trunk skeleton; the fused dorsal vertebrae form with shoulder blade, pelvis, ribs and sternum a firmly closed unity. Conversely, the principal limb-activity shifts into the wings and further forward into the jerking, pecking mobility of the head — pecking (chicken, sparrow, etc.) or drumming (woodpecker). In the head, then, a highly specialised limb-activity closes together with an intensely wakeful sense-activity. When one looks into the eye of a bird — above all of a bird of prey — one feels a soul-force that, as though passing through a still point, arrests one's own gaze with an almost overwhelming power; a gaze as from ancient times. The soul-nature of the bird communicates itself to the airy periphery in simple calls reaching up to tonally painterly sequences of sound. These stream forth from the syrinx (the so-called lower larynx), brought about by the outbreathing and, in part, also the inbreathing airstream. The skylark, when it swings itself up into the air on an early sun-brightened morning, is able to trill its melody for so long because it can make what are called micro-inhalations, with which it continuously replenishes the air sacs — comparable to a bagpiper.^[109] So it is also with the nightingale, which can sustain its melodic song in just this way for so long.

Unique in the animal kingdom, the form of the bird is shaped by its plumage. Both the quill and the vane of the feather grow out of the skin. But what then expresses itself in the richness of colour and the finely chiselled forms of the individual feathers and of the plumage as a whole appears turned outward like a puffed-up image of the bird's inner soul-life. The feathers have become for it a sense organ of the movements of the air.^[110] Rudolf Steiner characterises the feather-formation of the

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Rudolf Steiner characterises the feather-formation of the bird — taking the eagle as his example — in such a way that it is brought about on the physical level by the same forces that, on the soul-astral level, on the basis of the brain, bring about the formation of thoughts.^[111]

The nature of the bird arches like a bell over the farm and the village fieldscape. Its point of reference toward the earth is the nest. From there it widens out into the earthly and airy periphery and lives itself out, soul-wise, within its particular territory. Within the bounds of that territory the bird seeks its food and finds what stirs it to let its soul-being stream out into the surroundings — in flight, or in the branches of trees and hedgerows: whether it be like the buzzard, which, circling in the heights, lets itself be steeped in sunlight and warmth, and awakens in the beholder, through this image of earthly transcendence, the feeling of a sublime repose — akin to that of resting within one's own thoughts; or whether it be the nightingale, sounding its song at dusk along the borders of its territory; or the skylark, which in the morning hours suddenly lifts the spirit of those bent to the earth pulling weeds — with a jubilant trilling, invisible against the bright sky.

The sense-active head-nature of the bird overwhelms, as it were, its metabolic-limb function. The bird swallows its food almost as quickly as it digests it, and excretes it in largely mineralised form. Its physiological metabolic functions recede strongly and shift into the movement sequences governed by the nerve-sense system. The complement to this one-sidedness is supersensible in nature and lives, soul-effectively, as an elemental being of the air — called from time immemorial a sylph.^[112] Its being is bound to the world of birds. Such an elemental being follows the bird in flight within the vortices of air it leaves in its wake. In this community, every bird's flight is a source of ensoulment of the airy periphery. One need only follow for a stretch the generous, elegant sweep-figures of swifts or house martins shooting past. As the earthworm sculpts the solid earth, and the fish sculpts the water, so birds, with the forces of their soul-being, sculpt the element of air.

It is therefore also the farmer's task to ensure that the native bird-world finds its living-space on farm and village land. The airspace stands open to it; the earthly space, however, demands — with respect to nesting possibilities — the most varied shaping of the landscape, in fields,

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meadows, field margins, embankments for ground-nesting birds, shrubs, hedgerows, trees scattered across the open fieldscape and woodland islands for songbirds among others. Open barns are needed for swallows; for rare visitors such as little owls and barn owls, hollows in standing deadwood are needed, flight-holes in barns and the like. Wherever nesting places are found, visible-invisible territories arise in the surrounding space — soul-spaces that form invisible organs within the agricultural organism.

4. The group of insects living in the element of warmth:

Insects form by far the most species-rich and form-rich class in the animal kingdom. They live, to be sure, in earth, water and predominantly in air, but their most primordial elemental realm is warmth. The insect lives from the working of warmth. Within warmth its soul-nature weaves in hiddenness, and through its activity it structures warmth-processes — as for instance in the visiting of blossoms, or more manifestly still in the heat-development within the ants' nest or the beehive. As warmth permeates each of its sister-elements and sets them in relation to one another, so the world of insects too, with its wisdom-filled instinct-nature, permeates these elements and creates, on the basis of warmth, on a higher level, a living web of relational contexts.

For as soon as the rising sun in spring, bestowing warmth, awakens natural being from its wintry state of rest, ground beetles, springtails and the like are swarming in the topmost soil layer within the shortest time; diving beetles, water-striders and their kind are darting about in the pond; midges dance in the warm rays of the sun in the air; bees work the blossoms; in an unforeseeable abundance of forms, a host of insects hums, buzzes, flutters, hovers, dances through the air in ever purpose-filled industry.

Everything in the life of insects plays out in warmth. The development of the egg into the larva, and the larva's metamorphosis through the cocoon to the imago, the fully formed insect, needs the warmth of spring and summer.

The abundance of forms among insects, too, is bound up with warmth. This abundance is greatest in the tropics and diminishes toward the cold zones.

It is the reciprocal relationship to warmth that, in the bodily structure of insects, equalises the one-sidednesses attaching to invertebrates, fish and birds. The three functional domains of head, thorax and metabolism are, in the insect as regards bodily form, as a rule more equally developed, with particular emphasis on the middle member (thorax) — indeed they are in many cases sharply demarcated from one another by incisions (insect from Latin insectum = cut-into). Like all arthropods, the insect has no bony inner skeleton; instead, its threefold form is held together by an outer skeleton, the chitin-armour. The polarity of head pole (caput) and metabolic pole (abdomen) is particularly pronounced. Yet the sensory organisation of the head — with compound and simple eyes, and with palps and antennae (sense of smell and touch) — reaches, mediated by the ventral ganglion system, across into the limbs; in certain species, for instance, onto the forelegs (sense of gravity and vibration, hearing, taste).^[113]

Insectum = eingeschnitten). Wie alle Gliedertiere hat das Insekt kein knöchernes Innengerüst; stattdessen wird seine dreigliedrige Gestalt durch ein Außenskelett, den Chitinpanzer, zusammengehalten. Die Polarität von Kopfpol (Caput) und Stoffwechselpol (Abdomen) ist besonders ausgeprägt. Doch greift die Sinnenorganisation des Kopfes mit Facetten- und Punktaugen sowie mit Tastern und Fühlern (Geruch- und Tastsinn), vermittelt durch das bauchseitige Gangliensystem, auf die Gliedmaßen über, z.B. bei einzelnen Arten auf die Vorderbeine (Schwere- und Vibrationssinn, Gehör, Geschmack).^[114]

The belly segment of insects, by contrast, lacks entirely the limb-organisation that in the human being belongs to the metabolic pole. The limbs reach their highest development in the three pairs of legs (in arachnids, four) and the two pairs of wings in the thorax, and extend all the way into the head-organisation — for instance in the mobile, periphery-oriented antennae and the highly differentiated biting and sucking tools. What physiologically constitutes, in the vertebrates and in the highest degree in the human being, the rhythmic system with pulmonary respiration and cardiac function is entirely absent from the thorax of insects. The centre of the dorsally running blood-vessel system lies in the abdomen. Respiration takes place through openings in the skin distributed across the whole body, to which the tubular system of the tracheae connects. The rhythmic system reduces itself entirely to the movement of the wings and the jointed legs. In the thorax region itself it has developed no proper rhythmic organ-systems — no "true" lung, no "true" heart.

Insects feed — whether aphid, wasp, bee or butterfly — preferentially on substances that are themselves the result of warmth-processes in the plant: on assimilate saps, sugar-laden juice — honey arises from this only through the digestive tract of the bee — from the nectaries of leaves and blossoms, from pollen and resins. In building up their bodies they continue the warmth-blossom process in which the growth of the plant comes to an end. It is the same kind of soul-astral forces that flood in from the cosmos with sunlight toward the plants, touching and forming them from without in stem, leaf and blossom — it is these forces that have become internalised in the flower-visiting insects and have condensed into their soul-nature in each case differently. How else is one to understand that on the one hand certain blossoms seem formed precisely for the visit and pollination of particular insect species — the clover blossom in its relationship to

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the bumblebees; on the other hand, many insect species are organized in their bodily form, especially in their mouthparts, toward visiting specifically shaped blossoms. To intuitive beholding, an organic unity of plant and insect of a higher order presents itself. One need only look at orchid blossoms — for instance those of the bee orchid. Its blossom has the appearance of an insect that has not yet come to independent life. Thus Rudolf Steiner rightly speaks of the butterfly as the liberated blossom, and the blossom as the captive butterfly.^[115]

What is experienceable throughout the insect kingdom, and in a high degree among its state-forming representatives, is a wisdom working hidden in the soul, expressing itself in the highly specialized, tool-like bodily configuration — but above all in the division-of-labour, relationship-creating activity of a giving and taking, as for instance in the beehive or the ant-hill. In the latter two cases they are not merely dependent on external warmth: they generate the warmth themselves — the bees, for example, through intensive movement within the winter bee-cluster, the termites through the self-heating of compressed fresh leaves, grass and the like, to warm their brooding-places in their earthen structures. What otherwise lives itself forth in warm-blooded animals as instinctive, soul-filled inner life — in insects it turns itself inside out into consummate artistry: the spider and its web, the bee and its comb, the wasp and its nest.

Just as for the animal groups mentioned above, living in earth, water and air, the farmer must also create on his farm precincts a home for a varied insect life. This is found in an equally varied plant world. There is no tree, no shrub, no grass or herb that does not serve as the nutritive foundation for the grubs, larvae or caterpillars of particular insect species. The caterpillars of butterflies, for example, each have their specific host: the swallowtail (*Papilio machaon*) the umbellifers, such as dill, caraway, carrot; the peacock butterfly (*Vanessa io*), the red admiral (*Vanessa atalanta*) and the small tortoiseshell (*Vanessa urticae*) the stinging nettle; the large white (*Pieris brassicae*) the cabbage species, and so on. Many have taken their name from their host plant — the wheat gall midge (*Cecidomyia tritici*), for instance. However closely they are bound in this larval stage to a particular host plant, so widely does there open before them as

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the fully formed imago, swarming out, a wide breadth of nourishment across the flowering fields.

These few examples alone show how much attention and care the farmer must give, alongside his cultivated plants, to the world of wild plant nature. In doing so he provides for the balance and equilibrium of the insect species on his farm. He must strive to ensure that something blooming enlivens the landscape from spring through into autumn — whether through tending the meadow and wayside verges, embankments and the like, or through a richly articulated crop rotation, through the laying out of flowering strips in the arable crops, and so on.

An enormous increase in insect life is offered by a rich variety of forms among wild woody plants in hedgerows, but above all in standard-tree plantings in fruit growing. A fifty- to sixty-year-old standard apple tree harbours in trunk, branches, foliage and blossom upwards of a thousand insect species.^[116] Such a wide-spreading tree crown or a species-rich hedge constitutes an accumulation of astral substance: "Of that which passes as astral richness through the trees, the fully formed insect lives and weaves."^[117] It is the insect world above all that, with its astral-soul being, mediates toward the etheric-living of the plant world. It takes its nourishment from the plants and in return pollinates them, or protects them from sudden mass outbreaks of pest insects — for example through the parasitisation of aphid colonies by ichneumon wasps.

The warmth being par excellence among insects is the bee colony, whose cultivation has been documented since the fifth millennium before Christ.^[118] From their beehive in the garden and from the fruit-tree margin of the farm, they range across the farm's field precincts and bring their harvest home to the farm just as the farmer brings his own in field crops.

The insect species have a highly specific, frequently an extremely specialised bodily formation, according to what quality of a one-sided soul-nature has congealed into them. This one-sidedness finds its complement in the elemental beings working supersensibly in the element of warmth, of "fire" — that is, the *salamanders*.^[119] It is these that create in the insect kingdom the completeness — bordering on the miraculous — of the connection between bodily formation and instinctively intelligent patterns of behaviour. The

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elemental beings of warmth are those that — as in the case of butterflies — bring about the complete metamorphosis through all the "elements," from egg through caterpillar, cocoon to imago. They permeate spiritually the soul-nature of the insects, congealed as it is to so high a degree into the threefold bodily form. They create relationships between the kingdoms of nature and so also to the human being — for example in the relationship of the shepherd to his sheep, of the beekeeper to his bees. In the whirring and humming of insects in the warmth of sun-bright days, in spring around flowering hedgerows, fruit trees, lime trees, moods become perceptible that allow one to sense the working of these elemental beings of fire. They are present and active wherever the farmer creates living spaces for the insects — the physical correlate of the elemental beings of warmth.

Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm-and-Landscape Organism

Among the domestic animals we count above all representatives from the kingdom of mammals: dog, cat, pig, horse; from the order of ruminants: sheep, goat, cattle; from the kingdom of birds: hen, duck, goose and dove; and from the insect kingdom: silkworm, bee (Figure 9, p. 115). They differ from their wild-living counterparts with respect to the four levels of being:

1. With Regard to the Spiritual-Essential:

Like all animals, domestic animals too have no incarnated I that would endow them, as it does the human being, with self-consciousness and thereby the power of free self-determination. The animals stand under the guidance of group souls.^[120] From these, the individual animals are "pinched-off portions" that have received imprinted into them, in a being-way, the properties of the group soul to which they belong and of which they are, in their physical-bodily nature, an image. In the wild, these soul-properties have congealed evolutively as behavior into the bodily formation, and express themselves in the physical as instinct, in the etheric-living as drive, and in the soul element as desire. In the process of becoming domestic animals, the human being once stepped to the side of the group soul of the animals — holding sway in the supersensible — and took upon himself, on earth, in a sacred human-animal relationship (the Abel stream), the responsibility and the care.

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As group souls or genus souls of the animals, Rudolf Steiner^[121] designates spiritual beings comparable to the I of the human being, beings that direct the individual animals of the animal species belonging to them, as it were from without. The group soul guides and works through the blood; the human being, however, through his "keeping" — through the manner in which he inwardly and outwardly conducts himself toward the animal: he "keeps" the domestic animal, otherwise it would fall. He once lifted it out of its natural, group-soul-guided creatureliness, held it back at the stage of still-heightened embryonal plasticity, and thereby preserved for it, across all subsequent generations, a certain measure of youthfulness. Thus through the human being the development of domestic animals took a different direction. It bends off, so to speak, prematurely — before the fall into wild nature. In the wild fauna, the development of species has aged morphologically and physiologically into an end-stage. The wolf, for example, regarded as the progenitor of dogs, has evolutively lost its youthfulness. It is wolf, is no longer plastically formable, as it was in the times of the high flowering of its evolution in the Tertiary (Atlantis). Its behavior is purely the projection of its group soul into the earthly form of existence. The dog, by contrast — like the domestic animal species as a whole — appears, as it were explosively and with great plasticity, in a multitude of breeds. This manifoldness is the work of a humanity that in the post-Atlantean ages (Holocene) freed itself further from its bondage within its own group-soul nature, and now itself, in the spirit-connected youthfulness of the I-awakening, united with the group souls of certain animal species. Domestic animals, seen in this light, have not emerged genetically from the evolutive end-product of a lineage through mere selection; rather, it is near at hand to assume that they owe their origin to the particular soul-spiritual constitution of an early humanity that still stood in a dreamlike relationship to the genus souls of the animals.

One can see in the becoming-domestic of animals a step toward the compensation of that debt which humanity has taken upon itself — guiltlessly guilty — in that on its path of evolution it has set the animal kingdom out from itself and left it behind. The domestic animal, through the education of the human being, has preserved its plasticity. It has placed itself in service beneath the guiding will of the human being, and in so doing has emancipated soul and body from wild nature to such a degree that into all future it stands in need of this human guidance — "the keeping"; it cannot fall back down into the same condition that

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In place of the evolutive education of animals, conducted under the guidance of the Mysteries in the earlier great ancient civilizations, today's animal breeding has stepped in. It optimizes and exploits certain heritable traits, and makes the domestic or culture animal into a mere utility animal, an object of mass production. This development — seeing in the animal only a hollow, material object, arbitrarily manipulable through its genes — can be met only if the intuitive beholding strives for a true understanding of the essential nature of the various domestic animal species. What wisdom speaks, for example, from the beholding and active engagement with the cow, the horse, the bee? The becoming-aware of their outward appearance within the context of their living and activity space, their faunal interdependencies, and the indications from spiritual research awakens sensations and ideas that open to spirit-and-morally guided action new, evolutive paths of breeding and education. These paths into the future are given voice by Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) in the sentence: "Whole ages of love are necessary in order to repay the animals for their services and merits toward us."^[122] Toward this aim, one must connect with what is evolutively disposed on the three following levels of being.

2. With regard to the level of being of the soul element (astral body):

The domestic animal does not flee from the human being — it seeks his nearness with trust, it opens itself soul-wise toward him and, in fulfillment of this openness, awaits expectantly the counter-gift of care and devotion. How deeply the manner of this devotion imprints itself upon the domestic animal, how thoroughly human peculiarities rub off onto it, is shown by the saying: "Like master, like man." This soul-openness, extending to a kind of individually devoted comportment in comparison to the wild ancestral form, lays upon the human being today a responsibility of unsuspected magnitude. For the soul-open expectation of domestic animals is not fulfilled by mere emotional devotion, but only when this devotion gives occasion — however initial — for a knowledge of their essential nature. The domestic animal expects from human guidance not a self-referential, emotional devotion in the manner of a lap-dog mentality, still less a soulless utility, but a knowledge of its essential nature that, through deeds of love, gives the domestic animal

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what the group soul itself can no longer give, and will not be able to give in the future either. In this sense does responsibility become real — does a future ideal of breeding become real.

A further mark of spiritual imprinting reaching down into the genome is the mostly wide range of domestic animal breeds, to whose essential image breeding should once again connect itself. A particular expression of the soul element is the manifold patterning and colouring of coat and plumage. The soul's inner differentiation creates for itself therein an image in the outward. Thus every breed of domestic animal shows itself unmistakably in its "astral garment."

Regarding the level of being of the living (etheric body):

In all domestic animals, with the exception of dogs and cats, the nerve-sense pole is reduced in favour of the metabolic and limb pole. Consider the enormous metabolic performances of dairy cattle, pigs, the horse harnessed before the plough, and so forth. The openness of the soul element holds the organic processes of the etheric body — with particular emphasis on the rhythmic — in a specifically plastic and mobile condition of its own kind. Domestic animals have thus emancipated themselves from their wild kindred both in their earlier sexual maturity and higher fecundity, and also in their reproductive cycle and change of coat, which are no longer governed by the course of the year.

Regarding the level of being of the physical (physical body):

Soul-openness provides for a sustained plasticity in the life processes, and these in turn give plastic form to the physical organisation — expressed perhaps most strikingly in the skeletal structure, which in the greatest variability preserves juvenile forms. The most conspicuous mark of this is the shortening of the facial skull and the smoother cranial bones, even in fully grown animals — which is a characteristic trait of the young animal. The great number of ruminant breeds carry each their own specific horn forms. In cattle and pigs, the brain is smaller by up to thirty percent in volume compared to their wild kindred; the spinal cord and the sympathetic nervous system, which directs metabolism, are correspondingly more strongly developed. The reduction in brain size concerns above all the forebrain, and signifies thereby a diminution of the sense-faculties directed toward the outer world. For domestic animals generally, what holds is the extraordinary breadth of variation in the bodily configuration of breeds within a single species — large or small, compact or elongated, thick or slender, long-legged or short, and so forth.

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The domestic animal species are a human cultural heritage of the early post-glacial high civilizations. With the newer breeding methods, the gaze upon this cultural heritage narrows itself at certain points entirely onto the given genome and onto the interchangeability of its genes among the various domestic animal species. The breeding aims are directed arbitrarily toward one-sided performance increases at the expense of animal welfare. This technological mode of proceeding conceals from view the artistic throw that first made the domestic animal into what it is. What follows will address the artistic-breeding approach that characterizes the series of domestic animals, has made them serviceable to the human being, and has allowed them to become organs of the farm or village organism.

The Honeybee

In general we encounter the bee (*Apis mellifera*) as an individual in its visit to the blossom, where it sucks the nectar, pollinates the flowers, and collects pollen in its baskets on the hind legs. This taking and giving activity fulfils itself in the periphery of its living space. Polar to this, the single being finds its centre in the beehive, where it unites with thousands of others in the most vigorous activity and becomes a member of an all-encompassing inner life — the life of the «colony», a self-organizing organism whose activities articulate themselves with organ-like strictness. What otherwise in the functions of an organism remains hidden from view, here a division-of-labour activity opens itself to the gaze: the egg-laying queen, the mass of worker bees — who in their turn attend to comb-building, brood care, feeding of the queen, self-cleaning, foraging, and provisioning — and the drones, who fertilize the queen in her sun-directed nuptial flight. Each of these spatially and temporally finely attuned activities awakens the impression of a selfless going-forth in sacrifice. In the warmth that the bees seek to maintain in the hive through their own activity at approximately 35°C, they create the incarnation-medium for the group soul: the beekeeper speaks of «the colony», which in a nature-given way allows a social organism to arise that anticipates a selfless behaviour that human beings will first have to acquire in their social life together out of the force of the I.

The honeybee requires the human being, the «bee-father». He steps to the side of the «colony», the group soul. He provides for its dwelling, the

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hive or the skep, in which the colony can close itself off from the world.^[123] The skep is so arranged that within it the division-of-labour life of the bees can unfold under the eyes and the guiding hand of the beekeeper. And when swarming comes, he ensures that the bee colony does not vanish into the wild and ultimately to its ruin, but is caught in the swarm cluster and assigned a new dwelling. He further ensures that the apiary or the individual hives have their position in the vicinity of the farm, where from spring to autumn blossoming things are to be found in the fields, and where through the winter the well-being of the hive can be regularly observed and appropriate treatments carried out.

The bee colony lives enclosed in a soul-space in which it does not wish to be disturbed from without. Only *that* human being does not disturb it who has made the wisdom-filled doing and being of the bee colony wholly his own, and from this source — with reverence, composure, and stillness — carries out his work with the bee colony, a work raised to the level of artistry. This soul-space polarizes itself into a head-like centre, the hive, and into a periphery bounded on the outside by the sea of blossoms that the worker bees fly to and from which they return, laden with honey and pollen, to the centre — a process comparable to the circulation of the blood.^[124] What they carry into the hive they share with the human being: honey for nourishment, wax, propolis, and venom for manifold purposes including healing. With an appropriate number of colonies they are indispensable soul-organs of the farm organism, which in their activity weave the spiritually active in warmth into the farm precincts in a different way than the farmer does when, out of I-directed will, he incorporates his thoughts into the whole of the farm through his work.

Domestic Poultry

Right up into the 1950s and '60s it was still hens, ducks, geese, and pigeons that gave farm life a particular colouring and, through their behaviour, a rhythm all their own. In the case of hens, for example, the day's course began at sunrise with the high-pitched reveille for

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man and animal, the crowing of the cock. He stepped forward first, neck and head raised vertically, beak stretched wide open, tail feathers lifted and fanned out — a sight as though he wanted to crow his whole inner being out into the breaking day. The flock of hens followed him from the nocturnal rest of the stable into the chicken yard, or in free range across the farmstead, the open threshing floor, the midden; scratching and pecking, they scatter in search of food. Before long the first clucking of a hen would sound from the stable, announcing to the world her happiness at having laid an egg. Usually in the afternoon came the dust bath with feather-cleaning, and further scratching, scraping, and pecking at seeds, larvae, worms, insects, grass, and grains of sand. As darkness fell the flock gathered again in the stable and roosted close together on the perches. In much the same way the life of ducks, geese, turkeys, and pigeons naturally played itself out; their point of reference was the farmstead with its sheltered stable and the human beings who cared for them.

Hens and turkeys are bound to the earth; ducks and geese love the nearness of water and prefer to graze the green zones close to the bank. Just as these swing back and forth between water and earth, so do pigeons between air and earth; their range of movement extends in mostly short flights from tree to tree out into the open fieldscape, and for rest they gather again, lined up along the highest ridge of the farm's rooftops. Their field of vision is thus, alongside the bees', the most expansive among the domestic animals; considerably more restricted is that of the waterfowl, and for hens it confines itself to only a few metres. Hens see sharply only at short distances — the hen eats with its eye. The eye's resolution of movement and differentiation of colour is far superior to that of the human eye. Like all birds, domestic poultry and so also the hen have good hearing. They lack an external ear; the entrance to the inner ear lies hidden beneath the fine plumage of the head. Soul-expressions such as calls, sounds of mutual communication — the crowing, clucking, quacking of ducks and geese, or the cooing of pigeons — are exchanged over considerable distances. The sense of taste is, as with their wild counterparts, weakly developed. Hens do distinguish, for example, the qualities salty and sweet, sour and bitter, but these sensations play only a minor role in the selection of food.^[125] The sense of smell is apparently far better developed than was still believed until

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the 90s of the 20th century. By contrast, the highly developed touch organs in the beak, alongside the eye, are mostly decisive for the choice of feed and its grain size.

Digestion is just as rapid as in wild fowl. The highly concentrated food passes unchewed into the crop; from there into the glandular stomach and on into the muscular stomach, where it is ground down. After swift passage through the intestine and large intestine, with a pause in the two caeca, it is excreted together with the urine via the cloaca. Corresponding to the original food and the rapid digestion, what arises is a highly concentrated manure, rich in organic substance as well as nitrogen and phosphorus salts — a valuable organo-mineral blending material for plant composts or other animal manures. The salt character of poultry excretions corresponds to their pronounced head-pole, or nerve-sense nature, which is further emphasised by the nearly vertical posture of these running birds along the axis of head, outstretched neck, breast and legs. The particular metabolic achievements do not, as with the ruminants, communicate themselves to the digestive stream — they are taken up entirely into growth (flesh) and reproduction (eggs).

Since the 1950s and 60s, poultry keeping — above all, hen keeping — has lost its role of enriching the soul organisation of the farm organism, disposing of waste and vermin. In its place has come mass poultry keeping. Bred for the highest efficiency of their metabolic function, the animals live crowded together in hermetically sealed, electronically controlled, fully air-conditioned production facilities, and are kept healthy through the use of predominantly abiotic means for the brief span allotted to their productive lives. Poultry keeping has separated itself out from the agricultural whole. In modern poultry breeding and keeping, poultry as farmyard animal experiences its cultural death. Of the more than 150 chicken breeds,^[126] today only a few are drawn upon for line, crossbreeding and hybrid breeding. Their performance, trimmed to the highest pitch, compresses itself into a laying span of only one year.

Reflection on this misdevelopment increasingly leads to a reintegration of smaller poultry flocks into newly forming farm organisms: mobile housing with rotating access to open fieldscape is a first step. This form of keeping once again establishes a relationship to all the life processes

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of the farm whole in the course of the year and allows the chickens to bring their instinctive life to bear without restriction. Because of predators, unfortunately, any arbitrary change of location runs into limits: fox-proof fencing is essential! A further step in carrying forward the development befitting domestic animals is the turning away from the uniform hybrid breeding operated worldwide by a handful of large corporations, in favour of farm-based breeding. This includes the regional co-operation of breeding and rearing operations with respect to the choice of breed and breeding objectives, as well as the willingness of consumers to share in carrying such a demanding cultural achievement.

The further development of domestic poultry is, in the first instance, a genetic question: what inherited predisposition from the past must be taken up again? Above all, however, it is a question of epigenetics — of breeding not only on the basis of acquired characteristics, but of characteristics yet to be acquired. What conditions, directed toward this latter aim, must be created in the shaping of the farm organism — with respect to keeping, the farm's own feed base, human care and attention — so that the organismic wholeness may imprint itself epigenetically upon the life organisation and physical organisation of the animals?

The Domestic Pig

Comparable only to the high-performance breeds of chicken, the pig has been reshaped through the methods of modern breeding, feeding and keeping — away from its original way of life and the diversity of breed types — into uniform production breeds. Once predominantly a pasture animal that shaped the landscape, tended by herdsmen, then, through crossbreeding in eighteenth-century England with Asian and southern European breeds, brought to higher growth performance, and in the nineteenth century as the improved landrace integrated across farming operations with outdoor access — today, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, it is being lifted out of the living context of the farm whole and produced in factory-style mass keeping. The aim of modern breeding was and remains: away from lard — toward the uniform hybrid, the early-maturing meat pig, whose slaughter-readiness is reached at half the lifespan of the parent breeds. As in modern poultry keeping, the relationship between human and animal — necessary for the soul-nature of domestic animal existence — along with the relationship to the wholeness of the farm and its precincts, is switched off. When this double relationship falls away, the pig withers in its soul-nature and the landscape

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(1)

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Encounter and exploration, a covered outdoor dunging passage, bedded resting areas, sleeping quarters closed on all sides and sheltered from cold and wind, as well as opportunity for intensive contact with the attending human being — through being spoken to, for instance.

Pigs have a family sense; they are sociable, intelligent, sense-alert animals. Their sense of smell dominates their perception, shapes the feeling of their well-being and discomfort. They communicate vividly through a fine sense of hearing, and when they raise their heads they look at the approaching human being with a clear, almost knowing gaze. Yet their brain performance is reduced by up to thirty percent compared to their wild counterparts^[127] — that is, the nerve-sense system has shifted more into the spinal cord and the sympathetic nervous system, thereby serving an enhanced metabolic performance with regard to fertility and the laying down of meat and fat.

The critical question — whether animals grow dull through the loss of sense-capacities when the human being makes them into domestic animals — must be answered with "No," on the condition that he is fully aware of his full responsibility toward the domestic animal. What the domestic animal gives the human being through its metabolic performances, he must give back to it twofold through his intelligent behaviour in husbandry, feeding, care, and through a breeding practice that grasps the essential nature of the animal.

The function of the dentition makes the pig an omnivore — an eater of flesh and plants alike. It bites and chews as the human being does. This double function shows itself in the digestive tract as well. The single-chambered stomach is relatively small; the pig must therefore take in its food continuously in small portions. In the long passage through the small intestine — with the enzymatic breakdown of the readily digestible food components and their resorption — microbial digestion of the cellulose-rich food residues takes place in the caecum and colon. The pig digests thoroughly; unlike the ruminants, it extracts forces from its food that it consumes for itself as a sense-active and simultaneously metabolically active being. This diminishes the fertilising force of its excretions — not their mineral content. The form, colour, consistency, and odour of the dung depend on the kind of feed. When the balance between glandular and microbial digestion is not maintained — as occurs with high-performance feeding and lifelong stall-keeping on slatted floors — pig slurry arises, in which

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the unpleasant stench and the one-sidedly drive-laden fertilising effect come as no surprise.

The measured calibration of pig husbandry to the farm's own feed base — with bedding, outdoor access, and pasture grazing wherever possible — produces a low-odour, substantive manure of relatively firm consistency. In peasant tradition, probably on account of a sensitivity to the essential nature of pigs as omnivores in comparison with pure plant-eaters, pig dung was called "cold manure" — suited less to the "cold clay soil" than to the "warm sandy soil." Mixed with the other manures arising in the farm organism, it is a valuable complement. As a manure it bears, in its substance-composition as well as in its forces, the stamp of the pig's soul-nature. What the pig tastingly savours and soulfully lives through in deep contentment as it roots in the earth — plant and animal food alike — it subjects, like the other domestic animals of the farm, to a "cosmic-qualitative analysis."^[128] The outcome of this analysis characterises the manure's fertilising value. It is a different value in each case, depending on whether the feed is imported goods or produced on the farm itself. By analysing the self-produced feed in its own way, the pig prepares a manure that meets the site-specific needs for the enhancement of soil fertility.

Horse and Donkey

Contrary as they are in temperament despite close kinship, both are — as riding, pack-bearing, and draught animals — the most faithful helpers of the human being, traceable back to the times of the ancient Persian cultural epoch, to the fourth and fifth millennia before the turn of time. The horse carried the human being on his great cross-country journeys of wandering and conquest; it was the means of travel from place to place, marched with him into great battles; it fought under his guidance and leadership, and gave itself up in sacrifice. It drew the plough furrow by furrow and brought in the harvest on the high-laden hayrack. Endless services has the horse rendered to the human being, and unspeakable sacrifices brought in doing so. And likewise the donkey — the equally willing and stubborn riding animal, the pack-bearer of the peasant and craftsman down to the companion of the beggar. All the burdens of daily life were heaped upon this small, thin-legged donkey; with sure-footed step

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carried them sure-footedly over stock and stone. How could social life among the pastoral peoples, and in and between the village communities, have been maintained without the donkey? So he carried on his back the least of men and his heavy burden, and in the ascent to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday the highest being who overcame all earthly heaviness.

Both, horse and donkey, are odd-toed ungulates. They stand and walk on the tip of the middle toe, or middle finger respectively. These are encased in the hoof, a horn-shoe that is impermeable to outer force-radiations — just as are the cloven hooves of the even-toed ungulates and the horns of the ruminants. However heavy the horses are in body, so lightly, indeed so dance-like, do they move. In beauty and elegance the movements of the horse are unsurpassed, as indeed its soul-nature lives itself forth wholly in the body language of rhythmic movement. Whether at the walk, or in a measured tiptoeing trot — both with head held high — or in the purposefully forward-flying gallop with neck stretched and nostrils flared, it always offers the image of noble unfolding of force and of proportion, heightened to a higher harmony through the rider. Only in the unity of horse and rider does it reveal its nobility of bearing and character. It is otherwise when it puts its weight into the harness and draws the plough or the heavy wagon, rhythmically raising and lowering its head at each step: then it evokes the image of a complete surrender of its will-nature to the call and the rein-guiding hand of the human being, and to the service it performs selflessly upon the earth.

The donkey too possesses all the gaits of the horse. Less noble in appearance and movement, it shows itself rather humble in the lowered carriage of its head, as a rule obedient and submissive to whatever is demanded of it — and then again stubborn from cause that is mostly unfathomable. In its ancestral territories of the Orient and Africa it appears all the nobler the more it is still embedded in older forms of cultural consciousness and life.

The horse is, even more than the donkey, highly teachable and requires from birth a thorough upbringing for the unfolding of its talents, and throughout its life for the exercise of those talents under human guidance. In the case of the noble Arabian horse, for example, the newborn foal was kept for a considerable time under the roof of the shepherd's tent, within the family circle. This was still the case into the twentieth century.

The bodily nature of horse and donkey is an image of their soul-nature, and at the same time an image of the landscape — the expanses of the grass steppe — in which this soul-nature experiences itself in its joy of movement. Consequently it concentrates

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The sense organization concentrates especially on the outward-directed, distance-encompassing senses — eye, ear and smell. The expressive, strikingly large eyes, set to the sides of the head, take in a nearly complete circle of vision. Only forward — in front of and below the head — is there a blind strip of roughly two metres that cannot be seen into; likewise behind, on both sides of the spine. In depth perception (three-dimensional seeing) the horse takes in only a relatively narrow angle of vision of fifteen to twenty degrees to the front. In the remaining arc of its visual field the sight flattens and blurs toward the rear. Precisely in that blind strip to the rear sits the rider, the coachman, or the ploughman walking behind the plough, who with a gentle pull on the lead rein or through the snaffle bit determines the gait and the direction of movement. In the lively play of the ear-flaps the direction of soul-attention is revealed in finest nuance. Sounds inaudible to us are filtered out from the general noise. The horse takes in above all through its hearing the soul-mood of its environment — how, for example, one speaks to it. The position of the ears, whether pricked or drooping, betrays much about its soul-feeling.

The sense of smell is extraordinarily highly developed. The elongated head houses an extensive system of nasal cavities whose inner surfaces correspond approximately to the total area of the animal's outer skin. Horses sniff one another to greet or to make each other's acquaintance. With their exceedingly fine sense of smell they analyse their surroundings — whilst grazing, the selection of their fodder — every exhalation however subtle, even across great distances. Is it above all these three sense-capacities of eye, hearing and smell, together with the characteristic of carrying the head raised above the spine, that make the horse so teachable, let it respond with such high differentiation, that it awakens the belief it might be able to think? In Greek mythology the Perseus legend describes how thinking freed itself from the blood-boundness of the body — the bearer of the clairvoyant power active in ancient times: in the mythic image, Perseus beheads the Titaness Gorgo. From the stream of blood welling from her trunk, Pegasus springs forth — the winged horse. It symbolises thinking freed from the body, whose wings can now swing themselves freely up into the world of spirit. What appears in the intelligent behaviour of the horse's body as bound to the blood — in the human being it loosens itself from that bond and becomes the free spirit-soul activity of thinking.

Horse and donkey are herbivores. Though they thrive on fodder even coarser in raw fibre than the ruminants with their highly differentiated

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fore-stomach system, they have only a composite, single-chambered, relatively small stomach. To this connects the long small intestine, which breaks down the readily digestible components of the fodder. The harder-to-digest raw fibre is broken down bacterially only in the enormously developed caecal sac and then in the colon and rectum. This mode of digestion corresponds to their feeding behaviour. Horses eat twice as long as cows — namely sixteen hours a day. They are day-and-night animals. With their good eyesight even in the dark, they find their fodder with sure step by night as well. Horses and the so frugal donkey are excellently suited, after pasture rotation, to graze back over the plants the cows have left untouched.

The joy of movement and the strength of horses and donkeys find their expression in their strongly formed, still very raw-fibre-rich dung. Polar to the "cold pig-dung" it is a "heating" manure. Through continued bacterial breakdown, accelerated by contact with the open air, it warms itself very rapidly, and on account of this property was used as underground heating and simultaneously as manure for cold frames. Fresh horse manure contains a good deal of ammonia; its smell is therefore strong, sharp and penetrating — but not unpleasant.

Horse and donkey have, by reason of the mechanisation of working processes, largely taken their leave of agriculture — for now? With them has been lost an important element in the ensouling of the farm organism — both with regard to the utilisation of fodder and straw, the particular character of the manure and the rhythmisation of working processes, and with regard to the ensouling of the work that they performed in devotion to human guidance.

Dog and Cat

Both belong to the line of development of the predators. With their soul-filled instinctive life they enrich the soul-body of the agricultural organism in thoroughly contrasting ways. The dog is the oldest of the domestic animals; the cat ranks among the most recent — it appears in Europe only from the first millennium BC.^[129] The type of the dog is related to that of its wild kindred, the wolf, as the type of the cat is to that of the wildcat. What strikes one especially in dogs is the great variability of forms. They

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The type variability found in dogs appears already at the very beginning of their domestication, towards the end of the *Tertiary* (Atlantis) in the *Pleistocene* (Ice Ages), and above all then in the *Neolithic*, in the first post-Atlantean ages. No domestic animal species that subsequently emerged has ever again attained this wealth of forms.^[130] It stands to reason, as already intimated earlier, that the development of domestic animals was a product of early humanity. Humanity was in a position, out of its living experience of the animal soul and of its spiritual origin — the group soul — to hold this soul back at a more embryonic stage in its bodily formation, and thereby to furnish the form-building type with an abundance of varied possibilities of expression. The younger the domestic animal species, the more human beings had exchanged their instinctive directness with the spirit for the awakening to self-consciousness, and the more impoverished in variation becomes the outward appearance of domestic animals. When in ancient Roman times the wealth of forms increased again (dwarf dog breeds), this is already a consequence of deliberate selective breeding, in the sense of crossing and selection. How much the domestication of dog and cat — and likewise of the other domestic animal species — from its very origins down to ancient Egyptian culture was not primarily a matter of practical usefulness, but rather how this usefulness was inseparably bound up with an instinctive, intimately sacred feeling, is borne out on one hand by the burial culture uniting human being and dog, and on the other by the veneration accorded to cats and to the divine being dwelling within them — a cult that reached its culmination towards the end of ancient Egyptian culture.^[131]

The soul disposition of dog and cat lies very far apart. Even more than the horse, the dog has subordinated its soul-instinctive nature — the sum of its capacities — to the guidance of the human being; not so the cat. Well trained, the dog obeys every call or whistle. With its impulse to movement it reaches out expansively into the wide — so the hunting dog, following the trail with its keen sense of smell, marking the kill or retrieving it; as a herding dog driving the sheep or cattle or holding the herd together. Always, after each task accomplished, it returns, settles onto its hindquarters, wags its tail, lifts its head stretched upward, gazes at its master with faithful devotion, in expectation of the next command. Equally attentive and devoted it is as a guard dog of house and farm, as a companion and guide dog — a dog for the blind, for instance — as a sniffer dog unerringly tracking down the faintest traces of scent, or as a

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sled dog, pulling heavy loads through snow and ice. Each of these capacities shapes for itself the body appropriate to it: large and powerful, lean and swift, small and nimble, and so forth. This plasticity of body and soul — in almost every conceivable bodily form and with the corresponding comportment of dog-kind — has, since Roman times, fallen prey to human emotionality and perverted into the breeding of luxury dogs, dwarf dogs, and lap dogs.

The essential expression of the house-and-farm cat is an entirely different one. It seems to have fallen evolutively deeper into wildness. It lives, as it were, two lives. In the one it lives itself out apart from the human being, nocturnal as its wild kindred. With all its senses at full stretch it follows its hunting instincts, steals along its own ways, lies in wait for its prey, and seizes it in a powerful spring. Rodents — mice and rats — are its preferred nourishment; and unfortunately birds as well: ground-nesting birds, those nesting in low branches, or swallows that shoot too close to the ground by day, which it makes its sure quarry with a nonchalant upward-darting paw. Its second life it spends seeking out the domesticity of the human being as its sleeping place, purring its way around the family members in coaxing affection, delighting the children in playful sport — and thereby recommending itself for this further form of provisioning. Then at night the way out opens again into the other life. Here again it is human emotionality that, when misdirected, reduces the cat to a mere house pet and creature of cuddling.

In the dog it is the preeminent sense of smell — differentiating every nuance, setting body and soul alike into activity — and in the cat the eye-sense specialized for night vision, that each imprints upon the agricultural organism a distinctive quality, an ordering principle: the dog that raises the alarm on its night watch, that accompanies the farmer with its nose to the ground across fields and meadows and pastures following a trail, or that, obeying the shepherd's sign, encircles the flock of sheep and holds it on its allotted grazing ground — within the limits set for it, it is the executing organ of the human being. The cat is not this in the same sense. It remains unobserved on its nocturnal forays across farmstead and precinct, sets its own measure in the destruction of harmful rodents, and is in this sufficient unto itself.

It is not the excretions of dog and cat that are welcome to the agricultural organism — they are foul-smelling and carry no weight — but their contribution is the ordering watchman-function. Unfortunately dog and cat have largely lost this function as human-guided co-formers of an ensouled natural whole. As house

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As companion animals and luxury pets, they have largely estranged themselves from the soul-body of the agricultural organism.

Sheep and Goat

As the so-called "small ruminants," sheep and goats rank among the oldest of our domestic animals, following the dogs. Although closely related, they differ markedly in temperament, mobility, and in degrees of frugality. Like all ruminants, they appear in the history of their kind as cloven-hoofed horn-bearers only at the end of the mammalian series. Indeed, the diversity of forms among wild sheep- and goat-like creatures and the later domesticated forms developed only in the transition from the late Tertiary into the Ice Ages (Pleistocene) and within these epochs continuing into the present (Holocene)^[132] — in times, that is, when the human being stepped among the animals and, out of a cosmically shaped, instinctively spirit-near consciousness, founded with them a magical-cultic relationship that found its expression in the manner of hunting with regard to food and clothing, and in animal sacrifice.

Is it not therefore a legitimate question whether the nomadizing human being, woven into the workings of the forces of nature, did not play a part in this still very young differentiation of forms? Do not the myths of the peoples point toward this conceivability — for instance, the animal sacrifice of Abel, or the rock drawings reaching back into the Ice Ages (Pleistocene), among others in the Sahara, and many more besides? Are these not all together the expression of a magical-cultic human-animal relationship of the Atlantean time, of the late Cenozoic? And did there not then take place later, in the second epoch of the post-Atlantean age (Holocene), out of the Zarathustrian Mysteries, in a kind of repetition on a higher level, the process of domestication?

Sheep and goats, endowed with all the characteristics of their domesticated state, appear from the end of the ninth millennium B.C. onward in the mountain regions of south and west Asia. In the sheep these characteristics are the following: smaller in form than the wild type, high variability of body size, no seasonal change of coat, the transformation of the coat into a continuously growing wool fleece, vivid coloring and patterning. A similar diversity of outward appearance is shown by the goats, extending even to the coat transformed into wool in the Angora and Cashmere goats.^[133]

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Sheep and goats are extraordinarily frugal. Their food is grasses, herbs, leaves and shoots. The goats in particular are highly adaptable to the aromatic, cellulose-rich and salt-bearing food supply of extreme geographical zones — mountain regions and semi-deserts, for instance. Overgrazing of the latter leads rapidly to progressive desertification. Through the manifold gifts of both small ruminants — wool, meat, milk, hair, hide, skin and horn — they became the great cultural companions of the human being. They stood in closed herds under the care of the pastoral peoples, as the very foundation of their existence, and in many places became in village settlements the "poor man's cow." The close relationship of the sheep to its environment and to the human being led worldwide to a great diversity of breeds, and since the Middle Ages in Europe to the development of landraces, and in the modern era to line breeding for meat, wool and milk breeds. The breeding toward the white wool sheep (Merino) took place in Spain. Today, frequently through the crossing-in of landraces, it has found the widest distribution worldwide.

In Europe, herd-keeping under the leadership of the itinerant shepherd persists in remnants to this day. It can be maintained economically only through the fact that the sheep flocks are employed pre-eminently in nature reserves for landscape management. The keeping of goats is declining most sharply. Ninety-five percent of all domestic goats serve the cause of self-sufficiency in the smallholder-structured agriculture of the developing world.

The soul-expressions of sheep and goat are polar to one another. The sense-performances of both are admittedly similar — the sense of smell is the most excellently developed, followed by the sense of sight and, at some remove, the sense of hearing. Yet the soul element lives itself out differently in body language and through the senses. With head mostly lowered below the line of the spine, with a more massive body, more turned toward the earth and toward the inner world of its own metabolism, more ponderous in its movements, the soul-nature of the sheep expresses itself in a more dreamily subdued way. The goat is otherwise: it springs up vividly, leaps over stock and stone, raises the head high, sniffs curiously now at this, now at that, climbs the nearest available elevated position and holds its gaze attentively directed into the distance. Rather than grazing across wide plains, it prefers mountainous terrain — grazing at head height on steep slopes, or standing upright on its hind legs to reach for the highest attainable leaf on bush and tree.

Sheep and goats carry horns. These, in contrast to cattle, are larger in the male animals and — depending on the breed — spiral in form

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twisted or curved sabre-like toward the rear. Alongside the horn-bearing breeds there are hornless breeds — among sheep, most of today's commercial breeds belong to this latter group.

Where breed diversity narrows, breeding concentrates on the wool or dairy sheep and, in goats, on dairy or meat animals.

The small ruminants are herd animals — sheep more so than goats. Consequently, by their essential nature, they are more landscape-shapers in the large sense, less a formative organ within the individual agricultural organism. As long as village-organisms with their village lands still existed as a more or less closed whole, it was the calling of the shepherd to make his flock the organ of that whole: whether in grazing the fallow, the commons, or the waste ground; in driving the animals across the harvested root-crop fields, across the winter sowings that had shot too luxuriantly into leaf; or in grazing the herb-rich verges of paths and field margins in autumn as a dietary measure before the coming winter stalling; or finally in folding the sheep on the arable for the purposes of manuring. All of this was established right, and it was done in agreement with the village community. There are narrow limits to any prospect of reviving the shepherd's calling. Opportunities present themselves in the care of nature reserves or on large farms with marginal soils.

The situation is different with dairy sheep and dairy goat keeping. Neither is bound to the herd and both can, in smaller or larger numbers, contribute substantially to the ensoulment of the agricultural organism. The small ruminants recommend themselves above all for the further development of one-sidedly directed market gardens into garden-farms. There they stand in for cattle in the utilisation of cover crops for green manuring as well as of the residues from a diversified vegetable production, and they provide for the transformation of these into a sustainably effective manure.

By way of the four-stomach system of the ruminants, plant-based foodstuffs undergo a uniquely intensive digestion (see chapter "Cattle", rumen digestion and rumination, p. 150ff). This makes it possible to break down cellulose — that is, raw-fibre-rich nutritive substances — and render them serviceable for growth, maintenance and production (milk, wool, meat). In the course of this digestive process, forces of the animal's soul organization are impressed into the stream of plant-based nutrition. In keeping with the essential nature of sheep and goat, this impression differs between the two. The difference cannot be sufficiently grasped from the quantitative composition of the so-called nutrients of the manure. Not the quantitative proportion

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of the so-called nutrients is decisive — it is their composition through the forces of the soul-body working into the life processes. Essential nature itself manures through the substances. Thus sheep manure works more mildly, more harmonisingly and more structuringly upon the life processes that condense in the vegetative toward the food-fruit — in leafy vegetables, for instance. Goat manure, by contrast, works more heatedly and, as may be surmised from the essential nature of the goat, more stimulatingly upon the growth impulse along the axis root-stem-blossom.

The sheep's contribution to the ensoulment of the landscape becomes experienceable when the shepherd draws with his flock in autumn across the farm precincts and beyond through the surrounding cultural landscape: the shepherd striding ahead with his staff, the flock pressing close behind him; or he standing in the midst of the field, the sheep ranging around him in search of food. This scene awakens a mood of deep peace that spreads across the landscape — a picture of perfect stillness and movement at one and the same time. A flock of sheep moving thus across the fields, from precinct to precinct, each stirring of whose being gathers itself in the shepherd's consciousness and is guided from thence, forges relationships that bind the individual agricultural organisms into the higher unity of the cultural landscape. The goats, beside the sheep, are less creatures of the herd. They have more "self-will." They are kept in limited numbers for milk and meat production and render, partly as a substitute for cattle, valuable services in the whole canon of domestic animals toward the shaping of the soul-body of the agricultural organism.

Das Rind (Bos taurus) gilt nach gängiger Auffassung als Nachkomme des Ur- oder Auerochsen (Bos primigenius).^[134] "Modern zoological domestic-animal research regards [...] today with certainty only one wild bovine, the aurochs, as the sole ancestral form of domesticated cattle."^[135]

It is assumed that the European cattle breeds migrated from the "fertile crescent," the Near and Middle Asian region. The oldest bone finds point back to the eighth millennium BC, to the beginnings

of the ancient Persian cultural epoch. The early breeds, like all later ones, are smaller in build than the presumed wild form of the aurochs and show from the outset a high variability of outward appearance. Precisely in the grazing animals — cattle, sheep and goats, the oldest domestic animals after the dog — it becomes evident how the derivation from their wild forms remains obscure. When one looks to the myths of the peoples — the sacrifice of Abel in the Old Testament, for instance, who was a herdsman — sheep and cattle above all stand at the centre of religious sacrificial acts. "Cultural-historical documents show that cattle in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and India initially served solely for cultic purposes."^[136] In the ancient Egyptian myth, the heavenly goddess Hathor was venerated in the archetype of the cow, depicted as a cow bearing the solar disc cradled between her horns. In India today the cow is sacred among Hindus as she was in primordial times. Does this not point rather to the fact that the spirit-real experience of the being of cattle — that which supersensibly constitutes the group soul^[137] — stood as godparent to the process of domestication?

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Position within the Farm Organism

With regard to shaping the agricultural organism into a self-contained whole, cattle — or rather the herd organism formed into a higher unity — are "queen and king" among all domestic animals. To be sure, each of them, as indicated in the preceding chapters, makes its contribution in accordance with the soul element submerged in its bodily formation. But to the being of the cow there belongs a universal potency. On account of this fact, cattle-keeping cannot, strictly speaking, be dispensed with. Their essential significance lies only secondarily in what they produce by way of foodstuffs and other raw materials. That is the outer side. This side is represented by the range of field crops that form a substantial foundation pillar of primary value-creation in economic life. The primary contribution lies on the inner side; it is the particular capacity to bring the physiological functions — or more precisely the members of the farm organism — into relation with one another, and thereby to maintain this organism as a wholeness that is healthy and capable of development. The cow — always conceived as a member of the farm-centred herd organism — sets the wisdom-filled measure

Stellung im Betriebsorganismus

Hinsichtlich der Gestaltung des landwirtschaftlichen Organismus zu einem in sich geschlossenen Ganzen ist das Rind bzw. der zur höheren Einheit geformte Herdenorganismus «Königin und König» unter allen Haustieren. Gewiss, ein jedes derselben, wie in den vorausgehenden Kapiteln angedeutet, leistet seinen Beitrag gemäß dem in die Leibesbildung untergetauchten Seelischen. Dem Wesen der Kuh aber ist eine Universalpotenz eigen. Aufgrund dieser Tatsache kann streng genommen auf die Rinderhaltung nicht verzichtet werden. Ihre essentielle Bedeutung liegt erst sekundär in dem, was sie an Nahrungsmitteln und sonstigen Rohstoffen erzeugt. Das ist die Außenseite. Diese repräsentiert die Reihe der Feldfrüchte, die eine wesentliche Grundsäule der Urwertschöpfung im Wirtschaftsleben bilden. Die primäre Leistung liegt auf der Innenseite; es ist die besondere Befähigung, die physiologischen Funktionen oder mehr noch die Wesensglieder des Betriebsorganismus aufeinander zu beziehen und dadurch diesen als Ganzheit gesund und entwicklungsfähig zu erhalten. Die Kuh – immer gedacht als Glied des hofbezogenen Herdenorganismus – setzt das weisheitsvolle Maß

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in its bodily formation and in the interplay of its organ systems — sets this forth from out of itself through its activity, and thereby stamps, from the side of nature, the measure, the inner economy of the farm as a whole.

One can speak of a true herd organism only when the herd replenishes itself over generations through its own breeding and has bound itself to the conditions of the place, down to the farm's own fodder supply. The breeding bulls occupy a special status: they are replaced at regular intervals by sires from herds of the same character, for the purpose of refreshing the blood of the herd. The herd organism stands above the sum of the individual animals. This finds expression, among other things, in the simultaneity of the animals' day-rhythmic behaviour. In the morning they follow the lead cow out to pasture in what might be called a hierarchical order. There they spread out, yet do not run in all directions; they graze moving in one direction, take in fodder for seven to eight hours a day, interrupted by communal rumination phases that likewise take up around eight hours a day. The going to the watering place, the rest periods, and the giving of milk are likewise subject to a strict rhythm that governs the whole herd. All measures of keeping, feeding, care, and breeding should serve to strengthen this herd-rhythmic process. The more fully developed it is, the healthier the herd.

The methods underlying the factory farming practised worldwide today — feeding with silage and easily digestible concentrates from all corners of the world, year-round stall-keeping on concrete slatted floors, the practice of dehorning, and breeding for maximum output crammed into a sharply shortened lifespan — weaken the cows. It means the loss of the capacity to develop their own self-contained soul-body. The dairy cows are already spent in their youth and as a rule are gone after four and a half years — that is, after two "forced" lactations.

The scale of cattle-keeping is determined by the size of the farm, by its natural endowment with regard to climate and soil conditions, and thereby by the need for manuring, as well as, in varying degrees, by the intensity of management. Decisive here is the farm's own fodder base, which comprises the available grasslands — meadows and pastures — together with field fodder cultivation. The extent of the latter follows from the configuration of the crop rotation in arable farming.

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Manifest Appearance and Knowledge of the Essential Being

As a ruminant of the highest developmental stage, the cow is a being as metabolically active as it is rhythmic. Its nerve-sense activity, by contrast — setting aside its highly differentiated achievements in smell and taste — recedes more markedly in relation to the environment. Its sensory performances stand primarily in the service of its inner life, its digestive activity. Its intelligent being reveals itself outwardly in a rather phlegmatic, dully dreaming way; inwardly, however, in a high, wisdom-filled instinctive life. Highly introverted, it experiences itself in a kind of inner beholding.

If one seeks to approach the essential being of the cow through cognition, one must direct attention to its principal activity: to the processual steps in the interplay of inside and outside in the taking-up of food, through the working-over of the fodder masses in digestion, all the way to the excretions of manure and liquid manure.

If one follows what natural-scientific individual facts yield regarding the digestive process, one quickly reaches the limits of cognition. These limits are generally not noticed, because the threshold to what is sense-unobservable is not sufficiently attended to and consequently not weighed. One slides unawares into abstract, qualityless model-conceptions. But once one becomes aware of this boundary of cognition — which opens up between what is objectively perceptible and the processual character of substance-activity, for example in the transition from outside to inside through the intestinal walls — one first truly begins to appreciate and value the significance and range of Rudolf Steiner's findings in spiritual research. When these research findings are brought in, the cognition resting on the outer senses becomes a continually expanding process of cognition. They illuminate the operative agent, the essentially active being, that brings forth the appearances in their forms and colours. The findings of spiritual research add to the outer side of the world of appearances its essentially creative inner side.

Oral Digestion

Already in the taking-up of fodder — daily around one eighth of body weight; that corresponds to 60 to 70 kg of fresh substance — the metabolic-limb system dominates the head region. The head plunges, feeling its way with the muzzle, deep into the fodder mass; like a limb, the long

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tongue seizes a tuft of grass, herbs, or hay, draws it into the mouth, and, in the case of fresh green growth, clips it off by pressing the lower jaw against the edge of the toothless pad of the upper jaw. Between times the tongue slides with pleasure across the muzzle and tastes the glandular secretions of the same. The cow is presumably carrying out thereby a kind of first quality-analysis of the fodder taken in, probably also with regard to the kind and quantity of salivation. In the muzzle, the upper lip has merged with the nasal cavities. Thereby fodder-uptake and breathing are closely bound together, and likewise the senses of touch, taste, and smell.

During the short dwell-time of the fodder in the long-stretched oral cavity, it is again the tongue which, in the few chewing acts, moves the fodder rhythmically back and forth between the rows of molars. A first digestive step is thereby initiated through fragmentation and salivation. A number of glands of varying size secrete saliva — in hay-feeding up to 180 litres per day — and provide for the enzymatic breakdown of starch into sugar.

Rumen Digestion and Rumination

Oral digestion undergoes a tremendous intensification in the act of rumination. This proceeds in the opposite direction to fodder-uptake. What the cow has grazed, tasted, and swallowed, it brings back up again in portions from a deeper digestive zone, the forestomachs, chews it and tastes it through once more — and now for the first time thoroughly. Depending on the kind of fodder, whether fresh green or roughage, it carries out 30 to 80 rumination strokes per portion.

Before this process, a remarkable transition takes place. Little fragmented, tuft by tuft passes from the oral cavity of the head region, through the oesophagus and the separating diaphragm, into the abdominal region — into the three gland-free forestomachs: firstly into the reticulum (also called the honeycomb or centrifugal stomach), from there secondly into the rumen, and thirdly into the psalterium or leaf stomach (*Omasum*). If not already earlier in the rumen, it is decided definitively in the psalterium whether the fodder-pulp passes on for further digestion into the abomasum or glandular stomach, or whether it — pressed out — takes the way back once more into the oral cavity for rumination. The unique task of the forestomachs, and here above all of the rumen, is the microbial breakdown of the crude-fibre-rich plant food. The rumen with its enormous capacity of approximately 150 litres extends from the diaphragm rearward into the pelvic cavity.

Together with the reticulum and the psalterium, it fills the entire left half of the abdominal cavity. In the great fermentation space of the rumen, intensive fermentation processes take place within the fodder masses, which are kept in constant motion. However chaotically these proceed, they stand under the strict direction of the astral body of the bovine. In these rhythmically unfolding churning processes, bacteria and ciliate organisms — belonging to the protozoa — break down the more readily digestible components of the fodder pulp; some of these, above all energy-rich fatty acids, pass here already — in their passage through the metabolically active rumen mucosa — into the bloodstream.^[138] As soon as the rumen is full — visible from outside in the bulging of the left flank — satiation thus sets in, and as a rule the cow, or the whole herd, lies down and after some time begins to ruminate. The rumen contents sort themselves into three layers: a lower liquid one, floating above it a middle layer of still coarser material, and an upper layer of fermentation gases. From the middle layer of the rumen and from material pressed out of the psalterium, the bovine now swallows portion after portion back up into the mouth, releasing the fermentation gases by the same route. These travel with the exhalation stream as far as the frontal sinuses — indeed as far as the hollow of the horn peg. Here a wide tableau of perception and qualitative analysis opens up for the bovine, in relation to what has so far revealed itself to it, in terms of substance and forces, in the course of the digestive process.

Rumination: A Perceiving and Sifting of Substances and Forces

In the activity of rumination — eight to nine hours a day — the essential expression of the cow changes fundamentally. Its metabolic-limb activity comes largely to rest. All inner and outer activity shifts toward the head pole. Not only is the cheek musculature engaged in powerful, rhythmic activity — grinding the fibre-rich bolus swallowed back up, dosed at roughly 100 grams — but equally the tongue and the salivary glands. The senses behave in complete contrast to this. In concentration upon the act of rumination they come, in a certain sense, to rest, to a state of inner recollection. Now for the first time the cow truly thinks through what it has taken in from outside — from this field, that meadow or pasture — in the way of living, structured substance. To be sure, it has done so in the

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in its grazing and wandering already felt, tasted, and smelled. Now, however, in the repeated tasting of the already pre-digested fodder stream, what was perceived unites with the cow's whole soul-nature. What was previously merely living, structured plant matter is now, in the perceiving act of rumination, lifted up to become soul sensation. The cow awakens in this activity to its consciousness — a consciousness that, dreaming, is wholly immersed in the processes of the body. It is the sentient force of the soul body that henceforth ensoul the entire further digestive process right through to the end products of manure and liquid manure. What Rudolf Steiner calls the "cosmic-qualitative analysis"^[139] that the animal carries out in digestion applies in the highest degree to the bovine. In rumination this analysis takes its beginning. This becomes visible at the eyes; the gaze changes during rumination. Whereas ordinarily one looks into the large eyes as into the blueness of a deep well, now — with the head slightly raised — eyes and face take on an intently concentrated expression. It has the appearance as though the cow were "meditating" all that it has inwardly received, in the way of perceptions, in this first phase of digestion. Such an intensely inward-directed gaze is found, one might well say, nowhere else in the animal kingdom. It is as though in the expression of the eyes there is mirrored the becoming-conscious of the formative forces that are released in the grinding down of the carbon scaffoldings and protein structures of the plant masses. In the act of rumination the cow is wholly with itself, close to a self-perception it cannot have — because it has no incarnated I. Through the proximity of its highly concentrated soul body to its I-hood, which lives itself forth as its "group soul"^[140] and comes to expression as a reflection in the herd organism, it is in a special measure fitted to work through inwardly the powerfully surging mass of formative forces. In a first step it carries out the aforementioned "cosmic-qualitative analysis" in the breaking down of the plant nourishment, culminating in the act of rumination. It analyses, in a dullness of soul, the formative forces that have built up the plant form from out of the cosmos in the light of the sun, that have congealed in the individual forms of those plants, and that have at the same time become bearers of the living substance-process within the plants.

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Small and Large Intestine Digestion

As the plant forms dissolve in the digestive tract, the formative forces are gradually released from their material confinement. This is the result of a step-by-step breakdown process that unfolds in three phases: a mechanical-to-microbial phase from chewing through to the rumen and psalterium activity; a predominantly enzymatic, though also bacterial phase from the abomasum through the jejunum to the ileum; and from there a purely microbial phase from the caecum through the colon to the rectum. While in the forestomachs the opening-up of cellulose is the governing process — and alongside it, through the extraordinarily active microbial life, a re-building and up-building protein metabolism takes place — protein breakdown begins in the abomasum (Abomasum), in the acid medium brought about by the gastric acids. This continues, taking in the dead microbial masses from the forestomachs, along enzymatic and bacterial pathways through the sections of the small intestine (Intestinum tenue): first through the secretions of the pancreas (Pancreas), which, like the bile that emulsifies fats, empty into the duodenum (Duodenum); then through the jejunum (Jejunum), set with countless glands and villi; and through the short ileum (Ileum). The latter forms a sluice between the jejunum and the large intestine. It prevents backflow from the bacterially rich contents of the colon and rectum into the bacterially poor jejunum.^[141] Altogether the small intestine reaches a length of up to 48 metres in the fully grown cow. It hangs in rich convolutions from the mesentery (Mesenterium) — a fold-rich double lamella of serosa. Mesentery and small intestine encircle, like a wreath, the in-winding and out-winding spiral of the colon, which, joining and opening into the caecum and ileum and then into the large intestine or rectum, forms the third section.^[142] What has passed through rumen and jejunum undigested, in the way of raw-fibre-rich feed mass, is now subjected once more to an intensive microbial breakdown. A not inconsiderable remainder of undigested raw fibre, permeated by a still active microbial mass, appears finally as the cowpat. The question is whether this microbially enlivened, material residue alone makes up the manuring value of cattle dung.

The substance-processual activity in the digestive tract belongs, although it unfolds under the governance of the being of the animal, from beginning to end to the

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outer world. Its task is to overcome the foreignness of the nourishment. This happens through complete breakdown — carried so far that the pre-formed configuration, the substance-processual and force-configuration of the feed, whether of grasses, herbs or legumes, loses its own-being character entirely.

The Threshold from the Outer World to the Inner World

The threshold between the outer world of the digestive tract — relocated into the animal body — and the efficacious inner world of the animal's own being is formed by the mucous membrane walls of the rumen, the glandular stomach, the small intestine, and, fading out, of the colon and rectum. These boundary membranes are organs that, in comparison with the external bodily skin, display an inverted structure: the powerfully developed mucous membranes are turned outward, toward the stream of feed; they are in the highest degree metabolically active with respect to the breakdown of feed and to the absorption of substances stripped of their foreignness. The side of the intestinal wall turned toward the body's interior — the serosa — is innervated. It belongs to the peritoneum, which lines the abdominal cavity rather like an "inner sky" and thereby represents the sense-nerve or perceptive pole of the intestinal walls. Between the two, forming the middle, a circular muscle layer articulates itself, which rhythmically provides, among other things, for the peristaltic movements. It is the soul-nature of the cow itself that is active in the three members of the digestive membranes — simultaneously perceiving the process and letting it sound together into the wholeness of the bodily functions.

Thus from the digestive tract there works into the bodily inner space an etherised and soul-permeated substance-stream: a stream of etheric formative forces released from their binding in the plant forms; and radiations of sentient — that is, soul — forces that the cow has stirred in itself through its sense activity, above all during rumination. The former are taken up by the blood and stand available for the building of the organism's own substance, for growth and for reproduction. The latter radiate in close relationship to the blood into the organism. The venous blood, flowing back from the great systemic circulation, loads itself with the substances and forces sifted in the intestinal walls. It reaches, by way of the liver, the lesser circulation of heart and lungs, and there enlivens itself into arterial blood. From the heart it flows into the great systemic circulation, a portion branching forward into the trunk of the head arteries, one of which reaches as far as

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into the bony core-processes and their bone-sheaths (*periosteum*), as well as into the under-skins of the two horns. How vigorous the blood-supply to the horn-cores growing out of the frontal bone actually is, becomes plain in the case of a horn fracture: the blood wells up like a spring, seemingly without end.

The Significance of the Horns and Hooves

In the horns and hooves the blood — and the etheric-astral radiation bound up with it — strikes against a wall that is impenetrable even to this radiation: the outer horn-sheath. This is the outer skin hardened into horn, pure "form," the death-pole standing over against the life-pole of the substance-stream pulsing upward from the depths of the body. Here, at this point of damming-up or death, the blood and the radiation are driven back into the organism.^[143] In the horns and hooves the organism of the ruminant closes itself off completely from the in-raying workings of cosmos and earth. The cow is thrown back upon itself — not, however, in the direction of a heightened consciousness in the head, but of an enhanced formative force in the living reality of the metabolic pole.

The course of the cosmic-qualitative analysis proceeds in processual steps, in which the function of the nerve-sense system stands in polar relation to that of the metabolic system — and this in a twofold way: the perceptive activity of rumination and that of sifting through the rumen and intestinal walls stands polar to the sequence of digestive steps that begins in the mouth with salivating and breaking-down, continues in the forestomachs through microbial digestion, reaches a high point in the gastric and small-intestinal digestion, and comes to completion in the large intestine. Here the substance-compositions of the fodder are so far broken down that they lose their own character. They are transferred step by step into a physically-mineral, inorganic condition which, from the side of substance, opens a wide field for the cosmic-qualitative analysis. Standing in polar relation to this process of annihilation is the life-stream of the blood, which transfers these substances — now set into the state of the inorganic — into the body's own building-up processes and guides them all the way to the peripheral barriers of the horns and hooves.

Rumination is a sense-process that becomes dimly conscious through the brain and reflects itself in the concentrated expression of the face.

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The cow perceives the farm through its fodder. In the grinding, the fodder's compositional character — its substance-compositions and the forces working within them — as well as its origin from the farm precincts become known to her. These sense-functions continue rearward in the rumen and intestine. There they sink gradually into unconsciousness.

What takes place in horns and hooves, by contrast, is a heightened perception in relation to the inner empowerment of instinctive life. The perception discloses what the blood, suffused with ensouled vitality, carries forward from the digestive region toward the periphery of the body. In the surge against the dead horn-sheath, what lights up is not a consciousness bound to the brain, but a spiritual force working into the subconsciousness and raying back into the organism. An understanding of the nature of this force can arise when one turns, by way of comparison, to the thinking force working supersensibly in the human being — whose product is thoughts, which then become conscious in the head pole through the brain in a shaded reflection of their spiritual being-nature. In the cow this force does not rise to a thought-borne self-consciousness. It remains bound to the metabolism as a force that has the power to work upon the etheric formative forces freed from digestion — dampening, ordering, disclosing potentials of living efficacy. These potentials may be compared to an imaginative world of pictures that an artist, for example, stirs into activity within himself in the creating of his work of art. What the cow possesses as disposition, the human being can develop through self-schooling by way of body-free thinking. Through this he learns, in full wakefulness, to know in true pictures the world of forces holding sway in and around him. It is the step toward Imagination — the first step from knowledge of the senses to knowledge of the spirit.

Cosmic-Qualitative Analysis and I-Disposition

From the comprehensive view of the essential being of the cow, the following picture emerges: if rumination marks the beginning of the cosmic-qualitative analysis, the processes in horns and hooves mark its completion. This completion consists in the damming-back of the blood and the repulsion of the radiations connected with the blood at the horn-sheaths — now died into mere form — back into the organism. The back-radiations contain the sum of all that the soul-body of the cow has

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to the strengthening of its sensations. The food of the cow consists of plants, predominantly stem and leaf. These are formations arising from the in-rayings of the cosmos into the earthly element of substance. When we eat plants, we eat the cosmos. The cow, with its highly developed instinctive life, analyses the cosmic share in the physical coming-into-form of the plant. The organ that processes the result of this analysis, of the back-radiation, is not the consciousness-engendering brain. Rather, what must be thought of is — in polar opposition — the sensitive peritoneum lining the entire abdominal cavity, and in particular the *mesentery*. This concentrates itself in double-lobed fashion especially in the mesentery that bears the small intestine. What discloses itself to the cow there, in sleeping-dreaming awareness, is no longer the form, but the substantial-and-forceful, the being-side of substance. Its own, unincarnated I-being — the "group soul" — enters into relation, in the depths of metabolism, with the essential ground of the substantive.

The foregoing considerations concerning this essential relationship can build a bridge toward an initial understanding of what Rudolf Steiner, with regard to the cow, calls the "I-disposition."^[144] Is it not this that incorporates the result of the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" into itself, and so imprints itself upon the cow dung as a fertilising force-source? Understood in this way, the cow dung carries outward "an etheric-astral element that by rights belongs within the belly of the animal," and through this fertilises the soils of the farm precincts.^[145] It is the "I-disposition," with the etheric-astral back-radiation from the uttermost periphery of the cow incorporated within it — back into the substance-stream of digestion — that lends cow dung its enduringly enlivening and formative fertilising force. The dung "has the power to overcome what is inorganic in the earthy."^[146]

Surplus Performances

What the cow — and this holds, with variation, for all ruminants among the domestic animals — takes up from the masses of its plant food in the way of substances and formative forces, it needs to the least degree for itself: for the unfolding of its consciousness, for its movement-activity, the maintenance of life, and reproduction. A great surplus remains, which it does not need for

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itself, because it has no I that wishes to live itself out. The human being has an I and claims its food for what it needs for itself in the living-out of its self-consciousness. The cow yields its surplus force to the heightened life-performances, such as reproduction, growth — that is, the production of milk and flesh — as well as, in connection with the "I-disposition," the manure and liquid manure, and through these, as an enlivening and ensouling fertiliser, to the earth. The measure by which these surplus forces are distributed between the production and value-formation of foodstuffs on the one hand and the value-formation of manure on the other is determined, in the first instance by way of nature, by the soul body of the cow. When this measure is in balance, health, longevity, and a high value-quality of the manure arise. The human being of the present has managed to shift this wisdom-filled measure by compulsion in favour of a quantitative maximum performance. The health of the animals suffers from this, just as do food quality and the value of the manure. In factory farming, the question of the quality of the manure — in the sense of the lasting potency of its enlivening and ensouling working — no longer arises at all. What stands in the foreground instead is the disposal problem of the slurry accumulating in mass quantities. The organism principle, by contrast, has the right measure immanent within it.

Renunciation

The cow is — as, in degrees, are all domestic animals — a being of renunciation. The cow, to the highest degree, renounces something that belongs to it by its very nature: the nourishing and fertilising forces that it gives over, in the most literal sense "selflessly," to the human being and to the earth. These forces enliven, heal, and harmonise the site-specific enduring fertility of the soils. They strengthen and bring health to the relational nexus of soil and plant. This is a process advancing through time, which comes into its own the more exclusively the manure derives from the livestock of the farm, and likewise the fodder on which the cow herd carries out the cosmic-qualitative analysis.

The Cattle Herd and the Farm Organism

Viewed in relation to the whole of the soul body of the farm organism, the cattle herd fulfils, in the stream of time, a kind of pulsating heart-function. It takes from the circumference of the farm precincts the fodder; it eats, year after year, a

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good measure of what the life body of the farm organism has brought forth. What comes, in the course of the year, from meadows, pastures, and field fodder cultivation is the product of the interworking of the physical and life organisation of the farm. This product — the abundance of grasses and herbs — does not serve human nutrition, but it does serve that of the ruminants, and, through plant residues as well as manure and liquid manure, the fertility of the earth. The cow eats and processes enormous masses of plant matter as though it needed all of this for itself alone. But this is not the case at all. What has congealed into those masses as cosmically enlivening formative force, the cow raises into the sphere of its analysing, dully sentient soul body; permeates with these forces of sentience the etheric formative forces released from digestion and suffusing the whole body; and finally generates a product that it bestows back upon the earth as a surplus value — and so helps the soil toward an enduring, continuously working fertility.

This happening, which fulfils itself in the rhythm of the year and of years, is — like the blood — only outwardly a circulation. Just as the blood refreshes itself in the lungs, impregnates itself in the periphery of the body with impressions that are perceived in the heart, and is sifted at the kidney for usable and unusable substances — so too, in the agricultural organism, the path of fodder growth proceeds in metamorphoses: it renews itself every year under the influences of the cosmos and the earth, grows up far out in the periphery of the farm precincts, is taken up and analysed by the cattle herd, sifted at the intestinal wall and transformed into manure, which preserves the yield of what has become and leads it into a new becoming. It is not a repetition of the same, but a process of advancing development.

Thus through the activity of the cattle — viewed from the side of nature — the law of "giving and taking" that holds sway in all nature fulfils itself at the highest level; and at the same time the cattle herd as a whole, as no other domestic animal does, ensures the greatest possible closedness of the farm organism. It is the unique achievement of the cow that, in the first instance in accordance with nature, centre and periphery of the farm close together into a higher whole. "Manure works more wonders than the saints."^[147]

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The physical, life, and soul organization of an agricultural operation, as sketched here, is given macrocosmically through the site-specific interworking of the kingdoms of nature in the polar field of tension between earth and cosmos. The human being's task is to raise this given condition, according to the principles that underlie his microcosmic bodily and essential form, up into a higher unity. Novalis captures this state of affairs in the words: "Humanity is on a mission — we are called to the formation of the Earth."^[148] Biodynamic agriculture takes the fulfilment of this mission as its own task — extending the Western-Christian agricultural culture through anthroposophical spiritual science. The point of departure for this endeavour is the aforementioned course for farmers given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924.^[149] Biodynamic agriculture strives for a further development of the site-specific practice still proving its worth at that time — above all through shaping the farm into an organic whole, and beyond that through specific manuring measures to promote soil fertility and the nourishing quality of the produce. A further goal of striving is the formation of farm communities that give themselves their social order out of the living and working conditions of agriculture itself, and that, radiating outward, plant social formative impulses into the surrounding social sphere.

Spiritual Research as Mediator between Being and Appearance

What is culture-founding in the future sense are ideas and their realization in self-determined work. Out of this arises a free relationship of the human being to himself and to the world. In agriculture, the human being encounters in daily work the phenomena of nature and the heavens, the infinity of the universe. To sense-perception, this infinity appears as a finite sum of individual facts, which reveal a coherent connection graspable in natural laws only at the level of physical-sensory appearance.

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Beneath this reductionist gaze, however, the concept of the universe — of all-ness, of wholeness — does not fulfill itself; it yields no account of what enlivens the plant between heaven and earth, what ensoulds the animal, and what prompts the human being to ask after his origin in the spirit. These, however, are the questions concerning the essential side of things. They remain closed to mere sense-cognition. This reveals not the becoming, but the become — that which appears to the senses as form, as the dead image of the spirit that creates living from out of the supersensible.

The overriding question confronting every striving human being today is not the question of appearance alone — that is, the side of form in things — but the question of the agent that creates this form. Form we perceive through the senses, which are body-bound; being we perceive through soul-organs, which we can first develop along the path of individual spiritual schooling, in that part of the soul that lifts itself free from body-boundness.^[150] From anthroposophical spiritual research there are results available — won by the spiritual researcher through body-free cognition on the basis of such developed higher soul-organs, and graspable by the thinking consciousness of every human being. The essential factuality of the results of anthroposophical spiritual research discloses itself to ordinary consciousness: on the one hand through logic — in the unprejudiced thinking-through of spiritual-scientific results they support one another and unite into spirit-real thought-pictures — and on the other hand through the deed of action — they prove their fruitfulness in daily doing. Both paths of cognition, deepened by a third, personal spiritual schooling, complement each other and help the soul toward a spirit-certainty within the I, concerning what the spiritual researcher describes of the world of beings that creates, forms and shapes. Anthroposophical spiritual research opens to human reason a deepened understanding of the concept of wholeness. The human being learns to understand himself as a microcosm that contains everything which, macrocosmically, fulfills the universe. Through self-knowledge, supported by the results of spiritual research, he can acquire the capacity to discover his spirit-kinship with the things and beings of earth and cosmos. Nature no longer appears to him as a sum of individual facts — arbitrarily manipulable and, in negation of their own worth, interchangeable with one another — as the methods of agrarian industrialism are characterized.

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Aspects of the Social Question

In contrast to the prevailing tendency to render the working human being superfluous in industrially oriented agriculture, the development and leadership of a biodynamic farm organism requires the force of consciousness and the joy in work of ever more human beings. With this counter-movement, which began in the 1960s, the «social question» entered agriculture — more than a hundred years after the emergence of the urban proletariat in the nineteenth century. Today, on biodynamic farms, it has become a burning one. As set out in the introductory chapter, capital in the industrial production process brings about division of labour. The extraordinarily manifold life-activity between earth and cosmos in agriculture, and the way in which the human being, through working, enters into a personal relationship with it, articulates the wholeness into domains of work. Rigid division of labour tears the members of the agricultural organism into fragments and makes them self-contained. To meet this great danger, a social order must be sought within the farm from the outset — one directed toward the wholeness of all the members of the farm organism working together. This new social form takes shape in communities of responsibility or farm communities. In germinal beginnings, such communities are laid out on every biodynamic farm. Every formerly peasant family enterprise has developed, through the articulation of its manifold tasks, step by step into a family-bound community of responsibility.

Toward further steps in community-building, ever higher hurdles rear up unexpectedly. In a more outward sense, a first hurdle is the buyability and sellability of rights. The property right over land and capital has become tradeable merchandise, an economic object that carries a price on the real estate and capital market. No different is the case with the trading of so-called «eco-points». By their very nature, rights can never be merchandise. In social life they belong to the sphere of rights — not to the economic sphere. They cannot be multiplied or diminished at will, as commodities can be according to need. Rights manifest in agreements and contracts, through which the relational nexuses between human being and human being are regulated. But how can the right come into its own right — that is, how can it become just? Who is it who, as owner, may dispose over rights; who is it who can administer them in accordance with their nature and their being:

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the state, a juridical person, or private hands? Strictly speaking, none of them — so long as land and capital are brought to market, so long, that is, as they are conceived as capitalizable and traded as commodities. Looking toward the future: who, then, can be the owner? Again, only human beings within institutions and organizations that administer this right in trust, in accordance with its spiritual aim, and that make the subject-matter of the right available for use by those who are capable of it.

As a first approach toward this future aim, the state offers the legal form of non-profit bearership. It is designed to serve the common good and is accordingly restricted to defined purposes that exclude private benefit. Agriculture does not fall within this category; it is assumed a priori to operate for profit — that is, for private gain. This assumption does not hold for biodynamic farming, which takes the organism principle seriously in practice and thereby serves the common good to a high degree. What drives it here is not the private benefit of economic success, of profit maximization — but the cultural deed of *the formation of the Earth*. The production of foodstuffs, when it orients itself strictly according to the organism principle, is always oriented toward the common good.

Larger biodynamic farms have in many places joined together with non-profit institutions — for example, with those engaged in social therapy and curative education, as well as those engaged in research and training. This makes it possible to transfer the land, in part or entirely, into the sphere of non-profit status. The hurdles toward this remain, however, very high, and a legislative restructuring with regard to a management oriented toward the common good would be urgently called for. Wherever human beings join together for the sake of the biodynamic management of an agricultural operation, the cardinal question arises of the release — the liberation — of land and capital from old legal bonds.

Where such a release succeeds wholly or in part, self-responsible farm communities arise, pledged to the common good. To establish a new legal form for the neutralization of land and capital ownership — and to practice this formatively — is the aim of what are called agricultural communities (*Landwirtschaftsgemeinschaften*, LWG). These rest on the idea that every human being has, from birth, a right to a piece of land, whose size is measured by the number of people living within a given territory

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in the territory in question. This, Rudolf Steiner held, would be valid "ideal-really."^[151] This entitlement secures for every human being, on the one hand, physical-bodily existence, and on the other hand obliges him to take on, in a trusteeship capacity, responsibility for the stewardship of that piece of earth. In the commercial, labour-divided world the individual cannot realize his entitlement on his own. He can, however, join together with other people and groups of farmers in an LWG, which in the ideal case buys out an agricultural operation from old legal bonds, takes an inventory of it according to the needs of biodynamic farming, and commissions the farmers to realize the obligations of use arising from the pooled entitlements of all the members. Against this attempt — to transform privately and freely disposable ownership of land and soil into a pure right of use, which gives as much free scope to individual initiative as to the social will to shape — the prevailing legal order sets up great resistances, above all through tax law. To venture such a step demands trust, a readiness for risk, courage and initiative, as well as a high degree of practical sense and community sense — virtues that unfold when a field of practice such as this opens before them. Related attempts to bring human beings once more into a responsibly active relationship to the earth open up in community-supported agriculture, which in North America has found wide currency under the designation Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA).^[152] Tom Petherick reports on an LWG in England.^[153] In many variations, LWGs and the efforts of community-supported agriculture are to be found in various countries of Europe. In the case of community-supported agriculture, the concern is primarily with the social shaping of the relationship between producers and consumers.

In one case, a body of consumers leases a piece of land, finds a gardener who, according to all the rules of the art of biodynamic horticulture, produces everything in the way of fresh and storage vegetables that the community needs. Operating costs and living costs are budgeted a year in advance and pre-financed in agreed instalments. At the close of the economic year, a reckoning is made: if surpluses remain, these are carried forward into the budget of the coming year; losses are distributed proportionally

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Each member is free to lend a hand, and each may draw, according to need, from whatever seasonal harvest produce is available. There is no price per unit of goods — and therefore no till.

In the other case, a consumer community cooperates — under similar conditions — with existing biodynamic farms. Or arrangements arise in the spirit of the box-subscription system: the weekly provision of a seasonally available range of produce, subscribed to at fixed prices, from what is as a rule the farm's own growing and processing.

In this way, bridges are thrown up in many places that ground, preferably on the economic field, a human social behaviour oriented toward perceiving one another's needs — and that builds an associative consciousness for the development of regional markets, which in turn help agriculture free itself from the shackles of globalised agrarian industrialism.

On the Formation and Capacity for Action of Agricultural Farm Communities

The greatest challenge in regard to a future-bearing answer to the burning social question in agriculture is the formation of farm communities. These will in future have to become the social form that takes the place of the old family bonds and the peasant community. Agricultural farm communities are places of schooling in which each person walks a path of practice toward higher certainty of spirit —

so as to will collaboration out of free individual initiative. Success depends on the "spiritual credit" that the community must first prove itself worthy of through its shared striving.
so as to meet, from the grasping of the essential totality of the farm, every concern of biodynamic practice in every partial domain — at the right time.
so as to do, in overcoming instruction-bound wage labour, what one has inwardly recognised, in unconditional work, oneself.

The farm community gives itself its own social order. This forms itself out of the consonance of thoughts, feelings, and impulses of will among those involved. Its living continuance requires the constant

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Cultivation. The farm community will act successfully and with foresight when each person involved keeps an eye on his own soul life and tends it, just as the community tends its own in regard to the commonly pursued goal.

Willing in Freedom, the Path toward the Initiative Community

Active thinking that strives toward clarity of thought, and feeling that immerses itself in perceptions, place themselves wholly in the service of willing (Figure 10, p. 172). Thinking kindles willing and points it in a direction; feeling enlivens it and lends it depth and breadth. People come together into a farm community out of individual motives. The moving force is the wish to farm a biodynamic operation together with others. The motives are either still quite indeterminate — a more or less dark impulse, subjective, woven through with destiny — or they are already brighter in thought, directed through conscious engagement with the given reality. When one then ventures the leap into the unknown together, it is and remains, for a time, a thrown-together community of motives. One notices how little the personal motive can sustain, how gladly the collaboration still leans on bonds of friendship. But these, like the motive itself, are determined by the past — and soon enough disappointments, conflicts, and estrangements set in. One can then only be grateful when lean times rule the kitchen, when necessity commands reason and humour prevails. Such times of being pressed back to the essential, to challenges never before suspected, brighten the willing that presses darkly in the motive. Shared insight begins to take up the reins where until now necessity has been doing the pushing. But it is precisely this cultivation of insight that matters. It unfolds both individually and in community, on different levels: Individually, insight widens through the schooling of thinking and feeling in the shared living-through of the rhythmic alternation of natural phenomena — in the mirror of the shifting relationship between earth, sun, moon, and stars across the course of the year; further, in the intuitive beholding of the resting world of rock in the forms of the landscape, and in the changing life processes of soils, plants, and animals — and, taken together, as members of a higher whole. Interest awakens, as if newborn; what one believes one knows becomes question once again; out of the dullness of the motive a spirit of inquiry awakens; to the beholding eye, relational contexts open themselves up in a new way — a personally knowing

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relationship develops toward the things and beings of nature; certainty in judgment grows stronger, and with it the presence of mind and the resolve to do freely what the times demand.

This personal path of cognition generates thought-pictures with as many facets as there are human beings willing to walk it. The imageless intellect tries to force these methodically into a general formula — one that extinguishes the image-content and with it the connection to the cognizing spirit-soul. What remains is the concept, the dead image of the concrete experience, and knowledge of this kind separates itself — like a lifeless desert — from the living reality one stands before in experience. This is a feeling that can come to the person whose very motive is to do justice to the being of the living in the running of a farm. One encounters there the contradiction that ordinary thinking, bound to the senses, cannot reach the secret of life. Yet it is precisely these dead, abstract concept-forms — shaped at the surface of the sense-world — that form the preconditions for ascending to a cognition of life. This conceptual thinking develops and sharpens self-consciousness. In this flaring self-consciousness lives the self-knowing I, the kernel of being of the human being. In the soul-activity of thinking and feeling, it binds the thought-images of the sensory world of form together with the spirit-force that springs from the essential nature of the I. This path — on which the outwardly directed knowledge of nature and the inwardly directed self-knowledge unite in the I — opens to the human being for the first time the possibility of free self-determination, and gives to the knowledge of nature its first groping steps toward the being of the living. Thinking in the logical chain of causation of abstract concepts widens into mobile image-thoughts. They seek out in intuitive beholding the relational contexts through which the individual conceptual facts become experienceable. One enters a path of self-schooling in thinking and feeling that fertilizes and enlivens the scientific path of cognition through art.

Behind every act of perception stands the whole human being. What he perceives impresses itself into his feeling-borne life of thought; it is the revelation of the spirit in an image that the soul paints in thoughts. The thought lives in this image. The schooling of cognition consists in holding the concept, with the force of self-consciousness, within the image-context out of which one has grasped it. What matters is not to lose the image — as the subjectively felt share in the act of cognition — along the way of

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of abstraction to be eradicated — but on the contrary to purify it upward, so that the hidden spirit dwelling within it can reveal itself living in the thought. Goethe overcame the subject-object separation in the manner of his nature observation. He drew so close to the reality of the truth that shines through his whole work, that in the thinking enlivened by intuitive beholding he felt the same working spirit that has enchanted itself into the phenomenon in nature.

It demands an inner effort to sort out from the sum of feelings those that distort the phenomenon through exuberant sympathy or negating antipathy. It is self-consciousness that makes the choice here — that separates the essential from the inessential within the concept-determining image-content. The more the cognizing soul turns to the phenomenon in reverence, faithfulness, and love, the more self-consciousness binds thought and image into a unity. A judgment takes shape in which the spirit resonates — the spirit that lies hidden and holds sway in perception: for instance, the living context, living itself forth in metamorphosis, of egg — caterpillar — cocoon — butterfly. What hides itself in sense-appearance as a spiritually working principle reveals itself to thinking consciousness through a science that has made spirit itself the object of perception. The results of this spiritual research lie before us in idea-forms. When one studies these, the spiritually felt element of the sensory thought-images brightens into spirit-thoughts — into ideas that lend the soul-activity of willing a moral force of working. Now thinking and feeling can plunge into willing and become one with it. Now at last, in such stellar moments, truly free initiative can arise. In a group of collaborating human beings the fire of enthusiasm kindles and gathers them, in the confluence of free individual willing, into a community of initiative (Figure 10, p. 172).

Only when, in conscious inner empowerment, I-thinking and I-feeling become one with willing, can the spirit-soul of the human being lift itself to the level of cognition of Intuition — the source-place of the truly free deed. Yet how far we still stand from this high capacity for supersensible cognition. Whoever seeks it must surrender, in free self-determination, to the practice of soul-exercises. In what form can such a practice be carried out — in the work outdoors in the field, for instance? One has worked physically hard the whole day, was wholly submerged in the will. Then, after the work is done, one goes out once more, animated by the impressions

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of the day, in meditative stillness of mind, over the field; suddenly, swift as a lightning flash, intuition overtakes one — the unmistakable certainty of what is to be done on the morrow in the farm as a whole. One is in the picture, living in presence of mind out of the future into the present. To make the work itself, in this sense, into a path of training toward timely intuitive capacity for decision — this transforms the community of initiative, if only in stellar moments, into a community of intuition. One experiences how ideal and spirit-reality draw near to one another.

Feeling in Equanimity — the Path toward a Living Sense of Right

In feeling, the human being experiences himself as dreaming, close to the spirit (Figure 10, p. 172). Upward, toward waking conscious thinking, feeling brightens — but loses its closeness to spirit. Downward toward willing it becomes more spirit-filled, yet finally loses itself into unconsciousness. In feeling, the human being lives wholly present-related, in the changing moods of current events and in the relationships of human being to human being. In equal measure one can neither feel the past nor the future. Both must first be brought into the present: the past, by being re-created in thought; the future, by being felt forward. Every farm has its biography, every village community has its own. It lies deposited in the annals, which convey only a shadow-image of the life, suffering, and striving of past generations. This biography has also inscribed itself in the landscape — in the fields, meadows, forests, the livestock, and so forth, in the atmospheric periphery. Upon these markers the farmer must direct his empathetic attention; he must, through thinking, acquire as far-reaching an understanding of history as possible — one that nourishes his feeling. Only through such conscious inner sensing of the past can he learn once more, in reverence, love, and faithfulness, to transform what has become into what is present. It bears upon all that is set before us today as a task demanded by the times: the re-enlivening of the agricultural organism with all the organs that constitute it, together with the conscious implanting of the idea of development through idea-borne work. Thinking spins the red thread of the cultural achievements of the past up into the present, and strengthens the force of feeling for what nature, here and now, questioningly awaits from us.

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In equal measure, one must strive to acquire a historical consciousness regarding the developments and transformations of the sense of right in village communities and, in a different way, in the rising towns — and furthermore regarding how the sense of right, usurped by abstracting thinking, has congealed into personal claims of ownership, and how in this way the deep gulf between right and justice came about. In the feeling of the unhealthy nature of this gulf, thinking can awaken and create institutions in which, purely from the relationship of human being to human being, feeling can become the bearer of a living sense of right among equals. Such an institution is what an agricultural farm community seeks to be.

The cultivation of a powerful feeling relates, on the one hand, to the relationship we seek to the things and beings of nature, and on the other, to all that plays out between human being and human being. All of this presses toward the form of expression of the artistic. If one, for example, holds thinking consciously back and allows the gaze to rest upon a sun-permeated, ripening field of grain, the eye seeks, groping, for something that first satisfies the beholding; it seeks, for instance, the sky-blue of a cornflower, which here or there shines forth out of the golden ground of the swaying ears of grain. Or one transposes oneself into the mood when, from who knows where, a robin joins us in intimate nearness during the garden work. And so it is with all that accompanies us in an essential way throughout the course of the year. Looked upon with interest, moods arise that awaken the sense of beauty. The more this sense grows, the less it will let the human being rest until he has also let it come alive in all work, in social life together, in every celebration.

The modern self-understanding of the human being presses toward the question of how feeling is deepened beyond personal concerns, how it — supported by reality-related thinking and purified willing — can become a sense organ for the working of the soul-spiritual in nature and in human beings. With regard to nature, this can come about, for example, by lingering outside in a winter's night on the open field — above one the radiant luminous splendour of the star-strewn sky, around one the motionless crystalline chill of the airy periphery, below one, resting in itself, the crystalline depths. In quiet thought one feels the infinite sublimity of the far-spanning polarity; one feels the heights and depths gathered together in the heart as if drawn to a single point, warming what cannot be grasped. If one undertakes the same in a midsummer night, the heart feels itself widened into the periphery. One feels oneself of the air and warmth

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interwoven with what, springing up from the earth out of the consonance of the heights and the depths, fills the periphery with life. In the same way one can then also feel one's way into the spring events, when the forces of the heights and the depths begin to interpenetrate one another, and the earth, breathing out into air and warmth what is spiritually hidden within it, brings it to appearance; or into the autumn events, when these forces begin to dissolve, and the earth, in outer dying-away, breathes in the spirit-fruit of the course of the year.

This outwardly directed experience of natural appearances individualizes itself with regard to the farm as a whole. Only in the intimacy of feeling does the concept of the closedness of the agricultural organism come alive. When feeling itself becomes an organ of deeper nature-experience, one walks a solitary path — yet on a beaten track. What one feels is given in advance, has taken on sense-perceptible form. It is otherwise in the relationship of human being to human being. There the given meaning of natural law is absent. In human togetherness, the individual feeling of the one encounters the individual feeling of the other. On the same soul-level, this relationship is shaped by all the facets of sympathy and antipathy, of affirmation and denial, of beauty or ugliness, and so on. With all this wealth of facets, one must acknowledge that this or that manner of feeling is an objective fact — and that one must help feeling, through the force of thinking and willing, to find its point of equilibrium, and so awaken the sense of truth. It is this heart-felt sensing that recognizes in the other human being one's equal, that creates the trust from person to person and with it the ground for the sense of right. Reality-related thinking illuminates the sense of right between human beings and condenses it into agreements and laws. In purified willing it kindles initiative — the love of the deed. In trust lives the social consensus; it transforms the contradictory inequality in soul-experience into the consciousness of the dignity of equality before the law. Trust builds on what is past and looks without reservation toward what is to come.

In law, the trusting accord that had its validity in its time is set down in writing. It threatens to become a social hostage when it continues unchanged, inheriting itself "like an eternal sickness."^[154]

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Figure 10: The working of the soul-activities of the farm community into the three member-beings of the agricultural organism.

A genuine rights-life founded on morality can only come into being when trust in a group of collaborating human beings is ever and again born anew out of the spirit. Trust nourishes and bears the sense of right. When it is broken, there is no safety net, no satisfaction through the judge's verdict; one then experiences disappointments that reach into the boundless; the felt ground of right of trust, on which one believed oneself to stand so securely, has dissolved into sheer nothingness.

The flourishing of a farm community therefore requires the never-flagging cultivation and strengthening of trust, and with it of the sense of right, down into the smallest things of daily life. Friendships ordinarily form no secure foundation for an enduring trust in collaboration. They have their origin in the past of destiny — that is, in circumstances that were other than those of the present. They gain continuing weight-bearing capacity only when they develop upward into spirit-friendships. These find themselves in the ideal and in the initiative of letting what is grasped in the spirit become deed without condition. Only on this twofold experiential ground of thinking and willing can trust grow. From its spirit-substance one learns to pre-sense what is to come.

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In the practice of the farm community, the building of trust rests on each participant living in the consciousness of his being rooted in the spirit, and of what the individual and common striving-goal is. To gain clarity about this, the study of anthroposophical spiritual science in the widest sense is of help, the cultivation of intuitive beholding and its deepening through meditation, as well as the meditative engagement with the esoteric word-wisdom of Rudolf Steiner.^[155] Further, trust is grounded in consensus on questions that concern each individual's contribution: What capacities can the individual bring; how and where is one willing, out of consciousness for the wholeness of the farm, to take on a share of responsibility; how to throw oneself selflessly into the breach, life-capable and presence-of-mind, at any time and anywhere; and how is one inclined to let an esthetic-artistic inner disposition hold sway in all activity? So that such questions may become conscious and stimulate the building of capacities, institutions must be created — these are addressed on pages 177ff (chapter: "On the Spiritual Development and Leadership of an Agricultural Farm Community").

Thinking in Human Fellowship (Brotherhood), the Path toward Solidary Economic Life

When one works down from the sphere of free willing, of individual initiative, into that in which from the creation of trust the sense of right holds sway — of being an equal among equals — a new field of experience arises for the thinking consciousness (Figure 10, p. 172). In everyday consciousness, thinking supports itself on the sense-perceptible appearance. In the social realm it must raise itself from this toward a world of phenomena that come into being only in social togetherness. These are the expression of what moves human beings in a spiritual-moral way. Ways of acting are the phenomenon, and thinking must now strive to research paths by which the manifold of these predominantly instinct-guided modes of behavior of human nature can be directed into right channels. Here, in the sphere of social life, thinking no longer merely reflects what is sense-perceptible; it stands before the challenge of actively bringing forth something that does not yet exist or is only just now coming into being. It

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must become, out of the experience of what is spiritually-morally at work in human beings, a shaping thinking — one that arrives, in body-free cognition, at judgments conforming to the spiritual-moral world. Necessity, the law, is immanent in the natural order; for the social order, the spiritual must first condense, in sense-free thinking, into moral law through the act of cognition. In shaping thinking, the future shines into the present; action itself becomes directed toward the future. Becoming conscious of this fact in practical collaboration is what first opens the eye to the path along which an agricultural farm community learns, step by step, to become capable of action and of self-governance. It thereby becomes the initial site of an economy oriented toward the side of nature — in the sense of shaping the farm organism — and toward the side of social life; it becomes the point of departure for a solidary-associative economy that inserts itself, as an autonomous member, into the social organism (Figure 10, p. 172). Economic life articulates itself in three functions: production, distribution, and consumption. The internal economy of the farm has as its aim the meeting of the needs of the earth, the fertilizing of the soil. This occurs, for example, through the production of the farm's own manures, their distribution across the fields, and their consumption by the plants.

The external economy — that which attaches itself to agricultural production — has as its aim the meeting of human needs for nourishment. In both cases the needs are of a will-like, that is to say spiritual, nature.^[156] To comprehend them and to satisfy them through the cycle of economic life is a task of shaping thinking. In economic life, the phenomenon it connects with is need. Within the farm, this need articulates itself in every case out of the wholeness of the farm organism. One must, in order to satisfy the need, plunge thinking into the living web of relationships, weigh in thought every measure according to whether it promotes or hinders, and incorporate the result into the farm organism through the deed. Nature satisfies its needs through the wisdom inherent in it. In agriculture, the human being simultaneously shapes

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his needs upon nature — in the cultivation of cultivated plants and in the keeping of domestic animals, for example. To reconcile both with one another, the farmer must learn, through shaping thinking, to form the concept of the closedness of the agricultural organism. From this concept alone — and only on a higher level — can all measures be derived that not only satisfy the human need for nourishment but likewise take account of nature's latent needs for future development.

The agricultural product becomes, directly or through processing, a product, a commodity, which has a nutritive or use-value determined by the conditions of its production. Price must be measured against this value. In economic life generally, this measurement cannot be determined by the individual, the seller, the entrepreneur, but only through the balancing of all the contributions that all the others in the economic cycle have rendered, from the production of the product through to its consumption. This wide web of relationships, out of which the value-creation of a product emerges, must be grasped as a whole in thought — and at the same time the attempt must be made, through shaping thinking, to bring price closer to objective value. With regard to the formation of value and price, agriculture has the particular feature of the site-specific "gift of nature." As the human being brings his gifts productively into economic life, so nature brings its productive power — its gift — with respect to climate, soil, topography and so forth. A steep south-facing slope in warm regions, for example, is unsuitable for grain cultivation, but entirely suited to viticulture; a deep, level loess soil of the fertile lowlands is, for the same expenditure of labour, incomparably more productive than a shallow, stone-rich soil on a hillside or in hilly terrain.

The sum of all the reciprocal relationships that arise through collaboration in social life and that precede the meeting of needs — these cannot, in their simultaneity and succession, be grasped by individual judgement. One must create opportunities for a regular exchange in which the individual dynamic flows into a community judgement. Out of such effort there arises a common sense that, guided by spiritual science, orients all work purposefully and in keeping with the times toward the whole of the farm. This common or social sense of reality opens a field for the cultivation of daily practice — both in the sphere of practical work and in the relationship of human being to human being.

What is objectively necessary — the measured attunement of all members to the whole of the farm organism, for example — must be grasped, alive down to its details, as a community judgement and made the guiding thread for the action of each

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made real. Only the comprehensive practical knowledge grounded in experience creates consensus. This forms the foundation of collaboration, creates transparency, and awakens the joy in the measured (economic) consonance of all members and organs of the farm organism into a whole.

Human fellowship in economic life, too, grows out of a community judgement. Where individual judgement rules in its place, egoism forces its way through; competition arises, mutual exploitation, displacement rivalry, agrarian industrialism. Community judgement in economic collaboration emerges from interest in what the other does. The questioning stance — "Where is there need, where is help required?" — must be alive in the community toward each individual. The boundaries between areas of responsibility, both within the operation and in relation to associated processing enterprises and farm marketing, must become flexible and permeable for the sake of mutual assistance. The disposition to seek the ground of one's own economic activity in the need of the other creates for thinking consciousness a new field of experience — one that makes the striving of others its own content of perception. On this path there arises an associative overview of the fields of activity; formative thinking points the will toward associative action — that is, action in brotherliness. On these new shores of an economic life grounded in human fellowship, landing attempts are made ever more frequently — in organic wholesale and organic retail trade, for instance, as well as in further processing. The shore itself, however, is the threshold between agricultural primary production and the economically differentiated cycle of labour. At this threshold — the farm boundary — the commodity finds its value: the objective intrinsic worth of primary value-creation out of enlivened and ensouled nature is assessed through the subjective appreciation of the trader and consumer. In associative economic life, this appreciation by each participant can, by virtue of the transparency generally sought, rest on concrete, perceptible facts that ultimately have their origin in the bodily and spiritual-soul needs of fellow human beings. Concretely, this means: biodynamic operations must open themselves to further processing, trade and the consuming public — must enter into dialogue on all practical and developmental questions, seek solutions together, reach agreements, conclude contracts.^[157]

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Looked at more closely, the "new shores" form the two sides of the farm boundary. One shore borders on nature and constitutes the outer skin of the farm organism; the other borders on emancipated social life. The latter can only take shape as a threefold social organism to the extent that it includes agriculture — to the extent that human beings come to recognise what potential lies in an agriculture newly configured in the spirit of the organism principle. Biodynamic operations are beginning, in small steps, to practise the principle of association as pioneers, so to speak, within local and regional settings. In doing so they can stimulate wider cooperation and, more generally, implant in economic life a measure that frees it from the compulsion to growth inherent in capitalism.

The more consciously a farm community seeks to shape its farm into an organism, the more the work of collaboration articulates itself, as if of its own accord, into a spiritual, a legal and an economic sphere of activity. However deeply these members interpenetrate one another, they are nonetheless experienced as distinct and separate domains. And all the spiritual force of the farm community must be directed toward bringing what is separated together — both ideally, in an encompassing image, and through the work itself — into a higher wholeness. Here, away from today's economic mainstream, a field of practice opens up: something like a preparatory school for genuine social praxis, one that, through formative thinking reaching far beyond the farm's own boundaries, allows the impulse of the Threefold Social Order to take root (Figure 11, p. 189).

On the Spiritual Development and Leadership of an Agricultural Farm Community

The first farm community in the world to achieve lasting existence dates to the year 1968.^[158] Since then, encouraged by the spirit of the age, comparable social pioneering ventures have come into being on larger farms. The impetus was the necessity of a canon of complementary capacities and of capable hands for mastering the diversity of tasks; along with the liberation of land and capital from the constraints of outmoded rights, and steps toward overcoming the condition of directed wage labour.

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Experience shows: the goal as conceived in ideas is stretched unattainably far into the future, and the capacities to do justice to this goal — both individually and in community — run quickly up against their limits. Recognizing and consciously living through this discrepancy generates, in the spiritual-soul dimension, a field of tension that does not allow the consciously striving person to rest — not even for a moment — or, in the face of obstacles, failures and the like, to settle for whatever solutions happen to be at hand. If one does not experience oneself with full force within this polarity of spiritual aim and the sense-bound world of fact, the striving force grows lame; the shared willing threatens to collapse into banality; the everyday business exhausts itself in routine completion; and what could have become development sinks into stagnation and regression.

In order to reassure itself, again and again, of its path toward the goal, the farm community must create institutions that serve the practice of social-moral techniques. These relate to the ever more conscious grasp of both poles of the field of tension — and to the attempt at their transcending equilibrium.

The Spiritual Aim of Striving

It lives as a motive — the will to farm biodynamically — more or less clearly, and bound up with destiny, in each individual. How can this individual driving impulse not only become more conscious, but rise beyond that into the striving-goal of the whole community? Neither the individual nor the community may content itself with having once formed that goal. It requires continual cultivation through the study of anthroposophical spiritual science. Its research contents, set in motion through mutual conversation, stimulate thoughts and feelings that light the way ahead on the path to be walked in common. A weekly study circle of this kind — when it truly succeeds — gives wings in a double sense: for one thing, the internal work-flow of the farm coordinates itself, as if of its own accord, in the right place and at the right time; for another, the community moves, in such an hour lifted out of the everyday, thoughts that mirror themselves in the bearer of the motive — in the consciousness, that is, of each individual. Thoughts gained in this way, from shared spiritual-cognitive work, enter into relationship with the observations and will-experiences made daily in the work itself. The two polar ends of the field of tension move toward one another — or, in fortunate moments, partially merge with each other.

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The anthroposophical study-work takes place on "objective ground."^[159] It strengthens and objectifies the consciousness of one's own motive as well as that of the community's spiritual aim of striving.

The Practice of Working Together

The wholeness of the farm articulates itself into fields of work, each responsibly attended to by one or several members according to ability and inclination. This articulation — into, for example, the field of arable farming and plant cultivation, of horticulture or fruit growing, of manuring, of the various areas of animal husbandry, of meadow and pasture husbandry, of landscape care, and so forth — must not degenerate into a division of labour, not into attitudes of entitlement, not into the marking-off of kingdoms. On the contrary: out of the consciousness of the whole, the highest flexibility is called for — fluid transitions, mutual help, stepping in for one another wherever and whenever it is needed.

The Morning Work-Meeting

It takes place on every working day, after the early-morning preliminary tasks, in the great circle on the farm, and can be opened with a saying or a humorous remark. Good cheer seasons the day's work without taking away its earnestness. In terms of content, what is at stake is the exchange of current observations, noteworthy occurrences, and urgent matters — and then, picking up the thread of the previous day's work-flow, the concrete distribution of tasks. It is to be observed here that in all work undertaken with the participation of apprentices, trainees, and assistants, the members of the farm community exercise a function of exemplary leadership.

Through the morning work-meeting, the image of the farm as a whole — in the changing round of the seasons — should be called ever anew into consciousness, and each person should know what the other is doing. Far too easily there arises the belief that everything is clear — one is, after all, in the work-flow from yesterday to today — and a bored silence makes its round. No: what appears self-evident must be lifted once more into the consciousness of all. Joined to that is the forward-look toward the day. A morning work-meeting that truly succeeds already constitutes a good part of efficient farm management. The rest is skill — is being an example in all work.

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The Study Circle on the Contents of Anthroposophical Spiritual Research

In practice, the ideas of the shared striving-goal descend into the living reality of the farm organism. As constructive as these ideas are, as capable as they are of creating living interconnections, one must before long confess to oneself that certain expectations have gone unmet. Things will not come together; one runs up against limits and is thrown back upon oneself. The ideal is shaken — one experiences it as a dying-away, a partial death of the soul. One refuses to acknowledge this and searches for outer reasons: adverse weather, one's own incapacity or another's, wrong decisions or failures of execution, misunderstandings, social discord, and so forth. Yet — as life itself does — dying-away, death, shows itself in veiled form as well. How is one to recognise what failure is trying to tell us? From this uncertainty there follow painful experiences, trials for the individual and for the community alike. When one faces these experiences squarely, self-knowledge awakens — and with it, from out of the depths of the soul, an unspoken question; and then, unexpectedly and all at once, the answer arrives from without. It is precisely this opportunity — of arriving unexpectedly at new, encouraging insights — that the weekly gatherings of shared spiritual-scientific work of cognition serve. In conversation, thoughts can be voiced without being asked for and without being expected, thoughts that give a reconciling answer to the quietly harboured, pressing question in one's interior, and that can open a new view of things and summon one to new exertions. What takes place here is "the awakening of the human being through the spiritual-soul nature of another human being."^[160] The shared anthroposophical study-work refreshes the spirit, lifts and broadens the motive out of its subjective narrowness, and awakens forces that help bring ever-renewed momentum to the practical work.

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collectively and unanimously on all practical questions that arise in the individual areas of work.

In looking back, what succeeded and what failed, and whatever is noteworthy in the way of experiences, observations, and so on, should be brought to speech with the greatest possible openness. Concealment — whether deliberate or through inattentiveness — breeds ghosts and gives a foothold to impulses of power. Documentation is to be encouraged!

The forward-looking perspective focuses on the seasonally due work, and on the social and cultural concerns with regard to

arable and horticultural measures concerning soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring, as well as seed production, crop care, harvest, storage, and marketing;
production of the biodynamic preparations and their timely application;
measures in fruit growing and landscape shaping, such as hedge and woody plant care;
herd management, fodder harvesting, and care of the pastures, as well as arable fodder harvesting;
keeping, feeding, care, and breeding of domestic animals, with the emphasis on cattle;
care and repair of machinery, and replacement and new investment;
care and repair of buildings and farm roads, as well as planning and financing of new construction;
general administration, budget planning, and finances;
income arrangements for the members of the farm community;
staffing questions and income with regard to apprentices, trainees, assistants, and temporary co-workers;
shaping of the seasonal festivals and other celebrations, as well as further events such as farm walks, agricultural practicums for school classes, courses, and so on;
farm-specific, experimental, practice-oriented research;
collaboration with processing and trading enterprises;
care of the circle of people connected with the farm;
public relations work;

The farm community administers itself in all respects — that is, all those responsible are sufficiently involved that they are at any time conversant with the whole. The greatest challenge is the unbroken flow of information and crystal-clear transparency. The former is achievable only

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through the steady interest of every individual in everything that is going on. From this interest grows presence of mind, as well as a sense of reality that forestalls any clinging to a judgment once formed, any ideologizing. The latter — transparency — is a question of reliability down to the smallest things of daily life, of clarity in agreements, of attentiveness wherever practical or soul-related distress prevails, and of the unconditional readiness to step into any breach.

In the work and administration conference, the fruits of schooling through life realize themselves. In these fruits, the interworking of the aforementioned poles — the spiritual striving-goal and its implanting into practice — unites itself in ongoing synthesis. From these fruits, from what has been won individually and in community, flows for the first time the substance that lends the farm community its own being; only this makes it creditworthy in the spiritual sense.

The Farm Organism and the I-Willed Work of the Human Being

Work in agriculture in general is determined by the things and beings active in nature. What in older times was instinctively felt as a prevailing wisdom guiding and sustaining the work has, in the dawning age of natural science, emancipated itself into the conceptual abstraction of the laws of nature. This was on the one hand an act of freedom on the part of the self-consciousness awakening in the I, and on the other hand a plunge into the compulsions of materialism as the henceforth dominant world-view. The outward fruit of this act of freedom is technology — an extract from physical-inorganic nature reshaped by the spirit of the human being. Technology does make it possible to relieve the human being of heavy labor, yet it imposes itself on nature with the consequences appearing worldwide. It severs the wisdom-filled relational contexts between physical, living, and ensouled nature from one another.

Technical progress aims at making the working human being in agriculture superfluous. Biodynamic farming aims in the opposite direction. Here the endeavor is to reduce machine work as far as possible, so that sufficient open spaces can arise for creatively practicing, craft-grounded activity. How far this can succeed depends on overcoming an excess of external social restrictions.

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What working in enlivened and ensouled nature means must be rediscovered. For this, intuitive beholding and thinking must turn toward its distinctive character — toward what grows living into outward form, and toward what closes itself soul-wise into a bodily form. What has been formed is graspable in ideas; the formative agency is illuminated by anthroposophical spiritual research, which unlocks the world of beings in idea-form, making it thereby accessible to thinking. Knowledge of the essential being is what first lends to the ideas formed through sense-perception — which are themselves rooted in the world of beings — moral force. When they take hold of the will, they become one's own in being. With these ideas, absorbed into one's own I-being, one finds a new, a free relationship to work. One learns to work out of one's own ground of being, and finds in it direction and aim. The moral source is oneself, and one determines oneself in freedom from it. From this primal ground of the I alone flows the true enthusiasm. It springs from the idea that has become spirit-real. It is this that runs ahead of the work, warms it, and fills it with soul-joy. The work — however hard it may be, however apparently lowly and inconsequential — ennobles itself through the spirit that permeates it. It is spirit-filled from beginning to end, and adds something to the farm organism that lifts it out of its mere naturalness.

The machine, by contrast, inserts itself into agriculture like a wedge between the human being and the nature that creates out of its beings and forces. It functions according to what the human being has constructed into it from his knowledge of inorganic nature. Through exclusive machine-work, the human being's spirit-creative power threatens to wither; work becomes desolate routine, the will is left without guidance and grows lame.

The less work exhausts itself in routine, in mere getting-things-done — the more it is done, in the sense described, suffused with idea-joy — the more the sense of beauty is also awakened, which first raises what is human-made, ordinarily sinking in the case of the machine into monotony and banality, to the level of a true work of art.

In agriculture it is the wisdom working in nature that human work places itself in service of. This wisdom, rightly understood, lives on in the work as meaning-giving. Beyond this, the human capacity for ideas works in a superordinate, meaning-founding way in the shaping of the farm into the bodily organism of the "agricultural individuality."

Just as thoroughly as the agricultural craft must be learned, so thoroughly does it teach throughout one's whole life. It strengthens the force of self-consciousness when what is perceived in the work is brought to conscious

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cognition; it broadens and deepens the world-view when one experiences how fruitfully what has been done continues to work, shaping, in natural and social life.

In this twofoldness lies the great pedagogical significance of work that directs itself toward the things and beings of nature. It proves to be a blessing in school garden-education, in the practice on school farms, in the farming and forestry practicums for upper-school students, and in the supervised participation of people with disabilities. For the reasons named above, many young people born into city life seek a biodynamic vocational training, which is increasingly run as a "free training" under its own direction by the biodynamic working groups. Beyond this, biodynamic work gains increasing significance — above all on larger operations run as farm communities, or on village-like establishments — in adult education, vocational reorientation, self-discovery, and so on. What Goethe, in a poetic foreseeing, pointed toward in "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years" with his description of the "Pedagogical Province,"^[161] and what Rudolf Steiner pointed toward a hundred years ago when he spoke of how cultural sites would arise in the countryside in the future,^[162] — this is emerging today here and there in the most varied approaches.

The spiritual-soul constitution that points the way and the goal for work in enlivened and ensouled nature — every human being today must consciously win this for themselves anew. To this end it is advisable to take Rudolf Steiner's "Fundamental Social Law," formulated in 1905,^[163] as the spiritual backbone of every form of collaboration in the social field. It is the law that comes into its own the more that egoism is rooted out as the driving force of social action. It inaugurates a path of schooling toward a flourishing social life together. Among other things, this law leads to the insight "that working for one's fellow human beings and earning a certain income

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The two are entirely separate things."^[164] The one is a question belonging to spiritual-cultural life, the other belongs to rights-life. Like all matters of rights, labour cannot be measured by a purchase price — an hourly wage, for instance. Labour is not a commodity. In agricultural farm communities the possibility presents itself to practise the separation of labour and income in an initial way. This possibility opens up when one becomes conscious of the far-reaching spiritual dimension of the essential articulation of the agricultural organism. Thus it is the most urgent task of the human being and the human community on the farm to form a living picture of this and to make it the lived impulse-giver of the work. For it is through the work that the organism-idea grasped in spirit becomes a work of art in the living — one that forms itself outwardly into a gestalt and inwardly articulates itself into organs.

Through the realization of this idea held in living picture, each person reaches into the farm organism in I-willed work, in accord with all the others, irradiating its web of essential members (Figure 10, p. 172). What works there is the I; it sets the measure in all things. It rays into the soul-body of the farm, takes care of the manner of keeping, feeding, and tending of the domestic animals as well as their breeding development, offers a home to the wild fauna, and brings it about that the soul-body of the farm individualizes itself through and through and lives itself forth as a self-enclosed whole.

It is once again the kernel of being of the human being — the I — and the image lighting up in the spirit-soul, that irradiates the life organization of the farm, holds it healthy in all its manifold forms, and raises it to a higher, farm-individual vitality. And finally the I in its work in-forces the physical organization, transforms and individuates the substance compositions in a formative way, in transcendence of the natural givens of the site (cf. chapter on Manuring). At the same time this threefold interpenetration and site-specific individualization means that the essential members of the farm organism are brought into a more intimate, top-to-bottom mutually furthering relationship. The manure of the livestock, for instance, provides for the enlivening and ensoulment of the physical organization, for the life-bearing interplay of the four elements in the soil, and for the fruit formation and nourishing quality of the plant cultures. The life organization is different: on the one hand it donates, through the residues of plant growth, the basis for humus formation in the soil,

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the enlivening of the physical organization; on the other hand it provides the fodder-foundation for the wild fauna and the livestock herds, the strengthening of the soul organization.

Through work, the guiding idea first becomes reality of being. One can behold what one has done, and inquire into what one has brought about. It is a research that binds together human being and world, and whose finding of truth measures itself against what one has recognized as fruitful.

This holds in still far higher degree for a work whose foundational idea dwells solely in the results of anthroposophical spiritual research, and to whose cognition and effective mastery the farm or operational community as a whole finds itself challenged. One such is the making and application of the biodynamic preparations. Their essential nature is taken up in the chapter on manuring. The work with these manure substances, in preparation and application, extends across the whole year. Their application in materially smallest amounts takes place either in liquid form directly on soil and plant from sowing through to the ripening phase, or — in the case of the majority of the preparations — through the farm's own composts and manures.

With regard to the farm organism, the fertilising efficacy of the preparations lies in a kind of education of its members of the human being toward higher wholeness. In the context of the rhythms of the solar year, they strengthen and dynamize not only the specific working of these members, but above all they further their reciprocal interpenetration — that which alone enables the farm organism to arrive at its self-enclosure and site-appropriate development. It is in particular the work with the biodynamic preparations that leads toward a personal relationship with the substances and forces that prepare a living-fruitful soil for the plants. In this way the I-nature of the working human being can connect with the spiritual working of the inner nature of nature.

Human work carries all facets of the moral workings of the lower, body-bound I out into the world. These are then co-shaped by the human nature of desire, by arbitrariness, impulses of power, and the like. The egoism that thereby holds sway can be overcome in transformation, when through the spiritual force of the higher I the soul gains mastery over the body. Work becomes idea-borne and carried by inner disposition — work done out of love for the thing or in service of the other human being. An unselfish deed does not come about under compulsion; it arises rather out of wise insight, self-determined. Free self-determination in the work upon

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of enlivened and ensouled nature can only grow when sense-knowledge widens into knowledge of the spirit. The truth that opens up in this way confirms itself in the fruitfulness of action. This is what the words of John point toward: "… you will know the truth and the truth will lead you to freedom."^[165] Only this freedom, won in such a way, establishes identity between within and without. Before the free deed, done in love, goes a sacrifice. One sacrifices something that belongs entirely to oneself, that has become the possession of the higher I-hood, and gives it forth. When this becomes inner disposition within a community that works together for the sake of a commonly recognized task, a wind of freedom breathes through the willing.

Impulses of Biodynamic Farming for the Development of the Social Organism

All the symptoms of our time point to the urgency of a new natural order and a new social order encompassing the whole of human life. Just as the human being, in ignorance of his spiritual being and consequently of his tasks of development, tends to create disorder, so it is precisely self-knowledge that can open his eyes to a principle of order which holds for nature just as it holds for the shaping of social life. It is Rudolf Steiner's anthropological discovery: the threefold nature of the human organism in nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and metabolic-limb system (see pp. 88 ff.). Everything presented so far, and everything that follows, rests upon it. In the chaos following the First World War, Rudolf Steiner sought, through corresponding institutions, to articulate social life into the functional threefoldness of spiritual-cultural life, rights-life, and economic life, so that each of these members could develop autonomously and at the same time in living reciprocal interaction with one another, and unite into a higher whole of the social organism.^[166] He counted at that time on the openness of consciousness of the working class, on the proletariat held captive within capital-driven industry. This far-reaching attempt failed, as set out at the beginning, for many external reasons. The people still engaged in agriculture at that time (approx. 40%) were not in the same way affected by the social

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agriculture question; those few who remain today (approx. 2%) are affected by it to the highest degree. Indeed, agriculture has become globally a social case for society as a whole. And now it becomes evident: wherever biodynamic farming is practised today, socially effective forces grow organically, as if from a single point, into the social surroundings. They grow and reveal their great potential; but they must be recognised as such in their direction of working, consciously articulated and powerfully shaped. This can only happen through institutions that reach beyond the boundaries of the farm. Where such institutions begin to form, one soon recognises that they are fruitful only when those involved become conscious in which of the three spheres they wish and are able to bring their capacities and activities in relation to agriculture — whether in the spiritual-cultural, the legal, or the economic field. The consciously practised principle of the threefold nature of the agricultural farm organism can henceforth give measure and direction to general social life (Figure 11).

For, looked at more closely, agriculture stands in relationship with every domain of social life. Not only does it stand at the beginning of value creation from enlivened and ensouled nature and provide food and raw materials, but it shapes the face of the earth and the living space for plant, animal and human being within cultural landscapes. Furthermore it gives the sciences ample occasion to extend the boundaries of their methodology — grown too narrow — under restriction of their theories, toward the adequate grasping of the phenomena of the living. It creates spaces of intuitive beholding that satisfy the aesthetic gaze, and opens opportunity for new modes of experience. It opens a wide field of moral practice to the deepening of religious feeling, and finally a farming that is built upon the organism principle creates the preconditions for a renewed quickening of the crafts subordinate to it and their associative integration.

Willing in Freedom

The more a farm or working community succeeds in raising capacities and the will to work to a common initiative-force, to freedom in willing, the more the biodynamic farm opens itself outward and develops a spiritual radiance that awakens the interest of the social surroundings. Questions are asked, conversations begin, answers are sought in study circles and gatherings on the farm

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Figure 11: The biodynamic farm as the originating place for the development of the Threefold Social Order.

as well as at events marking the festivals of the year, at research gatherings, or — more concretely still — at open days, farm and field walks, occasions for temporary co-working, or through participation in the regularly recurring preparation work. Noticeboards further inform about practical themes throughout the farm and along well-trodden footpaths. How much to be wished for it would be, given the perpetually stretched labour situation on farms, to be able to carry these conversations still more intensively. Circles of friends and interested parties that form around the biodynamic farms prove helpful in many practical questions of this kind.

Alongside these adult-educational tasks that fall to biodynamic farming unbidden, it is above all the educational work with young people, and the training and continuing education that grows out of practice, that see to it that threads of spiritual connection extend into the surrounding social sphere. The rising generations of apprentices are almost

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exclusively «city-born». They stand far from the peasant tradition. Yet neither do they wish to be mere recipients of ready-made knowledge from an agriculture whose technological thinking and acting draws them entirely under the spell of a reductionist-scientific world-view. They seek a wholeness-oriented educational ideal that encompasses both human being and nature and that underlies biodynamic farming in the most comprehensive sense. This has led to practical training having largely freed itself from the state educational provision of the vocational schools. The so-called «Free Training Programmes» follow curricula that the farmers themselves work out. The same applies to the cross-farm biodynamic training centres for continuing education that have established themselves in various countries.

In intimate connection with the spiritual-cultural initiatives that radiate from biodynamic farms stands practice-near research. After both — teaching and research — gradually detached themselves from agriculture over two hundred years and became academised, agriculture submitted itself to a scientifically-technological progress that directed it from without, losing in the process the self-governance rooted in instinctive folk wisdom. Running counter to this, out of the practice of biodynamic farming there has grown from the very beginning a researching attitude and inner disposition that takes up the traditional methods, transforms them, and makes them the foundation of its further-reaching spiritual aims. This inner disposition cannot content itself with the causal-analytical, quantitative-reductionist methodology of academic research. The research endeavours extend themselves instead onto the qualitative side of perceiving and thinking — namely onto the question of what deeper cognitions are to be gained when the researching gaze turns toward the wholeness of the farm, its members, and all that develops there in living and soul-bearing self-life. Wherever the eye turns, it never sees an isolated thing — it always sees a context in which that thing appears. Only the intellect abstracts from the context the isolated thing and places it before itself in conceptual form. The context grows pale in the process, or falls entirely out of view. That marks the causal-analytical procedure.

If one seeks instead, for example, the context that establishes itself when swallows appear on the farm in spring — one can begin by describing everything as to how the swallow lives itself forth in its activities. One will distinguish various species that are present

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In the farm's surroundings — the barn swallow and the house martin, and the common swift, which no longer belongs to the swallows proper. One will form a picture of their manner of feeding — insects snatched in flight —, of their nesting sites: the barn swallows mostly indoors in the stalls, the house martins outdoors under the eaves of barns, the swifts in cavities of old masonry or the open roof-timbers of outbuildings. One will come to know their various calls and songs, follow their breeding, and much else besides. All of these are activities through which the body-bound soul-nature of these birds makes itself known to the senses. Their characteristic expression of being, however, is their tireless flight. As feathered head-sense beings they shoot through the air, trailing vortices behind them, modelling the airspace of the farm in wide sweeping arcs and lines throughout its far periphery — only to break away suddenly with powerful wingbeats, swift as lightning, upward, downward, or sideways, to seize their prey. Their activity is almost wholly exhausted in the most astonishing feats of flight, and this from morning to evening throughout the summer half-year. In winter they have gone southward and vanished.

When the gaze comes to rest on these meaning-laden phenomena, questions awaken about interconnections that reach beyond what the senses can experience: Does not the soul-nature of these sense-powerful creatures weave itself, in their wide-ranging, sculpting flight-movements, into the very element of air of the whole farm? Does there not come about here an ensouling of the air-mantle? And then the further question: Why does this happen only in the summer half-year from April to September? A monocausal answer lies ready to hand: it is the food supply of flying insects, which falls away in winter. Yet this too is phenomenon. Does it not point — as do all the phenomena named — toward an ur-phenomenal context that reaches beyond the sensory? This was addressed as the polarity of the head pole beneath the earth and the metabolic pole above the earth of the farm individuality (see chapter "The Threefold Nature of the Human Being and the Farm Individuality," p. 88 ff.).

In the summer half-year, the etheric-enlivening metabolic forces — which need the ordering and form-giving forces of the soul-astral — hold sway in warmth and air. The astral being of the bird impresses itself in flight into the air-mantle of the farm. In beholding especially the flight movements of the swallows, the experience can condense into this image-mood. One feels as if woven into a sense-supersensible event. One can say that in the wondering experience there reveal themselves the very same

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forces on a spiritual-soul level, such as those that in the airy periphery physically sculpt warmth, light and air in form of movement.

When the gaze comes to rest on the described "context of appearances,"^[167] abstracting thinking can enliven itself into active, synthetic thinking. Instead of sharply demarcating the individual concept and letting it stand on its own, one seeks to hold it in connection with the whole of the appearance. It expands into a thought-picture that leads the researcher more deeply into the meaningful context.

This first step toward knowledge of the essential being is followed by a second, more deeply penetrating one, when one practises in thinking the following of the transformation — for instance of the farm whole in the course of the year. The one form of appearance transforms itself, taken as a whole, into another. The very same winter-wheat plant that, after its hidden germination in the earth, first comes to appearance in its still rolled-up first leaf, transforms itself into one that now from its densely packed nodes puts forth further leaves (tillering); then into one that in winter presses its leaf rosette star-like to the ground; further into one that in the warmth of spring raises its leaves; then into one that suddenly shoots up as a vertical stem; again into one that pushes out the ear; once more into one that ends its growth in the forming of the ear; and finally into one that flowers inconspicuously, self-pollinates (or, as with rye, surrenders its spores in yellow clouds to the wind). There follow the transformation-stage of complete dying-away, and in the course of this the ripening of the grain or seed, and at last its detachment from the living context of the mother plant — bearing within itself what is yet to come. Thus in constant transformation the sum of all plants, and with them the sum of all animals, stamp the face of the farm precincts. Between each of these steps of transformation there exists an evident connection, for it is always one and the same plant, one and the same animal, that lives itself forth now in one way, now in another. What transforms itself there becomes perceptible appearance; how it transforms itself remains in darkness. The forces through which the one form of appearance arises out of the other, and which thereby bring about the "context of transformation,"^[168] remain invisible. The transition from the one to the other either never becomes a question — or one loses oneself in theory.

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«Consider what, far more consider how.»^[169] The what is objective and therefore sense-perceptible; the how the researching eye can approach when it compares one phenomenon with that which arises out of it, internalizes what has been beheld — the transformation of form — and in practising thinking powerfully and pictorially re-enacts the transition. To live one's way in thought and research into the transformation-contexts of "Die and Become" — in the social realm as well — creates a consciousness of the continuous flow of work through the course of the year.

A third step of research leads finally to grasping the composition of the ensouled living, of the "living interconnections,"^[170] as they show themselves in nature generally and in the biodynamic farm organism in particular. Every higher plant forms a living interconnection with root, stem, leaf sequence, blossom and seed; so too does the near-infinite web of relationships of the "oikos," the household of nature, which differentiates itself in turn into a multiplicity of living communities (biotopes) — and so too does that which, from what nature provides, is created by human hands as an agricultural organism. The living interconnection of this organism is formed by the measured, harmoniously attuned composition of arable farming, animal husbandry, garden, fruit and hedgerow cultivation, meadow, pasture, forestry and water management. This composition has as its basis — in the broad and deep sense — the forces working essentially in cosmos and earth: precisely those that bring about the transition from one form of appearance to the other. The laws of nature are fragmentary abstractions of the human spirit from this supersensible world of forces — an isolated knowledge, through which the farmer for his part co-shapes this composition. If this knowledge, without any effort of cognition directed toward the living interconnections, is reduced to a mere isolated technical implement — pesticides, herbicides, and the like — then it wreaks incalculable havoc in the household of nature. These are arbitrary interventions in the essential nature of the living. To recognise living interconnections means: with the force of living thinking, to peel out of the sum of appearances and their transformations conceptually self-consistent wholes of content — as, for instance, the concept of organism and individuality as the foundational idea for the shaping of agricultural operations. This is where the core task of research in biodynamic farming is touched upon. It concerns:

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1. Study of the results (facts) of spiritual-scientific research, their penetration in thought, and the experiencing of their spirit-reality in the thinking-experience.

2. Study and one's own observations of corresponding, sense-perceptible, scientifically graspable facts.

3. The bringing-together of the sense-perceptible and supersensible world of facts, and the experiencing of their truth and fruitfulness in unconditional work.

This threefold research-work concerns itself with the formation of a small universe, as the human being is one as microcosm. The building of this small universe, the bodily organism of the "Farm Individuality" in the process of becoming, touches ultimately on all spheres of life and activity, and thus on social life as a whole. Not so long ago, farming, craft, trade, and commerce formed a coherent regional form of life and economy. In Goethe's lifetime, roughly 85% of the working population was still active in agriculture. Today people have turned, in their search for free self-determination, to other fields of activity — all but 2%.

The more the spiritual dimension of agriculture's task for the development of the social organism is recognised, the more people will, out of free will, turn again to farming, and contribute to shaping consciously the relational nexus that every human being has to it. From this there grow impulses for a free spiritual-cultural life that henceforth, radiating from every biodynamic farm, helps to overcome the narrowing, destructive world-view of materialism.

Feeling in Equality

Every agricultural operation is embedded in the general legal order. Through the law, this creates equality before rights. Equality is a high good — but the question is: how consciously does the principle of equality live in human beings? Does it live by the compulsion of law from without, addressing the intellect alone — or is it the sense of reason that awakens from within the ideal of equality to life? In the first case, anonymity prevails in the relationship of person to person; the rights can be enforced, one demands one's right. In the second case, one feels — finely differentiated — what is rightful, and holds to it. Reason nourishes the sense of right, the feeling-oneself-into-equality. Reason

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itself feeds on the living experience of spirit-real connections in nature and social life. Out of this experience grows trust; it creates the highest security of rights. This becomes immediately apparent when one looks at the rights relating to land, labour and capital. It belongs to the self-understanding of society that these are without question rights — yet at the same time tradeable economic objects; the rights have a price! And there the inequality begins. When land, labour and capital can be brought to market, the principle of equality is undermined. The individual makes himself master over land, sells himself on the labour market and directs, through the accumulation of capital, human labour to his own advantage. The sense of right vanishes from the law; the law becomes abstractly inhuman; it dies the death of rights.

This problem becomes acutely virulent when one wishes to develop a biodynamic farm: one needs land, co-workers and capital — that is, a financial volume that can never pay off in monetary terms; the workplace in agriculture is, under present conditions, more expensive today than in the chemical industry. What is to be done? One must bring about a condition of pure right — that is, one carried purely by the principle of equality. Such a condition does not exist in today's legal order; rights are marketed like potatoes. One must first *invent* this condition of unadulterated right in the very act of bringing it forth. For this, a legal framework is needed in which that is possible. Such a framework is offered in the present legal order through non-profit association law, commercial law and foundation law. The task is to ensure, as far as possible through non-profit bearerships, the inalienability of land and capital. To this end, wherever at all possible, an act of gift is necessary — or, through a one-time financing, *à fonds perdue*, a buyout of the land-holdings and the capital bound within them from old legal encumbrances (inheritance law, and so on). Once this is secured, new paths can be taken in trustee stewardship and right of use — in the sense that land and capital are made available for use, from purely spiritual points of view and excluding any claim of inheritance, to those who have qualified themselves for it both spiritually-ideally in the sense of spiritual science and practically in craft. The trustee stewardship rests in the hands of those who are in a position to carry the spiritual impulse of biodynamic farming forward — through the changes of the historical advance of humanity — from one generation of cultivators to the next.

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Behind the work stands the basic right to work and the capacities of human beings. When one seeks to grasp the organism — and, beyond it, the idea of individuality — in direct intuitive beholding and active living experience, the sense of right clears to ever higher levels of clarity. It tells one unmistakably: land is not capable of ownership, but it is capable of possession — one possesses it for as long as one works it, or a qualified successor takes over the right of use. Capital embodied in the means of production (machinery, and so on) and in buildings stands in no different a position.

A particular challenge presents itself with regard to the shaping of income rights. Within the framework of a farm community one can, in this respect, detach oneself from the guardianship of a wage-tariff order — though unfortunately not where employees on wages and salaries are concerned. The ideal — that every long-term member of the working community would be a co-entrepreneur, forming together with all the others an entrepreneurial community that determines its own incomes in accordance with the level of returns — would be a worthy goal to strive for, but under existing legislation it is only very limitedly practicable. To determine incomes in advance according to the sum of the possible needs of each individual is abstract and leads necessarily to inequalities, and with them to conflicts. The same holds when one seeks the solution in "equal pay for all." Income arrangements are oriented in each case to the concrete conditions of life. Under communal management they depend essentially on family circumstances. A young family needs, at the same time, less income than one whose children are going to school and need musical instruments, or than one whose children are making their way through university. When the children have left the house, what is really needed as income can reduce again — and more still in old age. This naturally embraces all the adversities of life that the community must face from case to case.

One must learn, within a self-managing farm community, to handle the formation of income as a dynamic process. Depending on the duration of one's participation, this also includes the right of residence for a period of time or for life. Income from outside agriculture — such as fees for lectures, seminars, consultations, or from other activities — flows into the communal budget.

The community-based shaping of income, with regard also to the arrangement of old-age provision, rights of residence, and so on, excludes private capital formation. This means the practising of a high degree

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of attentiveness, empathy, and a sensitivity to all that lives unspoken in the human-between as need.

Thinking in Brotherhood or Fellow-Humanity

On economic ground, thinking no longer merely stands over against the world — it plunges into it and becomes itself a creative process. It plunges feelingly into the will and is wholly there for the fellow human being and for the world. In thinking, the human being finds the ground of his activity in the time-necessary demands of the farm and in the satisfaction of his fellow human beings' needs. These are held sacred by thinking in the economic realm. Drinking spirits, for example, can be a need. The distiller will spare no mental effort to devise the best possible process for meeting that need — naturally he is free, out of spiritual insight, to enlighten his spirits-consumer about the harmful consequences of alcohol consumption — and the trader keeps the product on the shelf because people want it. Economic life is autonomous, just as rights-life and spiritual-cultural life are autonomous. Strictly speaking, it is not the business of the one engaged in the economy to withhold a product from the consumer because he thinks it harmful. To decide on that belongs, at the level of spiritual-cultural life, to insight into the grounds of the harmfulness, and at the level of rights-life, to the law that restrains availability. Every human being stands, answerable for himself, within these three members, and must learn to align his social conduct to the validity of the autonomy of the three members of social life.

Brotherhood and sisterhood in economic life calls for a new mode of thinking. This mode of thinking must grasp, with a sense for reality, the value-creation chain panoramically in a thought-picture. It must endeavour, at every phase, to keep in view the human being acting economically — in his spiritual striving and in the given legal framework — in order to be able to assess one's own contribution in relation to that of the other economic partners. Concretely, this means forming a picture of the conditions of life and production where everything has its starting point: in the primary production of agriculture. In biodynamic farming this originary production arises from a spiritual impulse, from the thought of organism and individuality. To plant this into the earth of a whole farm requires the capacities and hands of many people. These people give their collaboration a

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Brotherhood in economic life — and hence the legal basis — and they produce commodities, daily bread, that flow outward into the circulation of goods. The end-consumer price of these commodities must be such that this stream of goods can flow continuously from the beginning of sowing to the end of consumption. This calls for an imaginatively formative thinking. Out of this thinking there forms a community judgment, and that alone is adequate to economic life. The individual judgment cannot accomplish this. It ends necessarily in the dead end of egoism. Only in the forming of associations, in the associative collaboration of economic partners, can a thinking develop that takes the needs of fellow human beings as its point of orientation. It grasps economic contexts in living pictures and brings forth, fluently and vitally, a community judgment whose product is, among other things, the price. Only this mode of thinking — one that anchors and enlivens itself at the facts of economic life — is capable of rooting out the apparently invincible egoism, the cancerous ill of economic life.

The price of the primary production of agriculture converts into money. Money, taken by itself, is then no longer an object of economic life, but a counter-value for the value of the commodity. Money takes on the character of a right; it becomes a drawing-right on commodities. It is a means of flow, to ease the exchange of goods. But as such it must disappear back into the economic process, as quickly as possible, out of which it arose. In this way it guarantees the continuous flow of primary production, against which all further economy-wide value- and price-formation must measure itself.

If one looks at the agricultural organism and its three members, it is like a seed that does not germinate and unfold only once, but goes on germinating and unfolding continuously, radiating beyond its boundaries into the social environment and there stimulating social processes. Now and henceforth, an agriculture renewed in this way — from the thought of organism and individuality — can become once more the source-place of value-formation in all economic life. Everywhere, radiating outward from individual points, it can contribute to disentangling the threads of social life, wound into a tangle, into the three domains of an autonomous spiritual-cultural life, rights-life, and economic life — and to shaping these, transparent and threefold, into the social organism. And it is this social organism that in turn helps, acting back, so that the germinal forces of the seed of the agricultural organism, as the body of the agricultural individuality, go on renewing themselves, continuously.

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Part Two

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The Agricultural Individuality and the Three Pillars of Soil Fertility

As mentioned in the chapter "The Threefold Nature of the Human Being and the Agricultural Individuality" (p. 88 ff.), the concept of "Agricultural Individuality" receives its essential being and meaning when the farmer undertakes to grasp it on the basis of a knowledge of the essential being of the human being. What anthroposophical spiritual science says about the threefoldness of the human being according to body, soul and spirit can be traced and verified in self-experience and self-knowledge. One can direct one's gaze toward the organisation of the body and find that this forms the physical and life-foundation for the activity of the soul and the working of the spirit. In the physiologically breaking-down processes in the nerves and sense organs, the soul becomes consciously awake to the content of its perceptual and thinking activity; in the physiologically building-up processes it unfolds, sleeping, its will-activity; and, mediating between the two poles, in the rhythm of heartbeat and breathing, it enacts, dreaming, the soul-activity of feeling. The spirit of the human being, his most original kernel of being, is rooted in the I. In the activity of the I, the spirit permeates these three soul-activities and the bodily processes belonging to them. The body, with its organs, substantive compositions and life processes, is the earthly organ of the spirit-soul — an image of that spirit-soul itself. The spirit-soul and the higher hierarchical spirit beings connected with it^[171] enliven and shape the body into a largely self-enclosed organism. Within it, as a microcosm, everything is active that fills the macrocosm spiritually and in soul. Through his spirit-soul, the human being is endowed with the disposition to find within himself the means and paths by which he can come to know both himself and the essential working and being of the macrocosm.^[172] What in primordial times was still essentially and livingly present in the macrocosm has, in the course of evolution, poured itself into the world — into the wealth of forms of the kingdoms of nature. It has become a Work. In the human I, the primordial beginning lives on, germinal, as microcosm. Out of the I, the force grows in the human being — through self-knowledge — to develop into a free individuality.

These indications may once more confirm the justification and the depth of Rudolf Steiner's statements: "The human being is made the foundation" — when the task is to carry on agriculture in a manner befitting the spirit. The

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The concepts of individuality and the self-enclosed character of an organic whole (organism) can, in the strictest sense, be derived only from the human being. The human being, each one for himself, is an individuality by virtue of his I, his spirit-soul, which opens upward toward the realms of the spiritual world and downward, through its bodily organisation, binds in the realms of nature. The human being becomes comprehensible only when one learns to regard him in this sense as a citizen of two worlds.

When we speak of an agricultural individuality in the greatest possible self-enclosure, the concept of self-enclosure refers to its bodily organism, which — through the idea and will of the human being — shapes itself into the vessel of reception for the agricultural individuality. This was indicated in detail, from the aspect of the fourfold nature, in the chapter "The Fourfold Nature of the Human Being and the Self-Enclosure of the Farm Organism" (p. 97 ff.). But what gives content to the concept of the "agricultural individuality"? What fills the piece of earth of the farm in a spiritual-essential way? The content arises, as described, through the artful coordination of all the cultivated and landscape elements of the farm, spread horizontally across its surface to its boundaries. The centre — from which this process is directed — arises anew out of the spirit-soul of the human being as it raises itself toward knowledge of the spirit.

The filling with essential being is a macrocosmic event and at the same time one into which intervention — whether in the good, constructive sense or in the evil, destructive sense — is placed, now and henceforth, in the freedom of the human being. Out of the instinctive states of consciousness of earlier human epochs, interventions have occurred that led to the development of cultivated soil, the cultivated plant and domestic animals (cf. chapter "The Ancient Persian Cultural Epoch," p. 42 ff.). The stamp impressed upon natural things and beings through these cultural achievements already bears an "individualized," site-specific character. This intensifies with the awakening of the I — an impulse of Christianity, which in the Middle Ages led to the formation of village communities with centre and periphery. Today we stand at a fundamental turning point: the shift of the centre from without to within. To the degree that the spirit-soul places itself, cognizing and acting, into the macrocosmic contexts and brings its doing into accord with these — to precisely that degree does the individuality of the human being widen and impress itself, "filling with essential being," upon the wholeness of the farm. With this, a development into the distant future is mapped out: "We must be altogether clear that the agricultural domain, together with

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what already existed below the surface of the earth, represents an individuality that continues to live forward in time as well."

As set out in detail in the chapter "The Threefold Nature of the Human Being and the Farm Individuality" (p. 88 ff.), the "farm individuality" is threefold like the human being and, like the human being, orients itself vertically along the Earth-Sun axis — with the difference that the functions of the depths of the earth are comparable to the nerve-sense system of the human being, and those of the heights above the earth to the metabolic system. The middle between these poles is formed by the soil, comparable to the functions of the human diaphragm. The soil spreads itself horizontally like a skin over the solid earth. Within it, the working of forces of the heights and the depths concentrates and interpenetrates rhythmically, making it the primordial ground of all higher life on earth.

All work in agriculture ultimately concentrates upon this middle member as well. The farmer seeks to guide the interworking of these forces of the heights and the depths — and of the substances to which each stands in relation — in such a way that the rhythmic middle can develop and individualize toward ever greater self-sufficiency. This refers above all to species-typical growth and to the fruit formation and nourishing quality of cultivated plants. At its core, the task is to develop the "diaphragm function" toward a progressively independent dynamic — and to bring the forces of the heights and the depths into consonance through the rhythms of the course of the year in such a way that the organ of the middle can become the central organ of development of the farm individuality. This will find, and will increasingly find, its expression in the farm-individual soil fertility. In it, the working of nature and the working of the human being close together into a becoming wholeness.

The concept of soil fertility has at best retained meaning for the practitioner of ecological farming. From scientific usage it has disappeared with the breakthrough of agricultural industrialization since the 1960s. It cannot be derived from quantifiable parameters and is therefore not amenable to scientific method. In its place has entered the concept of the yield capacity of the soil, which expresses in measure, number and weight what the soil yields — but not how that yield came about and by what means. Through the arbitrary deployment of production inputs according to type and quantity

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of so-called mineral nutrients, pesticides, herbicides, growth regulators, and so on, calculable maximum yields are achieved year after year even on soils that are by nature little "gifted" — that is, poor soils. With this, the qualitative aspect of soil fertility — for example, the site-specific or provenance-specific value, or the nutritional-physiological quality of foodstuffs — has become obsolete. The concept of yield capacity refers largely only to agrotechnological questions; the concept of soil fertility, however, refers to the question of an art of farming yet to be developed anew. This requires, as indicated above, that the view be widened to encompass the essential side of the world, to the more intimate workings of forces in the household of nature.

Taking up the derivation of the concepts "agricultural organism" and "farm individuality" (cf. pp. 88 ff.), the dimension becomes clear into which reality of being the farmer is actually working. All the arable and horticultural measures he takes set their point of engagement at the middle member of the "farm individuality" — the soil, whose function, viewed macrocosmically, is comparable to the human diaphragm (Figure 5, p. 90). Just as the diaphragm stands in its rhythmic dynamic in relation to the pulse of the heart and the breathing of the lungs, so too do the soil processes answer to the rhythms that have their origin in the movement-relations of earth and cosmos. Just as the rhythm of day and night lays itself out microcosmically into the polar states of waking and sleeping, so too does the world of nature beings working in concealment experience polar states — on one hand, of being held fast in the fullness of forms as a summer sleep, and on the other, in the passing away of these forms, of being released and becoming self-sufficient as a winter waking. In like manner, the transitions in spring signify a falling asleep and in autumn an awakening. Into this steady transformation in the course of the year the farmer intervenes — with the consequence that no measure resembles another. The continuum within the changing of appearances, to which all cultural measures relate, is the soil and its education toward enduring fertility.

Depending on the site-specific natural endowment, soil fertility rests on the three pillars of soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring. Cultivation steers, in accordance with the needs of the plants to be cultivated, the physical processes of the soil; crop rotation contributes to their enlivening; manuring enlivens and ensoul them. These three load-bearing pillars of primary agricultural production are to be considered in what follows from expanded points of view.

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First Pillar:

On the Nature of Soil Cultivation in Connection with Soil Development in the Course of the Year

The Soil

The science of soil science, in the temperate climate zones, confines the soil to the rooted weathering layer that rests upon the bedrock of the substratum. This weathering layer is in its depth and structure an expression, on one side, of the nature of the geological parent material and the terrestrial forces of the depths, and on the other, of the nature of atmospheric working and the cosmic forces of the heights. As a modifying third there comes the geomorphology, the landscape form, (tectonics, water and wind erosion). Through the interplay of this threefold of forces and substances there arises in the vertical a variant-rich, again threefold-articulated soil profile. Its uppermost zone, the A-horizon, is in high degree influenced by substances and forces working in from the atmosphere, the "belly" of the agricultural individuality. Here in the uppermost layer is concentrated the plant and animal soil life, and, having arisen from this, the humus as a decisive bearer of fertility. The humus provides for the dark coloration of this horizon and for a pore-rich crumb structure.

The middle layer, the B-horizon, is a result of progressive weathering. It builds itself up from a mixture of clay, silt, fine and coarse sand, which can one-sidedly narrow toward the extremes of a heavy clay soil or a light sandy soil. The bearer of fertility in this zone is the harmonious proportion of the mineral bodies silica, clay, lime, as such is present in a mild loam soil.

Beneath the weathering horizon stands the parent rock, the C-horizon. The boundary between the two is determined by the lime-dissolution front. Through progressive decalcification, this deepens in barely perceptible steps from year to year.

The physical foundation of the soil is formed by the four classical elements: earth, water, air and warmth. Mineral soils exhibit a total pore volume of 40 to 50 per cent. This is composed of a complex system of

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finest to coarse pores, shrinkage cracks, biogenic channels and the like. In rain they fill with water; in drought and percolation, with air. Warmth — to which physics, since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has no longer granted a state of its own as an element (an aggregate state) — penetrates its three siblings, sets them in relation to one another, sees to their passage from one elemental state into another, or in its absence (cold) to their separation and their remaining in their own particularity.

In soil science, on the basis of empirical studies of profile structure, one speaks of a soil development that has been taking place since the end of the last Ice Age, some ten to fifteen thousand years ago. According to the outward appearance of various soil profiles and their manifold differentiation as a consequence of this long-term development, a series of characteristic soil types are distinguished. Depending on weathering intensity, vertical substance-displacement and horizon formation, one deals on the one hand with soil types that still show juvenile stages of development — such as the AC soils of the *Rendzina* on lime-rich sites in sloping or dry positions. Polar to these, also with AC profile, the *Ranker* forms on siliceous-acid rock in erosion positions. Starting from these juvenile stages, one can on the other hand trace soil types of increasing age — for instance, on lime-rich sites the aging sequence Rendzina → Para-brown earth → Pseudogley, or on acid quartz-silica the sequence Ranker → Brown earths → Podsols.

Every farm has one, or often several, of these soil types. Knowledge of them says a great deal about workability, water-retention capacity and other growth-determining factors — in short, about their natural endowment. Beyond this knowledge, it is still more important for the farmer to turn his attention to the soil development that takes place from year to year, and to grow into it, to make it his own. To participate in shaping it is, in the first place, the art of soil cultivation.

The course of the year divides into the seasons winter, spring, summer and autumn. Through these characteristic successions of time the soil passes through a development that is inseparably bound up with the living and dying of plants and the world of soil animals. With soil cultivation the farmer and gardener seeks, according to circumstances, to promote or to hinder the processes of life — and likewise those of dying. The symptomatology of this processual activity becomes clearest of all in the example of cereal cultivation.

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The Winter Process and Soil Cultivation

In winter, the world of appearances is reduced to the merely physical. Outer life has largely gone out; it has withdrawn into the resting state of spores, seeds, buds, and into the cambium and the storage organs — tubers, beet. The growth of the leaves of winter grain sown in autumn comes to a standstill. With the onset of cold the leaves press themselves, in a rosette, star-shaped, like an image of the starry heavens, flat against the earth.^[173] Only the roots go on growing slowly down into the depth. Nature is clothed in bright and dark, in white and black. Out of the white blanket of snow the darkness of the branching of trees and shrubs stands out in contrast. From November onward the soil shows a darker colouring than at other times of the year. It is a consequence of the saturation of all soil pores with water. This phenomenon points to the central winter process — to the far-reaching separation of the four elements from one another. The warmth that otherwise permeates everything withdraws, leaving its three siblings to their own physical being. In its place, as its counterpole, cold steps in. The air is pure and clear and opens the gaze into the distance, or upward into the starry sky. Water ceases to evaporate; it grows denser, heavier, and seeps down into the depth. The earthy-solid contracts and forms itself into its strictly geometrical crystal nature.

The winter process brings the earth into a condition of being surrendered to itself — a kind of spiritual waking. "The earth is thus most truly earth during the depths of winter; there it is in its essential nature."^[174] It emancipates itself from planetary influences and opens itself to the instreaming workings of the "farthest cosmos" — the sphere of the fixed stars, which the Greeks, with good reason, called the crystal heaven.^[175] Winter is "the time when the greatest crystal-forming force, the greatest formative force, can be developed within the earth for the mineral substances. There it is peculiar to the interior of the earth […] under the influence of the crystal-forming

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forces, which are in the expanses of the cosmos, to come […] and the deeper one goes, the more they have this longing to become crystalline-pure within the household of nature."^[176]

The crystal-forming formative forces seize, in the cold of winter, the element of water as well. Water reaches its greatest density at +4 °C and begins — expanding again — to crystallize into ice below 0 °C. This process takes place at the surface of the earth and of bodies of water, and in the moisture of the air, forming snowflake crystals. In deep cold, individual crystals fall in forms of which no two are alike; and yet they all crystallize in beauty and purity according to the same principle — hexagonally, into the six-pointed star.

These crystal-forming and formative forces that stream in during winter from the "farthest cosmos" are significant in a threefold way for soil development in the following year.

The Formation of Frost Tilth

As a consequence of the anomaly of water — that in crystallizing it expands in volume and thereby becomes specifically lighter — it produces a bursting action in the water-saturated capillary cracks, fissures, and pores of the soil. This is particularly beneficial when, after a late root-crop harvest in autumn and a waterlogged soil, the plough has left behind a smeared, coherence-compacted furrow slice. Then "Master Frost" is called for, who restores the soil to a crumbling condition such as no implement could achieve. The frost shatters the coherent mass of the soil into a multitude of small, angular, polygonal crumbs — the "frost tilth." Since it arises by purely physical means, it is unstable and can easily be washed back into a slurry by heavy rain. But if the farmer is fortunate, and the frost tilth holds through into early spring, it stabilizes by biological means and secures — so it is said — half the harvest, even before the spring seed is in the ground.

Through the winter, with "Master Frost," nature itself takes over the soil cultivation. The hand of the human being rests.

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The Formation of Clay Minerals and Their Renewal

Clay is a mixture of various clay minerals together with the amorphous end-products of weathering — the hydroxides of silicon, aluminium, iron, and so on. These latter are colloidal in nature, formless: a condition between solid and liquid, the very same condition that underlies all processual activity in the living. The plasticity of clay derives from its affinity to water, as well as from the partly submicroscopic smallness of the crystalline clay-mineral platelets, from the swelling capacity of certain clay-mineral types (*Montmorillonite* and others), and from the high water-absorbing capacity of the soil colloids. Water makes clay swell. The withdrawal of water through drying generates the finest shrinkage cracks, right down to deep fissures in the soil.

If the dynamics of clay are essentially determined by its affinity to water and the salts dissolved in it, then it is air and warmth that co-bring about the rhythmic swinging back and forth between form (solid crust) and processual substance-exchange. This rhythm manifests especially in the dynamics of the hydration sheaths of the clay particles. In dryness (summer) they contract and draw near in their density to the earthy-solid. In wetness (winter) the water sheaths expand their volume. Thus clay is the bearer of the rhythmic interplay of the solid, the liquid, the gaseous and warmth — and thereby the representative of the member of the middle, the "diaphragm," between the metabolic pole above and the head pole below the earth (see Figure 5, p. 90).

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in dryness (summer) they contract and draw near in their density to the earthy-solid. In wetness (winter) the water sheaths expand their volume. Thus clay is the bearer of the rhythmic interplay of the solid, the liquid, the gaseous and warmth — and thereby the representative of the member of the middle, the "diaphragm," between the metabolic pole above and the head pole below the earth (see Figure 5, p. 90).

What gives clay its structure-forming quality are the clay minerals themselves; they crystallize hexagonally in gossamer-thin platelets with a surface extension of less than 0.002 mm. They cleave to such submicroscopic thinness of crystal faces that one can address these as the materialized idea of the "plane" — which, following the crystal-forming forces of the cosmos, develops the crystal lattice in surface-spanning fashion out of substance and delimits itself into the hexagonal form. The clay minerals owe the high dynamic of binding and releasing substances to their expandable interlayers — but above all to this very double-sidedness of their surfaces, which in serial arrangement extend as if into the boundless. The surface extension of 1 g of swellable *Montmorillonite*, for instance, amounts to 800 m².^[177] In the rhythmic swinging back and forth between crystalline form and the aqueous-substantial

dynamic it is the clay minerals that make clay the bearer of fertility in the realm of the physical-mineral.
Durch chemische Verwitterung basenreicher Magmatite und metamorpher Gesteine entstehen Reihen von sekundären Tonmineralien bis hin zum völligen Zerfall der Kristallgitter, unter Bildung der genannten amorphen, kolloidalen Hydroxide.
Neubildung sekundärer Tonminerale aus der Synthese der kolloidalen Masse von Silizium- und Aluminiumhydroxiden.

The various types of clay minerals arise in three ways:

Through physical weathering of mica. In the process, among other things, primary clay minerals form, and through further chemical breakdown, transformations into secondary clay minerals.

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arise (in winter) and display, by comparison with the crystalline primary rocks, a lesser degree of ordering in their crystal lattices.

One can thus say in summary: from the standpoint of the dynamics of weathering processes in inorganic nature — all the way to amorphous colloidal states — as well as the dynamics of the arising of new silicatic clay minerals, winter marks the beginning of soil development in the course of the year.

In winter, soils renew themselves in their physical constitution through a self-working by the winter forces.

Bearership and Preservation of the Cosmic Formative Forces in the Course of the Year

The formative forces raying in during winter work through the material substance of the earth — and the more powerfully, the more severe the winter. Towards these crystal-forming, structural-purity-creating formative forces, the physical-mineral nature — represented by silica (quartz, silicates), lime (base-rich rocks) and clay — stands in differing relation. Quartz-silica, in the temperate and polar-adjacent zones, is nearly resistant to weathering. It repels the form-dissolving force of water; lime draws it in. Rock crystal (silica) is by nature "crystallically pure"; lime develops an intrinsic dynamic of breakdown and buildup; it appears in manifold forms, across the whole span from rhombohedrally crystallising calcite in its purity to water-bearing sinter lime. Silica and lime form polar opposites in the soil and in the world of rocks. Lime has a high affinity to water. Just as it "greedily" receives the formative forces of the starry heavens, so too does it receive the formative forces working through the element of water — the forming forces of the near-solar planetary periphery, radiating from Mercury, Venus, and above all the Moon. The latter is the case in spring, in connection with the life that is then unfolding. In winter, by contrast, lime greedily absorbs the fixed-star forces, while the inwardly resting, crystallically pure silica reflects them back. "Lime lays claim to everything; silica claims, in truth, nothing at all any more [...] Silica is the general outer sense in the earthly realm, lime is the general outer desire in the earthly realm, and clay mediates between the two."^[178] Clay stands in relation to the

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Clay stands in closer relation to the siliceous than to the lime. This shows itself in the silicate-crystalline layered structure of the clay minerals. Yet it has the capacity — as though in a higher synthesis — to unite the silica pole and the lime pole with each other. Its dynamic is twofold: on the one hand, the surface of the clay particles is surrounded by a hydration sheath, and on the other it can receive water between its crystalline layers. The substances dissolved in the water — above all the basic ones — are in turn adsorbed by the crystalline boundary surfaces, or can release themselves from this bond in exchange for others. When soil science speaks of adsorption or of the exchange capacity of soils, these parameters refer — alongside humus — above all to the clay minerals. In the light of what was said above, it stands to reason that the winter star-forces influence both the degree of crystalline order in the clay minerals and that of the substances bound to the boundary and interlayer surfaces.

On the other side, clay preserves the formative forces that silica reflects back and that lime would claim entirely for itself, and mediates them to the roots of the plants over the course of the growing period. Clay is — by way of the roots and the shoot growing upward into air and warmth — "the promoter of the cosmic upward streaming."^[179]

This indication points to the salt-water stream — Goethe called it the *Erdsaft*, the earth-sap — which in the shoot-axis moves upward through the xylem, inside the peripheral cambium, directed into the foliage. It is this stream, bearing formative forces, that helps the plant to the physical shaping of its substances — protein, the structural carbohydrates, and so forth — and thereby to the sense-perceptible gestalt of its type as a whole.

The physicist and chemist delimits substances from one another according to their properties. These properties are traced back to a force-potential — electricity, magnetism, nuclear force — which, however, characterises only the physical, earth-bound side of substances. Rudolf Steiner is fully aware of this side in his spiritual research, but opens up alongside it the other side — the cosmic side of substances — through which alone their being, active in the physical, is disclosed. The physically force-endowed constitution of a substance-element — or of a composition of such, as the clay mineral is — proves to be a point of reference, mediator and bearer of the forces radiating specifically from the cosmos: such as the formative forces of the sphere of the fixed stars, or those of the life-bestowing etheric formative forces.

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Die Übersetzung beginnt mit dem Fortführen von Kletts Bewegung, die im vorigen Chunk bei der kosmisch-qualitativen Seite des Tons angelangt ist.

of the Sun and planets. "Cosmic life" and "cosmic chemistry"^[180] make use, as it were, of the earthly substances and forces present in the soil as silica, lime and clay, in order to sculpt out in the forms of plants their archetype, their type.

Viewed under this aspect, the crystalline nature of the clay minerals — together with the substances bound to them through sub-physical, earthly forces — is exposed, during the winter season, to the force-radiations of a supra-physical, cosmic nature that work in the organic realm as life-bearing and life-shaping. One may therefore understand Rudolf Steiner's indications concerning clay as meaning that clay preserves these formative forces and transmits them to the roots in the following growing period. They stream upward, shaping the plant form into the image of its type and composing the substances in the fruits as bearers of nourishing quality.

The Spring Process and Soil Cultivation

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Bacteria, bound together into colonies by the mucilaginous sheaths of their cell walls, form bridges between the soil particles. Smaller and larger cavities arise, the pore volume increases, the exchange of air and warmth in the rhythm of day and night intensifies, and the soil becomes receptive to sudden downpours. On closer inspection, however — where the furrow is still rough — the furrow-valleys are still dark, saturated with water; or, where the field was levelled in autumn by the plough's rear attachment, the subsoil proves too sensitive to pressure. Untimely soil cultivation — as a rule, too early — leaves irreversible compaction damage in the tractor tracks: soil development stagnates for the rest of the year. The situation is different with horse-drawn work. The localised pressure marks of the horses' hooves are soon restored again by microbial activity.

The maxim in early spring is: "Out onto the field as early as possible." This makes the impatience described above understandable. The aim is to level the field, to encourage crumbling through the warming and aeration of the soil, and to create a first seedbed for the weeds. This purpose is served by the first working pass in the course of the year — the drag-levelling. It has become superfluous in agro-chemical farming through the use of herbicides. For reasons of cost and on account of the high weights of tractors, the working passes for preparing the seedbed are combined directly with sowing. In biodynamic farming, where conditions allow and wherever possible, drag-levelling and one or two harrow passes should precede sowing, in order to uproot the weeds still at their tender seedling stage and allow them to dry out. At the same time, crumb formation and substance transformations are stimulated, capillary water rise is interrupted, and thereby the winter moisture is retained in the soil.

Alongside the preparation of the seedbed for the spring-sown cereals, the winter crop also requires soil care — be it through breaking the soil crust with the light harrow or the weeder harrow, be it through rolling the plants so that the root system regains contact with the soil after alternating frosts.

In Spring

The spring processes now setting in shall be illustrated through the example of spring-sown cereals. After the preparatory early-spring work, sowing takes place. The seed is laid a few centimetres deep into the darkness of the earth, on the slightly compacted layer formed by the seed coulter. This facilitates

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the swelling of the seed through capillary water rise; to the sides and from above, the seedling is surrounded by air and warmth in the finely crumbled soil covering. The germination of the seed is a process that does not presuppose the presence of the element of the earthy-solid, the earth — but it does presuppose the elements of warmth, air and water. This already bears witness to the fact that the growth of the seedling points back to an evolutionary condition in which the earth was not yet earth, and the plant was still a water-born being. This condition repeats itself at the beginning of the plant's own becoming as an earth-plant. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) formulated this principle of repetition of earlier states in 1866 as a result of his studies of embryonic development in plant, animal and human being — as the «Biogenetic Fundamental Law», which states: «Ontogeny is a repetition of phylogeny»^[181] — or: «The development of the individual is a repetition of the development of the species.» Rudolf Steiner does not confine this insight to the becoming of the Earth and its kingdoms of nature alone, but extends it to three planetary conditions that preceded the becoming of the Earth. These are described as «Old Saturn» (in which the element of pure warmth arose), «Old Sun» (in which a part of the warmth condensed into the element of air) and «Old Moon» (in which a part of the air condensed into the element of water). Only in a fourth planetary condition did the element of the earthy-solid arise.^[182] On the third stage of evolution, the «Old Moon», the plant-nature lived — forming itself out of water — as a still barely differentiated living mass. At the beginning of Earth evolution, the condition of the Old Moon repeats itself as a whole, on a higher level, just as do the two preceding evolutionary stages. As the plant world differentiates itself into the «earth-born», as root, leaf, stem and blossom incorporate the element of the earthy into themselves, the delicate, watery seedling stands at the beginning of the «individual development» of the plant — in repetition of the time of the Old Moon.

The cereals belong to the grasses and as such to the monocotyledons. The seeds are organised into the embryo and the starchy endosperm. Both are separated from each other by the single cotyledon, the scutellum. On germination, the cotyledon does not emerge into the light, as is the rule with the dicotyledons, and does not turn green as they do — it remains embedded in the soil within the seed coat. What appears is already the sharpening first leaf. The seedling is the elaboration of what is

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already visible in its organs, laid down in the embryo.^[183] In the embryo is revealed «the cosmic [archetypal image; added by the author], that lives as the form of the plant in the seed».^[184] The nutrient tissue of the starchy endosperm, which largely fills the volume of the seed, derives from the mother plant and is so constituted in kind and quantity that the plant — in repetition of the living-watery Moon condition — can develop only as far as the seedling, not beyond that into the highly differentiated, earth-born cereal plant. For this, two things are required: the greening of the upward-striving stem and leaves under the light of the presently in-raying sun, and the growing-together of the root with the earth. As is generally the case with the higher plants, so also with the cereals: the embryo, in longitudinal section, shows a threefold form already prefigured in its organisation — the root pole, the shoot pole with its vegetative apex, and, forming the middle, the germinal node, which holds within itself the force of uprighting.

With the swelling of the seed, and with the appropriate warming of the soil, breakdown processes set in within the nutrient tissue. First to begin is the growth of the seminal roots — three in wheat, four in oats. In the seedling stage these are still unoccupied by root hairs; they are outgrowths of cells of the root epidermis. For this reason weeds are most easily uprooted by harrow and weeder harrow when they are not yet visible. Only with the greening of the first leaves — and with it the stimulation of the plant's own metabolism — do the seminal roots enter into close relationship with the soil through the root hairs. The conducting pathways of the *phloem* (assimilates) and *xylem* (water, salts) take shape. The root hairs — now densely packed, up to 100 per mm of root length,^[185] grown together with particles of clay and humus — occupy, at some distance from the root tip, initially the entire length of the seminal roots during this juvenile stage. If one draws an oat plant — or in autumn a rye plant — in the one-leaf stage carefully out of the soil, crumbs of earth cling to the root like sausages. Only with its roots striving vertically into the depths, branching as they go, and with the shoot striving vertically upward toward the sun, does the plant leave its moon-like watery germinal stage behind and become the image of the relationship between the earth and the presently working cosmos.

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The seedling grows from earthly substances and from forces of the cosmos that the mother plant deposited in the grain's floury body for the seed. This source is exhausted with the completion of the seedling plant. What source must now be freshly opened up? What nutrient tissue takes the place of the one consumed? It must be, like that one, a product of past life processes. It is the humus, which arises through the transformation of everything that plants leave behind as residues, apart from what has gone into seed formation. But how can the fully developed seedling plant open up this new source of nourishment — whether nutritive or fully ripened stable humus? Here the formation of the fibrous or crown roots comes first into consideration. They grow in spring from the lowest one or two nodes and multiply with increasing tillering. Compared to the primary seminal roots, the fibrous roots are secondary formations. They grow close to the surface and form a wreath of roots that permeates the topsoil in the finest branching. The actual unlocking of the humus, however, comes about through the root hairs already mentioned — through their dense covering on seminal and fibrous roots the root surface is enlarged many times over. Through the root hairs the sprouting plant enters into direct connection with the surrounding soil.

The root hairs excrete a portion of the assimilates formed in the leaves — sugars, protein-like mucilaginous substances, ferments, organic acids — conducted downward into the roots via the peripheral *phloem* stream. In the counter-current they take up mineral salts and water, which with its freight of substances is conducted against the force of gravity via the conducting tissue of the *xylem* up into the assimilating organs of the above-ground plant shoot.

With its root excretions the plant seems a bucket without a bottom — a useless loss? The opposite is the case. In spring it extends its "life organisation" into the soil space it has permeated with roots and takes over the direction of the countless host of microbes. The root excretions refute the one-sided view that the soil feeds the plants and these are merely the passive recipients. In spring, conversely, the plants feed the soil to a significant degree out of their own active impulse, and set in motion within it processes through which they lay claim to the soil's fertility for themselves. It is a happening at once as subtle as it is immeasurably complex, governed by the life body of the plants, in accordance with the needs of their advancing stages of growth.

The root excretions nourish, activate and steer the activity of microbes, building up — in the root zone, according to the type of host plant — a

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Figure 12: Winter and spring processes in the soil. Skin tillage in spring.

specific living communities (symbioses) with bacteria and fungi, and through active substances raise the rate of bacterial multiplication in the root-near soil space, the rhizosphere, by fifty to a hundredfold.^[186] The acid excretions (carbonic acid, malic acid) also contribute to the breaking-down of the minerals.

Directed by the plant's life organisation as it extends itself into the rhizosphere, the actual spring process gets under way: the microbial breakdown of humus, all the way through to complete mineralization (Figure 12).

The life preserved in the substance-composition of the fully ripened humus now converts itself into the life of heterotrophic organisms in the darkness of the earth — the countless multitude of bacteria, protozoa and fungi which, comparable to intestinal digestion, in their turn decompose as they die back into their material components, and these then pass into solution in the soil water as salts. It is the vegetative growth of the plant stand in spring that conducts the proceedings, by way of the process of "digesting soil fertility," and so too governs the right measure of mineral salts released — above all nitrogen. The latter are adsorbed by the root hairs simultaneously with the excretion of assimilates, in counter-current to it.

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Where winter was dominated by a purely physical happening — the separation of the elements, a dying-away of outer organic life, accompanied by processes of densification and crystallisation — spring brings one of greatest outer life-unfolding, above and below the soil. Yet this future-directed becoming consumes soil fertility. That consumption proceeds from the breakdown of the bearer of past life: humus. As the endosperm belongs to the seed and dies into the formation of the germinating plant as it sprouts, so the nourishing tissue of the humus is the germinal ground from which, under the in-raying forces of the cosmos, the present life of the plant — all the way to fruit formation — can take shape in an earthly way.

And so the growing crops in spring are able to carry through this conversion of spent into new life all the more actively, the more fertile the soil is and the more sunshine and rain, aeration and warming of the soil alternate in succession.

Crust Formation and Skin Tillage

Under the exogenous influences of the metabolic pole above the earth, the dynamics of soil processes in spring are subject to strong fluctuations that call the farmer to exact observation, discriminating thinking, and presence-of-mind in action. As regards soil cultivation, what now matters — alongside timely suppression of weed growth — is to balance out weather-conditioned one-sided narrowings in favour of the growing-together of soil and plant. It comes down to breaking the crust. Crust formation sets in after every heavier rainfall; it must, up until the cereal begins to shoot, be broken again and again afresh. This scratching "skin tillage" peculiar to spring — carried out with harrow, weeder, hoe — must be done with as much vigour as possible: every crust formation closes the soil, diminishing or even preventing altogether soil respiration, the uptake of oxygen — essential for the aerobic plant and animal life of the soil — as well as the release of carbonic acid, which is partly excreted by the plant roots, partly liberated by the microbial breakdown of humus. Crust formation means carbonic acid congestion in the soil. This acts as a poison, inhibiting the subtle interplay of root excretion and microbial activity, and with it the dynamics of humus breakdown. Soil skin tillage means, therefore, on the one hand actively running down soil fertility — one can occasionally observe how a field sown with spring grain

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has a more vigorous growth on the part that was striegelled in time than on the part left uncultivated —, on the other hand harrowing helps carbonic acid, which is heavier than air, to escape from the opened pores, especially when the wind passes over the field and draws it out of the soil by suction. It accumulates in the air layer close to the ground, where it is breathed in by the leaves and becomes the scaffold-builder of plant form.

In the case of cereals, stem elongation puts an end to skin tillage. With root crops and field vegetable cultures it extends into early summer. These require — potatoes, for instance — a continued weeder-harrow, earthing-up, and hoeing work until the rows close. A deep intervention in the soil in spring with rotary cultivator, grubber, or even plough must be carefully weighed against its consequences. It ordinarily means, at first, a turbulent loss of soil fertility that cannot be directed or used by the freshly sown plants. The necessity for such deeper-reaching cultivation arises in arable farming after winter cover crops, winter-kill damage, and forced couch-grass control. The consequence of this untimely deeper intervention means loss of humus and loss of winter moisture, which frequently draws in its wake the necessity for irrigation. In horticulture a special situation prevails in this regard. As a result of the succession of consecutive crops, the soil must — regardless of season — be worked more deeply for re-sowing, and must, on account of the rapid development of the vegetatively fruiting crops, be kept throughout the year in a more spring-like condition. A higher humus turnover is therefore unavoidably the consequence.

Der Sommerprozess und die Bodenbearbeitung

Stubble Breaking, Mulch Cultivation, Humus Building, and the Activity of the Soil Animal World

At the flowering of the cereal crop, around mid-June, root formation — and with it soil tilth — reaches its peak. Until then the soil still springs elastically underfoot. After flowering, the first roots begin to die off, and likewise the first leaves, progressively from below upwards. The sun's rays penetrate down to the soil surface, and the further ripening advances, the harder and drier the soil becomes. This is the time in which the root crops

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close their rows; under the shade of the leaf canopy, soil moisture is retained — and with it, for that long, the vitality of soil tilth.

Even though precipitation in summer normally reaches an annual maximum on account of the heavy rains of thunderstorms, these evaporate again for the most part just as rapidly — or, depending on soil structure, are lost through surface run-off. The latter is typically the case under maize stands, even on gently sloping ground. If in winter we had water saturation and cold in the soils, then in summer the pores are filled with air and warmth. With the onset of dryness, the breakdown activity of the microbes in the soil diminishes. In its place it is now the soil animal world that commands the scene. If in winter it was the processual predominance of the physical, in spring that of the etheric-living, then in summer it is that of the soul-astral. Through the activity of the soil animals living in air and warmth, processes of inwardisation, of astralization, take place. If in the advancing spring the soil animals had, through their burrowing and digging activity and the legacy of their castings, played an essential part in building up a coarsely porous soil tilth and its system of channels — then from summer to autumn their function shifts by degrees. They now find abundant nourishment in the dying organic matter, above all in the root-permeated topsoil, and ensure that this nutritive humus, in passing through the digestive tract, is converted into enduring humus forms. What in spring was broken down from humus in favour of the vegetative growth of the plants — this is restored through the humus-building activity of the soil animal world, chiefly from high summer onward (Figure 13, p. 222). This process of humus building runs in time polar to that of crystallisation during winter, and takes place in the darkness of the earth. Consequently, all plant residues of the ascending course of the year must be worked into the soil during the descending. This is accomplished through a cultivation pass that incorporates the organic residues lying above the soil — stubble, straw and threshing remains, weeds — into the tilth layer. This mulch cultivation reaches deeper than spring skin tillage, but ideally not deeper than the tilth layer pre-formed since spring extends (approx. 8–10 cm). When this is fully ripened, it leaves behind after working a finely crumbling layer that interrupts capillary water rise, thereby protecting against further evaporation, absorbing heavy rain, and creating a seedbed for shed grain and weed seeds (Figure 13, p. 222).

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(1)

The mulch working supports the summer process of humus building by providing the soil animal world with suitable living conditions in spite of the intense solar radiation, the warmth, and the prevailing dryness. The stubble breaking after the grain harvest, and the activity of earthworms, may serve to illustrate this. Once the straw has been cleared, the stubble must be broken without delay. In the times before combine harvesting came on the scene (1950s–60s), grain was harvested at the yellow-ripe stage in sheaves, set up in stooks to finish ripening and drying, stored in the barn, and as a rule threshed in winter. The advantages of this harvesting method were as follows:

A stubble breaking roughly 14 days earlier than the dead-ripe stage required for combine harvesting.
Preservation of soil tilth.
Protection against drying out, and in the ideal case an early-advanced cover crop sowing.
Separate collection of the chaff. With herbal additions it makes a suitable dietary supplement for dairy cattle in winter feeding.
Weed seeds that had not yet shed went from the field with the straw and could be used in the "seed-ash process" — a method

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that Rudolf Steiner^[187] recommends for suppressing the multiplication of weeds.

Harvest loss was somewhat higher, but it benefited the wild fauna, above all the bird world.

The high art of summer stubble working with horse-drawn implements lay in this: the skim plough followed the mowing binder directly, so that the sheaves already fell onto the broken stubble. The combine harvester, as the technologically most elegant and efficient harvesting method, soon carried the day. That victory came at the cost of an early-advanced, tilth-protecting soil cultivation, and it altered the whole rhythm of farm operations fundamentally.

The mulch working does destroy the grown summer tilth — yet in doing so it mixes the stubble and weed residues with the root mass of the loosely crumbling soil. In this the soil animal world, earthworms above all, finds the ideal conditions it needs to unfold its activity. These are:

a finely distributed food supply from dead plant residues,
a fine-crumbling, loosened layer through which earthworms can press themselves in every direction through the soil,
an intensive aeration of the soil, and with it an oxygen supply,
darkness for the light-shy soil animals,
sufficient moisture: the water rising by capillary action from the unworked subsoil evaporates at the lower boundary of the mulch layer and, on cooling at night, settles there as dew.

When these conditions are assured, the earthworms (*Lumbricidae*) are drawn up from the deeper zones of the soil through their channels into the mulch layer, where through their beneficent digestive activity they convert the nutritive humus into stable humus. What in spring was a kind of eversion — an externalising of the life of the root and its growing-together with the earth, forming exogenous symbioses — what is at work in the body of the earthworm, among other things, is an invagination of life, a process of internalisation. In the former case humus is broken down: that is, the life preserved within it is converted through bacterial-symbiotic activity in favour of vegetative growth. In the case of invagination, present life is drawn inward through endogenous symbiosis under the direction of the

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The soul or astral organisation into the preserving life of the newly forming clay-humus complexes — a process that occurs predominantly in the summer-autumn period. This substance-renewal in the household of nature prompts the following questions: Are the earthworms in their digestive tract able to work over, in an even more earth-bound manner, those formative forces that ray in from the «remotest cosmos» by way of silica, lime and clay, than the plants that are forming themselves into their gestalt? Are it these formative forces that unite the polar earthly substances — crystalline clay and the residues of the universal-plant — into a higher unity, the clay-humus? And is it this union of mineral and plant substances through the ensouled activity of the earthworms that creates what is commonly called topsoil? This particular capacity of the earthworm certainly holds in graduated measure for other worm species as well, and for animals that live in the soil during their larval stage (Figure 13, p. 222).

Fruit Formation and Ripening

From early summer onward, the vegetative growth-activity shifts into the growing-out, the filling with substance and the shaping of the fruits. At first these are still green and assimilate in the sunlight. The fruit increases in volume. The assimilates that up until flowering had served partly for vegetative growth and partly, by way of the root, for the nourishment of the soil life, accumulate in the tautly filling fruit. The process of ripening unfolds both as a process of inward working and as one of outward working.

The outward working reveals itself in the change from green to a blossom-like splendour of colour, further in the streaming fragrances and in the dew-like bloom settled on the surface as though breathed there from without. These are manifestations of the working of the actual solar radiation, and of the radiations of the supra-solar planets woven through it. Thus Mars brings about the red colouration, Jupiter the white and yellow, and Saturn the blue.^[188] In whatever organs of the plant the flow of sap accumulates towards nourishing fructification — where vegetative growth thus pauses or reaches its end altogether — the blossoming impulse works from above downward: the direct working of the sun, supported by the sun-distant planets. The outer colouration of the fruit continues, as ripening advances, into mostly other, less intensive

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Colour-tones work their way inward, as ripening advances, into mostly other, less intensive shades. What envelops the plant as a purely living being only from without — the higher force-working of the soul-astral, touching it gently as cloud-light — penetrates in the ripening fruit more deeply into it. The healing action of medicinal herbs rests on this very process, and in certain specially constituted wild plants, for example the deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, it can extend as far as lethal poison-formation. In the case of food plants, human beings succeeded in the early period of plant cultivation, before the third pre-Christian millennium, in ennobling this astralisation-process — penetrating ever more deeply into the life of the plant — toward nourishing quality.

In the formation of humus from the manifold coloured and formed organic residues, there likewise unfolds a ripening toward a kind of organic-mineral fruit, the clay-humus complex already described. This "fruit" is black through and through — an image of what in ancient Persian times was set over against the "light" (the cosmic pole) as "darkness" (the earthly pole). In humus, the universal-plantlike that has become wholly "earth": humus "is the end-product of the earthy with the earthy."^[189] "The cosmic rock, the siliceous, takes the light into the earth and brings it to working within the earthly" — the humus does not. It is a "lightless working" that it "produces."^[190] This indication points among other things to the breaking-down and building-up of humus that takes place in the darkness of the soil, carried out by heterotrophic, bacterial-plant life.

The plant grows, with root, stem, leaf and blossom, through to fruit and seed-maturity, above all out of "direct co-living" with the classical elements "earth and water."^[191] These mediate to it a kind of inward working that manifests in the "earth-sap" (xylem) streaming upward along the Earth-Sun axis. Borne within it — taken up by the etheric organisation of the plant — the dissolved substances of the earth and the "formative forces" of the sphere of the fixed stars stream upward and unite with the warmth- and light-forces of sun and planets, giving rise to the substance compositions (proteins, carbohydrates, fats, oils, aromas, vitamins, etc.) that are proper to each plant species. It is a living activity directed toward a whole, governed by numerous enzymes. These force-configurations lead, on the path toward full ripeness, to the formation of ever new substance compositions structuring themselves with increasing complexity from stage to stage. The unripeness of a fruit is characterised by the fact that enzymatic activity has not yet

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completed, and organic compounds continue to be produced that are characteristic of a particular developmental stage in the ripening process. Thus in market fruits that appear outwardly ripe, one frequently finds substance groups indicating physiological unripeness — such as dehydroascorbic acid (a physiological precursor to ascorbic acid, vitamin C) or low-molecular precursors to protein formation (such as nitrates, free amino acids, amides, etc.).^[192]^[193]

Looked at more closely, the phenomenon of physiological unripeness occurs in today's mass production virtually across the board, for all substance groups. Only when the physiological processes come to rest — when enzymatic activity ceases — is the stage of full maturity reached, and with it the nutritional-physiological optimum of quality formation. Only in physiological full-maturity do we consume a food-fruit in which the cosmic-earthly "outward working" and the cosmic-earthly "inward working" enter into a perfect synthesis. This perfection is as a rule not achieved. The "outward working" feigns a full-ripeness; the activity of the "inward working," by contrast, finds no end. This thus-deranged metabolism leads to deficient keeping quality^[194] and gives cause for concern that herein lies a substantial cause of chronic disease. The reasons for the progressive diminishment of nutritive value are:

Global availability: harvest in an unripe state — refrigeration along world-spanning transport routes — thereafter artificially induced post-ripening, e.g. bananas.
Nitrogen fertilization (cf. Ch. Manuring): a fundamentally disturbed or hypertrophied metabolism in the plants. They want to keep on growing.
Monoculture: made possible by all kinds of genetic engineering (GMO) — an arbitrary intervention in the genome, the physical shadow cast by the archetypal image of plants — as well as by the large-scale application of life-hostile pesticides, herbicides and other growth regulators.

The conceptual formation around the question of food quality rests on a materialistic conception of life. Alongside genetics, it has on the whole remained stuck at quantitative substance-analysis and has given rise to the concept of "material equivalence" — which does not exist in the living. A "more or less" of a substance group tells us at best only

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something, when the time factor is taken into account as well. To this end, the stages of ripening must be followed analytically. If substance groups are found in the fully ripened product that are indicators of unripe stages, the result must be rated negatively. In this way, even quantitative analysis can contribute to a statement about quality. This does however require a considerable analytical outlay and bursts the cost-frame for routine investigations.

A substantial broadening of judgment-formation with regard to full-ripeness and food quality is permitted by the "image-creating methods"^[195]^[196]^[197] — such as copper chloride crystallization, the rising-image method, and the round-filter chromatogram. The truth about the value of a foodstuff comes nearest to the judgment of the one through whose spirit, heart and hands it comes into being. Spirit is meant to say: the unceasing striving for cognition of what holds sway and lives in cosmos and earth, and what takes shape, in this great field of tension, as the physical image of the spiritual archetype — through forces and through substance alike.

The implements for summer mulch cultivation

Where in spring it was the crust-breaking implements — striegel, harrow and hoe — it is in the post-harvest summer those that are to loosen the topsoil shallowly and mix it with plant residues. Depending on the depth of the crumbly tilth-layer, the cultivation depth amounts to 8 to 12 cm (Figure 13, p. 222). The diversity of implements testifies to the fact that evidently none of them fully meets all the desired requirements of mulching. The classic implement for stubble cultivation was — and could by its function still be — the skim plough: cutting fully through the sole, turning shallowly, cutting narrowly, it achieves through its shearing break-up and the crumbling-sifting deposit of good tilth a fine mixing effect. With the large working-widths demanded of skim ploughs today, and with the pressure-tracks of combine harvesters reaching in most cases right down to the sole of the tilth-layer, a clean skim-work can hardly

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be carried out any longer. In the 1950s and 60s, the rotary tiller stepped into the place of the skim plough for a time. It was to be the great deliverer. A shaft fitted with chopping blades rotates, driven by the power take-off, strikes into the soil, throws it into turbulence and lays it down magnificently mixed. The grave attendant drawbacks — formation of a smear pan, sealing of earthworm channels, chopping up of earthworms, loss of tilth through silting under heavy rain, high wear and energy demand — prompted its rapid disappearance, except in horticulture. Other power-take-off-driven implements, fitted for instance with forward-loosening shares, met with only limited success as well. The current practices form a diverse variation of soil-loosening stubble-cultivation implements with, for the most part, a moderate mixing effect. Closest to the skim plough comes the disc harrow, at a cultivation depth of approximately 5 cm. It carries the drawback that it cuts through and distributes the rhizomes of couch grass and thereby contributes to its spread. This drawback the narrow-share, many-tined cultivator makes good, in that it tears the rhizomes loose and lifts them upward, so that they can more readily be harrowed out. Its great drawback, however, is that it mixes insufficiently and does not cut completely beneath the tilth-layer. Against thistle and dock it can do little. Cultivators with appropriate combinations of implements can bring remedy here.

The frequently voiced thesis for stubble cultivation — "mix shallowly and loosen deeply" — cannot be applied in so general a form. The deeper loosening of the entire layer-packet interrupts capillary water rise, accelerates drying-out, and with it the activity of the soil organisms. Deep loosening can work beneficially in compacted soil when narrow shares are used at wider tine-spacings of approximately 50 cm.

All in all: every implement of soil cultivation is a tool — like hammer and chisel in the sculptor's hand. The work of art comes into being not through these tools themselves, but through the spirit of the human being who guides them, who feels and thinks.

In the long high-summer days stretching well into September, autumn has already been announcing itself for some time. In the increasingly cool nights towards the end of August,

dew formation increases again, morning mists draw in and fill the valleys. A new seasonal happening announces itself, whose forms of appearance stand in polar contrast to spring. While in spring the forces of the earth stream outward into the periphery and in doing so carry the upward-growing plants along with them — the earth thus breathing out what it held within itself in wintry rest, and through the summer pouring all of this into the wealth of forms and colours, into the formation of nourishing fruits — in autumn it finds its way back to the earth in one great in-breathing.^[198] The true mood of autumn comes fully alive around Michaelmas at the end of September, and frequently carries on into warm, golden days well into October. On the seedbed of a freshly sown autumn sowing there suddenly appears a silvery sheen, a net of gossamer threads woven across the expanse of the field; the "old wives' summer" has arrived! It is the time when the last crops vacate the field — the mangolds and sugar beets, the cabbages, the carrots and others. For these late-harvested root crops the golden sun-filled October days still bring a considerable increase in yield, and above all the highest degree of quality-formation in full ripeness. The same holds for the late-ripening fruit varieties and for the vine. It is also the time when the lignifying nature of tree and shrub — whether in orchards, hedgerows and field copses or in the forests — breaks into one last flowering in the leaves, in earth-coloured radiance, before after the first frost, in the sun of the breaking day, silently one and then another comes drifting down to the earth, or in the onset of the November storms the branches are swept bare all at once.

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Autumn is the time of the completion of ripening and of the great quiet dying. What only shortly before had made tree and shrub gleam in the green of their foliage — now it lies wind-scattered on the earth, given over to decay.

The same transforming, this passing-over into enduring forms and dying, seizes hold of the animal world. Every year in autumn it strikes afresh: suddenly the swallows are gone, and with them other species of birds on the great migration southward; along the roadside verges no butterfly rises any more, none flutters like a blossom that has taken on a life of its own over the open land. The lively humming and buzzing of the insects has come to an end. Where have they gone? Here one last flower visit, then the laying of eggs in a sheltered place beneath the bark of a tree, in crevices and hollows,

Ein gleiches Verwandeln, in Dauerformen-Übergehen und Sterben, erfasst die Tierwelt. Jedes Jahr im Herbst überrascht es aufs Neue, plötzlich sind die Schwalben verschwunden und mit ihnen andere Vogelarten auf dem großen Zug nach Süden; an den Wegrainen fliegt kein Schmetterling mehr auf, und keiner flattert wie eine selbständig gewordene Blüte über die Fluren. Das lebhafte Summen und Surren der Insekten hat ein Ende. Wo sind sie geblieben? Hier noch ein letzter Blütenbesuch, dann noch die Eiablage an geschütztem Ort unter der Baumrinde, in Spalten und Höhlungen,

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or overwintering in the pupal stage, or indeed as imago in the case of colony-forming insects, such as the bee colony. In the soil, single-celled bacterial life passes over into resting forms, fungal life produces spores. Tree, shrub, herb and grass form seeds, the soil insects lay their eggs, the earthworms withdraw into hollows of deeper soil layers. The abundance of early-autumn appearances grows visibly poorer, and at last what shapes the landscape is the rigid, as-if-dead branching of trees and shrubs. The one thing that in this dying still gives the feeling eye some hope of a continued working of life is the tart evergreen of the conifers, the still-lush green of the meadows and pastures, and the tender green of the autumn sowings.

What passes away in autumn are forms that, through the cosmic-earthly interworking of substances and forces in the ascending year, have received their year-specific impress. Already in the wilting of the blossom, the etheric — the formative life — loosens itself from what has shaped itself astrally according to the essential image of the plant. In seed formation and humus formation this coherence arises anew, a laying-down of seed in the stream of time. What, however, releases itself from its bond to the life of the sense-perceptible physical world is supersensible; it interweaves itself with the autumnally in-raying light and warmth in such a way that these, by comparison with spring, appear to feeling much fuller, spiritually-soul-saturated, indeed in their essential nature more strongly differentiated from one another. This loosening, this separating that occurs in dying can be felt as a waking of spirits permeating all of nature. If one does not close oneself off to this outer dying-event, one can become aware of the death-overcoming force of one's own I-being. It releases forces of courage, a Michaelic fore-sensing and forward-looking thinking that is as open to the future and to development as, conversely, the plant is — which preserves and maintains its being in the reproductive stream from seed to seed.

Soil Cultivation in Autumn

Cereals, with the exception of maize, are alternating-growth plants; there are summer and winter forms. The latter are sown in early autumn and in late sowings extending into November and December. Late sowings promote the reproductive power of seeds and thereby the capacity for variety-maintenance, while summer-proximate autumn sowings on the other hand promote "nourishing quality."^[199] The winter cereals require

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as a follow-on crop after another cereal, after root crops, cover crops, and fodder crops, a deeper, loosening, turning, and mixing soil cultivation is called for. In the case of a cover crop grown for green manure, this must be mown in good time, left to wilt, and then mulched in, before a seed furrow can be drawn — with crust-breaking press wheels where needed. Waiting too long in the hope of greater mass can have serious consequences: heavy dew-fall on the shortening days, persistent fog, or drizzle will cause putrefaction in green matter that has not wilted completely. On heavy soils above all, this leads through anaerobic conditions to lasting growth disturbances. The deeper-reaching seed furrow clears the way for the tender germinal roots, so that they can strive strictly downward. It is remarkable to see how swiftly, straight, and deep they grow together in autumn with the crumbling earth as one. As plants in spring, in the lengthening days, seem to outgrow the earth with stem, leaf, and blossom and strive toward the light, so in late autumn, with the first night frosts and the lengthening nights, they press their leaves to the ground in a compressed rosette and sink their roots vertically into the depth. The root strives and grows into the outwardly lightless, and meets in the darkness of the earth — through the cosmic radiation working in the earthly via silica, lime, and clay — that which shapes the archetypal image of plant genera, families, and so forth into their physically sense-perceptible likeness.

The soil cultivation appropriate to the autumn process of natural dying no longer directs itself primarily toward the promotion and preservation of life processes — as does skin tillage in spring for the activation of humus breakdown, or mulch cultivation in summer for the promotion of humus formation. The breaking-up of a green manure or fodder stand does bring nutritive humus into the soil, but this for the most part only converts and contributes to soil dynamics in the following year's spring cycle. Soil cultivation in autumn, strictly speaking, takes no account of what is past but prepares what is to come: the winter process. Attention turns now not to the metabolic pole, the humus layer, but to the mineral element of the soil — to clay, silt, and fine sand. Autumn — above all late autumn — allows for a deep or clay working, an autumn-winter furrow (Figure 13, p. 222). It brings about a destruction — or better: a chaotization — of everything that has built itself up so wonderfully over the course of the year in strict order as soil life. This must now be chaotized — together with the mineral constituents of the soil — in preparation for the

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crystallization processes of the coming winter and toward the laying of a germ for a new soil development in the following year. The old saying holds: "Ploughed before winter, half-manured."^[200]

The classical instrument of deep working is the turning plough (Figure 13, p. 222). It has fallen into disrepute in organic farming on several counts, with the result that in many places there has been a turn toward "ploughless soil cultivation." Faults are laid at the door of plough-working that are not grounded in plough-working as such, but are the consequence of designs oriented chiefly toward labour-economic and technical efficiency. Today's ploughs — as a rule heavy, multi-share full-inversion ploughs — are designed for ploughing depths of 25 to 35 cm and more, and cutting widths of 35 to 45 cm. "Depending on the shape of the plough body and the ploughing speed, the soil is transported between 20 to 70 cm forward and 40 to 70 cm sideways."^[201] This high displacement compels a correspondingly higher expenditure of energy. In the process, far more lifeless mineral soil is turned upward and humus-bearing living topsoil is turned downward; and of necessity the furrow must be cleared broadly on account of the wide tractor wheels. One attempts to meet this problem with multi-share ploughs extending beyond the tractor's width, which allow driving outside the furrow — or else the plough is replaced by the heavy cultivator, disc plough, and the like.

The plough detaches a furrow slice in the ratio of width (b) to depth (t) of b:t = 1.2:1 to 1.4:1 — in loose soil somewhat narrower, though not narrower than 1:1.^[202] It passes beneath the clod with the "undergrip" of the ploughshare, breaks it free from the subsoil, leads it over the curved mouldboard — whereby the furrow slice shatters in shearing action into predetermined breaking-pieces — and, offset by the cutting width, leans against the preceding furrow slice at an inclination of approximately 135°. The humus-bearing living topsoil either crumbles, decreasing from top to bottom, into the momentarily arising cleft before the clod is laid down — or it is, in the case of the application of farmyard manure or

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of a several-year main fodder crop, is thrown downward into the furrow ahead of the skimmer. With the two-layer plough one seeks to counteract the burying of the topsoil rich in nutritive humus. Over the winding of the mouldboard, subsoil rich in clay, silt, and fine sand reaches the surface and forms the furrow crest. Its mineral constituents are thereby directly and immediately exposed to the crystal-forming forces of the cosmos in winter, as well as to frost-shattering and, in the following year, to the forces of weathering. As inorganic material is raised up in measure, it comes under the enlivening influence of the forces of the metabolic pole. Deep tillage or clay working mixes and chaotizes in the vertical. It rejuvenates the soil, drawing up from the depth what has been displaced downward in microerosion by percolating water as finest clay particles.

In biodynamic arable farming the ploughing depth for autumn tillage should normally not exceed 16 to 18 cm, or 20 cm in the case of the winter furrow. This means, with a width-to-depth ratio of 1.4:1 and a cutting width of approximately 23 to 30 cm, a considerably more moderate displacement. However, the problem of lateral tyre pressure remains unsolved here.

The "rough winter furrow" had the advantage that the soil, with its enlarged surface, is exposed to the "crystal-forming forces of the distant cosmos," and the disadvantage of having to be levelled by dragging in early spring. This disadvantage is remedied by the plough follow-up implements — by the subsoil packer for autumn sowings, among other purposes to prevent the young seedlings from being lifted by frost — or, for the winter furrow, the levelling, crumbling light drag-harrow, and so forth. In the case of subsoil or plough-pan compaction, gradual deepening of the topsoil layer can be worked toward by means of a subsoiler attached beneath the share.

The plough has its place at the end of soil development in the course of the year — then, when the life-processes in the household of nature pass over into a general dying. The plough chaotizes what has ripened in the soil out of the manifold of life. It leads what has died fully into the condition of the physical, and is thereby the pathbreaker for the winter process, which lays into this death of what has physically become the spiritual germ of new life — of a new cycle of soil and plant development in the following year.

The cultivator has developed into a valuable complement, indeed a partial replacement, of the plough. It is characterized by a diverse array of working tools — narrow-bladed to fully cutting, with

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winged shares, a precise depth-of-working adjustment, and various crumbling follower attachments. It is suited for shallow stubble breaking just as well as for the deeper working in autumn of, for example, clover-grass leys. In many places the cultivator has become, like the plough, an implement of deep tillage that prepares the soils for winter.

The biodynamic farmer requires, for his soils and crops, the appropriate cultivation implements. A wide range of offerings is available to him on the market. Finding his way among them makes him an experimenter; he searches for criteria of judgment that, in active engagement — through observation and thinking — he can only find for himself. He recognises that the cultivation technology on offer frequently does not correspond to his insights and intentions. The cultivation procedures that, by their function, ought to follow one another in time are compressed by combined heavy machinery — rotary harrow and seed drill coupled together, for instance — or are, for all their high efficiency, oversized — ploughs, for instance. The art of soil cultivation, which fulfils itself as a happening in time, is reduced to mere technical completion-work.

It is therefore unavoidable that the biodynamic farmer finds himself challenged, in the field of soil cultivation technology as well, to exercise his spirit of invention. The understanding of the four seasonal processes points him in the direction.

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Second Pillar:

On the Essential Nature of Crop Rotation

Crop Rotation and the Life Organisation of the Agricultural Organism

The second load-bearing pillar of arable and garden farming is crop rotation. It is an organ of the life organisation of the farm — or, in the image of the agricultural organism and the "becoming farm individuality" dwelling within it, an organ of that individuality's etheric body. In what way does this make itself known? It is woven from a world of forces working out of the supersensible. Rudolf Steiner designates these as "universal forces," which he sets in contrast to "central forces" in the following way:^[203]

Of the phenomena that run their course in the lifeless, one can say: "They show themselves as governed by forces that radiate from the being of substance, from the — relative — centre-point toward the periphery. The phenomena of life show substance governed by forces that work from outside inward, toward the relative centre-point. At the transition into life, substance must withdraw from the radiating forces and submit to the in-streaming ones. [...] It is drawn into the forces that stream in toward the earth from the extra-terrestrial, from all sides [...] From all sides they work inward, these forces, as though striving toward the centre of the earth."^[204]

The etheric body belongs, then, to all living creatures, but is not to be imagined as a structure in space. Not the physical laws working in space delimit it, but it forms itself into a "time-body" through forces that ray in from beyond time and space, from the higher sphere of the soul-astral. The forces of the etheric are purely functional in nature.^[205] They are omnipresent, and — streaming in from the periphery — form, in immeasurable multiplicity, the ground-substance of the cosmos, as it were. The soul-astral mediates to them the direction of their working; it makes them into formative, form-creating forces that close together into a wholeness, into an etheric body, and — in the substance-realm of the earthly — kindle life and cause it to sprout forth into the physically sense-perceptible forms. The

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etheric body of the plant becomes a visible image in its form — its time-gestalt. It is the medium of becoming, of the relationally ordered succession in time: for instance, the processual activity of the plant unfolding from germ through shoot to blossom. The formative-force-filled functional nature of the etheric body lifts the substances governed by the earth's central forces up toward itself and estranges them from their merely physical properties. It composes them into organic substance-compounds — proteins, carbohydrates, and so on — whose specific functional contexts bring the form of the plant to appearance. Life becomes appearance in the forms it creates with the help of earthly substances.

The universal forces are fourfold in nature: they differentiate themselves into warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether (also called sound ether or number ether), and life ether.^[206] Under the working of the soul or astral body they unite into the etheric body, and this images itself forth in forms through the substances that work in the four elements of warmth, air, water, and earth. Through the central forces the plant delimits itself into its earthly gestalt; through the universal forces it stands in open relation to all directions. Thus the beech grows, relationally responsive to the in-streaming radiations of the cosmos, into a tree; the chicory into an herb; the meadow grass into a grass. Yet at the same time, through the working of substance within the four elements, they are bound to a particular place on earth. The universal nature of the etheric can create an image of itself in the earthly only in the multiplicity of individual things. Nature creates — wherever life can unfold, whether in primeval forest, savannah, meadow, or high moor — a site-appropriate diversity, a species diversity of plant forms. They stand in a spatial side-by-side, in which plants of the same species alternate as a rule with other species; in the untouched primeval forest, for example, trees of the same kind do not stand next to one another. The diversity of plant species at a given site is the principle that nature itself enacts. This diversity forms, together with all organisms living in and above the soil, a superordinate etheric-astral nexus of forces — or, ecologically speaking, a living space (biotope) and a community of living beings characteristic of that space (biocoenosis). It is this diversity that sustains endurance, health, and reproductive power in the household of nature. The merely physical-mineral tends toward fragmentation — an exemplary phenomenon

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— for sand is the exemplary instance of this —, while the living-etheric builds upward toward higher wholes.

This primal-ecological principle is broken, in individual members of the agricultural organism, above all in arable and garden cultivation, by the principle of monoculture. Wheat, potatoes in the field, lettuce in the garden stand, as a rule — setting aside mixed cultures for the moment — like every other crop, in pure stand. This entails a one-sided narrowing that necessarily results in a weakening of the life organisation of the farm. It acts as a disease-maker and leads, in agrarian-industrial farming, where regulated crop rotations no longer play any role, to the deployment of a wide spectrum of abiotic production inputs, with the unavoidable effect of far-reaching, life-hostile side effects. Every one-sided narrowing reduces the conditions under which the universal forces of the cosmos bring themselves to appearance in the earthly. They lose their dominion over the central forces. And with that, the kernel of the question of food quality is simultaneously addressed.

The art of arable and garden cultivation consists in compensating for the lack of species diversity, or even in raising it artistically to a higher level than the naturally given one. Crop rotation means: the sum of food, fodder, and other plants serving general use are grown each year separately from one another, distributed across individual field plots and garden parcels. The same crops follow one another on each of these areas according to certain criteria over the years. In this way all field crops move in lawful sequence through the farm precincts. The balancing effect of crop rotation can be substantially enhanced by mixed or companion sowing — oats with beans or peas, for instance — by undersowing with red, white, or Swedish clover, by the intercalation of cover crops, and by the multiplication of cultivation in accordance with the needs of a regional market.

The crop rotations under biodynamic management vary according to climate, soil type (sand, silt, loam, clay), landscape configuration, and proximity to markets. They are grounded, ultimately, in the three-field system going back to Celtic-Germanic times: winter crop — spring-sown crop — fallow. This system maintained the soils over centuries at the level of site-specific, enduring soil-born fertility. A change entered in the

eighteenth century with the so-called "improved crop rotation" — the summer-sowing of the fallow with clover, and subsequently with root crops (potatoes, beets, etc.). In the course of the intensification of cultivation during the twentieth century, there arose the system of alternating cropping with fifty percent root crops and fifty percent cereal crops. Through the advancing technology and the possibility of steering plant growth almost arbitrarily by means of inputs alien to the farm organism, there arose the systemless, purely market-driven "wild crop rotation."

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The crop rotations in biodynamic farming have evolved, through the insertion of at least two years of clover- and/or lucerne-grass, into multi-year sequences whose basic structure generally still rests on the three-year system.

Crop Rotation and Humus Household

In humus formation, the etheric body or life body of the farm organism unites with its physical-earthly organisation. The manifold forms and substance compositions of the harvest residues pass over, in the element of the earthy-solid, into a condition of the universally living — humus. Its character still bears witness to its origin. This is plainly visible in the so-called humus forms "raw humus" and "moder." Mull humus, by contrast, is a product of complete transformation. Raw humus forms in an acidic, moist-cool milieu; mull forms in the base-rich, active soil of a warm-humid climate. Raw humus and moder still show plant structures. In mull humus these have disappeared; it represents a new formation. And yet its living-substantive composition has, as it were, inscribed within it the constellation of formative forces that was proper to the organic starting material — the roots, stems, and leaves. Out of the multiplicity of growth forms and substance formations arises the "universally germinal" of the black, crumbling mull humus.

The individual species of field crops draw on soil fertility — that is to say, on the humus household — each in a different way. They accordingly exert upon the following crop a specific preceding-crop effect, determined largely by the quantity of harvest residues, above all by that of the root mass. The lowest preceding-crop value belongs to the root crops, and among these especially to the ridged crops such as potatoes and the like. These are regarded as humus consumers and leave behind for the crop rotation the smallest mass of humus-forming harvest residues: in the case of potatoes, 13 dt/ha, in the case of sugar beets, 8 dt/ha of dry root mass. The cereals are otherwise —

Die einzelnen Arten der Feldfrüchte beanspruchen die Bodenfruchtbarkeit, sprich den Humushaushalt, auf je unterschiedliche Weise. Sie haben dementsprechend für die nachfolgende Frucht eine je spezifische Vorfruchtwirkung, die sich weitgehend durch die Menge an Ernterückständen, vor allem die der Wurzelmasse, bestimmt. Den geringsten Vorfruchtwert haben die Hackfrüchte, unter diesen besonders die Häufelkulturen wie Kartoffeln u.a. Sie gelten als Humuszehrer und hinterlassen für die Fruchtfolge die geringste Masse an humusbildenden Ernterückständen, so bei Kartoffeln 13 dt/ ha, bei Zuckerrüben 8 dt/ha an Wurzeltrockenmasse. Anders die Getreide,

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whose root dry mass comes to 30 dt/ha for rye and an average of 23 dt/ha for the other cereal crops. They occupy a middle position with regard to preceding-crop value, particularly when one takes account of the straw masses that as a rule serve for bedding in the stall and find their way back into the crop rotation by way of farmyard manure. The highest preceding-crop value belongs to the legumes, and among these to the main fodder plants — red clover at 42 dt/ha and lucerne at 52 dt/ha of root dry mass. Beyond that, they penetrate in depth and breadth comparatively the largest root space, with the longest individual root fibres.^[207]^[208] The fodder legumes, used predominantly over two years, are regarded as humus-builders. The measured mutual attunement of root crops, cereal crops, and fodder legumes forms the basic framework of every crop rotation that is designed to preserve the humus household — or better still to increase it.

Crop Rotation and Cover Crop Cultivation

Cover crops enrich the species diversity of the crop rotation and increase the humus turnover. Through undersowing, stubble sowings, and winter cover crops, the life organisation of the farm organism can manifest itself still more powerfully and with greater equanimity. While the harvested produce of the market crops — the food for human beings — leaves the farm, the cover crops remain on the holding, as do the main fodder plants of the crop rotation, as it were as living nourishment for the maintenance and increase of soil fertility — indeed, for the healing and thriving of the farm organism as a whole.

Cover crop cultivation inserts itself wherever, between the harvest and the new sowing of the main crops, temporal gaps arise. Where these are short — for example, between a cereal crop vacating the field late in summer and the new sowing of a winter crop in autumn — only fast-growing crucifers can be introduced as stubble sowings: summer rape, mustard, oilseed radish. These grow with their taproot, richly branched, down into the depths, provide nutritive humus and earthworm activity into the subsoil, and through shading generate a microclimate in which the soil animals find ideal conditions for their humus-building

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Tätigkeit finden, und hinterlassen eine lockere, wurzelreiche Gare, die nach einer Mulchung ein feinkrümelndes Herbstsaatbett verspricht.

Stehen längere Zeitabstände zwischen Ernte und Neueinsaat zur Verfügung, z.B. nach der sommerlichen Halmfruchternte und der Bestellung einer Hackfrucht im folgenden Frühjahr, bietet sich ein Gemenge an von überwiegend ausgeprägt pfahlwurzelbildenden Leguminosenarten, wie Pferdebohne (Vicia faba) und Lupine (Medicago) sowie die reichverwurzelte Sommerwicke (Vicia angustifolia), Erbse (Pisum sativa), ferner Weidelgras (Lolium perenne), Phacelie (Phacelia tanacetifolia) und, als Stützfrucht, Sonnenblumen (Helianthus annuus). Möglichst noch im Juli gesät, bildet dieses Gemenge große Futtermassen – teils genutzt als Ackerweide –, eine reiche Durchwurzelung sowie gegen den Herbst hin ein vielfältiges Nektarangebot für blütenbesuchende Insekten. Solche Gemenge können – auch als Blühstreifen beispielsweise größere Hackfruchtschläge unterteilend oder als Randstreifen zwischen den Kulturen ausgesät – eine Bienenweide und überhaupt ein Sammlungsort eines überreichen Insektenlebens werden. Die mehrjährigen Futterleguminosen, Rotklee und Luzerne mit Beimengungen an Futtergräsern und -kräutern, werden in der Regel als Untersaaten im Frühjahr, vorzugsweise in frühräumende Winterung (Roggen, Gerste) eingebracht. In gleicher Weise können auch deckfruchtverträgliche Zwischenfrüchte untergesät werden, wie Rot-, Weiß- und Gelbklee (Trifolium-Arten) im Gemenge mit Weidelgras (Lolium-Arten) sowie Seradella (Ornithopus sativus).

Die Winterzwischenfrüchte – im Spätsommer als Raps (Brassica napus), im Frühherbst als Gemenge gesät – bedecken vom Spätherbst an über Winter den Boden, wurzeln tief, entfalten im Frühjahr in kürzester Frist eine große Futtermasse und hinterlassen im Boden als hervorragende Vorfrucht eine überreiche Wurzelmasse. Hierbei handelt es sich um Gemenge wie Wick-Roggen (Zottelwicke und Roggen) sowie um das Landsberger Gemenge (Zottelwicke [Vicea villosa], Roggen, Inkarnatklee [Trifolium incarnatum]).

Der Zwischenfruchtbau muss innerhalb der Fruchtfolge zwangsläufig flexibel gehandhabt werden. Durch die Witterungsbedingungen sind die Zwischenzeiten außerordentlich variabel. Die Regel einzuhalten – ein Aussaattag im Juli ist für die Entwicklung der Zwischenfruchtleguminosen so viel wert wie eine Woche im August –, ist oft Glücksache. Nässeperioden verzögern die Aussaat, Trockenzeiten den Aufgang. Gelingt die Zwischenfrucht, lebt der Boden auf und das Vieh im Stall schätzt das frische Futterangebot; misslingt sie, entfällt die gute Vorfruchtwirkung.

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The composition of the crop rotation serves the aim of developing a stable, or better still a positive, humus balance — and with it a positive nitrogen balance. To the latter, root crops and cereal crops contribute relatively little; all the more so the legumes. These live in symbiosis with bacteria in the root zone, the so-called *Rhizobia* or nodule bacteria, and have, in connection with the mother plant, the capacity to fix nitrogen from the air. The same capacity belongs, among others, to the alder (*Alnus glutinosa*), which lives in symbiosis in the root zone with the fungus-related *Actinomycetes* — recognisable by the deep green of its foliage, similar to the legumes. The capacity for nitrogen formation, without any direct relationship to higher plants, is found in free-living bacteria such as *Azotobacter*, which prefer a base-rich, more alkaline soil environment, and *Amylobacter*, which prefer a more acid soil medium.

Rudolf Steiner describes the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the legumes as a process of "inhalation", while all other plants "stand close to exhalation".^[209] The nitrogen inhalation of the legumes is a process comparable to "what happens on our epithelial cells [of the lung; insertion by the author]".^[210] The symbiosis with the Rhizobia is endogenous; they form a physiological unity with the mother legume. They migrate from the soil into the still-young plant and multiply there, forming the root nodules. They are therefore secondarily a gift of the earth to the legume plant — through which the legume is placed in a position to enliven the inorganically dead element of atmospheric nitrogen (N₂), and thereby to bind the soul-astral intimately into the life-activity, the soul-astral whose bearer nitrogen is.^[211] The forms of appearance of the legumes bear witness, in many characteristics right down into the shaping of the blossom, to an inwardness woven into the life processes to a higher degree than is the case with other flowering plants.

Alongside the particular relationship of the legumes to nitrogen, they show a particular affinity to lime in the soil. Not only are these plants found preferentially on lime-rich sites — acid soils they avoid,

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prefer a more acid soil medium.

Rudolf Steiner describes the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the legumes as a process of "inhalation", while all other plants "stand close to exhalation".^[212] The nitrogen inhalation of the legumes is a process comparable to "what happens on our epithelial cells [of the lung; insertion by the author]".^[213] The symbiosis with the Rhizobia is endogenous; they form a physiological unity with the mother legume. They migrate from the soil into the still-young plant and multiply there, forming the root nodules. They are therefore secondarily a gift of the earth to the legume plant — through which the legume is placed in a position to enliven the inorganically dead element of atmospheric nitrogen (N₂), and thereby to bind the soul-astral intimately into the life-activity, the soul-astral whose bearer nitrogen is.^[214] The forms of appearance of the legumes bear witness, in many characteristics right down into the shaping of the blossom, to an inwardness woven into the life processes to a higher degree than is the case with other flowering plants.

Alongside the particular relationship of the legumes to nitrogen, they show a particular affinity to lime in the soil. Not only are these plants found preferentially on lime-rich sites — acid soils they avoid,

lucerne foremost among them — but it is they that mobilise the lime in the subsoil, take it up into their physiological processes and deposit it in their tissues and cells. In this way they re-lime the topsoil through their residues. This is the case to a higher degree with lucerne, the queen of fodder plants, than with clover, and the more so with multi-year cultivation. Such cultivation ought to be absent from no crop rotation in biodynamic agriculture and horticulture.

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Auf Lehm anders als auf Sand, und wieder anders auf Böden verschiedener Säuregrade. So finden sich von den für Mitteleuropa beschriebenen 292 Arten der Begleitflora standortbezogen immer charakteristische, mehr oder weniger artenreiche Vergesellschaftungen von Un- oder Beikräutern und Ungräsern.^[215] Into this annually recurring intermixing of a wild flora with the cultivated plants, the farmer and gardener intervenes. He seeks to minimise the extent of weed and weed-grass infestation through manifold labour-intensive measures. The most costly and arduous of these is the use of the hand hoe and hand-weeding. What a relief, then, when in the 1960s synthetic herbicides arrived. Since then there are those with broad-spectrum action and numerous others directed selectively at the destruction of particular problem weeds and weed-grasses. In the wake of the genetic genome modifications of the target plants to be cultivated, total herbicides were added — such as "Roundup Ready", which with its active substance *glyphosate* has begun its triumphal march across the world. Herbicides are inventions of the human spirit. They are there to kill life, to destroy it. They intervene systemically in the nexus of life processes and steer them into nothingness. The etheric formative forces that constitute the life organisation of the plants lose their dominion over the organisation of the physical body. In the place of the astral forces — those that, through the in-rayings of the cosmic peripheral forces, and those that rise up from the earth, shape and configure the outward appearance of the plant — step forces that tear the threads between the essential archetype and the sense-perceptible physical form of appearance. These are life-hostile astral forces from sub-nature, from the sub-physical, which become operative at the level of the physical through synthetic substance-compositions. Herbicides, like the sum of pesticides and other synthetic plant-treatment agents, are creations of the human being assembled along purely reductionist paths of thought. They are bearer-substances of life-hostile forces that stand in isolation within the world-context. The procedure of arbitrary substance synthesis corresponds, in reverse, to that technology which forces the sub-physical forces bound within matter up into the light of day by means of so-called nuclear fission — both with consequences that are, in terms of (spiritual) evolution, unforeseeable.

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The Procedure of Weed-Seed Incineration

Decades before the aforementioned procedures for the destruction of weeds through the redirection of their life processes became worldwide practice, Rudolf Steiner — drawing on his research into the supra-nature of the cosmos and its participation in seed formation — opened up the procedure of incinerating weed seeds, the "burning experiment."^[216] It is a method of weed regulation that works against seed germination. The recommendation is to collect seeds from weeds, incinerate them — "a wood flame is best" — and scatter the resulting "pepper" across field and garden.^[217] Underlying this procedure is the recognition that growth and its intensification toward reproduction in seed formation stands in direct relationship to the sub-solar planetary working of Mercury, Venus, and above all the Moon. The Moon reflects back the rays of the Sun, of the planets, and of the wider cosmic periphery. The intensity of this back-radiation toward the Earth is governed by the phases of the Moon and reaches its greatest strength at full moon. The germination- and growth-stimulating effect of the waxing moon moving toward full moon has been experimentally documented many times over.^[218]^[219] Seeding weeds exhibit as a rule a high reproductive power — which for chamomile (Anthemis nobilis), for example, can amount to 10,000–20,000 per plant, and for creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense) to approximately 4,500.^[220] With a mortality rate of up to 50%, one finds even in lightly weeded soils somewhere between 10,000 and 300,000 viable weed seeds per square metre, and in heavily weeded soils up to 30,000 per square metre.^[221] Where near-surface soil conditions are favourable for germination — soil warmth (above 9 °C) and soil moisture — the moon forces become active and accelerate both germination and growth.

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The incineration of seeds is carried out during the seed's dormancy — in that condition in which the cosmic element «lives as the form of the plant in the seed».^[222] When the seed is passed through fire, it is consumed entirely by the flames; what remains is the earthly portion — the ash. Fire as an element reveals itself on one side sense-perceptibly in the phenomena of warmth and light. The other side, the inwardly active side of fire, is supersensible. In human experience this supersensible can become perceptible as a phenomenon on the soul level — as when a spiritual impulse kindles the soul to the fire of enthusiasm. Wherever fire appears, it consumes what has become physical; that becomes ash. Spoken from the side of what is spiritually active: the ash bears witness to a process of purification — one that implants new impulses of becoming into existence.

The task of seed incineration is now to create conditions in the soil such that the germination-stimulating effect of the moon forces is suppressed for the weed species in question. The ash that arises through the destruction of the seed by the fire element works against the moon forces: «Now the point is to treat the soil — since one cannot simply switch off the moon — in such a way that the earth becomes disinclined to receive the moon's workings; and not only can the earth become disinclined to receive the moon's workings, but the plants, these weeds, can also acquire a certain reluctance to grow in soil that has been treated in a certain sense.»^[223] This latter statement suggests the thought that incineration of these so excessively reproductive weed seeds liberates them, so to speak, from their bondage to the earthly reproductive cycle — so that their occurrence henceforth keeps within bounds.

Understanding Rudolf Steiner's spiritual-scientific indications concerning weed incineration requires an unrelenting effort of cognition and, building on that, a researcher's inner disposition that accompanies each step of practical implementation with conscious attention directed both inward and outward. This all the more so because the efforts undertaken to date have brought some partial successes, yet nothing that has really broken through. The reasons for this lie above all in the following:

The incineration of weed seeds and the working of these ashes — as also those of harmful insects and those of the pelt of damage-

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causing, highly reproductive animals such as the field mouse — must be fully embedded in farm practice and tended continuously.
This requires the support of the social environment surrounding the farms — people who are willing and capable of deepening the spiritual-scientific knowledge underlying the incineration method and practising it as an enduring discipline.
The increasingly refined techniques of mechanical weed control have meanwhile caused research into and practice with seed incineration to recede somewhat into the background.

Mechanical Weed Control

While herbicides act systemically and physiologically — from within, so to speak — misleading the life body's higher organising function in its relation to the physical organisation, the mechanical methods of regulating weed growth act from without. Through weeding, harrowing with the weeder, harrowing, and hoeing, the plants are uprooted; through mowing they are severed from the root stock. These measures do not step outside the lawfulness of becoming and passing away. This applies equally to flame weeding, which catches rapidly germinating and growing weeds before the germinating seed of the cultivated plant has broken through the soil crust and turned green.

Each crop in the rotation is accompanied by a characteristic weed flora. Its composition is determined above all by soil condition, by the time of sowing, by weather conditions, and by the faster or slower growth of the crops — and consequently by their degree of soil coverage as well.

Many weed species are indicator plants with respect to soil structure — for example: waterlogging, compaction, soil tilth, the nitrogen household, and soil acidity.^[224] The members of the rotation can be divided, with regard to the occurrence of specific weeds and weed grasses, into three groups: cereal crops, root crops, perennial fodder plants. Horticultural rotations are essentially root-crop rotations.

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Weeds and Weed Grasses among the Cereal Crops

The companion flora of winter crops divides into autumn and spring germinators. Among the weeds and weed grasses germinating in autumn, those that are winter-hardy prove troublesome: blackgrass (Alopecurus myosuroides) and loose silky-bent (Apera spica venti), along with weeds such as mayweed (Anthemis spec.), speedwell (Veronica spec.), and others. Because of its low ground cover in autumn and winter, wheat is more threatened than rye or barley. Through their pre-winter tillering, the latter two gain on the weed grasses and weeds in growth and soil coverage. Only rarely does the autumn soil condition allow one to intervene with weeder harrow or harrow at this stage. Even partial correction in early spring is of limited use. Hoeing with narrow goosefoot shares suits only wheat — which tillers only in spring — not rye and barley; these have already largely formed their shallow-running crown roots. Against spring germinators in the winter crop, the weeder harrow and the light harrow render good service.

The summer cereals — barley, wheat, and oats — benefit from early sowing; for this reason, as with all other spring-sown crops, they are exposed to heightened weed pressure. They compete with weeds already germinating at lower temperatures: corncockle (Agrostemma githago), common poppy (Papaver rhoeas), cleavers (Galium spec.), black bindweed (Polygonum convolvolus), and later chickweed (Stellaria media), gallant soldier (Galinsoga parviflora), and orache (Atriplex patula), as well as, among the weed grasses, wild oat (Avena fatua). The window for control before sowing is short, so that repeated post-sowing cultivation with weeder harrow, light harrow, and hoe is required up to stem elongation. Pre-emergence working is possible with the net weeder; after emergence one must wait for further measures until the third-leaf stage.

With stem elongation, shading restricts the vegetative development of seed weeds — but not that of thistles nor of the weed grasses that elongate alongside the crop. Late germinators such as orache (Atriplex), wild radish (Raphanus), fat hen (Chenopodium), and gallant soldier (Galinsoga) occur less, however.

Since the seed weeds and weed grasses growing through with the grain come to seed maturity before the crop or together with it, it is above all the summer cereals — more so than winter crops — that replenish the seed bank in the soil within the rotation. Stubble breaking immediately after harvest must

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through a fine-crumbling seedbed ensure that as large a proportion as possible of the shed seeds are brought to germination. A concern with the cereal crops is the unimpeded development of the root weeds and root grasses such as couch grass (*Agropyron repens*) and creeping thistle (*Cirsium arvense*), as well as docks forming a taproot. These must be combated after harvest with considerable expenditure of labour and time. Particularly effective here are fully undercutting cultivators with following tines, which fling the roots and root fragments to the soil surface to dry out. Creeping thistle (*Cirsium arvense*) and dock (*Rumex obstusifolius*) in the stand are greatly weakened by deep digging-out before flowering.

Weeds and Weed Grasses in Root Crops

As the name already says, root crops require, alongside good crumb aeration, intensive suppression of the growth of weeds and weed grasses. With regard to species diversity and competitive pressure, the weed population is the greatest within the crop rotation. Because root crops are sown later than summer cereals, there is as a rule sufficient time to precede sowing with one to three harrow passes, which uproot the early- and medium-early germinating weeds and weed grasses. Where possible — for instance with fodder beet (*Beta vulgaris*), cabbage (*Brassica*), and others — transplanting from the seedbed can gain still more time, to keep even later-germinating weeds such as gallant soldier (*Galinsoga*), orache (*Atriplex*), and fat hen (*Chenopodium*) from the field. Root crops generally have a long juvenile period and therefore permit mechanical weed control with weeder harrow, hoe, and ridger to be continued up to row closure. Where necessary, the rows must be gone through once more by hand.

In sugar and fodder beet cultivation and in field vegetable growing, refined mechanical methods are available — alongside pre-emergence flame weeding — that leave only an extremely narrow band along the drill rows untouched. Despite all good preparatory work, however, a residual hand-weeding is unavoidable. This work belongs to the few tasks still left to the farmer and gardener in which he can enter into direct relationship with soil and plants in a twofold sense: on the one side, he is laboriously and hands-on given over to an activity that goes all the more easily and swiftly the more one sets oneself aside and turns with a testing gaze toward the plants that are to be freed, so that they may unfold unhindered to the full formation of the fruit. This turning-toward works in two ways: it is purposeful — and toward that alone is the machine directed — and, polar to this, it awakens in the spirit an interest and in the soul an effective relationship with regard to the intimacy of the living context of plant and soil. One becomes aware of the challenge not to fall into the emptiness of mere routine, which makes the work a burden. Weeding can be, alongside other such activities, a field of practice that, bridge-building, awakens a moral sense toward the things and beings of nature. On the other side, contemplative thinking rests over the happening. One observes a wealth of phenomena — for instance, how the most varied herb species associate themselves with the one crop one is cultivating, how these are differently formed in root, leaf, and blossom and, in their earthly image, give tidings of the archetypal image that lives in its essential being in the supersensible. One identifies the weed or weed grass as belonging to a particular genus and family, and becomes aware how many of them carry a significant healing efficacy. One recognises how this healing efficacy is closely related to the nourishing efficacy of the fruit of the cultivated plant as it gradually develops. For the sake of this nourishing efficacy, the "stand of medicinal herbs" must yield to a certain degree. This holds especially for the root crops, which fruit more in the vegetative realm. Thus falls to the root-crop field, within the crop rotation, the function of serving as a cleansing field for the following crop — usually a cereal. At the same time it is the one that makes the greatest demands upon soil fertility.

freigestellt werden sollen, damit sie sich ungehindert bis zur vollen Ausbildung der Frucht entfalten können. Diese Zuwendung wirkt in zweierlei Weise: Sie ist zweckdienlich – darauf allein ist die Maschine ausgerichtet – und, polar dazu, erweckt sie geistig ein Interesse und seelisch eine wirksame Beziehung im Hinblick auf die Intimität des Lebenszusammenhangs von Pflanze und Erdreich. Man wird sich der Herausforderung bewusst, nicht der Leerheit der bloßen Routine zu verfallen, die die Arbeit zur Last werden lässt. Das Unkrautjäten kann neben anderen derartigen Tätigkeiten ein Übungsfeld sein, das brückenbildend ein moralisches Empfinden gegenüber den Dingen und Wesen der Natur weckt. Auf der anderen Seite ruht das anschauende Denken über dem Geschehen. Man beobachtet eine Fülle von Phänomenen, z.B. wie sich verschiedenste Kräuterarten mit der einen Kultur, die man ziehen will, vergesellschaften, wie diese in Wurzel, Blatt und Blüte verschiedenartig gestaltet sind und im irdischen Abbild Kunde ihres im Übersinnlichen wesenden Urbildes geben. Man identifiziert das Unkraut oder -gras als einer bestimmten Gattung und Familie zugehörig und wird gewahr, wie viele von ihnen eine bedeutende Heilwirkung haben. Man erkennt, wie diese Heilwirkung der Nährwirkung der sich nach und nach entwickelnden Frucht der Kulturpflanze nahe verwandt ist. Dieser Nährwirkung zuliebe muss bis zu einem gewissen Grad der «Heilkräuterbestand» weichen. Das gilt ganz besonders für die mehr im Vegetativen fruchtenden Hackfrüchte. So kommt dem Hackfruchtschlag im Rahmen der Fruchtfolge die Funktion zu, ein Reinigungsschlag für die Nachfolgekultur – meist Getreide – zu sein. Gleichzeitig ist er derjenige, der die Bodenfruchtbarkeit am stärksten beansprucht.

Weeds and Weed Grasses in Fodder-Plant Cultivation

The principal fodder plants are legumes — clover and lucerne in mixture with fodder grasses and, in small admixtures, dietetically active herbs such as ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata), burnet saxifrage (Pimpinella agna), chicory (Cichorium lupulina), black medick (Medicago lupulina), bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), and sweet clover (Melilotus spp.). The mixture stands in the crop rotation as a rule for two years of use, and accordingly occupies two rotation members. The first cut is taken early enough that the second growth comes into flower during the otherwise blossom-poor height of summer, holding ready a rich nectar supply for flying insects. Additional nectar sources are provided by flowering strips in the cereal and root-crop fields.

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In densely standing, fully grown two-year fodder stands the annual seed weeds find no room for development — though they do in gappy ones. With repeated mowing even these pose no serious threat. Fodder-field cultivation is above all a proven means of gaining the upper hand over the otherwise hard-to-master perennial problem weeds such as creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense) and curly dock (Rumex crispus). The creeping thistle is already weakened by the first cut, more so still by the second or even third. After two years of use in this manner, it becomes possible to keep the field largely thistle-free for the following crop — usually a winter cereal. With regard to the dock, which is weakened after each mowing but then rapidly shoots to seed, a reduced seed production is usually unavoidable. As for couch grass (Agropyron repens), repeated cutting impairs the vigour of the rhizomes and thereby their further spread.

In the frame of the crop rotation, something of an ecological wonder comes to pass with the legume-rich fodder-crop and cover-crop cultivation. It gives back to the soil the fertility it has lost, creates harmony in the living, draws the wild fauna back into the landscape, and offers sheep and cattle an excellent fodder through summer and winter alike — and in autumn a field pasture besides.

The question arises whether plants can fall ill in the same sense as animals and human beings. A direction toward an answer opens up when one takes into account the configuration of the members of the human being across the kingdoms of nature and in the human being itself: the mineral is one-membered, endowed with a physical body; to the two-memberedness of the plant — with physical body and etheric body — the animal adds as its third member the astral body, and the human being as its fourth the I-organisation. It is the astral body that is the cause of illness.^[225] No such body becomes embodied in the plant. Its soul body remains in the supersensible; it radiates its forces from the periphery into time and space, touches the plants only from without and creates for itself an image in their form. In the purity of the etheric organisation of the plant, it unites itself with the substances of the earth, enlivens these and composes them into its physical organisation. In this union it becomes, in its forms, the sense-perceptible

gestalt. In these its etheric-living formative processes, the plant is healthy through and through; it is the bearer of all healing forces; it cannot, by virtue of its own formative forces organisation, actually fall ill. What modifies — or even distorts, or wholly destroys — its outward appearance as the pure image of its type are influences from without. These are gathered today under the vague concept of environmental effects. Whenever these slide into extremes, the harmony of the relationship between cosmic and earthly workings is lost; imbalances arise. These can occur naturally through fires, storms, floods and earthquakes — or, increasingly, through the egoistic actions of the human being: through claims of possession and power, through ruthless exploitation and the like. The influences wrought by the human being manifest in global warming, climate change, the littering of the earth, the oceans and the stratosphere. Electrosmog envelops the plants on all sides, cutting them off from the workings of the cosmos. In the cultivation of crop plants, this extreme form of influence is intensified still further through life-alien technologies of every kind: the excessive fertilisation with nitrogen salts synthesised from the air, hydroponics (cultivation in nutrient-salt solutions), pesticides, herbicides and the rest. The plants are wrapped in foreign substances and radiations that weaken their etheric organisation. It is no longer in full measure capable of building up — or maintaining — its physical bodily organisation in accordance with its species-specific predisposition. The physiological consequence is that the plants contain a greater quantity of water — enlarged cells and intercellular spaces — and salts dissolved within it than they are able to convert into the building of their form-building tissues. All of this calls onto the scene a broad spectrum of plant and animal organisms: bacteria, fungi, mites, insects — beings that render useful services in the right place and at the right time within the household of nature, yet in the wrong place, at the wrong time, proliferate explosively in a one-sided manner and become harmful organisms. A special case within this canon are the viroses. Viruses constitute a kind of sub-nature of the plant kingdom, as radioactivity constitutes such a sub-nature of the mineral kingdom. Viruses have no metabolism of their own. They insert themselves into the metabolism of living organisms — from bacteria upwards — and can develop and multiply only through that metabolism. Whereas all that is living lives itself forth in rhythms, the virus conducts itself arhythmically. It is viruses above all that bring about, within the kingdom of cultivated plants, the ever more rapidly proceeding deterioration of varieties.

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The parasitic bacterial and fungal diseases are the expression of an excess of the workings of forces of the moon, which in the soil, mediated

Die parasitären bakteriellen und pilzlichen Erkrankungen sind Ausdruck eines Übermaßes an Kräftewirkungen des Mondes, die im Boden, vermittelt

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durch das Wasser, eine «Mondenlebendigkeit» erzeugen. This moon-vitality works, under balanced weather conditions, upward through the plants as far as seed formation. But when the moon works too strongly — in a mild winter with wetness persisting into spring, further intensified by the supply of readily soluble nutrient salts — the fungal pressure rises. The excess moon-life enters, as it were, into competition with the forces that stream upward into the plants from the cosmos through silica, lime, and clay in a form-building manner. These are weakened. A kind of premature fructification arises in the vegetative realm, in the zone of the leaf. Above the level of the soil — within whose interior lies the true home of the host of bacteria and fungi — a second soil-level for parasites and fungi forms up in the shoot zone. Under the too-powerful moon forces, the plant falls prey to breakdown by precisely that same realm of lower organisms that renders it useful services in the darkness of the soil.

The danger of an overly strong moon-working can be met by the following measures:

A manuring practice that promotes plant health — the strengthening of the plant's etheric organisation — (see chapter "On the Nature of Manuring", p. 259 ff.).
Building up a soil that works in an earth-like manner, rich in stable humus forms (clay-humus).
Several sprayings in the course of the year with horsetail tea (silica activity).
Preservation and care of moist biotopes and of the permanent grassland close to drainage channels and the water table. These are the natural sites where moon forces can — healing for the whole of the farm organism — "live themselves out" in the unfolding of a rich fungal and bacterial life.

Soil cultivation helps the plant, in a first step, toward the species-typical configuration of the formative forces of its etheric body. It receives a further strengthening through the right positioning in the crop rotation — and the highest intensification of healthy growth and of fruit formation and ripening through manuring (see chapter "On the Nature of Manuring", p. 259 ff.). For the shaping of the crop rotation, three principal moments come into consideration: self-compatibility, preceding-crop effect, and the maintenance of a high humus dynamic. In the case of repeated successive cropping, the cultivated plants are, with vegetative propagation, self-compatible to a far higher degree than

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with generative propagation; unless the parent generation is a virus carrier, a chief problem with the replanting of potatoes, the propagation of fruit trees, etc. Nature itself demonstrates the high self-compatibility of vegetative propagation, for example: couch grass (*Agropyron repens*), stinging nettle (*Urtica dioica*), thistle (*Cirsium arvense*), field bindweed (*Polygonum convolvulus*), horsetail (*Equisetum arvense*), etc.

With generative replanting of open-pollinated varieties, a varietal decline is the rule, in varying degrees. Underlying the self-incompatibility is the one-sided multiplication of harmful organisms such as bacteria, fungi, insects, and other soil animals, as well as pathogenic root exudates of the cultivated plants themselves (*allelopathy*). The harmful organisms can be met in the following ways:

Through all measures that strengthen the constitution — that is, the formative-forces organisation of the plant. To this belongs the farm-grown seed production through targeted replanting: "If one is [with the sowing; insertion by the author] close to the winter months, one will bring about a strong reproductive power; if one is further from the winter months, a strong nourishing quality in the cereal plants."^[226]

Observance of the sowing time according to cosmic rhythms, in particular the synodic or lunar-phase cycle.

A working, fertile soil that quickly digests every kind of one-sidedly narrowing influence from without and renders it harmless to the plants.
Spatial distance from the crop of the previous year (e.g. cabbage with respect to clubroot [*Plasmodiophora brassicae*], potatoes with respect to Colorado beetle infestation) and likewise a temporal distance that, depending on the degree of self-compatibility, amounts to three to six years.

In every case, continuous cropping through the accumulation of specific pathogens brings yield losses. Self-compatibility is thus limited — least of all in rye. On account of their modest demands, oats and rye follow the winter crops of barley and wheat as exhausting crops. Oats in this context count as a restorative crop. Their value as a preceding crop is low; yet viewed across the whole crop rotation, the cereals ensure a balanced humus budget. Here the root development of wheat and barley is substantially less than

that of rye and oats. The former are moderately strong humus consumers and therefore make high demands on the preceding crop — well-manured root crops. Wheat is incompatible with barley as a preceding crop. In this case, as indeed in all cereal-heavy rotations (>50%) and with poorly decomposed straw masses, foot diseases appear — fungal infections at the stem base of wheat, such as take-all (Ophilus graminis) or eyespot (Cercosporella herpotrichoides). Regular alternation of leafy and cereal crops provides the remedy here. Maize occupies a special position among the Gramineae as a crop highly compatible with itself. Fungal infections can affect wheat and barley, less so oats and still less rye, across the entire shoot up into the ear. In wheat, the principal ones in the leaf zone are rusts (Puccinia) — yellow rust, brown rust, and black rust — and the bunt diseases (Tilletia); in the ear, (Helminthosporium gramineum), dwarf bunt and stinking smut; in barley, stripe disease (Ustilago avenae) and powdery mildew (Erysiphe graminis), in the ear loose barley smut; in oats, loose oat smut; in rye, in the leaf zone snow mould (Fusarium nivale), in the ears ergot (Claviceps purpurea). Maize fits without difficulty into cereal-heavy rotations; foot diseases cannot harm it.

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Crop-rotation-related damage by insects — such as infestation by frit fly (Oscinis frit), stem nematode (Ditylenchus dipsaci) in rye, gall midge, wheat bulb fly (Hylemya correlata) and others in wheat, frit fly (Oscinis frit) and thrips (Thrips lini), nematodes in oats, gout fly (Chlorops taeniopus) in barley and wheat — carries less weight by comparison with fungal infestation. In maize cultivation, on the other hand, the European corn borer (Pyrausta nubilalis) causes the predominant damage.

Crop-Rotation-Related Diseases of Root Crops

The many kinds of root crops in field and garden cultivation each have their own pattern of infestation and damage. They are as a rule incompatible with themselves and must accordingly be placed well apart in the crop rotation. The potato forms a certain exception. Vegetative tuber propagation makes it the most self-compatible of all cultivated plants. In upland situations it can be grown continuously for decades. In warm, moist situations, various virus diseases — transmitted by the peach-potato aphid (Myzodes persicae) and further multiplied through tuber injuries — along with fungal infections such as the dreaded late blight (Phytophtora infestans), and animal pests such as the Colorado beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), set in at the

Fruchtfolgebedingte Krankheiten der Hackfrüchte

Die vielfältigen Hackfruchtarten in Feld- und Gartenbau haben ihr je eigenes Befalls- und Schadensmuster. Sie sind in der Regel mit sich selbst unverträglich und müssen entsprechend weit in der Fruchtfolge auseinandergestellt werden. Eine gewisse Ausnahme bildet die Kartoffel. Die vegetative Knollenvermehrung macht sie zur selbstverträglichsten aller Kulturpflanzen. In Berglagen kann sie über Jahrzehnte nachgebaut werden. In warm-feuchten Lagen setzen allerlei Virosen, übertragen durch die Pfirsichblattlaus (Myzodes persicae), und weiter vermehrt über Knollenverletzungen, ferner pilzliche Infektionen, wie u.a. die gefürchtete Kraut- und Knollenfäule (Phytophtora infestans), sowie tierischer Befall, wie der Kartoffelkäfer (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), der

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yield formation already in the first year of cultivation. Replanting is therefore as a rule impossible. A gap of four years should be maintained in the crop rotation. The potato's value as a preceding crop is excellent for all cereal crops and root crops alike.

Beta beets (sugar and fodder beets, red beets) are only slightly self-compatible owing to nematode infestation in the root zone. Nematodes (stem and bulb nematode [Ditylenchus dipsaci]) belong among the principal causes of crop-rotation diseases. They are many-raced, attack nearly all cultivated plants and many weed species as well, and are long-lived — which is why a gap of four to six years must be maintained in the crop rotation before a beta beet species returns. Beta beets show a wide spectrum of damaging organisms: virus diseases (including yellowing disease [Beta-Virus 4]), fungi (including root rot, various fungi), as well as nematodes, aphids (Phytophagus), beet fly (Pegomya hyoscyami), pygmy mangold beetle (Atomaria linearis) and others. Infestation is partly variety- and weather-conditioned, but for the most part a consequence of inadequate soil hygiene and too narrow a spacing in the crop rotation.

Suitable preceding crops for beta beets are preferably potatoes and nitrogen-fixing legumes, and with good farm-own organic manuring, all cereal varieties as well. Following crops are as a rule winter or spring forms of wheat and barley.

The crucifers (Cruciferae) — among them all cabbage species, oilseed rape, and representatives of the cover crops such as rape derivatives, white mustard (Sinapis alba), fodder radish (Raphanus sativus var. oleiformis) and others — enrich the crop rotation enormously. The overabundant flower display of oilseed rape (Brassica napus) and of the crucifers coming into flower, the cover crops, and — unintentionally — the weeds charlock and wild radish (Raphanus raphanistrum), constitutes a nectar source that draws in an abundance of flying insects.

Crop-Rotation-Related Diseases of Fodder Plants

At the same time, however, the crucifers also attract a multitude of feeding insects, foremost among them flea beetle (Phyllotreta spp.), cabbage fly (Chortophila brassicae), pollen beetle (Meligethes aeneus) and others. Equally damaging is a series of fungal diseases — primarily clubroot (Plasmodiophora brassicae), which as a typical crop-rotation disease largely determines the incompatibility of the brassicas, oilseed rape and so on, but also of cruciferous weeds among themselves. Oilseed rape is furthermore a host plant for numerous

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nematode species that cause damage in the following crops. Oilseed rape requires early-vacating preceding crops such as winter barley and winter rye. It leaves behind for the following crop a superbly structured, well-conditioned, relatively weed-free soil. For the reasons given, as with the cabbage species, a break of three to four years in cropping is called for. Where intensive crucifer green manuring is incorporated into the crop rotation, the intervals must be extended still further.

Central in the crop rotation, alongside the market crops, stand the fodder plants clover (Trifolium) and lucerne (Medicago), supplemented by a mixture of fodder grasses and herbs. Clover and lucerne, on the one hand, as deep-rooters enliven the entire volume of the soil profile by the direct pathway of nitrogen fixation, mineral release, and an abundance of root mass — all the more so with a stand of several years' vigorous growth —, while on the other hand they belong, at the plant level and indirectly, to the great promoters of the enduring fertility of the soils. This comes about through the fodder masses that, transformed and refined through ruminant digestion, return to the land as manure. The cultivation of fodder legumes is complemented by grain legumes, among them field bean (Vicia faba), lupin (Lupinus) and pea (Pisum sativum). These stand in the crop rotation either as a pure stand or in mixed cultivation with oats, preferably before a root crop. The priority of clover and lucerne in the crop rotation places limits on the growing of grain legumes. The reason is the leaf-margin weevil (Sithonia lineata), which is capable of causing considerable damage to fodder legumes in the early juvenile stage. The core problem of red clover — less so of lucerne cultivation — is clover rot (Sclerotinia trifolium). It is a typical crop-rotation disease. The black sclerotia (fruiting bodies of the fungus) cling to the root collar, destroy the vascular tissue, and the clover plant wilts from one day to the next as early spring breaks. The resting forms of the fungus can persist in the soil for up to eight years. A return of red clover, and of lucerne as well, should therefore not take place before five to six years at the earliest. With at least two years of cropping, the thistle problem for the following crop is resolved and the population of nematodes has also diminished significantly.

Other broad-leaved crops that are as a rule part of biodynamic crop rotations are fodder beet (Beta vulgaris var. alba) as a dietary element in dairy cattle feeding, and carrot (Daucus carota) and linseed (Linum usitatissimum) in calf rearing. These, together with the cultivation of vegetable crops and medicinal herbs for animal health, are partly grown in garden fashion, partly integrated on a field scale into the root-crop blocks.

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The Crop Rotation in Relation to Manuring, Humus Balance, and Plough-Working

With the crop rotation, the biodynamic farm creates for itself a framework of cultivation that guarantees an enduring soil-born fertility corresponding to the site conditions. This spatial-temporal framework sets a theme that can be varied from year to year according to weather and the needs of fodder and market. The theme must live as a living idea-context in the consciousness of the farm community and be impressed upon the farm organism progressively, year after year. Each year anew, this image of the crop rotation becomes a perceptible work of art in the shaping of the course of nature. The following example — the Dottenfelderhof — presents a twelve-field crop rotation that divides into two six-field sequences, each of which in turn reveals the original principle of three-field husbandry:

Year	Crop rotation		Cover crop	Manuring	Humus balance	Autumn ploughing
1	Lucerne – grass	BL		100–200 dt compost	+	-
2	Lucerne – grass	BL		Stable humus formation	+	pf
3	W. wheat – barley	H			~	pf
			Crucifers
4	W. rye	H			~	pf
			Legumes etc.
5	Root crops: potatoes, field vegetables, mangold beet etc.	BL		300 dt deep-litter farmyard manure	-	pf
			partly crucifers		+~
6	Oats, spelt	H	Clover undersowing			-
7	Clover-grass	BL		100–200 dt compost	+	-
8	Clover-grass	BL		Stable humus formation	+	pf
9	W. wheat – seed multiplication	H			~	pf
			Crucifers
10	Rye	H			~	pf
			Legumes etc.
11	Root crops: as under 5	BL		300 dt deep-litter farmyard manure	-	pf
			partly crucifers		+~
12	Oats, spelt, seed multiplication	H	Lucerne undersowing		~	-
BL = broad-leaved crop; H = cereal crop; + = humus increase; ~ = humus maintenance; - = humus depletion; pf = plough

At 50%, the proportion of broad-leaved crops corresponds to the system of alternating husbandry. The cover crops, however, shift the ratio of the

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The cover crops shift the ratio of cereal to broad-leaved crops in favour of the latter. The deep-rooting crops with the greatest root mass — lucerne followed by clover — outweigh the proportion of mostly shallow-rooting root crops with their limited root mass. The cereal crops occupy the middle position in both respects. Leaving aside the contribution of cover crops and organic manuring, the humus balance over the twelve years may be assessed as slightly positive. Soil cultivation, principally in spring and autumn, exerts a negative influence on it. The suspension of this cultivation during one quarter of the twelve years through the growing of field fodder crops mitigates the humus loss, as does the moderate deep-working in autumn and early winter by plough, cultivator, disc plough, and the like. Compensating for losses, or indeed a gradual settling towards a lastingly higher level of humus content, is then the task of the humus-donating cover crops — but above all of manuring with farmyard manure and composts.

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Third Pillar:

On the Essential Nature of Manuring

What manuring actually means is a question that remains a riddle. From the standpoint of conventional agricultural science, it no longer seems worth the trouble to probe further; the riddle appears to have been solved once and for all. In this sense, manuring means: supplying to the soil-and-plant system — conceived and calculated in the isolated form of individual chemical elements — those substances that may be expected to yield maximum harvests, approximating as closely as possible to the full exhaustion of the genetic potential of correspondingly bred cultivated plant varieties, all in the service of a harmoniously calibrated nutrient household.

This punctiform way of thinking in terms of external cause-and-effect relationships stands in polar opposition to the finding of spiritual-scientific research, which addresses «the secrets of manuring» as «extraordinarily real secrets».^[227] «Certainly, it [manuring; note by the author] is done instinctively out of tradition from ancient times. But the essential nature of manuring — that, today, virtually no one actually understands», «except those who are able to know this out of the spiritual».^[228] The three chapters that follow are an attempt to lay a foundation of understanding for this radical statement. In the subsequent account of the stages of manuring, the secret of the essential nature of manuring may become something more revealed.

The previous chunk ended with Steiner's statement that virtually no one truly understands the essential nature of manuring — and the announcement of three chapters that will attempt to lay a foundation for that understanding.

On the Question of Substance and Forces

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Farming means moving large masses of material, predominantly from organic nature: the living soil at every pass of the implement; the operations involved in harvesting green fodder, hay and straw and the like, their storage and daily presentation at the feeding trough; the laying of bedding in the stall, the removal of dung and the storage of farmyard manure and liquid manure, together with their distribution across fields and grassland; the repeated application of the spray preparations over the entire farm precincts; the harvest masses of cereal crops and root crops, their storage, and finally the provision of all harvested goods that leave the farm as food. Agriculture

is, against its will, a transport industry. That is the one side; the other side is that it is a process embedded in the rhythms of the course of the year and continuing beyond them. This holds above all for manuring. The manuring substances produced on the farm are themselves a result of life processes and at the same time the cause of their preservation and enhancement.

What are these substances that are moved back and forth in their various forms of appearance? What is a substance? Substances appear in the four classical elements: in the states of aggregation of the solid (earth), the fluid (water), the gaseous (air). For the element of warmth, natural science has not yet found a conceptual access that would characterize it as an independent fourth among the classical elements. To this day, the methodological principle of the dissection of phenomena continues to hold sway — a principle that goes back to the founder of experimental physics, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). This method, of seeking behind the phenomena the causative principle of being in material processes, still governs the common scientific enterprise today.

One seeks behind the subjectively experienced appearance the object — something materially concrete. One does not find this in warmth itself, but only secondarily in the thermal states that appear measurably in the elements of the solid, the fluid, and the gaseous. Warmth would remain imperceptible without this reference to the three elements or states of aggregation. For Francis Bacon, who with juridical means made himself judge over warmth, this was presumably the ground for denying warmth any independent existence as an element. To this day the immateriality of warmth, its essential nature, remains conceptually in the dark. It embodies no state of aggregation of its own. In more recent times, researchers have tended to designate the energy-rich, highly rarefied state of plasma as a fourth state of aggregation. Yet even in this highly complex context of appearances, warmth occurs in matter-bound form. Its pure nature as warmth-element becomes in perception the phenomenon of warmth-sensation in the gradations from cold to hot, mediated through the elements of earth, water, air. Furthermore, its pure immaterial nature reveals itself in the property of transferring, through its presence and absence, the elemental or aggregate states into one another.

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(1)

from those that occur in elemental form by nature, such as gold, silver, and others — a sum of physico-chemical elements comes to light, distinguished from one another by their properties. They are thought to be built up from atoms (atom = indivisible).

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the product of this dissection — the element as the "indivisible atom" — was itself dissected into its elementary particles. With this step, the qualitative character of the chemical elements lost its relevance for cognizing the essential nature of substances. In taking this step, one crossed a threshold from nature into "sub-nature"^[229] and entered the subatomic domain of elementary particles — of quanta. In this domain the sense-world dissolves and another world takes its place: that of measurable energetic effects.

These differ from the instreaming force-workings of the cosmos, which raise the earthly world of substances up to the constitution of the higher levels of existence — to the life of the plant world, the soul-nature of the animal world, the spiritual nature of the human being. The earthly substances, by contrast, reveal themselves as outstreaming,^[230] as condensed configurations of force — processes that have, as it were, run to their end and stand arrested in that condition.

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" — and reason leads us back to it."^[231] The worldview of materialism received a certain shaking through the findings of quantum physics, which demonstrates that matter cannot be differentiated into a sum of atomic material particles, but rather into energetic quanta of action. But who is their author? The question of spirit arises here — of a world of beings that creates out of the supersensible. "The intellect moves away from reality; reason leads us back to it."

When the human being directs all the force of his reason toward himself as a thinking being, he finds within himself the means and ways that lead him out of the stasis of the materialist worldview. He awakens to the consciousness that he himself — called forth from the spiritual primordial beginnings — is the bearer of development, and is to become ever more so; that within himself, through the soul forces of thinking, feeling and willing, he can cultivate higher soul organs of cognition and, with their help, school himself toward higher intuitive beholding. These enable him, in free self-determination, to take his own future — and the future of his fellow creation — into his own hands. Signs of this kind are dawning everywhere. And yet: the question of the being of substance in all its forms of appearance — in lifeless nature, in the life of plants, in the ensoulment of animals, and in the spirit or I-organisation of the human being — is not yet being asked in this sense.

To gain an entry into this complex of questions, the following must be held fast: "The sense-perceptible worldview is the sum of self-metamorphosing perceptual contents without any underlying matter."^[232] The perceptions we make of a sense-perceptible object stimulate thinking toward the formation of concepts that seek to grasp the properties of that object. Thus the substance-elements of the periodic system each characterise themselves through specific properties that are the expression of something which does not become appearance — that therefore does not belong to arising and passing away in time and space. Matter, however, is conceived as the continuum, the enduring thing in time and space, without itself being sense-perceptible appearance and without being subject to the building-up and breaking-down forces that work in time and space. What steps into appearance are the conceptually graspable properties. They are projections of something supra-spatiotemporal, something supersensible — of the being of this or that substance. They constitute themselves

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in the consciousness of the human being, through perception and concept, into a sum of properties. Their delimitation and assignment to this or that substance is the research concern of physics. Their constellation is such that each substance-element has a specific affinity to other substances. They can react with one another. When this occurs, the starting substances vanish from the field of view and, as a synthesis, a new substance arises — with surprisingly new properties. Beginning and end are connected by a discontinuous event. For example, hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) are gases. Their affinity to one another is so immense that they react in an explosive manner. They vanish, and water steps forth — the substance richest in properties, the foundation of all life. A leap takes place from a less densely to a more densely condensed state of aggregation. When water is subjected to electrolysis under expenditure of energy, the starting elements re-emerge as gases. In the transition from the gaseous to the liquid state — as indeed in every reaction between substances — the factor of time enters the picture. A process is accomplished. This processual activity in the world of substances is pre-eminently the concern of chemistry. It can be followed empirically in its reactive accompanying phenomena, yet as such it withdraws from perceptibility. In the chemical process, forces are at work that are laid down in the being of the substance and its properties. The forces in motion during the process rest, before the start and at the end of the reaction, in a state of stillness — congealed into form. In the form, the substance becomes sense-perceptible and, in its physical properties of measurability, countability and weighability, calculable.

In the course of the processual-chemical working of forces, phenomena arise — for example, warmth, light, colour and sound appearances, as well as experiences of smell and taste — that cannot be derived from the properties of the reacting substances. They allow the researching spirit of the human being to live more deeply into the processual activity and, indeed, in active enactment with it, to cultivate a personal relationship — in which the supersensible working of forces portrays itself, in personal experience, in a manner nearer to spirit. In co-experiencing the chemical appearances, substances reveal, by a crack, their force-nature and therewith their essential nature.

The further physics advanced in its spatial-temporal pursuit of deciphering the secret of the materially conceived substance-element, the atom, the more the phenomenon withdrew from the experimenter's field of view. He spun the red thread by means of imagined models with the help of

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mathematics. He stepped, unnoticed, out of nature into a realm of the "sub-sensible" — into sub-nature, into a realm of strictly law-governed, fixed, lifeless and soulless force-relationships of mass, electricity, magnetism and nuclear binding energy. In this sub-nature, everything objective in the sense-perceptible world is dissolved into a calculable system of energy-forms that are congealed within themselves yet interactive. Where they act in isolation, they are, to the highest degree, hostile to life. The sub-sensible forces act in "space" and are therefore inevitably conceived as bodies in space — as a mechanics of quanta. One distinguishes, in spatial demarcation and — depending on their mechanism of action — diverse elementary particles or energy quanta.

In the advance of quantum physics it became evident that these sense-experience-dependent ideas are not tenable. Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the father of quantum physics, arrived at the conclusion: "There is no quantum world."^[233] His congenial colleagues Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) and others confirmed this insight. Heisenberg writes: "The smallest units of matter are in reality not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas, which can only be expressed unambiguously in mathematical language."^[234] — The atom, then, is no thing in space. And he continues: "When one attempts to penetrate behind this reality [by which is meant the sense-perceptible one; the author's note] into the details of atomic events, the contours of this 'objectively real' world dissolve — not into the mist of a new yet still unclear conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that links the possible, not the factual, by lawful necessity."^[235] This "transparent clarity," however, is an abstraction. However correct it may be with respect to the being and working of sub-nature, it nevertheless runs up against a boundary — at which it can become clear to the cognizing human being that from this abstraction not a single spark of an ethical-moral impulse can be struck. Mathematics has to do with the physically-become, which makes itself known to thinking consciousness in numerical relationships. Their cogency is graspable in thought — that is, purely in the spirit. In them, the objective and the subjective fall into one. They are true in the restricted case of the

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Inorganic-Physical. In this respect, mathematics is a science of the spirit, not a natural science. One thinks thoughts that are capable of translating physical laws into technological functions. If one stays with these thoughts and seeks, in a spiritual inner empowerment, to bring their logical sequence, their logical connections, to the level of experience, then mathematics does not congeal into rigid, lifeless abstraction, but can become a preliminary stage of true knowledge of the spirit.

Numerical relationships are the expression of relationships of energy or of forces. The latter are, on the one hand, the process-bearers of material reactions; on the other hand, they are bound into matter as "arrested processes."^[236]^[237]

Matter is subject to gravity. This perceptible property above all else makes it the representative of the earthly. It is a sum of forms of energy or forces, bound into sense-perceptible form, which manifest in its properties. They enable processes that run according to natural law, that are reproducible and abstractable into mathematical formulae.

In living nature, this processual activity is no longer derivable solely from the properties of the physical elements of substance. On the contrary, the life processes estrange these elements, to the greatest possible degree, from their physical determinability. Protein, for example, is built up from the five elements carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and sulphur. These are taken, with their properties, to become bearers of forces that are of cosmic origin.^[238] These cosmic forces stream in from every quarter out of the planetary periphery and configure themselves, in accordance with the essential nature of a plant or an animal, into an etheric body or life body. This is through and through a creator of processes. It becomes the architect of the physical organisation, lifts the physical substances out of their captivity in the earthly, places them in the service of the life processes, and holds them so long in the stream of life until this stream dies into the forms of the organic formations. The etheric body then dissolves into the world-ether. In the bacterial breakdown — mineralization — the earthly substance elements are released from the organic formations; they fall back again into their own physical lawfulness.

What one addresses in organic nature as constitutive components — proteins, carbohydrates, fats, hormones, vitamins, and so forth — are

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abstracted from the living contexts in which they appear — bodily, dead constructs. Within the nexus of life processes, they are force-formations that, in well-nigh infinite variants and reciprocal interactions, build the earthly world of substance up into living compositions. Who composes these forces into this resonant symphony, so that an oak, in each of its organs — in roots, trunk, branches, shoots, leaves, blossoms and fruits — is unmistakably an oak, a rose unmistakably a rose? One searches in the plant kingdom for the type, for the being that gives itself gestalt-expression in a particular plant species. Neither the forces nor the more deeply hidden being that brings these forces forth from out of itself is sense-perceptible. They open themselves only to supersensible intuitive beholding.

What reveals itself in this regard in the animal? The being, the source of all formation, remains concealed. What appears is not soul and formative force themselves, but soul-expressions and workings of forces. A horse, harnessed to the plough, expresses itself in soul in its movements — in the compliance with rein-pressure, in holding to the furrow, and in the way it leans powerfully into the collar as it moves forward, and so forth. All these expressions of force have their origin, beyond any doubt, in the being of the horse. We perceive them in the tensed muscles, the traces, in the breaking-open soil, in the gliding of the furrow slice over the mouldboard to the lateral deposit. The force proceeding from the horse reveals itself in the polarity of rest and movement — and this in simultaneity. That is what characterises rhythm. The rhythm the horse displays in all its movements — in walking, trot and gallop, or in the up-and-down swing of the head when drawing heavy loads — springs from the soul-being of this animal. Rhythm creates economy in the working of forces; it saves force. One becomes conscious of all this as an onlooker; the underlying process — how the soul-element translates itself into force and force into an outward action — remains concealed.

How now does this relationship between the being and the appearance of the human being shape itself in agriculture? He himself is a purposeful actor and at the same time his own onlooker: coachman and horse in one. The being, the spiritual aim and the deed are directly bound together in self-consciousness: if I take a spade and dig over the ground, the effect is similar to that of the plough. Only — in every moment I am the impulse-giver and conscious participant in the event. My spirit being is the originator of the ideas that guide me, and at the same time the source of force to let them become deed. I find within myself the being that has the power to determine itself in freedom —

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the power to determine myself in this deed. The animal, by contrast, remains unconscious of its own being; it lives itself out purely soul-wise in its instincts. The being and soul of the plant act from the "supra-nature" into the life processes and create for themselves in their forms a sense-perceptible image. The being of the mineral-substantial reveals itself in a spatially bounded, fixed force-structure, congealed in the crystal into geometrically determined forms.

This relationship of beings to their modes of appearance in the kingdoms of nature finds expression in the manner in which the body-building substances are stamped. In the human being, the bodily substance-composition individualizes itself according to his spirit-soul, his I. The being lifts the substances out of their merely physical existence and composes them into force-configurations that correspond to the level of existence on which they appear. At the first, lowest level of existence — that of physically inorganic nature — the structure of substances follows the laws that hold sway there. These laws are graspable in chemical-physical concepts and manifest themselves objectively in the creations of technology. At a second level of existence, that of the plant kingdom, the substances compose themselves according to higher lawfulnesses, no longer graspable in concepts, of the etheric body of formative forces. Through this, earthly working of forces is incorporated into the cosmic. A third level of existence of substantial compositions constitutes the animal kingdom. The animal can build up its body only through the intake of nourishment from without. In the process of digestion it destroys the nutritive substances through the force of its own soul-being and composes out of this same soul-force its body-specific materiality. This is configured in such a way that it becomes the bearer of a soul-element dwelling within the animal — a soul-element whose essential ground lies beyond the sphere of the Sun, in the distant cosmos, in what is for that reason called the zodiac. The fourth level of existence of the substantial is embodied in the human body. In it, the physical, etheric and astral stamping of the substances is individualized through the I. Only through the substances in the body — the DNA, for instance — being arranged according to the force-source of the I can they dwell in the body. They create for themselves in the body an I-organization. Through this, the human being comes to appearance as an individuality.

The four levels of the modes of appearance of the substantial constitute earthly existence — and with it the reality of the agricultural organism. In manuring, the task is to bring these levels of being into such a relationship with one another that the dead, the mineral, opens itself to the forces of the living, the soul-element and the spiritual: "One must directly enliven the earth, and this one cannot do when one manures in a mineralizing

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way; one can do that only when one proceeds with what is organic, which one brings into a corresponding situation, so that it can work in an organising, enlivening way on the earthy-solid itself."

The concept of manuring cannot therefore be grasped at the level of the unliving "dead, earthy," but only when one takes the levels from the living upward into consideration.

On the Question of Spirit, Being and Individuality

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in it awakens self-consciousness. In this he develops the force to strive for self-knowledge, for grasping the spirit that works as real reality in himself as well as in nature and cosmos. In self-consciousness the spirit lights up, brightly in thinking and dream-like in feeling; in willing it lives asleep. The reality of the spirit becomes more and more a fact for him the more he lives in feeling the ideas grasped in thinking and lets them become deed in willing. In this striving the I works at the transformation of the members of the human being: of physical body and etheric body. It becomes their participant; it fills itself with the product of this transformation, with spirit, and enters into a free relationship with it.

The human I grasps that, in extending the science of nature, it necessarily requires a science of the spirit as well, and finds it in anthroposophical spiritual science. Its results communicate themselves to the thinking person consciously in the form of ideas. They spread light over the world of the senses. The sense-facts grasped in concepts expand and light up in consciousness as spirit-facts. One learns to know oneself as a spirit being grounded in itself, as one that can determine itself freely out of its own self-known being-nature. The human being learns through self-experience, through the schooling of the soul-activities of thinking, feeling and willing, to know himself as an I that, as a spirit being, is rooted in the eternal, that creates for itself a bodiliness in space and time, and in this lights up, shadowed, in self-consciousness. Through the science of the spirit one can learn to become aware of one's origin in spirit.

Through ordinary thinking bound to the senses the human being learns to know the world around him as something that has come into being, completed, and himself as something becoming, uncompleted. He finds in himself the force and the guiding direction to transform the uncompleted nature of his members — the astral body or soul body, the etheric body or life body, and the physical body — upward toward higher completion. This force toward self-transformation belongs to every human being; it constitutes the whole of being human. When one becomes conscious of this fact, the idea of development becomes living; it becomes a spiritually effective reality. It places the human being who struggles through to self-knowledge in a position to raise himself above merely natural being, which announces itself to the eye only in forms that have died away, and to experience and shape the process itself that allows the future to come into being, out of the transformation of what is past, in the present. This process is enacted by the I of the human being — and in doing so it perceives itself.

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The lived idea of development opens to the being of the I an unbounded panorama of spirit, from which it draws the substance that gives content to its own being and allows it to grow. "The I receives being and significance from that with which it is connected."^[239] The I lives in the soul and is, through the body, open to the senses toward the physical world and open to the spirit toward the world of spirit beings that stand above the human being.

In this field of tension the human being experiences himself as an individuality. This concept, understood in this way, cannot be applied to the things and beings of nature. These are, in their physical existence, without an I — bound into the world of forces and beings of the cosmos. Through the awakening of self-consciousness at the physical-sensory world, the human being has emancipated himself to a great degree from this bond. He stands, as a developing being, over against a world of forms congealed into a work.

Out of this condition of his consciousness, the human being is in danger of becoming estranged from nature just as much as from his own being rooted in spirit. He experiences himself more and more as if encapsulated within himself, and constructs for himself — mechanically and electronically — an outer world that is no longer nature, no longer a spirituality living and at work, but an artefact of soulless intellectuality. But what if, from within, out of the empowered spirit-soul, one turns one's gaze upon nature as she creates forms out of life itself — what if, out of the ideas of knowledge of the spirit, there reveals itself the development-inaugurating principle that creates these forms? The human being who in this way grasps himself, out of knowledge of the spirit, as an individuality in a being-way, finds within himself the spirit that transforms itself into idea-borne forces of will. These idea-illumined forces of will reach in, guiding, into the world of forces of nature. Preparing this path, Goethe points toward art: "Whoever nature begins to reveal her open secret to, feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter — art."^[240]

These human forces of will lift the agricultural organism as a wholeness out of the general working of nature and ensure a purposeful and measured flow of forces in the reciprocal interaction of its organs. This happens first and foremost, and with the greatest consequence, through the manuring with those organic substances that are excreted within the farm operation from the life processes. Here, past working of substance — transformed through processes of conversion — is called forth into the present.

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That characterizes the one side — the side of nature. The other side is the human being's spiritual achievement. Out of knowledge of the spirit, it points the will toward the paths of composing manuring substances that unlock present, work-become being for forces that prepare the ways for future possibilities of development.

The key to a deeper understanding of the essential nature and direction of efficacy of these two polar forms of manuring is the concept of the "farm individuality," which Rudolf Steiner derives from the intuitive beholding of the essential nature of the human being.^[241]

The Question of Manuring and the Farm Individuality

In the chapter "The Threefold Nature of the Human Being and the Farm Individuality" (p. 88 ff.), the concept of the "farm individuality" was taken up, along with its derivation from the trichotomy of the human being according to body, soul and spirit. The body is articulated in such a way that in the head or nerve-sense system it helps the human spirit toward self-consciousness in thinking, in the rhythmic system of the chest organs it allows the human soul to experience itself in self-feeling, and in the metabolic-limb system the human will is able to be active. In the human being, what spreads out around him as nature and what meets him as an object through the senses — all of this gathers itself together. In agriculture, then, we are dealing first of all with images, whose generative being conceals itself within them — as, for example, in the outward appearance of the cow, her being lies hidden. But to the consciously cognizing human being there opens the possibility of not remaining standing within the image, and of finding — not, proceeding from it, postulating in soulless abstraction the primal ground of existence in matter — but finding this primal ground in ideas that light up in an intuitive consciousness and awaken moral-spiritual impulses in the human being. The ideas are then no longer abstractions, when the consciously cognizing one brings them forth through his own thinking, enlivens them through his own feeling-experience, and plants them into his own will as moral impulses. Ideas grasped in this way first of all establish a free creativity that goes beyond nature. This builds, out of ethical intuitions, a bridge that spans the gulf between the

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Moral-Spiritual in the human being and the creatively essential in nature.

The idea-forms of anthroposophical spiritual science have the character of releasing, in their conceptual unfolding, a life that spurs toward deed. Thus, as described in the chapter "The Threefold Nature of the Human Being and the Farm Individuality" (p. 88 ff.), one can trace directly — out of the ideational nexus of the threefold nature of the human being and the active standing-within a farm organism — how on the one hand the warmth-air element above the earth draws earthly substances into life processes and subjects them to a kind of digestion,^[242] a continuing transformation of their forms of appearance; and how on the other hand the substance-element of earth and water in the depths, below the level of the soil, has fallen out of life and becomes form through and through in crystallising. A tremendous polarity of the heights and the depths, of substance-processes and rigidification in form, of movement and rest opens up. It is precisely that polarity which, microcosmically, in the human being presses itself together as the poles of his metabolic and nerve-sense systems. As these poles find their rhythmic equilibrium in the pulsing heart and in the breathing of the lungs, so do those of the heights and depths in the rhythmic dynamic of the soil (Figure 14).

The wonder of the soil conceals itself in its inconspicuousness. The substances and forces make themselves sense-perceptible in the forms of the earth; their working and being remains hidden, and is to be sought in all the realms of existence — of sub-nature, nature, and supra-nature. There are beings and forces that bring about breakdown, decay and death (sub-nature); those that work physically-mechanically and constitute the physical body in plant, animal and human being; further, those that bestow life in the kingdoms of nature; and finally those that, in the animal kingdom, endow and sustain the soul. The spirit, which comes alive in the self-consciousness of the human being as supra-nature, is poured out over the kingdoms of nature and creates for itself in all form-building an image.

In the production of foodstuffs and their consumption outside the agricultural organism, what is lost to the latter is not only substances but forces as well. These are the forces raying down from supra-nature, from the cosmic heights, and raying up from the depths of the earth —

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Figure 14: The farm individuality, the three levels of manuring from internal production, and the two levels of mineral application from external sources.

the forces that nourish and heal in the proper sense. The task of manuring is now to compensate for the loss of substances from the soil, and to set soil and plant in a position to become ever anew receptive and open — sense-perceptible and capable of taking in — the forces and substances of supra-nature. From this there follow with inner necessity three levels at which the concept of "manuring" fills itself with full meaning:

It is manuring

with substances and forces from enlivened plant nature,
with substances and forces from ensouled animal nature, and
with substances and forces that are a product of the human spirit. As against this, the loss-compensation of earth-bound substances is to be designated as the "zero level." With the synthetic or chemically-digested, water-soluble salts used in industrialised farming, the level "−1" is crossed — the threshold from nature to sub-nature (Figure 14).

What follows will address fundamental aspects of the uses and the problems of mineral substance application, and then the three levels of manuring. The path toward unlocking the

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mystery of the same is a kind of synthesis of the natural-scientific and spiritual-scientific efforts at cognition, on the basis of deed-action. One walks here the path from science to art — a path of researching in the doing, in which the feeling for truth, in the small as in the large, measures itself against the recognisable and experienceable natural and social thriving of the farm as a whole, not against the quantitative result.

The view that matter alone underlies all phenomena of the world as the sole reality has, since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, given rise in agriculture quite consistently to the concept of "mineral fertilisation" — and with it to the notion of a sum of "nutrients" that the plant requires in order to grow. Behind this theory lies the consequential assumption that from a sum of inorganic, dead substance-elements life can emerge, that one could generate and multiply life with these. But life arises from life, from life-germs or seeds. Nowhere in nature, however exact one's observation, will one find any foothold for the claim that life could arise from mineral deadness — only the reverse: life falls into death. The concept of manuring, however, refers to the fact that life as such, within the growth processes of the plant, and likewise the soul-astral working from without in form-building, is fostered in a manner befitting its essential nature. It is not without reason that the concept of manure has, since ancient times, derived from the significant workings of the excretions of the soul-and-life organisation of domestic animals. One spoke of the "old force" of soils so manured. Out of the prevailing materialist inner disposition, organic manures are accorded no specific manuring value beyond their manifold mineral composition and their promotion of microbial soil life.

What criteria can be found by which to judge the consequences brought about by a concept of manuring that grasps the reciprocal relationship of soil and plant only as a material process? In what follows, this problematic will be pursued by way of the example of the motor of all plant yield-increase: nitrogen synthesised into salt form.

Welche Kriterien lassen sich finden, um die Folgen zu beurteilen, die ein Düngerbegriff verursacht, der die Wechselbeziehung von Boden und Pflanze nur als materielles Geschehen begreift? Im Folgenden soll dieser Problematik am Beispiel des Motors aller pflanzlichen Ertragssteigerung, dem in die Salzform synthetisierten Stickstoff, nachgegangen werden.

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The Application of Nitrogen Salts

Nitrogen (N), constituting 79% of the atmosphere, is the true bearer of the air element. It streams around the green foliage of the plant as it strives upward into the atmosphere, without, however, taking any direct part in its growth processes. As a substance of the air, it is, like oxygen, bound to itself (N₂) and is for this reason nearly reaction-dead. It enters the denser states of water and earth by natural means in two ways only: 1. through the energy discharges of lightning, at approximately 6 kg/ha/year,^[243] and 2. by biological means through nitrogen fixation by plant organisms capable of this, in particular the species-rich family of the legumes. To break through this barrier of the natural nitrogen input — which sets its own measure — by means of large-scale industrial processes was the declared aim from the end of the nineteenth century onward. The breakthrough came with the synthesis of ammonia by the Haber-Bosch process. Under high energy expenditure, atmospheric nitrogen is converted in aqueous solution into the hydrogen compound ammonia (NH₃). Through further condensation there arise the solid compounds with oxygen — the nitrate salts — and with hydrogen — the ammonium salts — both of which likewise pass readily into solution, the former more quickly, the latter more slowly. Both compounds are in aqueous solution highly reactive, and the nitrate compounds in solid salt form are highly explosive. Through the synthesis process, any desired quantity of nitrogen salts can be produced at any location on earth, independently of the biological rhythms of day or year. Beyond their civil or military usefulness as explosives, they have, in the course of the twentieth century, unleashed a global revolution in plant production. They constitute the productive capital for agricultural mass production and are, in conjunction with the deployment of herbicides and pesticides, the cause of the development toward agrarian industrialism.

In view of the enormous increase in yields in arable farming, horticulture, and fruit growing, as well as in all other specialised crops, one would be obliged to sing the praises of this bright side of industrially produced nitrogen salts — were it not for the dark shadow-side. Nitrogen compounds, insofar as they are not bound in the form of ammonium (NH₄) to clay minerals, have the tendency to disappear as quickly as possible from the middle region of the "diaphragm-soil" — either as nitrate (NO₃) downward into the groundwater region of the head pole, or as ammonia (NH₃), nitrogen oxides

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(laughing gas N₂O) or elemental nitrogen (N₂) upward into the metabolic pole. These losses amount to roughly 25% each of the total input of synthesised nitrogen salts — that is, equal portions on both sides. On the one hand they contaminate groundwater and well water, or cause eutrophication of surface waters. On the other hand, through their emissions, they contribute substantially to the nitrogen oxide burden of the atmosphere and thereby to climate change. The remaining 50% of the nitrogen input account for a reduction and one-sided narrowing of the biological activity of soils^[244] as well as for a forcing of plant growth with simultaneous weakening of their organisational forces, their nourishing quality and healing efficacy. Synthesised nitrogen salts also contribute to the floristic and faunal impoverishment of species diversity in the landscape. It is they — and only they — that make possible the narrowing of crop rotations all the way to monoculture, and beyond that, cultivation in nutrient solutions (*hydroponics*).

In plant production, every external application of nitrogen represents a kind of thrust-by-thrust compulsion to grow. In every case, whether administered as fast-acting nitrate or as the more slowly acting ammonium compound, the nitrogen concentration in the soil solution rises — and the plant has no defence against it. The compulsion to absorb an excess of nitrogen salts weakens the etheric organisation of the plant in all its organs. In the root, which reaches downward into the head pole, this manifests as a dulling of its functions. One of those functions is its predisposition toward a kind of sense capacity — not only in relation to the formative forces of the cosmos and the water element, but above all in relation to the element of the earthy-solid. The subtlety of these processes reveals itself in the following phenomena:

The classic "unimproved meadow" has largely disappeared from our open fieldscape. From it, cut in several rounds, the hay for winter feeding was won. It was — depending on the site — extraordinarily rich in species: in upper and lower grasses, but above all in legumes and herbs.

If one now proceeds to apply repeated dressings of synthetic nitrogen salts for the purpose of increasing its vigour, this triggers a chain reaction with respect to species composition. The herbs are the first to disappear from the sward, and as the years pass the legumes follow — red clover, bird's-foot trefoil, and others. White clover holds on the longest. Eventually even the lower grasses yield to the dominance of the upper grasses,

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Figure 15: The functions of the root hairs and their impairment through external application of nitrogen salts.

which by the end of this sequence yield monoculture-like mass harvests. This example illustrates the primal phenomenon of external nitrogen application: the impoverishment of species in associated plant communities.

Looked at more closely, this effect makes itself felt in a multitude of details within the root zone. In red clover, for instance, one can observe how the number of nodules on the roots — arising through the endogenous symbiosis of the clover with rhizobia, nitrogen-fixing bacteria — declines under continued applications of nitrogen salts. As a result of the high nitrogen concentration in the soil solution, the nitrogen-fixing capacity of the root diminishes; it loses, degree by degree, its capacity for symbiosis.

What holds for the endogenous symbioses of the legumes holds equally for the exogenous symbioses with bacteria and fungi of other plants. Figure 15 shows a longitudinal section through the terminal portion of a root.

The root tip consists of living tissue made up of dividing cells (meristem), with the mucilaginous root cap (calyptra) extending before it. Together they form the ever-renewing life pole of the root. A short distance further up the root, the root dies into its form pole, or death pole; it lignifies. Mediating between the two, as already described, a third member articulates itself, in which both poles — life and death — interpenetrate in the two functions

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of the root hairs (cf. Ch. "The Spring Process and Soil Cultivation", p. 213 ff.). The root hairs arrange themselves in rhythmic order around the root body. They are outgrowths from the no-longer-dividing cells of the root skin (epidermis). As such, they are on the one hand metabolically active: through them the assimilates from the greening above-ground organs of the plant stream downward via the descending phloem current into the soil, where they activate the microbial and fungal life of the rhizosphere and draw it into symbiotic relationship with themselves. The root exudates amount on average, across cultivated plant species, to approximately 30% of their assimilatory output.^[245] In this way the etheric body of the plants — in accordance with their rhythms and needs of growth — governs the soil life through the assimilation stream (phloem): these are low-molecular proteins, carbohydrates, enzymes, vitamins, acids, chelating agents, coumarins, phenols, glycosides, alkaloids, essential oils, ethylene.^[246] On the other hand, the root hairs are sense-active. "The root of plants […]: it is an eye, but a poor eye."^[247] The root hairs perceive, as it were, the salts that have dissolved in the moist-watery medium of the soil through their own metabolic activity (exchange processes) as well as through their symbionts. In a processual simultaneity running counter to itself — a property of the life body — the root hairs excrete the assimilates into the root's surroundings, stimulate microbial breakdown processes by means of these, and take up the end product of those processes: the mineralized, dead salt. This travels in countercurrent to the assimilates through the cell tissue of the roots and flows into the upward-directed xylem stream. The one stream — dead, mineral, from below — and the other — living, from above — are separated from each other by the cambium.

With merely object-bound thinking, this subtle activity in and around the root hairs cannot be grasped. These life processes and sense processes — attuned to one another in simultaneity, woven together as it were — are sensitively disturbed or degree by degree blocked by the application of synthesized nitrogen salts. The plant roots have no capacity to distinguish the origin of the dissolved nitrogen salts. If their concentration rises through continued external supply, the activity of the root hairs flags. The roots become metabolically weak and

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sense-dulled. Their capacity to form symbioses is weakened, as was illustrated above by the example of the clover root bearing nodules. The etheric organisation of the plant, which had extended itself outward into the root's surroundings, withdraws back onto the root itself; the *rhizosphere* is impoverished. It lacks the formative force of the cosmic-astral, whose "material bearer" is nitrogen.^[248] Soil and plant form a unity of life. From their life processes of breaking down organic substance, nitrogen arises and passes — through the dead salt form — directly into the life processes of building up. The life body of the plant governs the moment of death that belongs to the salt form. With the massive supply of synthesized nitrogen salts, the plant finds itself subjected, as it were, to a compulsion to take these up. In accordance with their origin, they are bearers of forces from sub-nature, forces that work against the formative forces of supra-nature.

The above-mentioned problem sheds light as well on the question of the validity of the law of the conservation of substances and forces. Is their behaviour and working in non-living nature, compared to living nature, continuous or discontinuous? Observation teaches that substance and the manner of its force-working receive being and meaning through the context in which both appear.

The application of nitrogen salts synthesized from the air has the power to negate living interconnections in favour of its own mechanism of action. They tend to bring the physical principle of the temporal succession of cause and effect into force within the life organisation of the plant. That this is so is spoken by the fact as well that, in order to maintain yields, roughly the same — or even increasing — quantities of nitrogen salts must be applied year after year anew. Through the external supply of nitrogen, yields become almost calculable.

All this, however, means that the root is estranged from its evolutively endowed function by so-called "mineral fertilization." The middle zone — rhythmically populated with root hairs, lying between the life pole of the root tip and the death pole of the lignifying root — gradually loses its metabolically and sense-active function; it becomes passive. The plant is tended to be thrown back into an earlier state of evolution, in which it was a purely "water-born" being, floating freely as the algae in the salt water of the world's oceans. But now, having developed itself through long-enduring steps of development into an "earth-born" being with roots, standing freely

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stem, leaf sequence, blossom, and up to the seed, it stands in need of a manuring that is serviceable to its being as an earth-plant and capable of holding that being further in development.

The synthesized nitrogen salts fulfil the concept of manuring only in appearance. They do not manure — they drive and hypertrophy the plant reproductively into a watery mass-lushness. The study of the phenomena arising in this connection with respect to physiology and form-building is exceedingly instructive and calls forth, almost of itself, the demand that the concept of manuring be grasped anew. "The plant lives [...] directly with earth and water."^[249] In the purely watery milieu, plant (and likewise animal) life develops up to the lower stages of evolution; in the moisture-permeated earth it unfolds its root activity. It grows actively downward into the element of the earthy-solid and develops in the region of the root hairs a metabolic activity in the opening-up of mineral materials and the breaking-down of organic materials, as well as a sense activity toward everything "that is earth [salt; note by the author] and water."^[250] Manuring therefore means enlivening the earth directly, "and that is not possible if one proceeds in a mineralizing way."^[251] A manuring that enlivens the earth itself encompasses a threefold:

The supply of the soil with organic residues from living and ensouled nature.
The activation of plant metabolism in relation to the force-workings of the cosmic periphery and those between root and earth.
The development of the germinal sense-endowment of the plant toward the substances and forces of earth and cosmos into a higher sense-capacity.
Die Aktivierung des pflanzlichen Stoffwechsels im Verhältnis zu den Kräftewirkungen des kosmischen Umkreises sowie jenen zwischen Wurzel und Erdreich.
Die Entwicklung der keimhaften Sinnesbegabung der Pflanze gegenüber den Stoffen und Kräften der Erde und des Kosmos zu höherer Sinnesbefähigung.

What is decisive for the assessment of manuring according to value and effect is its origin. The nitrogen compounds synthesized with great expenditure of energy (approx. 50 MJ/kg N) derive from the inorganic-dead atmospheric nitrogen (N₂). They are compelled to become bearers of an astrality that forces its way up from the sub-nature and works against that which rays in from the supra-nature of the cosmos. The astral moon forces, working through water, gain the upper hand over the solar astrality that works through the "earthy-solid." For this reason, in Figure 14 (p. 273) the

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application of synthesized nitrogen salts in agriculture is designated with the efficacy-level "-1." Only to nitrogen that arises out of life processes can a manuring effect in the true sense be attributed. It remains within the etheric organisation of the plant, receives through this the formative forces by which it forms the spiritual archetype, in image-fashion, into the sense-perceptible gestalt.

The Application of Rock Dusts

Just as mistaken as the concept of "nitrogen fertilization" is, just as little applicable is that of "mineral fertilization," which subsumes the application of every kind of mineral substance in agriculture and horticulture, regardless of what origin in the household of nature they may have or by what technical process they have been prepared. The mineral elements make life processes possible in a highly differentiated way, but do not bring them forth. They do not manure life as such, but provide for its physical-sense-perceptible appearance. In the current conception of mineral fertilization, no distinction is made between the nitrogen from the element of air and the earth-born substances, such as phosphorus and the alkali and alkaline-earth metals — potassium, calcium, magnesium, and others. Nitrogen is nearly reaction-dead in air and reaction-alive in earth. The substances of the earth are reaction-dead in their depths and become active in contact with air and warmth. This qualityless conceptual equalization had fatal consequences. Either "mineral fertilization" was propagated as the last word of wisdom, as the only successful technology of yield-assurance and yield-increase — or "heretics" appeared who rejected it in summa. In practice, minds divided and a deeper cognition of the matter fell by the wayside. Today, these things are judged in a more differentiated way. It is not insight into the being of substances that has brought about this change, but the taking-seriously of ecological contexts in practice. The moment one arranges the farm in the spirit of the organism principle such that nature itself takes care of the required nitrogen balance — supported by a process-oriented soil cultivation, a legume-rich crop rotation, and animal manures — the mineral balance regulates itself out of the soil's own resources, as a rule. This capacity of the soil to maintain itself in health at a higher level of production — that it owes to the artful hand of the human being.

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The sites, as regards their naturally given mineral balance, are in their endowments generally very different. On loess, alluvial land, glacial ground moraines, and on loam and clay soils of older geological origin, the mineral balance is, depending on the degree of erosion and weathering, reasonably well-equilibrated. On sites such as glacial sands, siliceous sandstones (Hauptbuntsandstein) or limestone (White Jurassic), abundance of one element is accompanied, sometimes, by complete absence of another. On older sandy soils it is mostly a deficit of metal bases — calcium, magnesium, and potassium — together with the so-called trace elements. On extremely shallow limestone sites, phosphorus is most often lacking. The deficiency that weighs most heavily on naturally disadvantaged sites is that of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. These deficient situations become still more precarious with the addition of nitrogen salts and necessarily draw after them the leaching of easily soluble mineral salts in increasing quantities.

In biodynamic farming and gardening one can speak only of a substitution of existing mineral deficiencies. This is not a matter of raising the substance level to the level of scientifically recommended guideline values — for the gradual liming aimed at restoring an acid-base equilibrium, pH > 6 can serve as such a guideline — but rather of stimulating, with the help of rock dusts, the "sense activity" of the root referred to above, in connection with the associated soil life. This twofold peripheral metabolic and root sense-activity directs the breakdown of the rock dust and through it the stalled biogenic breakdown of the mineral reserves of the soil. In this regard the silicate primordial rock dusts are of particular significance. They contain the full spectrum of all those substance-elements which form the starting-point of the development of the most fertile soils. In the purely mechanical grinding process, the strictly geometrical substance-composition of the silicates is preserved. The weathering of the fine particles occurs in the aerated, humus-rich, metabolically active topsoil and is therefore a largely biogenic process. It leads to the genesis of primary and secondary clay minerals in the fine-root zone of the *rhizosphere*. In addition, chemical and light etheric forces are released — forces which in primordial times had congealed in the passage from the condition of the living-watery into the dead form-state of the earthy-solid.

The world's most fertile soils owe their genesis to silicate rock dusts. They are the dust-drifts of *loess* from the

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in calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and thus loses its immediate reactivity. It should therefore be used sparingly and only in cases of acute need.

glacial drifts of the late ice age into the ice-free forelands, as well as the annual clay-silt sediments in the floodplains of rivers (e.g. the Nile before the construction of the Aswan Dam) and the deposition of volcanic ashes. The latter were used in antiquity throughout the Mediterranean region to improve marginal soils. The rejuvenation of ageing soils or naturally acid sites through marling — that is, through the application of loose, easily weathered, lime-rich clay rock — has been widespread practice since at least the edict of Charles the Bald (823–877) from the year 864.^[252] The range over which such heavy masses could be transported was, of course, limited.

In repeated waves during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempts were made to give rock dusts greater attention. These efforts found themselves in hopeless competition with the rapidly spreading so-called "artificial fertilizer economy" — the application of essentially nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in highly concentrated form. Quick results were hoped for; they failed to materialise — which could hardly have been otherwise. The application of rock dusts is, precisely, a matter of long-term amelioration, of a gradual rejuvenation of base-deficient soils. The efficacy of these dusts accelerates with their degree of fineness, and is still more effective in combination with organic materials such as farmyard manure, liquid manure and composts.

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into the no longer aggressive slaked lime — calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)₂. Burnt lime is recommended as an additive to rapidly decomposing compost materials.^[253] It dampens "an overly rampant life in the etheric" in favour of the shaping forces of the astral in the compost heap.

Soils leached of lime draw a magnesium deficit after them, above all on clay-poor sand. Dolomite meal can remedy this. Limestone deposits contain, as a rule, small admixtures of magnesium. In dolomite (CaCo₃ * MgCo₃) these rise to 50%. A further rock dust is magnesium sulphate, kieserite (MgSo₄ * H₂O). The question of remedying potassium deficiency is answered by Rudolf Steiner^[254] with potassium magnesia, patent potash (K₂So₄ * MgSo₄), a proven combination that strengthens the base balance.

A special form of liming — not only of liming, but above all in horticulture — is the use of algae lime. In it, in all its diversity, the entire spectrum of elemental substances is united that the — one can call it so — mineral-plant life of origins in the world's oceans holds in readiness.

On acid soils of advanced age, in extreme cases an amelioration of the phosphate balance may, alongside the amelioration of the base balance, also become necessary for the activation of soil life. While the basic constituents of the soil — calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium — are subject to leaching, this is the case for phosphorus only to a small degree. In an acid medium it combines with aluminium, in an alkaline medium with calcium. Aluminium and calcium phosphates are sparingly soluble and are unlocked mainly through root exudates, symbiotic bacteria and mycorrhizae (*fungal hyphae*). Under normal conditions, in a biologically active soil the phosphate balance regulates itself.

For ameliorative measures, calcium phosphates from the Tertiary bone deposits of North Africa come into consideration, as do phosphates of blast-furnace slag bound to silicon and calcium. Their breakdown proceeds ultimately, in the sense described, under the direction of the etheric organisation of the plants as it extends into the root-pervaded soil space.

The breakdown of silicate rock dusts — which include volcanic ashes — likewise proceeds largely biogenically. Their significance for the amelioration of leached soils is to be assessed differently still

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than the targeted ameliorative action of sedimentary rocks. The silicate rock dusts weather slowly, depending on their degree of fineness. No short-term recognizable success makes itself apparent, yet here the saying holds: "Time heals." A development takes its beginning; it concerns the root-force of the plant as much as the unlocking symbiotic soil life, and a quasi-homeopathic clay formation *in statu nascendi*. A new beginning of a soil-born intrinsic dynamic is underway. Yet only repeated applications of approximately 2 t/ha/year show effects in the tilth-readiness of the soil and in the widening of the root zone.

The great number of elements that make up the substance-composition of magmatic intrusive and extrusive rocks are soil-forming and at the same time essential in large numbers for the thriving of plants. Here, in the soils and parent rocks, just as there in the plants and plant species, the proportion of these elements varies. The intrusive rocks of the granite series, for instance, show decreasing silica content from granite with approximately 80% SiO₂ through *syenite* (60%), *diorite* (55%) and *gabbro* (50–45%). Conversely, the content of iron, magnesium and calcium oxides increases to a multiple. In the porphyry series from quartz porphyry through porphyry, porphyrite to diabase or melaphyre, the same holds, as it does for the series of extrusive rocks from the silica-rich *liparite* through *phonolite*, *andesite* to basalt. On basalt plateaus one finds particularly fertile, mineral-rich soils. On account of its widespread occurrence and its rather basic mineral composition with 45% SiO₂, 10% FeO, 7% MgO, 10% CaO++^[255] basalt furnishes the most widely applied rock dust. Here, in the broadly ranging elemental composition, the dominance of silica and of alumina (aluminium oxide, Al₂O₃), or respectively the force-potential that this particular composition has brought forth, is of great significance. The strict state of form of the crystal transforms itself into the colloidal, in which the substance is held in suspension between solid and liquid.

Alongside the less commonly practised surface application, the rock dusts are preferably passed through the composting process. The unlocking and uptake into the life processes unfolds in a microbial metabolic activity. The quantity employed via composting is restricted to a mere light dusting of the compost material at setting-up.

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To summarize once more: where rock dusts of any kind are applied, this cannot be a matter of manuring — it is a substitution of given mineral deficits in the anorganic, dead realm of nature, whether on account of a one-sided mineral composition of the parent rock from which the soil formed, or as a result of deeply leached soils of advanced age. These are ailing soils, which can be treated and stimulated toward a new developmental dynamic through a comparatively modest substituting effort in combination with the actual manuring measures to be described in what follows. External nitrogen applications in salt form largely or wholly annihilate this subtle activity, borne by the life of the plant and of the soil. The consequence is that the earth-bound substances too, brought into readily soluble form and apportioned annually to the requirements of the respective crops, must be applied in ever greater quantities.

Stage 1: Manuring from the Living Substance of Plant Nature

The plant leaves behind two things when it withers: the seed, and everything that is common to the higher plants — namely root, stem, leaf and blossom. One can call it, in contrast to the individual seed, the universal-plant. It grows, forming its gestalt, from seed to seed. In the newly forming seed, however, the cosmic — «that which lives as the form of the plant in the seed»^[256] — imprints itself anew each time. In the act of germinating the seed dies into form; the seedling unfolds and is now powerfully subject to the working of earthly forces. The seed-force, however, works on without ceasing; it streams through the root that strives downward into the depths, equally through the upward-shooting stem and through the leaf-veins of the leaves striving laterally into form; it reveals itself finally, in gestalt and blossom, as an image of the being that has lived spiritually as form within the seed. Hidden within the blossom, the shoot dams itself up into the ovary which, polar to the radiant blossom, closes off as the sheath of the seed-primordia. Here, in the seed-primordium, the seed-force unites itself with the «crown» of the universal-plant — the pollen. In the dying of the plant the twofold germ-disposition ripens into seed. It contains all that has unfolded in space and time as a present, earthly-cosmic activity

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imprinted into it, filled and formed with substance. At the same time there lives within the seed an Eternal, which again and again makes itself present anew in the earthly. It is otherwise with everything that has become the outward appearance of the plant from the germinating and dying seed. All its organs were irradiated by the seed-force. Through it the appearance of the plant became an image of its type. The seed-force has left its traces in all its organs — in root, shoot, leaf sequence and blossom. These traces are the more pronounced, the more the tissues still permeated with life congeal into the form of the structural framework, or become lignified altogether.

In the residues of plants, in all that has not become seed but remained behind from it, there lie before us products of the spatiotemporal course of nature. In the composition of their materiality they still carry within them traces of life and of the seed-force. They threaten to fall wholly into death, into mineralization. And that does happen, and must happen, since the plant requires dead mineral salts in order to awaken them to new life through the power of its etheric organisation. Only it should happen at the right time and in the right measure. Now nature has the power to slow this mineralization process, or even to halt it and redirect it toward something new. What then comes into being is humus. With the plant residues and the animal remnants that return to the earth and transform themselves into humus, the earth manures itself. It manures itself according to the maxim: life manures life. With humus formation there arises a substance-composition that alone deserves the name of being the most elementary manure in the household of nature.

On the Nature of Composting

What nature demonstrates, the human hand can raise to true artistry. Composting is a work-art in which thinking, experiencing and doing stand in continual conversation. One can, according to Rudolf Steiner, acquire «a personal relationship to manure and specifically to the working with manure …»^[257] One can only achieve that when one knows all the circumstances of the kind and origin of the material — for instance, whether it is young green matter, whether it is bulky or even lignified, rich in protein or in silica, whether it is predominantly roots, leaves, masses of straw, and so forth. Each of these organic substances has a definite

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character-based substance-composition. It would therefore be ideal if the compost heap as a whole were built up from as great a variety of waste products as possible. In horticulture this is more readily achievable than in agriculture. Here, conditioned by the seasons, disproportionately large masses of a single kind may accumulate.

A rough but practically serviceable guide-figure with regard to the slower or faster decomposability of materials is provided by what is called the C/N ratio. The higher the nitrogen content in relation to carbon — the structural backbone — the faster the breakdown. The series from the difficult to the easily decomposable materials runs as follows:



Sawdust	=	500 C:1 N
Wood chips, depending on composition	=	250–400:1
Wheat straw	=	100:1
Rye straw	=	65:1
Oat straw	=	50:1
Oak and beech leaf-litter	=	40–60:1
Legume straw	=	50–30:1
Fresh farmyard manure	=	20–25:1
Kitchen waste	=	25:1
Rotted manure	=	50–20:1
Cow dung	=	14–16:1
Mature compost	=	10–12:1^[258]

Everything the agricultural organism excretes inwardly as organic substance over the course of the year can count as nutritive humus. On arable and garden land this comprises the stubble residues and root-work, which amounts to roughly one third of the total grown mass, together with the manure arising from animal husbandry (including the straw bedding), and old hay, straw, feed remnants from the stall, leaf-litter, lawn clippings, kitchen waste, ditch excavations and so forth.^[259] What will be addressed here above all is the processual activity from the setting-up to maturity. The compost heap is laid down in a location as shaded as possible, above ground level, within the working sphere of air and warmth — the metabolic pole of agriculture — upon

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upon an unfastened ground. The relationship to the depth-forces and height-forces must be ensured. The legal requirement to compost on an impermeable surface (a concrete slab) severs the working of forces in the compost heap from the depth-forces of the earth working upward from below. The compost heap is a piece of inverted earth,^[260] comparable to a lignified tree trunk rooting in the earth and rising above it into the airy periphery. The view that composting causes appreciable quantities of nitrate to filter into the subsoil is theory. Through the mucilaginous substances released in the course of decomposition, the soil pores seal themselves shut. With the coarse pores of sandy soils it is advisable to coat the ground surface with a thin skin of bentonite (swelling clay). The possible risk of occasional localised nitrate leaching, resulting from seepage water escaping after heavy rainfall, is as a rule the consequence of improper setting-up and inadequate covering. This deficiency is easily remedied.

On the composting site there should always be enough starter compost on hand to inoculate the newly set-up material — likewise loam soil, marl or loess for scattering between the individual layers and for covering the heap; and straw for the final covering. To narrow the C/N ratio, farmyard manure, horn shavings or blood meal may also be mixed in. As further additions in small doses, rock dust, raw phosphate, bone meal, algae lime and the like may be considered. The addition of the biodynamic compost preparations will be dealt with separately. The setting-up and mixing of the materials can be done with a manure spreader, though most probably best of all by hand. And here lies the sore point. Where are the many hands, the people who will do this not altogether easy work in good time, with understanding and with joy? They are missing — and for this reason compost-making has either become the stepchild of the farm's working routines or a matter of merely technical routine to be mechanically managed. The latter confines itself to the purely mechanical operations of mixing — and that very limitedly — of setting up and usually of repeated turning, in order to accelerate ripening into usable manure at the cost of heavy losses. Here one again relinquishes a rich field of experience — precisely this one: of gaining "a personal relationship to the manure and to working with the manure." Like everything organic and living, the composting process is subject to the

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It develops out of a chaotic metabolism, the nutritive humus, into the ripe condition of form, the stable humus. It is a process that runs in rhythm, in the field of tension between the emphasized movement at the start — high turnover — and the emphasized rest at the end — the formation of a new substance. This space-time activity wants to be accompanied perceptively in all its phases and pondered with active inquiry. This requires that one set oneself actively in motion and then, in the further course of things, pause in stillness — perceiving the smells, the consistency, and so forth — and dwell in the activity with attentive beholding and thinking.

In this sense, compost-making is a field of work for conscious practice that demands and schools the whole human being. One takes up fork and spade and builds the heap in layers on a width of roughly 1.2 m — placing material that breaks down easily and material that breaks down slowly beside and on top of each other in portions, inserting between them, as occasion warrants, layers of farmyard manure as well as thin strata of loam soil, with a little starter compost along the edges, and dusting each individual layer with the additions mentioned above in accordance with one's reading of its particular need. In the case of bulky and dry material the old rule holds: "Tread it firm and keep it moist." In setting up the heap one follows no scheme; every step of the work is preceded by a consideration.

The heap, built up to roughly one metre in height, will within a short time become a lively, surging chaos. It needs a bounding sheath, a protecting, breathing skin. This function is best served by a thin earth covering with a layer of straw, old hay or peat over it. In this condition the compost heap fulfils all the requirements that characterize a self-contained organism. With the help of oxygen — the bearer of the etheric forces — it develops a life of its own, and in connection with nitrogen — the bearer of the astral forces — an inner life. The plastic fleece used as the sole covering is, to be sure, rain-repelling and air-permeable, but still only a surrogate. The outer skin has the function of holding back the radiating forces and directing them back into the interior of the heap. From outside, the heap is surrounded by the forces and rhythms of elemental working in wind and weather. Independent of this outer activity, the compost heap unfolds a rhythm and dynamic of its own in the lawful traversal of the states of the four elements — warmth, air, water, and earth — and the life-creating etheric forces working together with these: the warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether, and life ether.

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In his extensive studies of the life of the compost heap, Bockemühl^[261] traced in compost trials (referred to below as BKV) with a mixture of cow and horse manure a series of life processes that unfold in the heap from setting up to maturity. These confirm in detail the four phases of compost development familiar to the attentive practitioner — on the basis of various measurement data in temporal sequence, and above all on the basis of the appearance and disappearance of various groups of organisms during these four phases. As a representative of the processes of decomposition and transformation in the heap, Bockemühl chose the species-rich group of springtails (Collembola), which, after the red compost worm (Eisenia foetida), carry out the main work of conversion. In this connection it must, however, be emphasised that their activity — like that of the ringed worms, threadworms, insect larvae, and the seemingly endless multitude of microbes — is in each case a symptom of a web of relationships that must be grasped as a wholeness. The conditions for the formation of this wholeness are created by the hand of the human being. That these four phases unite, in a being-way proper to themselves, into an organ within the organism of agriculture — this requires the continuous attention and the nurturing hand.

1. The Warmth Phase

In the BKV it announces itself after a short time through a steeply rising warming (Figure 16, p. 292), which then falls away just as quickly. With loose packing — that is, with unimpeded access of oxygen — the temperature can shoot up to 70 °C; with denser and moister packing the temperature rises to the optimum of 55 °C to 60 °C and then falls quite gradually to 30 to 25 °C. The warming is a function of aerobic microbial activity, which releases the solar warmth bound in the organic material from previous years and in so doing creates the elemental living-milieu for the relationally rich microbial life of the heap. The development of warmth requires steering — by means of, depending on circumstances, denser or looser setting-up, keeping moist, and where necessary subsequent treading firm. With packing that is too dense and too wet the heap remains cold; putrefaction sets in as a consequence of anaerobic decomposition. Turning is then unavoidable. With strong warming up to around 65 to 70 °C, those present in the starting material

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Figure 16: The four phases of the composting process.

small animals present in the starting material, harmful organisms and the like are killed off, and the weed seeds too lose their capacity to germinate. In the BKV the first phase, overlapping with the second, lasted around two weeks.

With the appearance of the sense-perceptible element of warmth, the warmth ether bound in the organic mass is also released. It is the spiritual-supersensible complement to warmth as element. It sustains the process and leads it, at the right moment, over into the next process-stage. The outer warmth tends to dissipate, whereas the warmth ether enters into relationships — indeed, it is the actual initiator of all processual activity. It is therefore important to ensure that the warming proceeds rather slowly and with persistence. The warmth should remain within the heap. The warmth ether connected with it then inaugurates a development in which the heap closes itself organismically into a whole.

2. The Air-Breathing and Degassing Phase

Parallel to the warming phase there begins a kind of breathing process. Oxygen, as bearer of etheric efficacy within the physical, is as it were breathed in; it stimulates the explosive bacterial decomposition activity. The carbon dioxide (CO₂) thereby released

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escapes as gas through the skin of the heap into the outer air (Figure 16). In the BKV the maximum was reached after three to four weeks, then falling away rapidly after seven weeks and thereafter uniformly toward the end of the trial after one year. The ammonia degassing behaved differently: it set in at the very beginning, reached its peak value in the second and third week, and had fallen to nearly zero after six weeks. During this period of ammonia emission — and with protein-rich materials such as vegetable waste also of hydrogen sulphide — clouds of odour make their way outward that should as far as possible remain within the heap: "an organic thing is the healthier, the more it smells inwardly and the less it smells outwardly."^[262] The odour emanation is a sign of a still rampant, formless activity. It points to irretrievable losses of substance. These are checked by the fungal growth (cap fungi) that arises in the second phase. It ensures — though itself proliferating and permeating the entire heap — a suppression of the bacterial decomposition that dominates in the first phase. Parallel to the fungal development, nitrate forms in place of ammonia from this point onward, its content increasing steadily over the following months and entering into humus formation by way of protein-like precursor stages.

The characteristic sight of mists of water vapour rising from the heaps in the cool morning hours bears witness in the second phase to a gradual drying-out and therewith to aeration. Simultaneously the C/N ratio begins to narrow, settling in the BKV at 12:1 by the end. The development of springtails rises — for one particular species of springtail in the BKV — sharply in the fourth week, then falling away again just as quickly by the tenth week. Other species follow and disappear again. In the BKV the duration of the second phase, overlapping with the first and third, already amounted to nearly four weeks.

With the release of the gases the light ether is freed; it is the etheric-supersensible complement of the element of air. It enables the living beings of the compost heap, despite the absence of direct sunlight, to sustain a life in the dark. It is a light-etheric quality preserved from an earlier, higher life that has died away — one that calls into existence the lower plant and animal life reaching back to early stages of Earth evolution. What now is the contribution of the light ether to the development of the compost heap? At the outset the compost heap is a rather random mixture of organic waste. The microbial decomposition of these materials is no causal event for

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the activity of the light ether, but a simultaneous one. The light ether is active on the one hand in the growth of the individual organisms; on the other, through the activity of all these countless plant and animal living beings, it creates relational contexts that orient the life of the compost heap as a whole toward the formation of stable humus. The light ether causes the compost heap first to grow, as it were, inward, and through the activity of the small animals it spatialises the end-product into the unified, crumbling, side-by-side arrangement of humus.

3. The Watery or Transformation Phase

It announces itself in the sudden subsidence of the heap. After the preceding dry phase, the heap now settles more densely and moistens itself, as through the breakdown of the hard-to-decompose cell membranes the liquid escapes from the cell vacuoles and intercellular spaces (Figure 16, p. 292). The heap closes itself more strongly against the outer world, no longer smells caustic, and in the moist-watery environment manifold conversions, substance-transformations and new formations take place. The small animals, foremost the *Collembola*, take over the direction; they comminute the material, feed on microbes and fungi and in doing so reduce their population. The proliferating chaos of phases 1 and 2 begins, through the mass multiplication of the small animals, to order itself and to articulate itself into aerated inner spaces. The environmental conditions shift, and correspondingly the springtails metamorphose from worm-like, little-differentiated forms into those with distinctly emergent organ-formations. From the BKV it is clear how one species follows another and disappears again. In this way, in the darkness of the heap, the world of small animals lives out evolutively a still lower, plant-animal as it were, mode of existence. This is irradiated, partly from within, partly from without, by forces of a differentiatedly working soul-astral. This sentient life makes the compost heap into an organism. In the third phase there takes place within it the transition from the still formless condition of the watery into that of the thoroughly formed earthy-solid — one single great substance-transformation.

In the BKV the third, watery phase, overlapping with the second and fourth, develops over seven weeks. In this period the *Collembola* reach, over two weeks, a maximum of their unfolding — that is, one-and-a-half to two months after the setting-up.

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With the third, the moist-watery, stage, the chemical or sound ether becomes active above all. The etheric kinds stand in functional contrast to the elements with which they are evolutively of equal origin. While in the watery stage the heap assumes a more dense, homogeneous consistency, the sound or chemical ether shatters the life of the heap into a countless multiplicity of individual cells — yet not at random, but in a continually changing order. It divides and joins into ever new variations. The essential thing is not the individual bacteria, protozoa, algae, fungi, worms, larvae and so on, but what plays itself out between them: the interval. Brought into an image, one can compare the processual activity in the compost heap with a symphony. In a symphony, the tones and the intervals that separate the tones from one another and at the same time connect them generate rhythm, melody and harmony. A symphony has as a rule four movements, each one has its theme, which sounds forth in a streaming movement of tones, repeats itself and varies. In the same sense the sound ether or chemical ether works in the compost heap — not in the air element of tones, but in the moist earth element of substances. In the latter it is the bearer of all rhythms, repetitions and metamorphoses up to the end-point where the ripened humus appears. Thus one can regard humus, in the variations of its numerical compositions of carbon (C), oxygen (O), nitrogen (N), hydrogen (H) and sulphur (S), as it were as an earthly mirror of spherical harmonies.

4. The Earthing Phase

After the losses of substance in the first and second phases and the substance-transformation in the third, the volume of the heap gradually diminishes. It passes over into the condition of the earthy-solid; it consolidates and structures itself uniformly in a kind of material new-formation, the stable humus (Figure 16, p. 292). This process shows itself not only in the darkening of colour and the loosely crumbling structure, but also in qualities of smell and taste — perceptions, therefore, that bring one closer to the essential nature of what is material. The heap fills itself inwardly with a mild, earthy scent. The qualitative of taste is immanent to the processual activity itself: the compost heap has now been brought into a condition in which a small-animal world multiplying in masses determines what comes to pass. It is evolutively of a lower kind, lives in the darkness and in the moisture

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and is active in a highly specialised way, breaking down and transforming substances. Each animal species finds, prepared in the food chain, the nourishment toward which its sense of taste and digestive activity are organised. Last to appear is the compost worm related to the earthworm (Eisenia foetida), which performs by far the greater part of the actual digestive and material renewal work. Working in a similar direction, though falling less significantly in quality and mass, are ringed worms (Annelida), millipedes (Myriapoda), woodlice (Isopoda), insect larvae and others.

If one reaches into a compost heap that stands at the beginning of the earthing phase, one holds in one's hands a dark brown to blackish substance that still contains the last root, stem and leaf remnants occupied by microbes, and is frequently penetrated in clump-like fashion by a large mass of the compost worms just mentioned. The worms and other small creatures die off as soon as even the last remnant of organic residues has been digested and — in endogenous symbiosis with the intestinal bacteria — becomes casting. This casting, as an etherically enlivened substance, is as it were impregnated with astral forces which the digestive mass has absorbed in its passage through the animal digestive tract. On the one hand these bring about the transformation of nutritive humus into stable humus and bridle the decomposing activity of the microbes, or even redirect it toward a building-up one. On the other hand it is the astral forces mediated by the animal that make possible the union with clay minerals for the formation of clay-humus complexes. One can speak, in this final phase, with full justification of an astralization, an ensoulment of the earthen mound. Everything forms and individualizes itself organism-like into a unified whole.

The fourth phase takes the longest time until full earthing is reached. It lasts the longer, the richer in raw fibre the starting material is. In the BKV (cow/horse manure) this stage was reached after approximately four months. Worm activity began in the 7th and ended in the 13th week. The temperature held itself nearly constant at approximately 25 °C, on average approximately 4 to 5 °C above the fluctuations of the outside temperature.

The fourth and last stage, humus formation — or better, clay-humus formation — is the most mysterious. Here the youngest, most hidden, finest and most powerful among the four kinds of ether, the life ether, unfolds its principal activity. The life ether is the other pole to the element of the earthy-solid. The life ether «bildet Leben» (builds life). What appears on earth as stone has its life

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in the supersensible.^[263] In the compost heap, the life ether is the builder of life for a great manifold of living beings. This life is at the same time meaning-filled. When this meaning-filled element dies into form, the life ether is freed to compose substances once again into a living context — at the end, into humus. This humus becomes, on one side, on the basis of the oxygen within it, a preserver of life; on the other side, humus contains nitrogen, which — like oxygen and others — is woven into a variant-rich substance-composition resembling protein. Substantively, nitrogen forms the bridge to the astral-essential, to that which gives meaning. From this it may be concluded that in humus the life ether is the actual formative force, in whose service its three elder kindred — the warmth, light, and sound ethers — stand. And does it not become the actual formative force precisely because, through the mediation of nitrogen, it has the capacity to bring the astral into relationship with the etheric and the physical? Does not compost — stable humus — thereby become the most elemental fertilizer of an enduring soil-born fertility? And does not this life ether, having thus become formative force, lend to the living context of "soil and plant" the power to form itself into wholeness, to individualize itself, and to become the faithful image of its being, rooted in the supersensible? Wherever we recognize in the living realm mutually interpenetrating, meaning-filled or wisdom-filled interconnections, we are following the traces of the life ether.

Im Ganzen angeschaut, can one say in summary: Organic waste materials that have died out of a higher living context undergo in the compost heap, in a breaking-down direction, a renewed yet chaotically proceeding enlivening, then in a building-up direction a successive transformation and a renewed dying-into the earthed form of humus. This humus, however, carries within itself the germ of a new life on earth: the "universal seed of the general-plantlike." In this sense humus is a fertilizer out of life for the unfolding of the higher life — that is, for the vegetative development of cultivated plants. Compost fertilizer is — like a ripening fruit that nourishes human being and animal — a nourishing fruit for soil and plant. Through it, what is past connects itself to what is present and makes possible what is future.

In the four stages toward the earthing of substance that once belonged to a plant or an animal, there is mirrored — inconspicuously in the small and in temporal succession — a kind of repetition of the evolution of the Earth and the

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cosmos. In the primal beginning, pure warmth (warmth ether — a deed of sacrifice of high spiritual beings) filled "Old Saturn." This condition was followed, by way of the condensation of a part of the warmth, by the arising of the air element and with it of the light ether on "Old Sun"; then, through condensation of a part of the air, the water element on "Old Moon" and with it the chemical or sound ether; and finally, with the condensation of a part of the fluid element, the condition of the element of the earthy-solid, the Earth become Work, and with it the life ether.^[264]

What plays itself out in the compost heap — raised above the level of the soil as an artificial-artistic process, the earthing of former higher life into stable humus — takes place in a more concealed manner in all soils, wholly naturally in forest soils. On arable and garden soils this happening is, guided by soil cultivation (see p. 205 ff.), brought to a higher level of fertility. Green manure serves this aim as well: a cultivation of fast-growing grasses, crucifers, legumes and others, devoted specifically to the supply of humus. The wilted green masses of the ground cover supply the nutritive humus for breakdown stages 1 and 2, whereas the root mass remaining in the soil serves above all in building-up stages 3 and 4 for the formation of stable humus.

The green manure is mulched in and takes on the character of a surface composting. This involves ground covers of organic materials — from young greens to wood chips — between the plantings in horticulture. A mixture of various materials is also appropriate here. Pure straw or leaf material should be avoided: the one is too loose and bulky, the other lies too densely, and both decompose only slowly.^[265] The ground cover protects against evaporation, silting, crust formation, erosion, and weed growth; draws the microbial-worm life up into the soil layer and creates for it a steadily flowing source of nourishment; keeps the soil respiration going and enlivens the soil tilth.

The humification of the organic ground layer is attended to by a world of microbes and small creatures that is characteristic of the particularities of the site. Common to all soils, however — in place of the red compost worm — is the appearance of the earthworm (*Lumbricus terrestris*), the master of soil fertility. Alone, on sandy soils poor in both lime and clay, its number of individuals

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The earthworm's beneficial, humus-stabilising activity is thus very limited. In arable farming, surface composting is practised wherever possible in combination with stubble green manuring; a veil of fresh or partly rotted farmyard manure is worked into the ground cover.

The Application of Compost

Ripened compost is a plant-animal product. It is so not only because animal excretions and other components from domestic animals are mixed in, but because the process of humification as such could not take place without the astral efficacy of the small-creature world of the compost heap. The main components are of a plant nature; their transformation into humus is essentially subject to the activity and organising force of the animals. Compost is therefore not a lusty, vegetative-growth-forcing fertiliser. Its effect is one that shapes and forms the vegetative. This makes it the fertiliser for all those cultivated plants that bear fruit primarily in the vegetative — whether grass, herb or tree. This concerns meadow and pasture husbandry, garden and field vegetable growing, as well as fruit growing. Fruit formation, in an expanded sense, here means a substance-building that accumulates in individual organs of the plant, filling them with spatial presence, whose nourishing quality is oriented toward the needs of human being and animal. This nutritive capacity calls for a fertiliser that holds back the growth and reproductive force straining toward seed formation and allows it to be reshaped by the present radiations of the sun and the planetary cosmos and formed into nutritive substance. This fertiliser places itself ordering and shaping into the working of forces in the plants. It is the black, crumbling stable humus.

The Compost Manuring of Meadows and Pastures

Permanent grassland furnishes the fodder for ruminants and horses. This consists of the vegetative parts of the shoot — stem and leaf. The growth is grazed off repeatedly from spring through into autumn, or mown for green fodder or hay. On pastures, and still more on herb-rich meadows, individual herbs come to blossom in spring. After flowering they withdraw into the leaf-rich rosette stage. The grass grows up anew again and again from its tillering nodes. Meadow and pasture remain green through winter and summer alike. The growth is maintained largely in the purely

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vegetative growth — and so too the soil processes, which are reactivated to fresh turnovers after each grazing or cut. Soil and plant come to no rest. Generative ripening is denied them. Under intensive use this leads to a diminishment of species. Meadow and pasture therefore call for a manuring that compensates this deficiency — and that is compost. In spring, after the first grazing or the first hay cut, or better still in autumn, it mediates to the sward and the soil a ripened, earth-natured force-structure that configures the substance-building in stem and leaf toward both the reproductive and the nourishing side.

Regular compost manuring of permanent grassland makes the sward denser, the grazing more even and shorter, the species composition — above all in herbs — more varied, and the fodder qualitatively richer.

The Compost Manuring in Horticulture

As on permanent grassland, so too in horticulture the ripening soil-rest is absent; one crop follows another. The soil must be held, for the greater part of the year, at a high fertility level in the growth-eager mood of spring. The building toward food or fodder fruit does not unfold in the generative phase but in the time of most intensive growth. Large harvest masses of fresh, vigorous substance leave land and farm. What remains behind — chiefly the root mass — becomes nutritive humus for the following crop. Against this, the etheric-biologically shaping force of the astralized stable humus falls into the background. What otherwise plays itself out on the arable land during the soil's resting periods of its own accord — the reshaping of nutritive into stable humus — must be supplied to the garden ground from outside as ripened compost. Depending on the type of crop, it works specifically, mildly aromatizing on taste and smell, consolidating the tissues, preserving freshness, and intensifying gloss and colouration.

The materials for compost in horticulture encompass cleared harvest residues, organic wastes of all kinds, green-cut chippings, wilted cover crops, rock dust, horn shavings, and wherever possible farmyard manure. Refuse and sewage sludge are excluded. For weed-free specialist composts for propagation and glasshouse crops, every kind of mixture of legumes, grasses, oats and others is suitable. A steam-sterilization treatment of the compost, to destroy harmful germs and weed seeds,

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should, except for propagation soils, be avoided. The compost is thereby rendered largely a lifeless substrate.

Compost application is as a rule distributed evenly across the surface and worked in shallowly. On sandy, stony, and dry sites the laborious method of planting-hole manuring has proved its worth.

Under tropical climatic conditions, soils are poor in humus; organic matter is subject to accelerated mineralization. The same takes place there in the compost heap itself, owing to the high temperatures and moisture. Against this, a composting "underground" in large earthen pits has proved its worth there — pits into which a number of goats, sheep, or cattle are penned overnight. They tread down the generally bulky, mostly woody material, moisten it, and enrich it with their excretions. A good humus quality is achieved. A handful of such humus placed in a planting hole, the seed embedded in the humus and lightly covered with soil, produces an outright miracle: yields rise to previously unknown heights, and the prosperity of a population living in poverty grows.^[266]

A similar method is the construction of broad raised beds over drainable ditches filled with brushwood and scrub. Through the greatly slowed decomposition and transformation into humus in the subsoil, such a degree of enlivening arises in the earthen mound that on the smallest area a varied mixture of vegetables can continuously supply one or several families. This method too requires many hands; it works in a socially integrating way and secures modest prosperity.

It holds for the whole world: a skilfully managed humus economy liberates from famine and provides for a new cultural flowering.

Compost Manuring in Fruit Growing

Fruit growing has, since the twentieth century, developed from an extensive, variety-rich standard-tree scattered-orchard cultivation toward half-standard plantings and finally, with shorter productive lifespan, toward the variety-poor low-standard intensive orchard. In the course of this, fruit formation has shifted down from the high tree crown — raised into light and air — into air layers close to the earth; and parallel to this, the demand for manure has enormously increased.

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The fruit tree lignifies and at the same time bears tender, palatable fruits. It masters the polarity of light and dark, life and death, and the working of ether and astral forces. This finds its fullest expression in the standard tree. In it, the etheric vitality strives upward from the root system reaching broadly and deeply, through trunk and branches into the leafy shoots of the tree crown. This strong enlivening in air and warmth draws a rich insect life: "That which passes through the trees as something rich in astrality — in this the fully formed insect lives and moves."^[267] Polar to this, throughout everything that lignifies and above all in the root zone, "etheric poverty" prevails. In this milieu, more strongly exposed to the forces of mineralization, the larvae of the insects unfold. The standard tree, grafted onto a slowly growing rootstock, embodies as it were this polarity; it is undemanding and requires no manuring — least of all manuring that stimulates excessive shoot growth.

Different is its counterpole: the low-standard tree, cultivated in closed plantations in a monoculture-like manner on fast-growing rootstock. It grows rather as a weakly lignifying shoot from the ground and fruits close to the earth, as it were in youth. The cambium, which in the standard tree exerts a moderating effect on excessive vigour, requires in the low-standard tree a continuous stimulation through a humus-rich soil that roots can penetrate freely. The formative force and vitality of the humus continue, as it were, into the cambium itself. The low-standard tree requires a manure that in no way stimulates excessive shoot growth, but whose formative force — livingly astralized throughout by the larvae and worms of the compost heap — is akin to the cambium itself. In the standard tree, the mineralized earth turns itself inside out into trunk and branch-work of the crown. In the shoot-vigorous low-standard tree, this inversion is reduced, in favour of an equally high vitality both in the root zone and in the crown region. The intensive green manuring cultivated in low-standard and half-standard fruit growing works in the same sense.

Intensive fruit growing succeeds when the humus content of the soil exceeds 3%; optimal is up to around 6%, combined with a mineralically potent soil.

As compost material, in addition to the supplements already mentioned, all types of farmyard manure are preferably considered. By virtue of their animal origin, these possess formative forces of a higher order, which hold the shoot vigour of low-standard trees to a harmonious measure. This harmonization makes itself felt throughout the entire growth process with respect to a strongly

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reduced infection and pest pressure, as well as in the palatability and keeping quality of the fruits.

To summarize: compost acts in a healing and harmonizing way on the development of plants; it creates in the soil the foundation for its enduring fertility. It is advisable, in the diversely structured farm organism, to prepare composts separately for the main areas of application: for meadow-and-pasture compost, with farmyard manure as the main component, all waste materials are suitable — including those carrying weed seeds; in horticulture, essentially plant-based waste arises, which should be as free of weed seeds as possible; proportions of farmyard manure are always an advantage. In fruit plantations, alongside green manuring and before all other waste materials, farmyard manure should be given priority.

This recommendation appeals to the entire farm community — precisely through the practice of composting — to cultivate and bring to mastery that "personal relationship to the work with manure" already mentioned, extended through the handling of the biodynamic compost preparations (see p. 344 ff.), and through the various compost earths to meet the specific needs of the cultivated crops.

Level 2: Fertilization from the Soul-Nature of Domestic Animals

The soul-astral, which touches the plant — as a purely living-etheric being — only from without, has in the animal become inner being. The animal bounds itself as a bodily organism against the outside and forms its body into the instrument of its essential unfolding. Through its senses the animal experiences its outer world and unfolds from this experience its activity in warmth, air, water, and earth. By virtue of its soul-nature, the substances compose themselves into the wonder-work of its organs, which in accordance with their executing activities assume the most wondrous configurations. In each of these activities a wisdom in its perfection expresses itself. If one would draw near in knowledge to the being of an animal, one must strive to inwardize all that has been perceived through the senses and to form it into a lived thought-picture. The wisdom-filled nexus that reveals itself therein furnishes the feeling cognition with the infallible certainty that the forces which compose the substances of the animal body — and through which it is able to set itself into activity — have their essential ground in the astral or soul body of the animal

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What comes forth, therefore, from the digestive activity of animals receives its fertilising force through the particular character of the soul-nature. As was said of plants: "Living substance fertilises living substance" — so beyond this it holds for animals: "Soul-nature fertilises soul-nature." This matter was treated at length in the chapter "The Soul-Organisation or the Astral Body of the Agricultural Organism" (p. 111 ff.). The soul-nature of ruminants, and here in particular that of cattle, brings the fertilising force to its highest level on the plane of pure nature-working (see ch. "The Cow"). To understand fertilising force as the sum-effect of individual so-called nutrients springs from a theory no longer questioned. Whereas to seek the fertilising value — as has been emphasised more than once — in the "composer" (the goat, the sheep, or the cow), out of whose essential nature the substances arrange themselves into just this order and no other, breaks through the materialist barriers and frees the eye for questions directed toward the reality of life, soul, and spirit. When one pursues these questions, it proves itself: the fertilising value is the higher, the more in keeping with their essential nature the animals are kept, fed, tended, and bred. All of this sets in motion, out of the being of the domestic animals, forces that fertilise. The farm shaped into an organism fulfils these conditions.

The stock of domestic animals on the farm is so measured that it can on the one hand be nourished from the farm's own feed-base, and on the other hold in readiness sufficient manure for the farm's fields. Quantity and quality — nature produces. The preservation, or even the ennobling, of the manure up to its application is the affair of the human being.

The preservation of the livestock manure that grazes outdoors fertilises directly — dung and liquid manure on the spot. Regular spreading of the pats avoids rank patches. By contrast, the manure coming in from stall-keeping must be stored between mucking-out and application with as little loss as possible. The best method for preserving the fertilising force of farmyard manure including liquid manure is the one using straw bedding; the most questionable, though decidedly the most rational, is liquid manure or slurry. In slurry — liquid manure and dung combined — anaerobic fermentation processes take place under near-complete exclusion of air, in the course of which the organic nitrogen compounds mineralise to ammonia, which escapes as a gas into the air above all during spreading — with all the accompanying stench. A stirrer can mitigate this effect. The slurry acts upon the enlivening

of the watery-lunar element and thereby, bypassing the element of the earthy-solid, directly on the rankness of the plant — tending, in other words, in the direction of a moderate mineral fertilization. Straw bedding, by contrast, has a manifold advantage. The straw absorbs a portion of the liquid manure, mixes fully with the dung during mucking out, and on account of its bulkiness ensures aerobic conditions during storage. Add to this that the straw of the cereal is permeated and shaped by the same fructification process that forms the grain in the ear. The culm is thickened and encloses a larger volume of air in the hollow of the stalk than is the case with wild grasses. In this one can recognise the expression of a stronger inward working and astral working. Moreover, after developing its silica skin in the ripening process, it gleams and colours itself in tones of yellow, reddish through to gold. It surrounds itself with a sheath of opal. The straw is a sun-fruit and makes the cow manure all the more a sun-earth manure — "the gold of the farmer."

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Deep-litter manure

The best and least wasteful storage is in the deep-litter stall. The cattle, sheep, and goats urinate and dung onto the fresh layer of straw; the liquid manure is absorbed completely by the straw. Its nitrogen content accelerates the aerobic breakdown of the nitrogen-poor straw. The animals themselves fulfil the requirement of "keep it moist and tread it firm."

The deep-litter stall does, however, have the highest straw requirement — up to 15 kg per animal per day, compared to the treading-manure stall at 3 to 5 kg, and the bedded cubicle loose-housing at 0.5 to 1 kg.^[268] In the interest of solid manure preparation and thereby the minimisation of slurry production, the quantities of bedding in the treading-manure and cubicle loose-housing stalls can be increased accordingly. A combination of tie-stall housing — for feeding and tending — with overnight stay in the deep-litter stall reduces the straw requirement. The topmost bedding layers of the deep-litter stall, the lying mattress, warm themselves to approximately 30°C and pass through the first phase of the compost heap — the warmth phase — with moderate material breakdown. Through the treading of the animals, the bedding layers lying beneath compact themselves; they cool and pass over into fermentation processes; under exclusion of air they become subject increasingly to a fermentation. Analogous to phase 2 of the compost heap, the rampant proliferation of the microbes is

Der Tiefstall hat allerdings den höchsten Strohbedarf mit bis zu 15 kg/Tier und Tag gegenüber dem Tretmiststall mit 3 bis 5 kg und dem eingestreuten Liegeboxenlaufstall mit 0,5 bis 1 kg.^[269] Im Interesse der Festmistbereitung und damit der Minimierung des Gülleanfalls können im Tretmist- und Liegeboxenlaufstall die Aufwandmengen an Einstreu entsprechend erhöht werden. Eine Kombination von Anbindestall (Fütterung, Pflege) mit nächtlichem Aufenthalt im Tiefstall verringert den Strohbedarf. Die obersten Einstreulagen des Tiefstalles, die Liegematratze, erwärmen sich auf ca. 30°C und durchlaufen bei mäßigem Stoffabbau die erste, das ist die Wärmephase des Komposthaufens. Durch das Festtreten der Tiere verdichten sich die darunter liegenden Einstreulagen; sie kühlen ab und gehen in Gärungsprozesse über; sie unterliegen unter Luftabschluss zunehmend einer Fermentation. Analog zur Phase 2 des Komposthaufens wird die wuchernde Vermehrung der Mikroben durch

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held in check. *Collembola* and other small creatures find no living conditions in this medium any longer. Ferments produced autolytically or secreted by bacteria initiate the final phase of fermentation: water, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and so on are cleaved. The organic tissues dissolve, leaving only friable straw remnants and lignified parts; aromas develop, the mass becomes homogeneous and takes on a brownish colouration. The manure now smells like bread — as people are accustomed to say — when the fermentation has gone well. Treated several times with the biodynamic preparations and stored undisturbed over the summer, the ripened product is "incorporated" into the arable land. To avoid waterlogging and thereby putrefaction in the base layer of the deep-litter stall, the appropriate subfloor would be rammed clay or ton. The same rule applies here as for the compost heap — direct contact with the earth. From ignorance of the finer workings of forces, the law unfortunately prescribes here too an impermeable concrete floor. The danger of waterlogging that this entails can be counteracted with a layer of wood chips introduced before the animals are brought in for housing in autumn.

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Stacked Manure

In the cubicle, treading-manure, and tie stall, mucking-out takes place daily — or with push-bar scrapers several times a day. A portion of the liquid manure is collected separately. The remainder reaches a nearby intermediate store as a dung-bedding-liquid-manure mixture. In this store, phases 1 and 2 — warming and aeration — begin already after a short dwell time, and with them uncontrolled breakdown processes with substance losses. From the intermediate store, the solid manure is either taken to field clamps for further rotting or composted. In both cases phases 1 and 2 set in once more, with renewed substance losses. To minimise these, the time-honoured stacked-manure procedure should be reconsidered and freshly practised. An impermeable base slab with drainage channels running all round for liquid manure and rainwater is, however, unavoidable here. The fresh manure accumulating daily in a recessed bay is taken up as promptly as possible with a front loader and dung grab, and set down in portions side by side across the width of the manure slab. Precise working is called for here. In front of this first row a second and third follow, and so on. Meanwhile the first row, the second, and so on, warm up, so that in the same sequence the second layer can be placed portion by portion, and finally a third and fourth layer, and so on, up to the maximum height technically achievable. Once this is reached with the first row, the first layer of the adjoining section can be begun. In this way the stack builds up gradually in breadth and full length. Through the pressure of the overlying strata, the phases of warming, degassing, and moistening are run through rapidly and incompletely, and end in fermentation. To that extent the same processes take place in the correctly assembled stacked manure as in the deep-litter stall. Even so, substance losses — around 20% — are higher than in the deep-litter stall on account of the all-round exposure to the outer air. Rotting advances more quickly along the near-vertical side faces and the surface, as is visible among other things in the appearance of cap fungi.

Manure Compost

In biodynamic farming a distinction is drawn between the "manure" that comes from the animals and the compost that is chiefly of plant origin. These are two different force-compositions that are doing the fertilising.

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In the composting of farmyard manure the same processes run their course as those described for plant compost. In its fully ripened, refined form a stable humus of a particular kind is built up. Its force-constellation preserves the astrality of the domestic animals carried in the manure. It is their soul forces that lend the manure its extraordinary long-term efficacy. This holds in especial measure for compost from pure cattle dung, or from cattle dung mixed in part with other dung. It mediates to the life of the plant forces that reach beyond the astral-soul realm — forces spoken of in the chapter "The Cow" as "I-disposition." This designation points to a nexus of forces of a higher order, one that not only makes the cultivated plants the image of their supersensible being, but creates within them the disposition for that being to enter into relationship again with what, in past evolution, congealed out of it in space and time as accomplished work — namely, the plant form as it steps into appearance — and to inaugurate new possibilities of development. It becomes clear from this that true manuring from enlivened and ensouled nature has, and must have, a breeding value, a value for the development of cultivated plants.

It is advisable to mix into the manure compost, alongside the cattle dung, all the other kinds of dung from the sheep, goats, horses, pigs, and poultry kept on the farm. Each of these animal species carries out, as the result of its digestive activity, a "cosmic-qualitative analysis" of the fodder appropriate to its own being (see chapter "The Cow — Cosmic-Qualitative Analysis and I-Disposition," p. 156 f.). The result of this analysis impresses itself, as it were, as a pattern of the force-composition of the manure. When various such patterns unite in the compost heap, a universal fertilizer comes into being that — as described above — stimulates and works through the fruiting in the stage of vegetative growth, as is pre-eminently required in meadows and pastures, in intensive fruit-growing, and in vegetable cultivation.

There is no occasion to compost the entire yield of animal manure. It is too laborious and causes storage losses of 50% and more. Suitability for use in arable farming is given when the solid manure has lost the sharpness of its smell — or, in the case of pig manure, the stench. This is so when it has run through rotting phase 1 and partly phase 2, as in stacked and deep-litter manure. The further course of rotting then continues in the soil, under the direction pre-eminently of the earthworm and the life- and sense-activity of the roots in concert with the microbes. In the composting of farmyard manure that is too moist — mostly a consequence of insufficient

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litter (pig manure) — the formation of wet cores occurs, which require timely turning.

Liquid Manure

Liquid manure and solid manure have, by reason of the physiological processes from which they arise, polar fertilizing qualities. As explained in the example of the cow (chapter "The Cow," p. 146 ff.), solid manure arises from the digestive system, in which the food taken in from outside — foreign to the body — is broken down step by step through the act of rumination, the activity of the rumen, the glandular stomach, the small and large intestines, and sifted in its passage through the mucous membrane walls. From there the mineralized digestive substances, stripped of their foreignness, pass into the venous bloodstream and onward into the liver. Urine, by contrast, is an excretion from the interior of the body and passes through the arterial bloodstream into the kidney, and from there through the bladder into the outer world. The kidney sifts the body's own substances and separates out those that have become unusable, in liquid form, as urine. An essential constituent of urine is urea, a breakdown product of protein metabolism. This nitrogen compound still carries the activity of the animals' soul body and life body. They carry outward with the urine forces of these two members of the human being — and it is these forces that fertilize. Different in the case of cattle dung: this consists of indigestible fodder residues, interspersed with spent mucous substances of the digestive organs and impregnated with the result of the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" (cf. chapter "Cosmic-Qualitative Analysis and I-Disposition," p. 156 f.). If the fertilizing forces of the urine stream outward from the cow's past-acting, moon-like astrality, then to these forces in cattle dung are added those that ray in presently from the sun. These are the forces that the cow in particular — out of its singular sense-relationship to the fodder, in the course of the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" from rumination through the digestive tract to the back-raying function of the horns as "I-disposition" — impresses into the manure.

Liquid manure is stored in pits or open elevated tanks; under largely anaerobic conditions it undergoes fermentation. It is therefore advisable to have at least two containers for alternating storage, so that after filling there is sufficient time for after-ripening. The refinement of the liquid manure takes place mechanically through stirring and aeration, and biologically or

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through the biodynamic route, by means of additives. The former promotes aerobic breakdown and transformation processes; the latter acts in a directing way on the entire course of the process right through to maturity. Proven additives that biologically re-bind the ammonia arising from the breakdown of urea include refined farmyard manure composts in small quantities, as well as chopped stinging nettle, sawdust and wood shavings. The biodynamic compost preparations (see chapter "The Compost or Manure Preparations," p. 360 ff.) are submerged in the liquid manure and slurry in permeable bags, suspended from a float. To avoid nitrogen losses, floating covers of straw, stinging nettles, etc., with raw phosphate and basalt meal scattered in, can also serve in open fermentation chambers.^[270]

In today's customary litter-free indoor housing of pigs and cattle, flushed manure — slurry — arises. This mixture of water, liquid manure and dung ferments, if left untreated, into a foul-smelling, fast-acting fertilizer. The mineralization of the substances is far advanced. In biodynamic farming, the preparation of solid manure should be aimed for instead of slurry production — as far as possible. In purely grassland areas, lack of bedding frequently leaves no other choice. All the more important it then becomes to take all measures for the refinement of the slurry, just as they apply to liquid manure. As a rule, raw slurry from factory farming operations is applied to the fields untreated. Apart from its so-called nutrient contents, it is regarded as a waste product that must be disposed of — with all the consequences of odour nuisance, nitrous oxide off-gassing (laughing gas, N₂O), nitrate loading of groundwater, sealing of soil pores by mucous substances, impoverishment of the soil flora and fauna, and the reduction of the nutritive value of fodder through predominantly low-molecular protein compounds. The high esteem once accorded to animal manure has fallen victim to nutrient-based thinking. With careful refinement — above all through the biodynamic preparations — and sufficiently long storage, it can succeed by degrees to produce from slurry, too, a sustainably effective manure that works in a building way into the soil processes.

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The Application of Farm-Own Animal Manures

For all crops, manuring with farmyard manure is a boon: as fresh manure for the solanaceous plants, potatoes and tomatoes; in a partially rotted condition for root crops and cereals; and thoroughly earthy-composted for the long-term field fodder crops, as well as for grassland, horticulture and fruit growing. On account of its sustainably high fertilising force, not every crop requires an annual application — rather, within a well-composed crop rotation in arable farming, every three years to the root crops. For good yield formation, the requirement of the root crops is met with approximately 300 dt/ha. With regard to the total manure volume of the farm, an annual manure quantity of one livestock unit (LSU) per hectare is ideal (1 LSU corresponds to 500 kg live weight). As a rule, with a herd of cattle including young stock, one LSU per animal can be counted on. One cattle LSU produces, depending on the quantity of bedding, 80 to 100 dt of solid manure. Including the manures of the other domestic animals, a stocking rate of one LSU per hectare is achieved on smaller and medium-sized farms — frequently even exceeded; in the case of large farms with predominantly arable operations, the number of LSUs per hectare falls to a critical low of 0.4 to 0.3. Cattle manure forms the main bulk, to which the smaller quantities of manure from the remaining domestic animal stock are mixed as far as possible. Surplus manure quantities are applied, within the crop rotation, to the depleting spring-sown crop before the main fodder crop, at approximately 100 dt.

The application of solid manure to the root crop takes place as a rule the previous year onto the stubble of the preceding crop. After light incorporation as a mulch, a cover crop follows, which through the solid manure forms an equally rich root mass as green mass, and with this a well-tilled seedbed for the spring sowing of the root crop.

Well-matured liquid manure and, if need be, slurry are welcome fertilizers when it comes to giving winter sowings a developmental boost in spring. Winter-kill and thinned-out stands, resulting from alternating frosts in spring, can be stimulated toward more intensive tillering. Urea assists in this. This nitrogen compound, mineralized from protein metabolism, receives its specific efficacy through the astral forces that derive from the soul body of the animals and that configure the material composition of the urine in which the nitrogen is bound. A further field of application is stubble fertilization with a view to the rapid development of a green-manure cover crop. On the pasture, the

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The application of slurry in early spring is helpful, and where applicable under rotational grazing after each grazing cycle. The application of liquid manure or slurry to stands in full growth — especially root crops — should be avoided.

The Efficacy of the Farm's Own Animal Manures

With each of the manures one must ask after the being — after the soul-astral force-potential that, through the etheric body and the physical body, so arranges the substances and keeps them in flow that it can appear in its image in the physical-sense world and act in accordance with its being. Individual essential traits of the wild fauna and of the domestic animals were discussed in the chapter "The Soul Organization or the Astral Body of the Agricultural Organism" (p. 111 ff.). There it was established that each animal species, through its bodily activity, makes a contribution to the whole of nature that is, so to speak, a manuring one. Through the activity of the ensouled animal world a wisdom-filled web of relationships arises that pervades the whole of nature in a meaning-giving way. Among the plant-eating mammals it is the ruminants whose organ activity is organized toward preparing a manure that is capable of enlivening and ensouling the "diaphragm organ" — the soil — to a higher degree. This cannot be inferred from the merely quantitative substance-composition alone. It is rather a question of the qualitative relationship of the substances to one another. This bears the stamp of the being of the cow, the sheep, the goat, and so on. The highest level of perfection is reached by the cattle. In the chapter "The Cattle" (p. 146 ff.) an attempt was made to characterize the digestive process permeated and lived through by its essential being, as well as its metabolically-related sense activity and intelligence. If one seeks from there to arrive at an understanding of the long-lasting, beneficial effect of cattle manure in particular upon soil and plants, then perhaps the following consideration can carry us further: The plant grows along the Earth-Sun axis. The root strives into the depths in the direction of the Earth's centre, the culm, stem or trunk rises vertically upward toward the sun. From this vertical axis, leaves and branches grow outward into breadth and width. The leaf-work, spreading itself out horizontally in flat surfaces, receives the raying-in effects of sun and planets by direct path and works them up into living substance, supported by the "earth-sap" (*Xylem*) ascending within the stem, inside the cambium. This conveys to the horizontally striving growth, on the one hand, the vitality of the nutritive humus and the formative force of the

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stable humus in combination with the lime — thus the fertilising forces peculiar to plant compost. This holds equally for the finely branching lateral root-work spreading itself out into breadth. It is otherwise with taproot, culm, stem and trunk. Their vertical impulse is grounded in substance not by humus as manure, but by the crystalline of quartz, the silicates and clay minerals (cf. the chapter "The Origin of Clay Minerals and Their New Formation", p. 209 ff.). These silica minerals mediate the raying-in forces of the sun, the planets and fixed stars by an indirect path. These gather themselves, through the working of the clay minerals, into the "cosmic upward streaming" within the plants.^[271] The I of the human being, his spirit being, gives him the force of uprightness; the animal is animal because it does not possess this force in its fullness; it has, however — as the cattle in a particular way — "the I as disposition." The plant, rooted fast in the earth, shapes its vertical form in "cosmic upward streaming" as the image of its supersensible spirit being. Animal manure is now able — so one may surmise — by virtue of the "I-disposition" woven into it through the astral body and etheric body of the animal, to make the plant being more independent in relation to its being held within the locally given conditions of the heights and the depths. Through the dung, the disposition is mediated to the plant to individualize itself even into its outward form-building, to connect itself more strongly, in its own essential nature, with the workings of earth and cosmos. Seen thus, one must — as already indicated — attribute above all to cattle manure, with regard to the living context of soil and plants, an "educative" capacity.

The manures of the domestic animals — above all those of the ruminants — work upon the substance-process and the type-true form-imprinting of the plant. They strengthen the forces through which the supersensible being of the plant brings itself to appearance. This reveals itself in its vertical orientation along the root–shoot–blossom axis, and therewith, conditioned by this, in the form-changes of the leaves from the base toward the blossom.

The light-and-shade experiment was a multi-year field trial with numerous variants, examining the effects of farmyard manure compost compared to an application of mineral salts — nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potassium (NPK) — and a treatment with the so-called biodynamic horn silica preparation

(cf. chapter "The Horn Silica Preparation," pp. 348 ff.) under full sunlight, in half-shade and deep shade, using rye, wheat, oats, potatoes, spinach and radishes. The programme of investigation encompassed morphological phenomena, a range of analytical parameters, and evaluations carried out by means of the image-forming method of copper chloride crystallisation.^[272]

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Here only that part of the trial will be highlighted which concerns the effect of farmyard manure compared to the application of NPK.

Evaluations by Morphological Findings

The trial confirmed the experiences — long familiar to the attentively observing practitioner — of the universally positive effects of animal manure in the form of composted cattle dung:

The root opens up for itself a larger soil space;
it develops according to the type-disposition of its species in an ideally typical way;
the taproot (cosmic type) of carrot, beetroot, radish, spinach shows a strong drive downward and is accompanied laterally by a fine root system tapering pyramidally toward the base (Fig. 17).
With radishes, the fruit bodies tend toward a thickening of the hypocotyl — toward the formation of a perfect spherical form, from which the root clearly sets itself apart. With NPK this transition was more turnip-like in character; the taproot lost itself and divided near the surface.
With the type that by nature develops in a spherical and strongly divided way (earthly root type) — bush bean, onion, grain — this phenomenon of disorientation of the root with respect to its species-disposition emerged more markedly under NPK.
With regard to stem formation (internode lengths), scarcely any differences were to be established; yet with manure compost dressing, a lengthening of the uppermost, ear-bearing internode was consistently striking. This surge of vitality also made itself felt at the stem base through a higher degree of tillering — that is, through a greater number of ear-bearing tillers per individual plant.
With regard to leaf development, under full daylight the outward appearance of the leaves approaches — in space, in form, colour, serration, hairiness and articulation of the leaf blade, in the firmness of the cuticula — the xeromorphic ideal type of the species; and equally in time, in the sequence of leaves from

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Fig. 17: Root images of spinach with manure compost dressing and NPK application in the light-and-shade experiment.

... the large-lobed, pinnate, basal leaves upward to the small, stem-close, tapering ones in the transition toward the blossom. This strongly rhythmically shaped mode of appearance finds more pronounced expression in the manure compost variants than in the NPK variants (Fig. 18, p. 316). Among the monocotyledonous grains the same tendency appears. With manure compost dressing the leaves are narrower, more firmly structured, and more strongly silicified at the leaf margins and tips. The NPK plants contrast with their tendency toward hydromorphism, like shade plants.

* Just as in the monocotyledonous (single-cotyledon) plants the internode sequence from node to node is characteristic — it increases progressively in length toward the top — so too in the dicotyledonous flowering plants the...

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Fig. 18: Leaf sequences of radishes with manure compost dressing compared to NPK in the light-and-shade experiment.

Abbildung 18: Blattfolgen von Radies bei Mistkompostdüngung im Vergleich zu NPK im Licht-Schatten-Versuch.

Leaf metamorphosis.^[273] It maps spatially the dynamics of growth as it unfolds in time.

The leaf metamorphosis from the basal leaves upward toward the blossom is shown for the example of radishes in Figure 18.
The basal forms show, in the lower part pinnate, in the upper part rounded, little-articulated and finely toothed leaf blades. In the successive leaves the leaf blade reduces itself more and more to the upper portion. It then becomes strongly toothed and increasingly lanceolate-pointed. This polar leaf-shaping in the primary as against the successive leaves is most sharply expressed in light. It loses itself toward deep shade, in which the successive leaves retain the habit of the primary leaves for a longer time (less toothing, more rounded blade).
The same difference appears in comparing manure compost dressing to NPK. The former goes in step with the influence of light; in the latter, leaf transformation is similarly inhibited as in the plants growing under shade.

Assessments Based on the Analytical Findings

Evaluation on the basis of quantitative comparisons of material components is only conditionally possible without taking the time factor into account. What does a great quantity of a substance say — what does a small quantity say? The reference point for assessment must be sought in the processual activity within the plant with regard to an endpoint. This endpoint, in terms of nutritive value, is maturity. Toward this endpoint, build-up processes lead through continuous transformation of substance compositions; away from it, breakdown processes lead. Tracing both processes together first yields criteria for a reasonably secure quality statement. From the analysis of the build-up processes the concept of "ripening physiology" gains content. When the life processes come to rest in maturity — the enzymatic activities reduce themselves to a minimum — the optimal degree of quality is reached and a natural storage capacity, given for a certain period of time, is assured. But if the enzymes remain active in full ripeness, the fruit remains physiologically in a state of immaturity and is exposed to breakdown after a short time; its nutritive value must accordingly be rated as inferior.

In the light-and-shade trial, the dynamics of substance build-up were determined by means of ratio figures — from precursors signalling immaturity to those characterising the state of full ripeness. It showed that in fruits fertilised with manure compost the degree of transformation of the substance compositions characteristic of full ripeness increases:

Thus the relative ascorbic acid content, which results from the ratio of dehydroascorbic acid (precursor) to ascorbic acid (Vitamin C);
thus a higher content of disaccharides as against monosaccharides; the latter are signs of still-continuing assimilatory activity;
thus the higher relative protein content; this characterises the ratio of total protein (crude protein) to pure, highly structured protein. The crude protein, which contains alongside the pure protein low-molecular protein compounds down to amino acids and nitrogen salts such as nitrates,

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shows in leaf vegetables with vigorous growth particularly steep rises upon application of NPK salts.

Thus the very low enzyme activities of the oxidising dehydrase and of the sucrose-cleaving saccharase in the harvested produce of wheat, potatoes, vegetables. With NPK applications these elevated themselves, as in the plants growing under shade, steeply to a level indicating immaturity.
Similar findings in favour of manure compost dressing were shown by the silica and ash contents of cereal straw; in the grain kernels no differences in content were to be established in this regard.

The routine analytics commonly in use confine themselves as a rule to the establishment of quantities — residue analyses of harmful substances, for instance, leading to the fixing of questionable limit values that have to be revised time and again — or to so-called quality-conferring constituents. What is lacking here for the interpretation of the data is the conceptual point of reference: such as, in the case of the light-and-shade trial, the comparison under defined conditions; or the relative, physiological resting state of ripeness; or the specific composition in which a substance appears and fulfils a particular function. A reliable statement becomes possible only — and this cannot be done without enormous effort — when the analytical data furnish confirmation for concepts that one has gained from the thinking beholding of life's manifestations.

Assessment by the Crystal-Diagnostic Method of Copper Chloride Crystallisation

In contrast to causal analytics, which confines itself to researching the parts of a living system, the "sensitive copper chloride crystallisation" according to Ehrenfried Pfeiffer^[274] permits, by morphological-diagnostic means, a judgement to be gained concerning the "living organism of the plant" as a wholeness that maps itself at the inorganic level as a defined physico-chemical system. The copper chloride crystallisation is accordingly suited to

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Assessment by the Crystal-Diagnostic Method of Copper Chloride Crystallisation

to render the formative-forces organisation of the plant sense-perceptible in a dead image. The principle rests on the change in texture of crystallising copper chloride needles when various plant extracts are added as co-solvents. On account of this fact, during crystallisation on plane glass plates in climate chambers, extract-characteristic and reproducible needle-structures and structural complexes (texture or habit) arise, which can be assessed comparatively.

Pfeiffer's method was further developed by many experimenters, above all with regard to crystal diagnostics: in the field of human medicine by Selawry,^[275] in the field of foodstuffs by v. Hahn,^[276] in the field of plants by Krüger,^[277] in the field of the quality of plant products by Enquist,^[278] Petterson^[279] and, for the present state of the art, by Doesburg.^[280]

The diagnostics of the crystal texture of copper chloride images rests on the comparison of the crystal image of the fresh extract with those from ageing stages of the same. Underlying this procedure is the consideration that the rate at which the fresh juice decomposes (ages) under defined conditions is a function of the quality of this fresh-juice extract. One finds that ageing — that is, autolytically and microbially degrading — plant extracts imprint themselves in the crystal image in a sequence of reproducible crystal-image types, so-called ageing stages (Figure 19, p. 320).

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Figure 19: Crystal images of an ageing series of potatoes in the light-and-shade trial (Var. 9).

the quality assessment: the speed at which the substance under examination, when subjected to decomposition, passes through the successive stages of the degradation series in the process of crystallising out. A rapid decomposition is the hallmark of inferior quality. The same holds when a fresh extract of a sample already shows features of an ageing image from the reference series.

In the light-and-shade trial a further point of reference for quality assessment was added: the variation of full light, half-shade, and deep shade. One of the questions asked was: against the background of the polarity between plants grown in full sunlight and plants grown in shade, can the working of forces of dung compost and NPK be qualitatively differentiated by means of the crystallisation images? Every plant species leaves in the crystal image a

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Figure 20: Typical crystal textures of potatoes in the light-and-shade trial.

characteristic imprint of its formative forces organisation. Where this is able to unfold unimpeded by disturbing influences, a correspondingly fine-membered, reproducible crystal image arises. In all the cultures examined — rye, wheat, oats, and several vegetable species — the crystal-morphological findings show, in their tendency, a striking agreement. The differences between dung-compost manuring and the application of NPK stand out with approximately the same strength as those between light and shade.

Typical crystal textures, using potatoes in the light-and-shade trial as the example, are illustrated in Figure 20.

With regard to dung compost compared with NPK: «in the light», variants 9 and 12 and variants 10 and 11 respectively are to be compared, and «in deep shade» variants 1 and 4 and variants 2 and 3 respectively. Under «C.V.» relative «crystallisation value numbers» are given. These abstract the visual comparison. According to a key, the sum of the individual crystal-texture phenomena is captured in a single number: optimum = 100, pessimum = 0. To the trained eye, the crystal image itself supplies the text for conceptual evidence.

In all the plants examined — potatoes among them (Figure 20) — the crystal image, under direct sunlight, approaches the respective texture optimum. Each plant species imprints pictorially the crystal image corresponding to its etheric organisation. In the «light plants», this shows a good coordination of the individual structural elements, gliding transitions between needle-stems and fine branchings, as well as fine, contoured

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needles. In deep shade, the addition-specific order of the needle structures is progressively lost in favour of a general radial orientation. The needle branches become broader through the accretion of fine branchings; they attach irregularly and at stagnation zones of the needle stems. The same picture is shown by stage 2 and, in heightened form, stage 3 of the ageing series of variant 9 in Figure 19 (p. 320).

The type of crystal images in Figure 20 (p. 321) corresponds, with dung-compost manuring, to the light variants; with NPK applications, tendentially to the shade variants. In the latter, the following textural features are especially conspicuous: formation of secondary nucleation centres during crystallisation, branchings at stagnation zones, broad radially directed, irregular, less branched needle stems, unequally long, fan-shaped fine branchings. The coordination of the needle structures is subject, to a lesser degree, to a unified formative principle (cf. var. 11). In the majority of cases, the crystal value numbers of the «light plants» of the NPK plots do not differ from those of the «shade plants» of the organically manured trial members. The particularly striking agreement of the NPK crystal images of the light variants with those of the shaded trial members speaks for a substantially reduced degree of vitalisation, or nutritive value (Figure 19, var. 2 and 11, p. 320).

All in all — the old peasant knowledge, all practical experience, the long-term manuring trials,^[281] and the light-and-shade trial reproduced here in extract — all point to the singular significance of manuring through domestic animals, pre-eminently the ruminants. They crown the work of nature by conferring a threefold blessing: through their being and their manure they bring

to the middle between the «heights and depths», to the «diaphragm soil», enduring fertility,

In the rocks, the element of the «earthy-solid» manifests itself. They have become the 'Work' of crystals out of a primordial metabolism-like life-activity in the development of the Earth. Only through the processes of weathering, the dissolution of crystalline forms, can the substances be raised again into the processes of living nature. As such they have no fertilising value. The plants reproduce themselves not only through the seed, but at the same time through the residues of the «universal plant-nature», which set metabolic processes in motion in the soil. Past life transforms itself into the «universal seed» humus, which fertilises future life. The animals, finally, fertilise out of the forces of their enlivened and ensouled nature. This reveals itself outwardly in the seemingly inexhaustible variety of their activities of being, and inwardly in the activity of the digestion and preparation of an enlivened and ensouled manure.

From the sequence of levels set out above, one could easily conclude that the excretions of the human being would bring about a further enhancement of fertilising force. The opposite, however, is the case! A glance at the structure of the members of the human being and the digestive activity resulting from it throws light on the matter. The purely spirit-resting kernel of being of the human being irradiates the bodily members and establishes itself in them through the I-organisation. It works upon these members of the human being and reshapes them towards higher stages of their development. In this consists the further development of the human being — one that, into all future, is to be won by the human being alone. Most powerfully, in the present time, the spirit-soul of the human being works at the reshaping of the still partly body-bound astral body into the body-freely working so-called «spirit self».^[282] This work of the I upon the members of the human being — that is, upon the life or etheric body and the physical body as well — lays claim to forces. The I takes these up through the I-organisation: through the soul by way of the perceptions through the senses, and through the body by way of nourishment. The substances and forces of the earth nourish the body, so that the spirit-soul of the human being may, within this body, in the unfolding of the soul-activities

Aus der genannten Stufenfolge ließe sich mühelos schlussfolgern, dass die Ausscheidungen des Menschen eine abermalige Steigerung der Düngekraft bewirken würden. Das Gegenteil aber ist der Fall! Ein Blick auf das Wesensgliedergefüge des Menschen und die daraus resultierende Verdauungstätigkeit klärt darüber auf. Der rein im Geiste ruhende Wesenskern des Menschen durchstrahlt die leiblichen Wesensglieder und befestigt sich in diesen in der Ich-Organisation. Er arbeitet an diesen Wesensgliedern und schafft sie zu höheren Stufen ihrer Entwicklung um. Hierin besteht die weitere Entwicklung des Menschen – eine solche, die in alle Zukunft von ihm selbst errungen sein will. Am stärksten arbeitet die Geistseele des Menschen in gegenwärtiger Zeit an der Umgestaltung des zum Teil noch leibgebundenen Astralleibes zum leibfrei wirkenden sogenannten «Geistselbst».^[283]Diese Arbeit des Ich an den Wesensgliedern, also auch des Lebens- oder Ätherleibes und physischen Leibes, beansprucht Kräfte. Das Ich nimmt sie über die Ich-Organisation, seelisch durch die Wahrnehmungen über die Sinne und leiblich durch die Nahrung auf. Die Stoffe und Kräfte der Erde ernähren den Leib, damit die Geist-Seele des Menschen in diesem Leib in der Entfaltung der Seelentätigkeiten

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of thinking, feeling and willing. In the case of the human being, the digestive process of nourishment stands exclusively in his service — not at the same time in that of the earth. He withdraws from the nourishment taken in all forces for himself alone. He is, by comparison with animal and plant, an egoist. What the human being excretes by way of the kidney-bladder process as fluid, and by way of intestinal digestion as more solid matter, is stripped of all nourishing forces — it is lifeless, soulless, and spiritless slag. Its substances are completely «decomposed» out of their living and soul-nexus; they are thrown back as N, P, K, Si, Ca, and so forth into the condition of the purely mineral, and can act only as such.

Thus human excretions — in the form of sewage sludge used as fertilizer, for instance — are unsuitable for the production of human food. When deployed with deliberate intent, they are «anti-manure», comparable to the nitrogen synthesized from the air.

On account of the materialistic way of looking at things — substance, regardless of its origin, is one and the same substance — one is repeatedly inclined to search for methods by which the «valuable nutrients» N, P, K of human faecal matter might yet be made serviceable for plant cultivation. The practice of vegetable production on the so-called «sewage fields» near large cities has been abandoned. Sewage sludge drying and composting is practised with success. Yet the product ought to be employed exclusively outside agriculture — for restoration purposes in road-building and landscape construction.

What the human being leaves behind bodily, under the direction of the spirit-soul, is drained of its forces by that spirit-soul; he gives nothing back to nature. Where, then, does the spirit of the human being work in a fertilising way? It is the body-free part of his being — the spirit-soul — that in thinking, feeling and willing turns toward the things and beings of nature.

The Spirit-Activity in Work

The animal extends its being into the life-surroundings in which it is active. In this activity there holds sway a wisdom-filled instinctive life that weaves a fabric of interconnections. Understood in this sense, the animal fertilises through its doing within the household of nature. What takes place is subject to an iron necessity. Thanks to his awakening self-consciousness, the capacity for freedom in action is inborn in the human being. He can decide for this or that — for good or evil, for truth or falsehood.

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What governs this is conscience, into which all thoughts, feelings and impulses of will ultimately flow, and from which all actions receive their particular moral-ethical stamp. In the older peasant culture the saying held: «The tread of the farmer fertilises.» One walked behind the plough holding the reins, or as a sower across the field, or in the Sunday round across the fields. As true as that saying once was, it is equally true today — in metamorphosis. Once it was still immediate instinctive experience, drawn from folk-knowing, what the earth says to the one who treads upon it, what speaks from the moods of the surroundings, what the soil breathes in, what it breathes out. One knew then what followed as the right next thing to do. Today, the certainty of «doing the right thing rightly at the right moment» must be newly won from the force of the consciousness soul. While walking across the field — after a day's work, say, filled as one is with the many impressions of the day — one feels a certainty arising from unknown depths of soul, not born of sense-bound thinking. Out of the felt wholeness of the farm and all its present living connections, one suddenly knows what is to be done the following day — whether to turn one's attention to areas of the farm that have fallen out of sight, or whether this or that crop urgently requires a treatment of care, such as harrowing or a preparation spray. Intuitions present themselves, rising dimly into consciousness from the sphere of the will. One knows oneself standing in a spirit-living stream from yesterday to today and from today to tomorrow. To let ideas flow thinking into the work so that in the work, through feeling, they lay hold of the will — this is what opens the way for intuitions that lead toward a new art of fertilising out of the spirit, toward an art of enlivening substance, of the «solid, earthy itself.»^[284]

The Farm Individuality and the Biodynamic Preparations

From his spiritual-scientific research into the nature of substances and forces, and into the nature of manuring, Rudolf Steiner

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a kind of technology within the domain of the living. He gave indications for the making and application of the biodynamic preparations. These are the two spray or field preparations and the six manure or compost preparations. They are made, according to certain principles that will be taken up later, mostly on the farms themselves, and are applied in very small doses.^[285] For the practice of making and applying them, the relevant literature may be consulted.^[286]^[287]^[288] What is attempted here is to set out, through a comprehensive view drawing together results of anthroposophical spiritual research, the experiences of lived practice, and facts accessible to natural science, paths of cognition and grounds of judgment for understanding a mode of fertilising that must necessarily remain incomprehensible to the prevailing materialist worldview.

The background that first makes the deeper significance of the round of the biodynamic preparations recognisable and experienceable is the all-encompassing core idea of the «farm individuality», its bodily organism, and the interconnections of ideas that constitute a biodynamic farm as a largely self-enclosed wholeness. Just as working with the preparations creates, as it were from below, out of the sphere of the will, a basis of experience, so, built upon this, the cognitive work with the supersensible reality of being is the necessary complement from above. Knowledge of the spirit and knowledge of nature must flow together in the doing; only in concrete engagement do they generate true images through which each particular thing fits itself into a higher whole. What lights up in the soul as such a true image of the spirit takes on outwardly material form in the individual preparations and continues to work with specific force-efficacy into the nexus of nature.

In the organism of a farm, the cosmic heights-forces or universal forces — raying in from the sphere of the fixed stars, the spheres of the planets, and the sun — and the depths-forces or central forces radiating outward from the earth, individualize themselves.

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Figure 21: The preparations as mediators of the heights-forces and depths-forces in the organism of the agricultural individuality.

This individuation is accomplished in the soil, in the balancing middle of the heights and depths, in the manner of a kind of heart-and-lung function. It manifests in the form of the plant in the vertically upward-striving shoot and the taproot growing into the depths, as well as in the horizontally spreading leaf- and fine-root-work. On the path of individuation, each earthly site develops first into the «organism in natural growth». In this too, the threefoldness of the head pole beneath the earth, the metabolic pole above the earth, and the soil articulating itself between them, is already laid in as a disposition. Through idea and will — that is, through the artful hand of the human being — this individuation advances toward the shaping-forth of the «agricultural individuality». The human being, himself a becoming one, makes it into a becoming one. This aim — to implant the principle of development into the soil, into the middle of the agricultural individuality — will henceforth be the task of agriculture. The means to this end is manuring, and precisely that manuring which has its origin in the spirit of the human being. What is meant are the biodynamic preparations, as it were

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«material bearers of development». They bring together the forces of above and below in the diaphragm of the soil, spiritualize, ensoul, and enliven this rhythmic middle, and provide for a transubstantiation of the physically mineral. Apart from the silica preparation, which stimulates the life-, fruit-formation-, and ripening-processes of plants in the metabolic pole above, through air and warmth, in the belly of the agricultural organism, the horn manure preparation and the compost preparations unfold their efficacy through the head pole and through the rhythmic middle. They promote and concentrate all those soil-processes that allow the plant to grow vertically into depth and height out of the head pole in the sense of the aforementioned «cosmic upward streaming» of a streaming of salt, water, and forces. The fully formed gestalt is an image of this working of forces (Figure 21, p. 327).

The biodynamic preparations are inventions of the human spirit, an efficacious artistry whose origin lies in the investigation of the world of the spiritually essential and supersensible. They are apprehensible only in a spiritually supersensible way — that is, along a path on which the spirit-soul of the human being, through long and rigorous schooling, makes itself capable of body-free cognition. Body-free means that the one who cognizes no longer requires the bodily senses in order to have thoughts; instead, the world of beings images itself, at the first higher level of cognition, directly in thought-pictures: in Imaginations. These are images of the life-creating spirit-reality, while thoughts bound to the senses and to the intellect support themselves upon the world of appearances; in this case the outer form is the phenomenon. In body-free beholding, the spiritual researcher recognizes the spiritually essential being that creates these forms within earthly existence. He recognizes how these forms, which constitute our world of appearances, are dead endpoints of a development out of the spirit that has gone before over long ages. He beholds in every form-appearance within the nexus of nature — in a rose, a lily, or a crystal — an «achievement of evolution», a work of art that has died into form. He beholds the end, yet knowing of its beginning. And so the question presents itself to the spiritual researcher: Does the end, the work of creation, bear within itself the germ of a new all-encompassing becoming? Can — yes, must — this hidden achievement of evolution be recognized, and grasped and brought to unfoldment through spirit, heart, and hand of the human being becoming conscious of his tasks for the future? Does not the sought-for kindling-spark for a new agricultural culture lie in this germ? And are not the idea-contents of the «Agriculture Course» — and here the spiritually scientific and artistic stroke of the invention of the

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biodynamic preparations, the answer to the question posed above? Rudolf Steiner researched, in body-free knowledge of essential being, the germinal that lies hidden in the mineral, plant, and animal worlds, and on the basis of these recognitions created a methodical principle through which the achievements of evolution in the field of tension between cosmos and earth can be brought into a new relationship. The fruits from the evolutionary lines of the past enter, through human hands, into relational nexuses of an entirely new kind, inaugurating a new becoming that transforms what has already come into being. This transformation process is a different one for each of the preparations; the methodical procedure underlying the production of the preparations is in principle the same or similar for all of them, however — it is a theme with variations. To arrive at a deeper understanding of this theme, three paths of research must be taken.

The Path of Spiritual-Scientific Research

Just as natural science has the phenomena of the senses as its object, so spiritual research has as its object the revelations of a world of spiritual beings. The results of the latter present themselves to thinking consciousness in idea-forms. They appear clothed in a particular wording that is adequate to the idea. This wording is the phenomenon. The more exactly and unprejudicedly one studies this wording, the more brightly the spiritual content of the idea lights up within thinking. The first step, then, toward understanding the spiritual-scientific results in the eight lectures of the Agriculture Course is the study of the exact wording. In superficial reading one easily goes astray, and finds in place of the eagle only individual feathers. In the Course, out of anthroposophical spiritual science, before an audience intimately acquainted above all with agriculture, the highest spirit-cognitions penetrating the kingdoms of nature are considered in connection with concrete agricultural practice. If one strives in the study of the text for the greatest possible unprejudicedness, then the wording in which the supersensible results are described in this way and no other is an equally given fact as any phenomenon of the senses.

Rudolf Steiner's expositions regarding the preparations point to relationships that are in part naturally given (for instance, in medicinal plants, the relational context of particular earthly substances and their healing effects), in part to relationships that first come into being through the spirit and hand of the

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human, originally created (for instance, the bringing-into-relationship of plant substances and sheath organs from the animal kingdom).

Here a second step of research is accomplished: one must bring the self-established relational context to experience — that is, one must carry it out oneself. In the doing, one becomes part of the event oneself. To shed further light on this second step, it recommends itself, as a kind of bridge, to extend the study to other fields of spiritual research — centrally to the foundational writings of Rudolf Steiner^[289] ^[290]^[291] as well as to the lecture cycles on education, medicine, natural science, art, the social question, and so forth. However remote these subjects may seem from agriculture, a thorough study of them extends, supports, and deepens — in ways one would not have anticipated — the understanding of the contents of the Agriculture Course.

As a third step of self-deepening research, meditative practice follows. One must attempt to inwardly work through the contents of the Agriculture Course in thinking, to hold them ever-present in all one's work, and to allow them to become the living substance of the consciousness soul. This substance of ideas has the power to impulse directly toward action. Its true being reveals itself only in the carrying-out and in what follows from it. The biodynamic preparations receive their significance only in unconditional doing. For only in the doing do they become real as beings. They are not yet so in the idea-form; rather, the idea-form fulfils itself — as it were from out of the future — with being only when it becomes free deed. The path toward this opens the view onto the higher levels of cognition of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, which stand as a future goal before humanity yet to be won. The spiritual researcher has gone this path ahead of us. We stand humbly at the beginning. Yet by virtue of the results of spiritual research, we can, out of the force of the consciousness soul, win the spirit-certainty that we are on the right path. On this path we practise a new art — one that "transforms the inner nature of nature."^[292]

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The Scientific-Goetheanistic Path of Research

The means for preparing the preparations are drawn from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and exposed to the conditions of the physical world — the elements of earth, water, air, and warmth — and to the seasonal rhythms that come to efficacy within these. Anthroposophical spiritual research thus directs the gaze toward the *what* and *how* of the sense-perceptible world: toward the *what*, for example certain medicinal plants and animal organ sheaths; toward the *how*, for instance the exposure to the forces of summer above the earth in air and warmth, and to the forces of winter below the earth in the sphere of the watery-earthy. In this way, under the guidance of spiritual research, sense-perceptible nature itself becomes in the fullest measure the object of scientific questioning — for example: What indication does the dandelion (*Taraxacum officinalis*) give, in morphological and physiological terms, concerning its relationship to the potassium of the earth and to silica in its finest distribution in the periphery of the earth, and what are the particular characteristics and functions of the peritoneum of the cow that make this organ especially suited for the sheathing of the dandelion blossoms in the course of the preparation? It goes without saying that the scientific research approach meant here cannot be a quantifying one, but rather one that, by means of the perception of sense-perceptible facts, forms concepts capable of serving in ordinary cognition as a support for the understanding of supersensible intuitive beholding.

The scientific path of research sharpens the gaze for the individual sense-perceptible phenomenon and seeks the connection to that wholeness toward which spiritual science points as the result of its research. Goetheanistic natural science and anthroposophical spiritual science enter into a mutually illuminating dialogue.

In the question-and-answer session of a lecture at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart on 17 June 1920, Rudolf Steiner says: "What spiritual science at bottom wishes to be is nothing other than phenomenology; but phenomenology that does not stop at contemplating individual phenomena, but reads within the coherence of phenomena. […] And one understands, too, when someone grasps phenomenology as Goethe did — and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism."^[293]

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The Path of Research through Will-Experience

On the two previously named paths of research, one begins to form a picture of the connection belonging to each of the preparations. But this nexus of ideas becomes fully saturated with experience only when one lets it become deed in repeated practice. In the experience of the reality-establishing power of the idea in the making of the preparations, ever deeper layers of understanding open up. One experiences oneself — like the artist — as the mediator who plants something into the substance, something that comes alive in soul-perception as the result of spiritual research. The spirit-content of the idea, growing ever clearer within one's own self, is the guarantee that the action arising from it is no mere arbitrary act. For the action in the process of preparation-making creates relationships between natural objects — dandelion blossoms and the enveloping peritoneum of the cow, for instance — that are not the outflow of a working natural law. It is not grounded in nature, in no force (will) inherent to it, but in knowledge of the spirit, which through the human will plants itself into the course of nature as an effective agent.

Thus in working with the preparations, the idea-borne will becomes the experiential ground of all grounds; one creates for oneself the phenomena, which at first, to be sure, either remain largely unconscious or rise up from deeper soul-grounds as feelings, moods, into thinking consciousness. It is toward these that the attention must be directed at every preparation step and in the application of the preparations. The gaze goes, as seen from the researcher, in two directions: one leads from outside inward, the other from inside outward.

In the case of the direction from outside inward, we submerge, in the activity of will — in the work, that is — into the spirit-reality of the world. What takes place within remains largely unconscious; as when, in the preparation of the yarrow preparation, we stuff yarrow blossoms into a stag's bladder. We would not do it at all if the will were not impulsed by the spirit that dwells in that idea, to the understanding of which we have drawn nearer on the two previously named paths of research. Thus the idea-content that lights up in thinking consciousness is tested in the doing — what is at first experienced only as an external process. It tests itself as an inner process against the hidden spirit-reality in which this idea-content creatively establishes a new relationship in the doing. This path from outside inward is one of practice — that is, of the year-by-year

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repeated doing. On this consciously chosen path of practice, one does not arrive at an abstract cognition that could be grasped as a law of nature. What can emerge from such effort toward cognition, however, is a progressive deepening of inner disposition. This becomes the objective spiritual ground in which a personal relationship — to the preparation steps, for instance — can develop. The idea of spiritual science, grasped at first in thinking, transforms the will inwardly into a force of devotion, of love, which makes this work a free deed.

The direction from inside outward turns the attention toward the nexus of nature into which we work, with the ideas of spiritual research, in the making and applying of the preparations. Here we bring about a transformation in our own inward being, in the sense of a deepening of understanding — and equally a change in the "inner nature of nature."^[294] Both transformations stand in a spirit-real relationship to one another through the idea-borne will — that is, over the bridge of the work. Thus one can accompany every preparation step with the question: what transformation process is being accomplished? — as, for example, in the case of the chamomile preparation, when the chamomile blossoms, enveloped in the small intestine of the cow, are buried in the earth over winter. In the process of making all the preparations, transformation steps take place that lead to new substance-compositions with new properties. Each of these new substance compositions holds a potential of properties that, as fertilising force, brings about specific transformations in the living. Rudolf Steiner himself indicates the direction for our researching attention regarding these fertilising workings. He points out that as a working of the preparations, particular substance-transformations take place in the living, and he characterises their effects on soil and plants, for instance, as "enlivening," "health-giving," "making-reasonable," "making-sensitive."^[295]

These qualities thus named — results of fertilising substance-creations from spiritual research at the level of the living and the soul element — can gradually become inner experience, when, through the experiential primal ground of the deed, one attempts in feeling to follow the forces of transformation into the inner nature of nature.

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Preparation, Application, and Efficacy of the Preparations in the Course of the Year

The paths of research named above open up three levels of reality-experience in working with the preparations. These condition one another. In earnest seeking for understanding, none of them can be dispensed with. There are two culmination points in the course of the year at which this can be raised especially into consciousness and can thereby take on a festive character. These are, in spring, the days following Easter, and in autumn, the days around Michaelmas. At both times, certain preparations are taken from the earth and carefully stored, and others are prepared and exposed — above or below the earth over summer, below the earth over winter — to the seasonally active forces of the yearly rhythm. In some places, the attempt is made to shape both events as outstanding festival days in the course of the year — above all the Michaelmas day on 29 September, in which not only all those working on the farm can take part, but likewise interested people from the surrounding social community. In keeping with the three paths of research, such a day can be shaped so that first the passages in the Agriculture Course that bear on the preparations to be made at that time are read aloud, then a contemplation may follow that seeks to characterise one or another preparation plant or animal organ sheath in its particular properties; finally, the further course of the day is devoted to the activity of the making itself and to the observations and experiences that can be gathered in the process.

All efforts should be directed toward ensuring that the festive character is not secured primarily by "outward additions," but that the right mood is allowed to arise from the earnestness of the contemplations and from the warmth of the shared activity. When this succeeds, it is not difficult to notice, on such days, that the work with the preparations — both individually and in community — carries within it an element of free creative activity.

Between these two culmination points in the course of the year, it is the individual preparation steps that, throughout large stretches of the year, create outstanding hours within the working rhythm of the farm: in spring and summer the gathering of the preparation plants, in spring and autumn the obtaining of the animal organ sheaths, and in winter and early spring the making of the silica meal. To cultivate a strengthened, conscious co-experiencing of the course of the year, each of these steps should each

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to keep in mind the full course of preparation-making as a whole — to do things at the right time, and to remain inwardly connected to what is happening even when the preparations are exposed, in and above the earth, to the forces of earth and cosmos. The logic of everyday work gives no occasion for this. One must wrest it from oneself — or will it together.

When we take something from nature in the process of making the preparations, we add something new to it through their application. Like a tissue of "individualising measures," we weave through the spatially articulated, time-rhythmically living, year-by-year advancing agricultural organism by applying the preparations. Let us try to picture how, within this organism, each crop — according to its kind and period of growth (field crops in arable and vegetable cultivation, meadows and pastures, fruit trees) — comes into the benefit of the preparations' working: whether through the field preparations from sowing to ripening, or through the other preparations that, by way of compost or manure, attune soil fertility to the plant-appropriate relationship between cosmos and earth. We experience directly how each measure of application is indeed directed pointedly at this field or that crop — and yet from there it works into the whole of the farm organism. Every plant, every crop opens itself to the cosmic-earthly surroundings and becomes, down into its very substance-configuration, an image of those surroundings.

In co-experiencing this, we can become aware of how an agriculture only closes itself into the wholeness of an organism through this tissue of activities and its effects — and the more so, the more the farm differentiates inwardly into a multiplicity of organ functions that relate to one another. We can form a picture of how the spatial side-by-side of the field crops weaves together as relationally as their succession in the crop rotation.

With an eye to the full scope of the preparations' working through the course of the year, we can notice how ideas drawn from spiritual research — ideas that otherwise merely live in us — become active outwardly through our activity in the natural context of the farm, raising it to what Rudolf Steiner calls "a truly self-contained individuality."^[296]

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In his introduction to the manure preparations, Rudolf Steiner points to the fact that agriculture necessarily operates as "extractive farming." With the commodity stream of primary production leaving the farm, the head pole and metabolic pole of the agricultural individuality become impoverished in substances and forces.^[297] The task of manuring is, first of all, to create a balance here. With respect to substances and forces, this is accomplished by the first-level fertilizers from the enlivened nature of plants, and by the second-level fertilizers from the ensouled nature of animals. For those substances and forces that enliven the earth in a higher sense — substances and forces that the human being, in the ongoing course of his spiritual-soul development, needs as nourishment — forces from the cosmos must become effective, forces for which the earth must first be made receptive. For this, new substance-compositions are needed that do not exist in nature as it stands, compositions capable of enlivening the lifeless being of matter and opening it once more to its spiritual origin. "Matter" — such is the finding of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual research — "is structured in the sense in which Christ has gradually arranged it."^[298] This strictly law-governed arrangement of substance we encounter as the result of evolution. It is above all the object of chemistry within the natural sciences. The third level of manuring is therefore concerned with creating substance and force compositions that reach into the accomplished work of the kingdoms of nature, grasp certain fruits of evolution from within it, and bring these into new relationships with one another. Anthroposophical spiritual science shows the path along which it lies within the freedom of the human being to connect with the evolutive working of Christ. In this the meaning and significance of the biodynamic preparations can be seen. The methodological framework of their mode of preparation derives from the trichotomy of the human being — according to body, soul, and spirit — and, looked at in nature, from the Tria Principia of Paracelsus: Sal, Mercury, and Sulphur, the contemplative mode of the medieval alchemists, which reaches back to ancient Mystery knowledge. This threefoldness-in-unity reappears in the modern era among the Rosicrucians, philosophically in Hegel as "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," and in Goethe's way of beholding nature

Einleitend zu den Düngerpräparaten verweist Rudolf Steiner auf die Tatsache, dass die Landwirtschaft notwendig «Raubbau» betreibt. Mit dem Warenstrom der Urproduktion, die den Hof verlässt, verarmt der Kopf- und Stoffwechselpol der landwirtschaftlichen Individualität an Stoffen und Kräften.^[299] Die Aufgabe der Düngung ist hier, zunächst einen Ausgleich zu schaffen. In Bezug auf die Stoffe und Kräfte leisten dies die Dünger der ersten Stufe aus der belebten Natur der Pflanzen und aus der zweiten Stufe aus der beseelten Natur der Tiere. Für diejenigen Stoffe und Kräfte, die die Erde in höherem Sinn beleben und die der Mensch im Fortgang seiner geistig-seelischen Entwicklung als Nahrung braucht, müssen Kräfte aus dem Kosmos wirksam werden, für die die Erde erst aufnahmefähig gemacht werden muss. Dazu braucht es neue Stoffkompositionen, die in der Natur nicht vorhanden sind, die in der Lage sind, das leblose Sein der Materie zu beleben und sie wieder ihrem geistigen Ursprung aufzuschließen. «Die Materie» – so das Ergebnis der Geistesforschung Rudolf Steiners – «ist aufgebaut in dem Sinne, wie der Christus sie nach und nach angeordnet hat.»^[300] Diese streng gesetzmäßige Stoffesanordnung finden wir als Evolutionsergebnis vor. Sie ist in den Naturwissenschaften vorzüglich Gegenstand der Chemie. Bei der dritten Düngungsstufe geht es daher darum, Stoff- und Kräftekompositionen zu schaffen, die aus dem gewordenen Werk der Naturreiche bestimmte Evolutionsfrüchte herausgreift und diese zueinander in neue Beziehungen bringt. Dazu weist die anthroposophische Geisteswissenschaft den Weg, auf welchem es in die Freiheit des Menschen gestellt ist, an das evolutive Christuswirken anzuknüpfen. Darin kann der Sinn und die Bedeutung der biologisch-dynamischen Präparate gesehen werden. Das methodische Grundgerüst ihrer Herstellungsweise leitet sich von der Trichotomie des Menschen, nach Leib, Seele und Geist, ab sowie, in die Natur geschaut, von den «Tria Principia» des Paracelsus, von Sal, Merkur und Sulfur, der an altes Mysterienwissen anknüpfenden Anschauungsweise der mittelalterlichen Alchemisten. Diese Dreiheit in der Einheit taucht in der Neuzeit bei den Rosenkreuzern auf, philosophisch bei Hegel als «These, Antithese und Synthese» und in der Naturanschauung Goethes

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in the principle of "polarity, metamorphosis, and enhancement." The threefoldness-in-unity, or threefold articulation, is immanent to all being — in past, present, and future, or, speaking in Trinitarian terms, in "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

Thinking in polarities is a key to understanding evolution. It formally constitutes the character of Goethe's way of beholding nature; he works it out exemplarily in his *Metamorphosis of Plants*.^[301] As a man of the eye, Goethe anchored his research in what is visible of the plant as above-ground form; its underground portion, the root, remained out of sight. When one brings the latter in — one must, through an act of abstraction, make the invisible visible by freeing the root from the earth — the polarity of root and blossom becomes perceptible to the beholding eye. The primal unity of the plant is split, within the earthly realm, into two poles. What connects them in a mercurial way is the leaf sequence carried upward along the stem. The leaf makes the middle between the poles sense-perceptible. When this threefoldness is taken to a higher stage, the form of the plant appears as a wholeness that, in the blossom, most purely becomes the image of its being.

The threefoldness is laid down tenderly and in mutual belonging in the germ of the seed. Moving outward from the middle — the germinal bud — root differentiates and separates itself downward, shoot upward. Everywhere in the creative work of nature one will find a middle between two poles, yet a middle that is determined in its mercurial functions. In the threefoldness of root, blossom, and the middle-forming leaf, the plant is a consummate work. The same holds for what in the human being is nature — the body and its organs. The skin organ, for instance, which articulates itself into the innervated, sense-active outer skin (*Epidermis*), the blood-permeated inner skin (*Corium*), and the metabolically active subcutaneous tissue (*Subcutis*). The same holds for the agricultural organism: the sense function of the rocks in the depths, the digestive activity of wind and weather in the heights, and, as the middle member, the soil.

It becomes otherwise for the human being as soon as he begins, in free self-determination, to take sovereignty over the soul. Then he learns, as Goethe expresses it, "to instruct his organs."^[302] He learns to bring his soul — which mediates rhythmically between spirit and body — to ever higher degrees

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of self-reliance. To the degree that he strives toward what he is destined for, he steps out of his bodily boundness and at the same time out of his sense-boundness to the natural being of the earth, step by step. He raises himself above nature and at the same time roots himself within it. Must he not feel called upon to give to the natural being of the earth something that the earth cannot have out of itself, something it would have to do without for all time? Certainly, every kind of love-borne devotion is called for here. But can this be limited to mere protection, to the preservation of what already exists — or must a new principle of evolution be implanted in the earth that has become a work of art, and with it in the cosmos, in the sense of a "creation out of nothing" that is caused by no outer necessity but springs as a free deed from the spiritual-soul nature of the human being?^[303] In answering this question, one may suppose, Rudolf Steiner conceived the biodynamic preparations out of a knowledge of the stream of time flowing from the future — as it were as "manure" for the stream of time flowing from the past, which has become the work of art of creation. This may be too large a thought. Yet whoever cultivates a practical relationship to the preparations out of heartfelt knowing can, in deeper feeling, gain a certainty of judgment that their handling marks an very first beginning in the direction indicated. Their manner of making follows strictly the principle of threefoldness — yet in a new way; it is not articulated according to the given primal unity but builds itself up out of the products of past evolutionary lines. These products — the physical-mineral (silica) of the earth, the living drawn from the plant kingdom (blossoms), and the ensouled drawn from the animal kingdom (organs) — form the poles of a polarity that is not given by nature. What relates these end-products of evolution to one another and thereby allows a new polarity to arise, and what heightens this into the synthesis of a new threefoldness, is the idea-led will of the human being. Idea and will are the formers of a new middle (see illustrations 23, 24, 25), of new substance compositions that are bearers of forces of a physical, etheric-living, astral-ensouled, and spiritual kind. Through the path of spiritual research, a treasure of spirit — ideas — has been laid into the hearts and hands of human beings, who can, in transformation, continue the "Work" of the ordering of substance through the "Christ" as a free deed. The new substance compositions of the preparations are inventions of spiritual research out of supra-nature, as the synthesis of ammonia is a result of the investigation of

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inorganic-physical nature, and atomic technology is one of sub-nature. In the first case, it is a matter of a handling of substance compositions from the sphere of life, of the soul, and of spirit raised to art — in order to enliven matter given over to death, the "earthy-solid." In the two latter cases, the life-generating force of plant nature threatens to wither, or the being of all creation on earth faces annihilation.

Approaching an Understanding of the Source Materials for the Preparations

As representative of the mineral kingdom, it is the quartz crystal and also orthoclase (potassium feldspar); from the plant kingdom: yarrow (*Achillea millefolium*), chamomile (*Matricaria recutita*), stinging nettle (*Urtica dioica*), oak bark (*Quercus robur*), dandelion (*Taraxacum officinalis*), and valerian (*Valeriana officinalis*); from the animal kingdom, cow dung as well as individual organs come into consideration — principally from the cow, in one case from noble game. All of these source materials are end-products of evolution, with properties that cannot be derived from the individual elements and their properties that are involved in the composition of the source materials. As has been indicated several times, rock crystal (SiO₂) fulfils a kind of sense function in the household of nature toward the forces that ray in as formative forces from the farthest reaches of the cosmos and year after year, in repeated rhythms, help plants to their form — the form they have taken on evolutively. Can this sense function of quartz, which becomes effective beneath the earth in the root zone, be so reversed in polarity that above ground it captures planetary influences in a metabolically active way within the leaf growth?

Conversely, can the dying-away life of the plant be subjected to such a process of transformation that it stimulates sense processes in the root beneath the earth — toward what is merely mineral in the solid-fluid — ? These questions are pursued separately in the following chapter.

With the preparation of the compost or manure preparations, the starting question is: How can the "earthy-solid" — that is, the inorganic-dead, that which has been disintegrated to mere element (K, Ca, Fe, Si, P) — be enlivened in a new way? The source materials for this are donated by the above-named preparation plants together with certain animals (organ sheaths). What is proper to all plants — the capacity to enliven the mineral through their life organisation — lies

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in the preparation plants this capacity is present as a specific potency in each case. Enlivenment means here that the physically earthly substances are lifted up into the streaming life of the plant and thereby estranged from their physical properties. Potassium, for example, which in physical terms has sharply defined properties, now reveals a force that becomes visible and active through the "higher" living working of the plant — a force that the "lower" cannot bring to manifestation out of itself. When potassium becomes a living process in this way, other properties appear: the maintenance of sap pressure (turgor), the stabilisation of tissues — or, in the case of calcium, the new properties of cell division and cell elongation, of root growth and the building up of tissues. This liberation of substances from their bondage to purely physical properties advances in proportion as the supersensible life organisation of the plant sensuously expresses itself in the outer form — and in doing so, simultaneously dies into it. In the root zone, salt-like properties are still predominant. They lose themselves in the growth processes of the greening leaves and progressively through the leaf sequence from below toward the blossom. This hidden process, which first plays itself out in the sphere of the watery, expresses itself in ascending fashion through the spheres of air and warmth in the increasing formation of the leaves, in the elaboration of the blossom, and substantively in the formation of highly complex proteins, aromatic compounds, and scents. The properties that substances have taken on in the domain of the vegetative growth of the leaves thus lose themselves again as blossom formation is approached. In the blossom the archetypal image of the plant comes to light. There, within the sphere of warmth activity, the estrangement of substance from its physical properties — and with it the degree of its openness to the formative forces of the life organisation of the plant — reaches its culmination. The outer signature of this event is the radiant blossom, the dispersing pollen, and the streaming scents. Along the path of stepwise enlivenment and refinement, the earthly substance-process opens itself in the blossom to the workings of the cosmic periphery. This can disclose itself to intuitive beholding when one enters into the gesture of the blossom — willlessly upward-striving, turning toward the cosmos. This refinement of the saps^[304] — one may also speak in Goethe's sense of an upward clarification of the earth-sap, the ascending salt-and-water stream of the *xylem* — or, equally, the estrangement of the substance-stream

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from its merely physical nature reaches, in the blossom — in the domain where the archetypal image of the plant reveals itself — its culmination and close. Beyond the blossom the plant can no longer ascend. But the blossom wilts almost as soon as it has come into bloom. The plant returns to the earth, either as seed or in the form of its organic formations, which transform themselves in the soil into humus.

In its organic processes the life organisation of the plant keeps in flux the lifeless substance taken up from its surroundings: "The lifeless transforms itself into the living."^[305] But this living thing dies into the form of the plant's organs — into the leaf, into the blossom, for instance. The question arises whether the stream of substance that has been kept in flux all the way into the blossom — there spent, yet open to the cosmos — can be preserved, indeed quickened anew at a higher level. One may assume that this was Rudolf Steiner's point of departure in his search for fertilising substances capable of "enlivening the earthy, solid element itself." The answer from spiritual research could only have been: to lift the earthly substance-stream, enlivened through the plant, into a sphere proper to the higher nature of the animal. For in the animal the living substance is held in flux through its astral organisation, which forms the organs into the streaming life.^[306]

In the organ-activity of the animal, the life that in the plant dies into form is held in streaming; the merely living substance of the plant becomes, in the animal, sentient substance. Is there, then — the question posed once more — a path by which the earthly substance enlivened through the plant can be raised across the gulf that exists between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, up into the domain of the soul's inward-drawing forces? That this gulf is not absolute is shown by the healing effects of certain plants upon diseased organs in human beings and animals — for instance the healing effect of chamomile with regard to intestinal disorders, and of yarrow in relation to the strengthening of the blood-purifying force in the kidney-bladder process. The healing effect rests in each case upon the manner in which specific earthly substances are enlivened by the life organisation of the medicinal plant in question. It is this specific enlivening of earthly substance-processes that Rudolf Steiner has in view when the task is to prepare a fertilising substance in which this substance-process can be kept durably in flux. The foregoing consideration shows that a path opens up toward this when it proves possible to bring into direct relationship the

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specific organ, and thereby to the astral organisation of a particular animal species. Such relationships Rudolf Steiner opened up through the path of spiritual research. What is at stake are organ sheaths which, together with the plant substances and the working of forces from earth and cosmos, form the foundation of the preparation.

The significance of this discovery arising from spiritual research can be illuminated, against the background of contemporary technological and natural-scientific development, by the following consideration: As has already been indicated several times, in the course of evolution along the path of the becoming-human, the kingdoms of nature have separated themselves out from an originally spiritual condition that once encompassed both the human being and the earth.^[307] This becoming has congealed into the sense-perceptible work of creation: the lifeless mineral finds itself separated from the living plant world, and the plant world from the ensouled animal kingdom. When one beholds nature, one can speak of every sense-perceptible appearance as a final state that has congealed into completeness — as something that has become. The crystal is such a state; so too is the flowering plant, and the animal living out its kind. Can the rock crystal be more perfect than it is — or a dandelion, a worm, a fish, a bird, an insect, a mammal? What meets us as sense-perceptible in the kingdoms of nature is the work of creation of evolution, congealed into completeness.

This work of creation is today the point of departure for every kind of technology. This holds especially for lifeless nature, which is fully graspable in terms of laws of nature. One seeks to fathom the secret of physical substance and creates from it, for instance, a technology directed at releasing the energy locked within substance — understood as atom, that is, as an evolutive final state — through its targeted shattering. This energy, unbound from lifeless substance, proves to be in the highest degree hostile to life. It has the power to extinguish the evolution that has congealed into a work.

The arbitrarily induced process of atomic disintegration represents the polar opposite of the approach that underlies the preparation of the spray and manure preparations. In making these, what is separated in nature is not divided still further; rather, the evolutive final state — the flower of a plant, the organ of an animal — is brought into a relational nexus for which mere observation of nature provides no indication whatsoever. Nature, as a spatio-temporal "achievement," makes the material available: medicinal plants, animal organs, and the soil conditions in the rhythms of the seasons; the concrete

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— relational nexus of these to one another, however, is what spiritual research unlocks; and it becomes reality through the deed of the human being.

The re-composition of the three kingdoms of nature signifies an artistic reshaping. What is essentially new and living, however, arises from spirit-activity, from the human I, which becomes a vessel for the creative divine consciousness, the "Christ force."^[308] This, together with spirit-guided human soul-development, is the path that — out of impulses of freedom — gives rise to artistic creating at the earth; the path through which creation can be carried forward, since the Father-divine no longer works directly into nature from without.

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The Manufacture and Use of the Biodynamic Preparations

The Horn Manure and Horn Silica Preparations — Manufacture, Application and Efficacy^[309]

The Horn Manure Preparation

In the ascending and descending arc of the summer half-year — the time of the earth's out-breathing — the growing plant becomes an image of the forces active in the periphery of light, air and warmth. This growth provides nourishment for human being and animal. Above all it is the ruminant, the cow, that takes in the growth from meadows, pastures and fodder fields. This fodder is, in the act of rumination and rumen digestion, raised to the level of soul-experience. In the physical dissolving of the plant substance, the cow tastes the cosmically constituting forces of that substance. She carries out a "cosmic-qualitative analysis" (cf. ch. "The Cow," p. 146 ff.). In this tasting, analysing sense activity in the processing of the fodder, the cow experiences the character of the environment from which the fodder comes — the particularity, for instance, of the site-specific conditions of the soil and the climate. Ruminating, she perceives all this as mighty force-formations. In this state — inwardly wakefully concentrated, outwardly dreamlike — her soul or astral body unites wholly with the etheric body, and this mirrors back to it the physical-chemical digestive processes. With infinite contentment, the soul of the cow takes part in what is happening in the body: "That is a whole world which the cow sees."^[310] She cannot hold fast this living-ensouled-force-filled quality and claim it for herself, for she has no being of her own, no I. She must excrete this force-filled quality, which she has permeated with her soul-nature. That is what lends cow dung its unique fertilising force — the highest and most harmonious that nature is capable of producing.

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Over the summer, under direct solar radiation, the substantive composition of the fodder growth intensifies. The grazing cow herd perceives this progressively in its digestion. In autumn this process of fodder ripening and its cosmic-qualitative analysis by the cow reaches its culmination. In observing and inwardly participating, we can bring this before us. From this grows an understanding of Rudolf Steiner's indication to collect, in autumn, cow dung from the pasture — dung that will be needed for the preparation to follow. In this cow manure we have before us a largely amorphous mass, a metabolic end-product that contains something which belongs in an essential way to the cow, because it has been permeated by her soul-nature but not claimed by it. In her excretion she performs, as it were, a renunciation. Left to itself, cattle manure would pass over into the general nature process of humus formation. Instead, we invert the normal course of natural events with what is now the first preparation step that follows (see figure 23, p. 347):

We procure cow horns — bull horns are unsuitable for this purpose — as far as possible from one's own herd, and pack the dung into their cavity. The cow horn is a formation polar to cow manure. It sits upon the head, the nerve-sense pole of the animal, and is a highly compacted skin-formation that has congealed into pure form. The horn sheathes a bony core that grows laterally out of the frontal bone and communicates through its air-filled cavity with the frontal sinus. The bony core is traversed by a fine network of blood vessels that supplies the dermis and the epidermis — responsible for horn growth — with blood. Through this strong blood supply the horn feels remarkably warm. In the horn thus pulsing with life, the four physical elements of the solid, the liquid, the airy and the warmth concentrate into a kind of sense organ that opens not outward but inward; it is an organ of reflux and concentration (figure 22, p. 346).

As a dense form-sheath, it radiates back into the digestive organism what presses up from that organism through the bloodstream into the head. One can say: the cow needs the reflecting function of the horns in order to configure the force-formations arising from the digestive process — are they unconscious Imaginations? — into the right fertilising force.^[311]

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Figure 22: The physical structure of the cow horn and the interworking of the four elements to form a sense organ directed inward.

With the stuffing of the horns the first preparation step is accomplished, and with it the first step of emancipation from the natural course of nature's workings (Figure 23).

It represents an inversion of the nature process. What was excreted outward now fills an inner space. The horn, condensed to pure form, gives the amorphous substance a sheath. We ourselves step between the nerve-sense pole and the metabolic pole of the cow and create — guided by the results of spiritual-scientific research — a new relationship between the end-products of both poles, the horn and the manure. What has evolutively come to its conclusion in the life of the cow in two directions forms, in its union, the point of departure for a new path of development. If one wishes to weigh this process — as also the preparation steps that follow — in its full import, one must direct attention to the three paths of research already named: toward the guiding nexus of ideas, toward the will-experience in the activity itself, and — mediating between both — toward the observable facts that enlighten us, in the cognition of the cow's life-expressions, about the significance of cow manure and the horns.

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Figure 23: Steps of inversion and emancipation in the preparation of horn manure.

In the second preparation step the horns, immediately after filling, are buried in the earth and rest there through the winter. Vegetation has withdrawn into germinal states; the earth lives spiritually in a sense-awake condition in its in-breathing, and in the elements of the watery and the solid is most strongly exposed to the crystal-forming forces of the sphere of the fixed stars.^[312] Once again we invert the nature process — a second step of emancipation from the natural course — in that the amorphous substance of the manure, which in its natural course is taken up into the humus-forming processes of summer, is now exposed to the crystal-forming forces of winter. The spatial inversion is followed by one in time. The cow manure becomes a receptive matrix for the forces that, mediated through the physical elemental states of the solid and the liquid, ray into the hollow of the horn within the earth and — dammed back — concentrate themselves in the mass of the manure as a formative fertilising force.

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Preparation in the Rhythm of the Course of the Year

Figure 24: Steps of inversion and emancipation in the preparation of horn silica.

In spring we take the horns out of the earth — a third step of emancipation — knock out the contents, and hold in our hands a new substance with new properties. This new creation of substance receives its significance and efficacy through the process of becoming described above, through which it passes. The finished preparation is, by the forces active under the earth in winter, a new substance "permeated and interwoven with spirit"^[313] (Figure 23, p. 347).

The Horn Silica Preparation

The manufacturing process of the horn silica preparation runs polar to the first two steps in the preparation of horn manure (Figure 24).

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In contrast to manure as a metabolic product of summer, crystalline quartz is a representative of the earth's winter activity: "silica" (quartz, rock crystal) is the "outer sense organ within the earthly."^[314] It resists most strongly the forces of weathering. In the first step we emancipate the quartz from its natural crystalline being: we shatter its crystalline structure, grind it as fine as dust, render it amorphous. We then work the quartz meal with a little water into a paste and fill it into cow horns. In this first step of preparation an inversion again takes place: an outer becomes an inner (Figure 24). And the same occurs in the second step, a second stage of emancipation. The quartz, standing close to the winter forces, becomes a summer substance when the filled horns are buried in spring and rest there in the earth throughout summer. The quartz, brought into an approximation of the amorphous state, now becomes a receptive matrix for the metabolic forces of warmth and air predominating in summertime. Caught and reflected back by the inner hollow of the cow horn, these concentrate themselves in the quartz meal made receptive for them. It is thus placed in a position to hold fast and preserve the forces of summer working — just as horn manure holds the forces of winter working.

The question naturally arises: why are the silica horns buried in the earth over summer and not exposed directly above the earth to the forces active in warmth, light and air? My own consideration is that the point is not to concentrate the forces in the cow horn in the manner in which they work directly above the earth, but rather to work with those same forces insofar as they are absorbed by the lime beneath the earth and thereby work indirectly — mediated through the clay — on plant growth through the root.^[315]

When we then dig the horns out again in autumn, at Michaelmas — a third step of emancipation — we receive with their contents once again a new substance with new properties: the horn silica. Its being and its significance emerge from the three-stage steps of emancipation described above, out of mere natural process through the idea and will of the human being. The finished preparation is shaped by the working of substance in

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Figure 25: Continuation of Figures 23 and 24: The stirring process, the application and the spheres of efficacy of the horn manure and horn silica preparations.

the earth during summer; it is a concentrate of "matter interwoven with spirit."^[316]

Both — horn manure and horn silica — come into being as substance compositions not as a continuation of the lawfulness inherent in nature. That lawfulness exhausts itself in what nature brings forth through the seasonal course of events in the way of formations: soil, manure, quartz, horn. Both arise through a threefold inversion out of space into time and back again into space. If we endeavour to accompany this — in the sense of the three paths of research — inwardly in our own enactment, the hidden meaning of this process can unfold itself ever further.

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The Stirring Process

Immediately before application, the fourth step of preparation follows — and with it the fourth stage of emancipation — for both preparations alike, yet each separately in itself: the stirring process, that is, the transfer of the earthy-solid state of the preparations into the liquid state (Figure 25).

A small quantity of preparation substance in each case — horn manure, at most four horn-fillings per hectare; horn silica, a knife-tip's worth, that is 3 to 4 g/ha — is stirred for one hour in hand-warm water with a rhythmical alternation. This is done best with a stirring rod mounted so as to move freely from the ceiling or a crossbeam, which dips with the stirring brush into a barrel filled with water. One begins by setting the body of water slowly in motion through circular, peripheral stirring. Through continued acceleration the stirring brush migrates toward the central axis against the forming vortex-funnel. In this, the speed of the rotating water reaches a maximum; toward the wall of the barrel it slows. In a vortex there exists the tendency toward unlimited speed at the centre — hence the drawing, sucking force — while toward the periphery the speed tends toward zero. Between the two poles, differences of speed give rise to spiralling vortex-layers that approach two-dimensionality, the idea of the surface. The homogeneous body of the water structures itself into surfaces gliding along one another — both in spatial relation between centre and periphery, and in time, building from the resting state of the water upward to the fullest unfolding of the rotational funnel.^[317] Upon reaching this maximum formation — one comes to the limit of one's strength to accelerate the body of water any further — the funnel is destroyed by an abrupt counter-thrust of the stirring brush; the structured body of water collapses, falls into the condition of a formless chaos, and approaches for a moment the state of homogeneous rest, only to be accelerated again in the opposite direction toward a new formation of the funnel. The liquid is thus held in rhythmical alternation in the polarities of rest and movement, homogeneity and surface-structured formation in the building-up of the vortex-funnel.

Eine jeweils geringe Menge an Präparatesubstanz (Hornmist, maximal vier Horninhalte pro Hektar, Hornkiesel, eine Messerspitze = 3 bis 4 g/ha) wird in handwarmem Wasser eine Stunde lang im rhythmischen Wechsel gerührt. Es geschieht am besten mit einer an der Decke oder einem Querbalken beweglich befestigten Rührstange, die mit dem Rührbesen in ein wassergefülltes Fass eintaucht. Man beginnt damit, durch kreisförmiges, peripheres Rühren die Wassermasse langsam in Bewegung zu setzen. Durch fortdauerndes Beschleunigen wandert der Rührbesen auf die zentrale Achse gegen den sich bildenden Wirbeltrichter zu. In diesem erreicht die Geschwindigkeit des rotierenden Wassers ein Maximum, gegen die Wandung des Fasses verlangsamt sie sich. In einem Wirbel besteht die Tendenz zu unbegrenzter Geschwindigkeit zum Zentrum hin, daher die saugende Kraft; gegen die Peripherie hin tendiert die Geschwindigkeit gegen Null. Zwischen beiden Polen entstehen durch Geschwindigkeitsdifferenzen gewundene Wirbelschichten, die der Zweidimensionalität, der Idee der Fläche sich annähern. Der homogene Körper des Wassers strukturiert sich in aneinander entlanggleitende Flächen, sowohl in räumlicher Beziehung zwischen Zentrum und Peripherie als auch zeitlich vom Ruhezustand des Wassers sich steigernd bis zur maximalen Entfaltung des Rotationstrichters.^[318] Beim Erreichen von dessen maximaler Ausformung – man kommt an die Grenze seiner Kräfte, die Wassermasse weiter beschleunigen zu können – wird durch ein abruptes Gegenhalten des Rührbesens der Trichter zerstört, die strukturierte Wassermasse bricht zusammen, verfällt in den Zustand eines formlosen Chaos und nähert sich für einen Augenblick dem Zustand homogener Ruhe, um dann in Gegenrichtung zu erneuter Trichterbildung beschleunigt zu werden. Die Flüssigkeit wird also im rhythmischen Wechsel in den Polaritäten von Ruhe und Bewegung, Homogenität und flächenhafter Durchformung im Aufbau des Wirbeltrichters gehalten.

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This water-mass, ever newly resolved through differences of speed into surface-layers, becomes thereby simultaneously the receptive matrix for a threefold impression:

of the concentrated force-potential of the preparation substance,
of the cosmically active force-constellations at work in the moment,
of the individual spirit-soul of the human being, who, working through the will, inaugurates, guides, and sustains the process.

The stirring process lasts one hour. Is this measure of time chosen arbitrarily — to ensure, for example, that the efficacy of the preparation has united itself with the water — or where does its meaning lie? The answer cannot be sought in the course of nature, but must be sought in cosmic rhythms that are being-effectively at work within the human being and have preserved their origin in him. Macrocosmically it is the twenty-four-hour day-night rhythm. In this Earth-Sun rhythm the I, the spirit-soul of the human being, lives in the states of sleeping and waking. Through the I-organisation of the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-movement system, it individualises the macrocosmic rhythms and impresses them into the physical body — for example as the rhythms of breathing and of the heartbeat. The wavelengths of these rhythms move in the range of seconds and minutes. In the nerve-sense processes the frequencies shorten to fractions of a second, while at their counterpole — the activities of metabolism — they expand to the measure of the hour or of hours.^[319] In the metabolic-limb pole, however, lives the will, whose activation and deactivation unfolds within the span of the hour — hence, for example, the «lesson-hour». This, together with self-experience, justifies the certainty that the time-measure of the one-hour stirring is related to the will-rhythm of the metabolic-movement human being. It is he, after all, who sets the stirring process in motion and sustains it.

In the unconscious depths of the will, again, lives the I; it works through the will into the world — here into the water to be moved. Everyone who is familiar with the preparation-stirring knows that one can sustain the time-measure of one hour in constant will-activity. Every human being fills this span of time in a rhythm proper to him, in accordance with his I living in the will. Every human being, through his will, impresses his rhythm into the water dynamised in the moving vortex-layers. This

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human will-rhythm, over against all the rhythms of nature that are of macrocosmic origin, is the one and only rhythm — first and unprecedented — that the human being as microcosm, in the course of this third step of preparation, inscribes into the course of nature.

Worth reflecting upon is the following: in the stirring process one can see, microcosmically, a technological realization of a macrocosmic event. Each of the planets has its own axial inclination in relation to the Sun, and its own rotational velocity. In this is expressed the individual signature of each individual planet, the working of the «planetary spirits». A notebook entry by Rudolf Steiner reads: «In the sphere the universe dissolves / In the axis it forms itself / With the Sun.»^[320] From this one can conclude, with regard to the stirring process: the «spirit of man» sets the rotational velocity, and likewise the «axis» — namely the inclination to the vertical in which the stirring rod is guided.

Against this background, the understanding can grow that Rudolf Steiner, in the manner of his spiritual-scientific presentation, places value on stirring by hand. Not only does something of the individual spirit-being of the human being impress itself thereby — by way of the will — into the dynamised liquid; reciprocally it receives from this process, which it itself brings forth, something that unites with it in a being-way. Hand-stirring therefore offers an opportunity, found nowhere else in the entire preparation-process, to penetrate in a knowing way into the processes along the three research paths named.

This opportunity — of immersing oneself with wakeful consciousness into the processual activity of the stirring — one forfeits when one delegates the stirring process to a machine. One thereby withdraws from one's own striving for cognition the ground of lived experience. The question of why one stirs for an hour loses its point of reference — on account of the elimination of the human will — and becomes meaningless. If it were only a matter of optimal mixing, this would already be achievable in a fraction of an hour with suitably constructed machines — such as, for example, the *Turbula* after Paul Schatz,^[321] which works according to the movement-sequence of the inverted cube — but that is not the point. If one stirs with machines — of whatever construction — or

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or even with cascading vortex-shell forms after John Wilkes (*flow forms*),^[322] Rudolf Steiner's remark comes into consideration: that «one can also resolve to slide gradually into something surrogate-like».^[323] The problem is not that one might imitate hand-stirring with a machine and generate vortex-funnels turning both right and left — the surrogate consists in this: that in place of the spirit-guided, individually rhythm-generating will, a regulatory process steers events in a metered beat from outside. Rhythm opens cosmos, earth and human being toward one another; beat estranges them from one another.

Preparation-stirring creates — in the best sense of the word — elevated hours within the predetermined work-sequences of the day. These hours are there to be shaped. This can come about by stirring, wherever possible, in pairs, in threes, or in larger company, and by inviting people from the circle of friends of the farm to take part. Out of this active togetherness in individually shaping a rhythmic process, there can grow the mood of release, of cheerfulness, of feeling-free in self-determined activity — a mood that holds within it the earnestness in which the deeper strata of one's own will-being unite with the stirring-event.

The singularity of preparation-stirring opens new dimensions again, along the three research paths, toward a deepening understanding. Apart from Rudolf Steiner's spiritual-scientific indications regarding the manner of stirring, and from the wide field of observable facts concerning vortex-formation and vortex-dissolution and so forth, it is especially self-experience in the soul-activities of thinking, feeling and willing that can gain in significance. One can become attentive to the following experience: self-observation shows that the rhythmic activity of the stirring process mirrors itself in the relationships in which the soul-activities of thinking, feeling and willing stand to one another through the individual phases. Before I resolve to set the mass of water in motion, these three soul-forces form an undivided unity within me. I am wholly myself and stand over against something outside. In the moment when I resolve, in conscious thinking-activity, to move the stirring-brush, willing begins to externalise itself into activity. This externalisation intensifies further and further; my will must continually — without a moment's

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— without a moment's relenting — race ahead of the water that is to be moved, until my will-force reaches its limits, and I can no longer increase the impulse of motion toward the formation of the vortex. Parallel to this, my thinking consciousness detaches itself from the will-activity ever more completely and internalises itself to the degree that it looks upon its own will-activity in perfect stillness and heightened self-awareness. My soul-experience lays itself open into stillness of thought and movement of will. In this field of tension, which builds itself up with the advancing formation of the vortex, my feeling can unfold itself, independent of thinking and willing, in soul-purity and openness to spirit. Moments of heightened presence of mind can then arise. I can then experience myself, between stillness and movement, as one with the outer event. I am in the midst of it. Here — in this sense-free feeling brought about by one's own activity — lies what is perhaps the deepest source from which I can draw an inspirative certainty for the truth of the path I have taken.

When the will to further acceleration of the water loses its force, thinking consciousness strikes back in and moves the will to let the vortex-funnel collapse by abrupt counter-stirring. In this way the water forms once again, at the moment of the turning-point, a homogeneous unity — and so too do thinking, feeling and willing, which at this act "collapse" together out of separation into one, reuniting themselves. Out of this becoming-one there then ripens the resolve toward a new vortex-formation in the opposite direction, and once again the soul-forces disengage from one another. Thus the soul weaves rhythmically, throughout an hour of stirring, between self-relatedness and world-relatedness. Through this gate the I inscribes itself rhythmically into the world, and in the same rhythm the world enters essentially into the I.

"The funnel becomes here, in the stirring, the real image of the connections between world and I. In the absorbing force of the funnel — produced, or better brought to appearance, through human will — the substrate (and the human being) receives, at the end-point through the infinite, the connection to the periphery, from which the cosmic forces that stand in relation to the material that has become the Work can ray in from without, and unite themselves with the substrate in the vortexing."^[324]

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The Application

After the two preparations have been transferred from the state of the solid into that of the liquid, they are sprayed directly thereafter into the air — the horn manure more in coarse drops onto the soil, the horn silica more as a fine-droplet mist onto the plants (Figure 25, p. 350). Suitable implements are used for this purpose, working with low pressure and low delivery volume (40 to 60 litres per hectare, or even less). It is natural to weight this process with no more than the aspect of necessary distribution. What actually takes place, however, and what is accessible to intuitive beholding, is the dissolution of the rhythmically moved liquid into a condition that opens itself to the element of air — that is, a surface expanding into the boundless within the drop-form. The force-constellation that holds sway, at the moment of application — differently in the morning than in the evening, for example — over field, pasture, garden and orchard in air and warmth and light, and that can be sensed as a mood, impresses itself upon the force-constellation that has concentrated itself in each droplet in the time-stream of the preceding preparation steps. Through the dissolution of the stirred water into finest droplets, a multitude of centres arises, and, toward the air, of peripheral boundary-surfaces, which in their totality enlarge themselves into the immeasurable. The skin-membrane of each droplet shimmers in the light that radiates around it in all colours, and is — polar to the absorbing force of the stirring-vortex — open on all sides at the boundary-surfaces of its spherical form to the peripheral forces working in the element of air.

The application of the horn manure takes place at sowing time on the cultivated soil, best of all simultaneously in direct combination with the sowing itself, with a possible second application in connection with soil skin tillage in spring. In grassland the times fall in autumn and spring, or respectively after grazing and hay cutting; in fruit growing, before bud break and after harvest. In the course of the day, following the rhythm of the earth's in-breathing, the later afternoon hours are preferred for stirring and spraying — above all when the sky is overcast.

Polar to the horn manure, the horn silica preparation is applied, as a rule two or more times, during the period of growth and ripening. The timing arises out of an inward familiarisation with the growth rhythms of the individual crops. As a basic rule for the choice of timing, it may be said that the horn silica preparation lends harmonising support to the growth and ripening phase in which the respective crop currently finds itself. In the course of the day

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In the early morning hours, following the process of the earth's out-breathing and therewith the ascending sap-stream, one will stir and spray into the still dew-moist crops. By contrast, in the ripening phase of those crops that fruit vegetatively — root crops and the like — a spraying working on the descending sap-stream would be preferable in the late afternoon toward evening. The timing of application for both preparations is subject to no general rule, but to the personal relationship one has with one's crops in relation to the whole of the farm. They reveal themselves — and indeed frequently with great definiteness — out of the force of Intuition, when one pauses in the work, whether in the evening or in the course of walking over the fields, and, lingering in observation, takes stock of what has been experienced.

Efficacy

Both preparations have, retracing the path covered thus far, passed through the elemental states of the earthy-solid, of water and of air, and dissolve in warmth at the time and place where they arrive in droplet form (Illustration 25, p. 350). In the briefest span the substantively graspable, the ponderable, has either been absorbed by the soil or evaporated. Through the state of warmth, what is pure force-working of a spiritual nature — what has concentrated itself in the course of preparation in the hollow of the horn in the manure or silica — becomes efficacious. One must, in outer and inner intuitive beholding, accompany this four-stage path, in order to meet the spiritual researcher's mode of expression regarding efficacy with the right understanding: "as the cow horn manure thrusts upward from below, the other (horn silica) draws from above."^[325] Pure force-workings in the living are what is meant — ones that have come into being through passage through a spatio-temporal process. They work back now into the earthly conditions of space and time in such a way that the plant, from the germ through shoot-growth to fruit and seed maturity, is able to integrate itself according to its type and the conditions of the site into the vertical axis of Earth and Sun. What is essential lives in warmth and reveals itself through warmth.

The horn manure preparation unfolds its efficacy beneath the earth — figuratively speaking, in the head of the agricultural individuality, in the root-space. In this sense it is a "head fertiliser." It fertilises the processes beneath the earth,

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which are akin to the nerve-sense processes in the human head (Figure 25, p. 350). It has taken up these fertilising forces during the resting of the horns in the winter earth, in the time when they are naturally at their most intense in working within the interior of the earth. We have therefore in the horn manure a "winter forces fertiliser" at our disposal, which, polar to the winter season, can be applied at will in accordance with the sowing times of the cultivated plants from spring through summer to autumn. The metabolically active cow dung has transformed itself into a sense-active fertiliser, which strengthens the intrinsic activity of the root in relation to the merely mineral character of the soil. It "educates" the sense-faculty of the root, which finds expression for instance in the mineral-opening capacity — "the roots of plants [...]: It is an eye, but a poor eye."^[326] This fact is reflected in experimental investigations which show that the root grows true to type, branches more finely, penetrates vertically deeper into the soil and thereby opens up for itself a larger soil volume.

The horn silica preparation unfolds its efficacy above the earth, in the shoot and leaf region. Here, in the "belly" of the agricultural individuality, intense metabolic activity prevails in exchange with air, warmth and light (Figure 25, p. 350). In this reciprocal relationship of the peripheral forces on the one hand and the ascending and descending plant saps on the other, the horn silica preparation works harmonisingly. It is in this sense a "metabolic fertiliser" for the plant. It has taken up this fertilising force during the resting of the horns in the summer earth, in the time when these summer metabolic forces are at their most intensely active. The crystalline, sense-active quartz — a representative of the winter earth — has transformed itself, in the course of the emancipation steps described, into a metabolically active summer forces fertiliser. With its help we can once again individualize the great macrocosmic rhythm of the course of the year at will toward the culture we happen to be growing. It opens the plant toward its environment and equally toward its type, its spiritual archetype. This comes to expression both more distinctly in the outward appearance of the plant — for instance in the articulation of the leaves, in the leaf metamorphosis — and in the composition of substances in all the stages of vitalization, of growth, and of devitalization, of flowering, of ripeness and of seed formation. In interplay with the horn manure preparation it harmonizes the processes of fruit formation, ensures, as experimental

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Experimental studies show: for physiological rest in the ripening, and thus for consistency, colour, smell and taste — for qualitative properties that, pointing beyond the threshold of the merely plant-like, constitute the nutritive value for animal and human being.^[327]^[328]^[329]

Horn manure and horn silica condition one another. They work in the Earth-Sun axis, which is made sense-perceptible in the vertical of root and shoot. They open the plant furthermore to the peripheral forces, which manifests in the intensive branching of the root and the thorough forming of the leaf-work. With the one we manure with winter forces, with the other with summer forces. We manure life through that which bears all life. These are substances held within the living, which release forces that individualize, site-specifically, the rhythm-creating relationship of Earth and cosmos.

There are many experimental studies on the spray preparations.^[330] They furnish, in this or that direction, a confirmation of their efficacy. For the one who asks after their being and their significance, understanding will grow in the measure that it succeeds — on the three named paths of research — to open oneself to the spiritual-scientific foundation of ideas, to bring before oneself, in a knowing way, the nexus of nature bearing upon it within the whole of the agricultural organism, and to allow oneself to be instructed through the will-experience in the doing.

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Horn manure and horn silica condition one another. They work in the Earth-Sun axis, which is made sense-perceptible in the vertical of root and shoot. They open the plant furthermore to the peripheral forces, which manifests in the intensive branching of the root and the thorough forming of the leaf-work. With the one we manure with winter forces, with the other with summer forces. We manure life through that which bears all life. These are substances held within the living, which release forces that individualize, site-specifically, the rhythm-creating relationship of Earth and cosmos.

There are many experimental studies on the spray preparations.^[331] They furnish, in this or that direction, a confirmation of their efficacy. For the one who asks after their being and their significance, understanding will grow in the measure that it succeeds — on the three named paths of research — to open oneself to the spiritual-scientific foundation of ideas, to bring before oneself, in a knowing way, the nexus of nature bearing upon it within the whole of the agricultural organism, and to allow oneself to be instructed through the will-experience in the doing.

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of the human being — but now out of ideas drawn from knowledge of the spirit. These ideas contain the relationship of the Work as it has become to its essential ground; in practical application, they initiate a new development.

Comprehensive descriptions of the source materials for the preparations and of the preparations themselves have been provided by the following authors — concerning:

the preparation plants, by Jochen Bockemühl and Kari Järvinen^[332] — a study designed to guide the reader from intuitive beholding toward knowledge of the essential being.
"A deepened understanding of the essential being of the biodynamic preparations from a Goethean, Christological, and spiritual-scientific perspective," by Erdmuth-M. W. Hoerner.^[333]
The practical handling in the making and application of the biodynamic preparations — a comprehensive overview by Walter Stappung.^[334]

The Composition of the Yarrow Preparation

Yarrow is characterised by Rudolf Steiner as "a quite special marvel."^[335] "This yarrow presents itself in nature as though some plant-creator had had a model at hand in this yarrow, in order to bring sulphur into the right relationship with the other plant substances in the right way."^[336] And further: "Yarrow develops its sulphur-force preferentially in the potassium-forming process. For this reason it contains sulphur in precisely the quantity necessary for working potassium."^[337] "In yarrow, the sulphur works the potassium content in such a way "that it conducts itself in the right manner in the organic process with respect to what now constitutes the actual body, the protein-nature of the plant."^[338]

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Sulphur mediates the spiritually-cosmic to the earthly substances. These arrange themselves according to the forces of the spiritual archetype — of the yarrow, for instance — and bring it to appearance in the form or gestalt of this plant. Sulphur can be spoken of, within the living, as the bearer of the spirit-creating principle, which finds expression in form, in gestalt-formation. Potassium, as salt-former, is the bearer of the substance-principle and is thereby a representative of the earthly. In the interworking of these two polar principles, protein formation accomplishes itself in the plant through a process of enhancement. At every stage of its appearing, from seed to blossom, the plant — and yarrow in particular — is an image of this polarity. It stands before us in purely objective terms when we lay a seed in the earth. In the seed, the spiritual archetype of the plant concentrates itself. In it, the cosmic lives "as the form of the plant."^[339] The seed is surrounded by humus — the formative agent within the earthly^[340] — and by the mineral constituents of the soil: silica, lime, clay, and the salts dissolved in water. It is surrounded, then, by earthly materiality, which, however, loses its character in proportion to how fully the mineral components have crystallized through and thereby become insoluble in water — silica, for instance. In the crystal, the cosmic archetype of the mineral appears as form. In dissolved materiality, the physical-earthly laws hold sway.

With the swelling of the seed, it takes up water and the salts dissolved within it from the soil. The cosmic form of the plant enters into relationship with earthly substance. The seedling develops in a mercurial way out of this relationship. What lives in the seed as the cosmic form of the plant transforms itself into the earthly form of the sensuously-physically appearing plant. In the moment of taking up earthly substance — potassium, for example — this substance already estranges itself, in a first step, from its physical-earthly lawfulness. In the field of tension between the becoming-earthly of the plant's form on the one side, and the potassium that progressively estranges itself from its earthly nature within the organic process on the other, protein forms itself. In the primal substance of all life, cosmic form and earthly substance interpenetrate. In protein formation — at the vegetative point, for example — the potassium process presses and swells from below upward, and out of the protein the spirit builds up the gestalt of the plant, making use of sulphur as its mediator. In the formation of plant protein, one may see the turning-point at which the cosmic form of the plant circumscribes itself into the earthly, and the representative of the earthly — potassium — estranges itself toward its cosmic

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Figure 26: Metamorphoses of the arrangement of substance across the three steps of the preparation of yarrow.

original being unlocks. The more yarrow brings its outer earthly form to appearance, therefore, the more does potassium lift itself free of the conditionedness of its physical properties. At each stage of this shifting reciprocal relationship between form and substance, between the becoming-earthly and the becoming-cosmic, protein differs in its substance-form arrangement. In the young plant and toward the root, it is more closely related to potassium — that is, to salt (nitrates, free amino acids); in the fully grown plant, and toward the blossom and the ripened fruit, it structures itself with ever-greater complexity. It becomes sulphur-related — that is, form-related (Figure 26, p. 363).

In the blossom, what lived cosmically as form in the seed appears in earthly formal completion. Everything that was laid down in the seed as the possibility of becoming form has poured itself into this determinate form. The being of the plant cannot reveal itself beyond what reveals itself up to the blossom in the image. On the other hand, the earthly substance potassium, in the blossom, has moved furthest from its earthly character. In the blossom it passes over into the most delicate, cosmically refined substance-formation — in the coloured petal, for instance, in the nectar, in the streaming fragrance. The one — form —

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passes completely into earthly appearance. In its form we recognise yarrow unmistakably: in the sturdiness of its stem, in the dissolution of the leaf blade into an ordered manifold of spear-like dividing pinnations, and in the flower umbels that radiate forth in white and rose, where the dry, densely concentrated individual florets of the composite gather on the gently arching receptacle. The other — the substance, which in the soil appears as potassium with its precisely graspable physical properties — disappears into the organic process, impressing certain qualities upon it, and then, rising from leaf to leaf, drawing near to the cosmos in the blossom, passes over into a kind of germinal state. Look upon the inflorescence of yarrow: one sees a high degree of earthly-physical formal differentiation, and simultaneously this gesture of opening itself so willlessly to the cosmos. Above all this delicate, devoted gesture — but also colour, fragrance, and taste — may stand as indication that in the blossom the substance-process approaches cosmic conditions in an etheric refinement.

In this way the blossom mirrors the relationship of the cosmic to the earthly — in form and substance — in polar contrast to the seed germinating in the earth. The plant reveals its being in the fact that in the blossom it dies into form, and in the fact that simultaneously the substance-process, shaped by its being, flows into a kind of cosmic germinal state in the blossom. However complete and perfect the blossom may appear, it is at the same time open and germinal. This state of surrendering opening toward the cosmos lasts only a moment. Then comes, on the one hand, the inraying that leads to the formation of the individual seed, and on the other hand the plant form wilts from blossom downward and succumbs to humification — to the formation of humus as the "universal seed." How can this *status nascendi* of formal revelation and etheric substance kept in flux be preserved in the blossom? How can the achievement of plant formation in the blossom be carried beyond the iron threshold set by nature — passing, as it were, between seed formation and humus formation? How can duration be granted to the moment of the blossom?

One can imagine that Rudolf Steiner, researching in the spirit and directing his gaze toward yarrow, stood before such questions. The mere beholding of yarrow cannot give an answer to them. What takes us further is to follow the working of yarrow into the animal and human organism. There it proves itself to be a significant healing agent, able to restore "what suffers from a weakness

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of the astral body."^[341] The flowering process of yarrow, in its use as a healing agent, extends itself into the higher realm of the warm-blooded animal and into the realm of the human being, and there, beyond its outer field of appearance, it unfolds a beneficently healing working. The spiritual researcher draws attention to this relationship of yarrow to something that, as a soul and spiritual reality, lies beyond the threshold of its appearance. But this still gives no answer to the question of how the form-and-substance process of the blossom as such is to be preserved. To achieve this, Rudolf Steiner turns his researching gaze toward the animal kingdom, which in its world of organs grants duration to the moment through soul-force bound within the body. The animal organism encloses an inner world that in the flowering plant appears, as in a mirror-image, turned outward. From the level of animality the spiritual researcher turns his gaze back to yarrow, with the question of which organ-process can preserve "what is in the yarrow."^[342] This power belongs to the "process that takes place between the kidney and the bladder, and this process is in turn dependent on the substantial constitution of the bladder."^[343] These conditions are met in the bladder of the male — that is, the antler-bearing — noble game. The bladder of the stag is used as a rule.

The fluid metabolism ends in the bladder. It absorbs, concentrates, and discharges into the outer world what the kidney, in its perception of the soul-permeated fluid organism, releases from the interior as unusable. The activity of kidney and bladder stands in a striking relationship to its counter-pole: the outwardly directed nerve-sense activity. This holds above all for the eye, and in the stag for the antlers, which after dying off remain for some months until shedding as a kind of groping sense organ. The eye, in its structure governed almost entirely by the laws of physics, appears like a piece of the outer world that sinks "gulf-like" into the organism.^[344] The antlers grow as limb-bones beyond the head and die away, quite literally, into an object of the outer world.

And so the noble game lives with its high-borne antlers and its gazing eye in a state of continual, quiet nervousness, perceiving its surroundings. The

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The eye stands in a polar relationship to the bladder. As the bladder captures a material stream of substance from the soul-permeated interior being and concentrates it, so conversely the eye, which captures the spiritual element of the outer world and concentrates it in the image of perception. And as the bladder, discharging, opens itself to the outer world, so the eye mediates the image-content, raying inward, to the interior being. How strongly perception and excretion are interconnected is experienced by anyone who enters a cow barn conspicuously and at an inopportune moment. The cows briefly take notice, and already the metabolism becomes active; a rushing begins. In noble game this connection is polarized more toward the nerve-sense side. In bodily-bound openness of sense, it lives along with the cosmic element of its surroundings, and this imprints itself upon its bodily organization. To this imprinting the noble game bladder owes its particular "substantial constitution."^[345] What the stag experiences as cosmic presence imprints the material arrangement of the paper-thin membrane of the bladder. In its substantial imprinting through the forces of the cosmos it is "almost an image of the cosmos."^[346] At the same time the noble game bladder has a nearly spherical form. As a sheath organ it encloses an inner space and, with this power-form of the re-forming sheath, preserves the continuous course of the processes unfolding within it. Like all organs the bladder carries within itself, in form and preserving function, the heritage of the past macrocosm. What makes the bladder of the noble game so outstanding in comparison with that of other ruminants, for instance, and so suited to the preparation of yarrow, is the duality of its function. In its substantial constitution it stands in relation to the presently working forces of the macrocosm — in its form, by contrast, to the preserving forces working out of the past.

What in nature unfolds into two completely separate lines of evolution — on the one hand the sulphur-potassium process, culminating in the yarrow blossom, and on the other the bladder-kidney process, culminating in noble game — are evolutive endpoints. The spiritual researcher beholds the end of a developmental path in form and material arrangement, and beholds the creative powers of the beginning and their further development. From the joint contemplation of both worlds the first step of the preparation opens up: yarrow blossoms are filled, lightly compressed, into the stag bladder so that they are enclosed by it on all sides (Figure 26, I, p. 363).

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What had previously opened outward in the yarrow blossoms, in will-less surrender toward the cosmos, now fills an inner space. What had previously stood entirely in the service of an inner organism as a bladder — a creation of the past cosmos in its form, an image of the present cosmos in its substance — is now an object of the outer world. The bladder is a formation of the astral body of the stag. Once removed from the stag, it lacks the astral body. In its place, through the exposure of the preparation to the periphery, step the radiations of the "world astral body" (cosmos). With this first step of the preparation, a first inversion of the bladder's function takes place. In its natural condition the bladder is an organ of metabolic activity; now, as an object in space and time, it becomes in its substantial constitution a kind of sense organ toward the cosmos. The blossoms, on the other hand, which in nature open outward in will-less surrender, arrive in the inner sphere of an organ so shaped by the animal organism that it permeates its contents wilfully with preserving forces.

In the second step of the preparation, what was laid down through the inversion in the first step begins to fulfil itself (Figure 26, II, p. 363). The stag bladder with its blossom contents is hung "in a place exposed as much as possible to the sun."^[347] There it is exposed to the forces of the physical body of the earth in the elements of air and warmth, and to what works as essential being along the vertical axis of earth-centre and sun. We may assume that it is now the substantial constitution of the bladder — that which came to it from the cosmic experience of the stag — through which the membrane of the bladder becomes receptively sense-active toward the physical working of forces surrounding it in space. This force-signature of the sun-permeated space in air and warmth, mediated through the substance of the bladder, communicates itself to the enclosed blossom-substance. And it is the form-sheath of the bladder through which what has been taken in is held fast and preserved in the yarrow blossoms. Through the inversion processes of this first and second preparation step, the working of the periphery imprints itself upon the potassium working — raised into the etheric — in the yarrow blossoms. It holds, so one may understand it, the etherised potassium process in flow and transforms it, through the higher forces of the astral, into a "formative force."

In the third step of the preparation we bury the yarrow spheres "not very deep in the earth,"^[348] so that there they are exposed to the forces of the physical

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body of the earth in the elements of the fluid and the solid, and to what works as essential being in the vertical direction (Figure 26, III, p. 363). Again it is the substantial constitution of the bladder that mediates sense-actively to the yarrow mass what lives physically in space in darkness, in earth and water, and it is the form-sheath that imprints it enduringly upon the germinal substance-state of the blossoms.

In the second and third steps of the preparation, the blossom mass of the yarrow is exposed to the forces of the physical body of the earth. This has its foundation in the four elements, which in nature mix and separate in manifold ways, but in the large separate out into air and warmth above the earth and into the fluid and the solid beneath the earth. Into both spatial qualities of "above" and "below," of light and darkness, the yarrow spheres plunge like seed-germs. Within them these spatial qualities of "the earthly" are preserved. The "upper," preserving itself, interpenetrates the "lower," and conversely. Condensed as it were into a single point, the world-polarity of the heights and the depths — the side-by-side in space and the objectification of the physical body of the earth — is cancelled out.

The second step of the preparation has until now been considered only under the physico-spatial aspect. To this is added the temporal aspect. The yarrow spheres remain, hung above the earth and there exposed to the forces of warmth and air and to the light of the sun, from spring through summer until autumn (Figure 26, II, p. 363). During this time, above all in summer, air and warmth and the moisture-sheath of the earth are permeated by etheric and astral forces that ray in directly from the sun and from the planetary periphery, especially that of the sub-solar planets. What lives spiritually in these forces allows the plants to grow; they configure themselves in their inexhaustible abundance of forms. This working of forces — holding sway as it were horizontally in warmth, air and moisture — is received by the blossom mass within the enclosing sheath. Again it will be the substantial constitution of the bladder that mediates what lives in the succession of time, and it will be its organ-form that preserves the imprint of each individual moment.

In the third step of the preparation, the yarrow spheres remain from autumn through winter until spring in the earth (Figure 26, III, p. 363). There the moisture-saturated earth is permeated by etheric and astral forces that work upon plant growth indirectly from the sun and from the planetary periphery, above all that of the super-solar planets. What lives spiritually in these forces enters into relationship with

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the representatives of the mineral-crystalline nature of the earth, to quartz (silica), lime and clay substance. As an indirect working it is mediated in "cosmic upward streaming"^[349] through the clay of the plant world and configures itself there, for example, in the leaf and blossom colours and in the finer substantiation of the ripening fruits. Immersed in this working of forces, the yarrow spheres rest in the earth through the winter half-year. Again it will be the substance of the organ-sheath that, in a kind of sense activity, mediates what advances through time to the germinal element of the blossom mass, and it will be the form that preserves this in the germinal element.

In the second and third steps of the preparation, the yarrow mass is embedded vertically, in spatial relation, into the physical body of the earth, and horizontally, in relation to the course of time, to the rhythmic recurrence of arising and passing away, into the etheric and astral body of the earth. The latter differentiate themselves into a multiplicity of beings that bring about the phenomena of the course of the year and the rhythmic succession of the seasons. Winter and summer stand over against each other in polar opposition, and the transitions of spring and autumn. For any given place on earth, it cannot be winter and summer simultaneously — they follow one upon another in the stream of time. In the exposure of the yarrow spheres to the processes of the summer half-year in air and warmth, and thereafter to those of the winter half-year in water and earth, the germinal element of the blossom substance has had impressed upon it — mediated and preserved through the deer bladder — a whole course of the year. Within the blossom content, all the qualities of temporal succession through the course of the year interpenetrate one another in simultaneity. The summer half-year, preserving itself, interpenetrates the winter half-year, and conversely. In the yarrow thus prepared, the peripheral working of a whole course of the year condenses to a point in simultaneity — and thereby to a potency of new possibilities of development.

In the further progression of the preparation of the yarrow, the stream of substance that ends in the blossom in the state of the germinal is carried across the threshold of boundness in space and time. What lived itself out in the yarrow blossom for a moment in a will-less gesture, as a mere potency — this, in crossing that threshold, opens itself to a higher nature of forces. The substantially germinal does not fall back into the natural course of seed formation and humus formation; rather, it germinates forth, fertilised by the forces of the physical, etheric and astral body of the earth.

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In the yarrow blossom, as equally in the bladder of the noble deer, a macrocosmic development reaches its end. There completion reigns — it goes no further. The human spirit, however, is capable, in the inner empowerment of its cognitive faculty, of pressing forward into the spiritual foundations of being and becoming. These have been opened to present-day consciousness in the results of anthroposophical spiritual science. Such results lie before us in the Agriculture Course of Rudolf Steiner, and they guide us to unite, in the first step of the preparation, what is separated in nature yet from its origin deeply related. Thus, in the outer substance-process, out of the human spirit, in the three steps of the preparation, a kind of threefold threshold-crossing accomplishes itself. Wherever nature, in the progression of the preparation, in the completion of itself, comes up against a threshold — there we can, out of the insights of spiritual research, lead it creatively across.

Stages of Efficacy

The finished preparation is, measured against the mass of the natural manures of the farm, a quantity that appears almost negligible. In it, the arrangement of substance is not work but germ. It appears outwardly related to humus, yet in being and efficacy it is the precise opposite. Humus "generates lightless working."^[350] "It shapes what is below through the earth."^[351] But the meaning of the yarrow preparation, as in modified form of the other compost preparations too, is precisely to impart "light-filled working" to the organic manures of the farm that are falling into decomposition — to transfer to the natural manures the capacity to become receptive to the archetypes of the cosmos that exist beyond space and time.

The being and significance of the yarrow preparation stands in connection with the being and significance of potassium in the household of nature. In its physical nature, potassium reveals itself in its determinate properties. With these the chemist reckons as the sole reality. In the life process of the plant, and archetypically in the yarrow, it estranges

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The potassium that has congealed into this wrought determinacy now estranges itself from that determinacy — and through the particular sulphur content of the yarrow, in the flowering process, it is brought a first step closer to its cosmic being of origin. One can call this the stage of «efficacy»,^[352] the stage of the efficacious living. In the field of tension with sulphur, potassium unfolds its efficacy within the living — working from the earthly pole into protein formation in the leaf zone. In the blossom, protein formation recedes almost entirely. It carries forward into the formation of seed. So in the blossom the potassium process is, as it were, released from its efficacy within the living. It refines itself into the state of the germinal — into what one can sense in image as the will-less opening gesture of the blossom. This state endures a moment, and already the germinal quality of this substance-process falls, with the dying-away of the plant, into mineralization, back into the state of the determinacy of physical properties. But at the moment of flowering, the preparation intervenes. Through the enveloping in the noble-game bladder and the further steps of the preparation, the potassium — which in the blossom has reached the highest stage of its transformation into the living — is detached from the bearer-plant and held in efficacy. This points to the fact that potassium, now in the current of its enlivening, becomes receptive to a higher sphere: to that of the revelation of its being. Through this, the earthly substance potassium is lifted not merely into the sphere of life, but into that of life bearing sentience. It becomes the bearer of a life permeated by inwardness.

This enlivening and astralization of substance takes place also in the animal through its soul- or astral-being. This finds expression in the extraordinary fertilising force of the excretions of ruminants — above all of the cow.

The cow manure is a telling example of this. In the human being, substance is spiritualized beyond the stages named, under the dominion of the I, and becomes the bearer of the I. What is extraordinary about the preparation is that here substances are brought into an arrangement through which they are able, outside the closed bodily organism of human being and animal, to become in the soil bearers of cosmic life and cosmic astrality.

The finished yarrow preparation — a creation out of the spirit of the human being — represents the third stage of manuring. It unfolds its working by being added in homoeopathically small quantities to that which

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that accumulates in the agricultural operation in the course of the year from the plant and animal world. It unfolds its working in the compost and in the manure stack. At the appointed time these manures go out onto the soil. But the soil is only a gossamer-thin skin. It forms, as a "diaphragm,"^[353] the middle between the "above" and "below," the heights and the depths, light and darkness. When we work the manure into this skin-like "middle," it is fertilised through this new arrangement of substances — which is the essence of a consonance of the mineral, plant, and animal natures, of the rhythms of the solar year and of the spiritually creative force of the human being. This manure ennobles and transcendingly equalises the modes of working of the three kingdoms of nature — those of the crystalline sense-nature of the earth, of the plant compost, and of the animal manure. It does not merely compensate what was taken from the soil by exhaustive farming; it gives to the earth, to the "Work," the capacity for the lifeless to become enlivened, for the enlivened to become sentience-bearing, and for this to individualize itself through the spirit raying in from the future.

The significance of the third stage of manuring can be seen in this: that we lead, in far perspective, into the future — there where work is done in this way — the existence of nature beyond the threshold of space and time, and reconnect it with the advancing development of the spirit-soul of the human being, and with it, of the cosmos.

Die Komposition des Kamillenpräparates

The preparation follows the same steps as the yarrow preparation, with one uncertainty: in the text of the Course, the second step — the hanging of the filled cattle intestines — goes unmentioned; a corresponding indication, however, is found in the notes to the Course. This difficulty will be addressed later.

In its outward appearance, chamomile (Matricaria recutita resp. Chamomilla officinalis) is polar to yarrow, though as a composite (Asteraceae) it is very closely related to it. At the same time it shows a kindred proximity within the functional field of tension of the polarity of root and blossom. This proximity and simultaneous distance grounds its position as the second in the sequence of biodynamic preparations.

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Spiritual research teaches that the chamomile preparation has the capacity to make "the manure capable of absorbing as much life as possible, and of transferring this life to the soil," so that the manure is brought to the point of "binding together even more of those substances necessary for plant growth — beyond potassium, also calcium, lime compounds." With yarrow we are dealing primarily with the potassium workings. "If we also wish to capture the calcium workings, we need once again a plant [...] that [...] distributed in homeopathic doses, contains sulphur, and through the sulphur draws toward itself the remaining substances necessary for the plant." "Chamomile processes [alongside potassium; author's note] calcium toward this end." It contributes to "excluding from the plant those harmful fructification effects, to keeping the plant healthy."^[354]

These indications of Rudolf Steiner cast light at the same time on the so characteristic outward appearance of chamomile in comparison to yarrow. Yarrow, by virtue of its sulphur activity in the warmth-air realm, stands in reciprocal interaction with the earth-salt potassium, in a progressive refinement of the potassium process from the root upward through stem, leaf sequence, to the blossom — it is entirely an expression of the mastery of the earthy and the watery. Everything about it shows the tendency toward strict form and toward a holding-back of the life processes: for instance, the pronounced succulence of the finely articulated yet dense pinnate foliage, and the tubular florets concealed as if behind walls of the involucral bracts. Chamomile, by contrast, appears as if lifted out of the earthly. Its relation to potassium shows itself still in a slight succulence of the leaves.^[355] Its sulphur activity, however, seems to concentrate itself above all on the processing and sublimation of the earth-substance calcium. Everything in it strives toward a loose, vigorous articulation of its vegetative organs. From the pronounced taproot — which widens slightly toward the top in a turnip-like manner — the lateral roots radiate partly horizontally in dense succession outward into breadth and depth. The primary shoot rises vertically upward, yet presently it divides itself at the base into a number of lateral branches which, branching little, radiate outward into breadth and height, and as a whole tend to give the plant a kind of spherical form. The leaves are articulated into a loose, sparsely ordered pinnation; the pinnate leaflets are

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Figure 27: Metamorphoses of the arrangement of substance in the three steps of the preparation of chamomile.

narrow, thread-like formations that themselves branch only slightly (Figure 27). These gestures of the radiating and the rounding point to features that are characteristic of the wealth of forms in which mineral lime (CaCO₃) appears — for instance the radiating character of aragonite, or the spherical and rounded forms of crystalline limes, löss nodules, stalactites, and the like.

The shoot-form of chamomile awakens the impression of a radiant dispersal and dissolution into light, warmth, and air. That it does not dissolve altogether — this is ensured by the terminal blossoms, in which the formative gesture of the whole plant repeats itself once more on a higher level and turns inward. The stem dams up and widens into the receptacle, upon which the tubular florets appear unassumingly, bounded at the margin by the white ray-florets. In the opening of the blossom, the receptacle arches into a rounded cone and begins to radiate in the warm golden-yellow of the tubular florets. Beneath the arching of the receptacle, an air-filled hollow space comes into being — the unmistakable sign that one is dealing with true chamomile. A particular mark of the mobility of chamomile

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in contrast to yarrow is the lifting of the white ray-florets at daybreak and their lowering toward evening.^[356]

In the blossoms, which envelop and complete the spherical form of the free-standing chamomile plant, its light-permeated, warmth-permeated, and air-permeated being appears once more on a higher level. The sulphur process permeates, compared to yarrow, the whole plant in a different way, all the way down into the root. And instead of holding the potash, as yarrow does, livingly within the earthy-watery, chamomile ætherises the upward-streaming potassium-calcium in the sphere of activity of warmth and air, culminating in the blossom, which gives out an intense fragrance. What comes to a processual end in the blossom forms, in the preparation of chamomile, the beginning of something new. This inversion is introduced by stuffing the gathered chamomile blossoms into an animal form-sheath — a section of the small intestine of the cow (Figure 27). The small intestine (*Intestinum tenue*) follows directly upon the duodenum (*Duodenum*) coming from the stomach, passes over into the ileum (*Ilium*), which opens into the caecum (*Caecum*). The long intermediate section is formed by the jejunum (*Jejunum*), which surrounds in garland- or wreath-like fashion the spirally arranged disc of the colon (*Colon*). This forms the middle section of the large intestine between the caecum (*Caecum*) and the rectum (*Rectum*). For the preparation, the jejunum is the relevant section. Within it — initiated by secretions that open into the duodenum (liver, bile, pancreas), and by the intestine's own glands — the main digestive activity takes place. The intestinal wall of the jejunum is enlarged many times over by the closely succeeding intestinal villi. Protected by the powerful mucous membrane (*Mucosa*), the blood and lymph vessels reach far into the intestinal canal within the villi. Here, through glandular secretions and bacterial breakdown, the nearly complete mineralization of the absorbed food takes place. It is an intensive metabolic activity, accompanied by the rhythmic movements of relaxing and re-erecting of the intestinal villi, as well as the peristalsis of the intestinal walls by a muscle layer, which in turn — through a strongly nerve-tissue-permeated, nearly transparent skin, the serosa — separates the intestinal wall from the interior of the abdominal cavity. This articulation into three membranes and the threefold chord of their functions is also shown by the stag's bladder. And yet both organ systems stand in polar relation to one another. The bladder centralises and stores the fluid secreted from the kidney

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and releases it into the outer world; the small intestine, by contrast, moves the solid-fluid of the nourishment taken in from outside, breaks it down, sifts it in its passage through the intestinal wall and releases what has been sifted into the inner world of the body. Bladder and kidney are organs of the astral body within the fluid organism; the bladder excretes what the kidney has sifted and rendered unusable from the interior of the body. The small intestine is an organ that filters the usable from the solid of the nourishment and inscribes it into the body. Deep in the unconscious, the I-organisation participates in this process in the human being. It reaches deeply into the digestive process and ensures the destruction of foreign substantiality right down to the level of the physically inorganic.

The first preparation step is one of inversion and emancipation from the natural course of events. The question is: how can the potassium-calcium process, which was kept in flow during the growth of the chamomile and in the blossom reached the highest stage of etheric plasticity, be lifted beyond the dying-away of the blossom and out of the limitation of space and time, so that what was disposed in the blossom can be kept in flow at a higher level? This task is fulfilled by the small intestine — the jejunum — of the cow. We obtain one ideally from a cow that throughout her life has carried out the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" in her digestive system upon the farm's own fodder. We cut the jejunum into sections of approximately 25 to 50 cm, tie these at one end, and using a funnel stuff the chamomile flower heads into the intestinal sheath, tie it at the filling opening and obtain in this way taut, substantial sausages (Figure 27, p. 374).

What previously, as chamomile blossom, was turned toward the expanses of the cosmos, toward the sun, now fills densely packed the inner space of the small intestine — the jejunum — of a cow. This inversion from outside to inside holds also for the new function of the small intestine itself. It now has a content that it no longer digests, unlocks enzymatically and moves, but on the contrary preserves in its consistency and makes receptive to forces that ray in from the planetary periphery through sunlight. The ordinary function of the intestine and the intestinal wall consists in mediating the worked-up intestinal contents of the earthly nourishment to the interior of the cow's body — physically through the lymph and blood pathways, and spiritually through the nerve-sense skin of the serosa. In polar relation to this, the outer skin of the intestine (*Serosa*) is now turned toward the forces of the cosmos and the earth. Detached from the cow organism, the sensation-permeated substance of the intestinal membrane mediates

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to the chamomile blossoms forces of earth and sun. The question is: are these not precisely the forces that keep the etherized potassium and calcium of the blossoms flowing across the threshold set by natural law? For that, in the end, is what matters with all the manure preparations! With this first preparatory step — the inversion of polar processes — a heightening takes place that, as one may understand it, has the potency to open the "Work" of what has become to a new developmental stage of efficacy. This potency ultimately realizes itself in a second, and above all in a third, step of inversion and emancipation (Figure 27, p. 374).

With regard to the second step, the uncertainty mentioned at the outset arises concerning Rudolf Steiner's indication in the Agriculture Course and that in the notes he prepared in advance of it. These are printed as an appendix to the Agriculture Course. On sheet 30 of these notes there is the remark: "Intestines — hang up." Of this there is no mention in the fifth lecture of the course, that is, in the public presentation of the matter. What is decisively emphasized instead is the third step — the exposure in the earth to the winter forces: as a "natural effect [...] to allow something living that is as nearly kindred to the earthy as possible to work there." The character of the place where the chamomile preparation is to be buried is also described in some detail: "Expose these precious [...] little sausages again throughout the whole winter in soil that is not too deeply buried, in soil as rich in humus as possible, and also seek out places [...] where the snow lies for a longer time, and where the sun shines well upon the snow, so that the cosmic-astral effects may work in there as fully as possible."^[357]

This third step of preparation — compared with the yarrow, it is the third — is evidently where the actual significance lies. The second step, the exposure to cosmic influences through air and warmth, remains unmentioned. More recently, in analogy to the preparation of yarrow, the practice of hanging the intestines over the summer has become more and more widespread. The flower heads of the chamomile, which blooms from late May into June, are gathered, slightly dried, stuffed into the intestines, and exposed before Midsummer Day, or the summer solstice, to the summer forces of air and warmth.^[358]

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When one seeks to weigh the various statements concerning the summer and winter workings in the case of chamomile from the spirit of the Agriculture Course itself, the following consideration may be of help: as the procedure with the subsequent preparation plants shows, it is attuned to their characteristic way of dealing with the cosmic forces and earthly substances. As described, the growth of chamomile is an expression of the prevailing of an intense astrality in light, warmth, and air. This intensifies once more in the blossom and comes to expression in the air-filled hollow space beneath the arching receptacle — this hollow space can at the same time, without contradiction, be understood as an expression of the formation of an inner (soul) space of its own, not yet filled by the being — in the rhythmic movement of the ray florets, in the warming-airy fragrance, and in its high healing efficacy. All of this points to the fact that chamomile, already in its growth activity, is exposed to such a strong summerly-cosmic astral working that the second step of preparation appears almost superfluous; it anticipates this step, as it were. Nevertheless, a hanging of the intestinal sausages over the summer can certainly do no harm.

After wintering in the earth — protection against foxes and dogs gnawing at them is necessary — there follows as a further step of preparation and emancipation the digging up in spring around Eastertide. A new substance with new properties has come into being, one that on account of its astral formative force "is more resistant to nitrogen than other manures, but which also has the peculiarity of enlivening the soil in such an extraordinarily stimulating way that it can work upon plant growth. And one will above all produce healthier plants."^[359]

The "refreshing and enlivening force" of the chamomile preparation may be ascribed to the etherized potassium, the healing force to the etherized calcium. The latter becomes receptive to the ordering astral forces streaming from the supersensible being of the chamomile. In the "binding together" of these earthly substances, potassium and calcium, the etheric or life body of the plants becomes richer in formative forces; it is thereby able to "exclude the harmful fructification workings." ^[360] "Fructification" can here be understood as the right process in the wrong place: in the soil, bacteria, fungi, etc. fructify and provide for breakdown processes right through to mineralization, and then also in connection with soil animals for transformation and

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Building-up processes. There — in the soil — is the right place; the wrong place is when this activity begins to proliferate a storey higher, in the shoot above the ground, for example in the form of viral infections or bacterial and fungal diseases. This destructive upward-working of the earthly element of the soil into the stem and leaf zone is counteracted by the organic manure treated with the chamomile preparation.

Like the other biodynamic preparations, the chamomile preparation is stored in evenly tempered, rather darkened rooms in earthenware vessels, surrounded on all sides by peat. Peat insulates against radiation. Application takes place in portions of roughly a three-fingered pinch — two to three grams per 2 m³ in the horticultural context, in the agricultural context 10 to 12 m³ of dung or compost material, that is to say depending on the size of the heap. The personal relationship one builds up through working with the manure sets the right measure.

The Composition of the Stinging Nettle Preparation

As the third in the alliance with yarrow and chamomile, the stinging nettle shows in its characterful outward appearance scarcely any family resemblance to these — yet it does so in the manner of its dealings with potassium, calcium, and additionally iron. The sulphur process permeates the whole plant from above with great power. It bestows upon the stinging nettle the capacity to lift these substances out of their earthly-inorganic nature and to incorporate them into its life processes. Rudolf Steiner calls it "the greatest benefactress of plant growth […] The stinging nettle is truly a jack-of-all-trades, it can do an enormous amount […] besides the fact that the stinging nettle carries potassium and calcium in its radiations and streams, it also has a kind of iron radiations, which are almost as beneficial to the course of nature as our own iron radiations in the blood. The stinging nettle does not really deserve, for all its goodness, to grow out there so often despised in nature. It ought really to grow around the human heart, for it is truly in outer nature, in its magnificent inward working, its inner organization, actually similar to what the heart is in the human organism."^[361] (Figure 28, p. 383).

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The whole growth habit of the stinging nettle, its inclination to grow modestly wherever human hands have brought something into disorder — at places where putrefaction holds sway, where rubble heaps lie, on neglected pastures and where old machines rust away in the undergrowth, or on soils with iron-bearing groundwater close to the surface, and further where transition zones have been created in the landscape: along roadsides, at the banks of waterways, along hedgerow and woodland edges. All this, together with the intense green of the leaves — this is a nitrogen effect, but above all an iron effect, without which the magnesium-bearing chlorophyll could not form — and likewise the strict order of the plant's martial, upright form, all of it points to the fact that the stinging nettle has mastered the iron process, an expression of a heightened I-force. Where it grows, it creates order — by virtue of its "magnificent inward working" — in the middle between the "heights and the depths." It creates a harmonious equilibration of one-sidedly displaced soil processes, forming an extraordinarily stable, crumbling mull humus.

Striking is the fact that the sharp emphasis of the polarity between root and blossom — so characteristic of the composites yarrow and chamomile — is absent in the stinging nettle; it belongs to the order of the *Urticales*. With its inconspicuous inflorescences it submerges into the foliage of the upper third of the stem. The flowers grow from the leaf axils of the leaves, which are arranged in a strictly opposite-decussate pattern, rising in tiers one above the other (Figure 28, p. 383). The pollen-bearing plants show a more elongated leaf blade and a rounded toothing of the leaf margin, while those of the fruit-bearing plants have a more compact, heart-shaped leaf blade and a sharply pointed toothing. Leaf metamorphosis manifests only weakly: already in the lowermost leaf the type of the plant reveals itself, with a pronounced yet still somewhat rounded toothing and a covering of stinging hairs; indeed even the cotyledons already bear such hairs. Upward toward the middle of the shoot the leaf blade widens into an accentuated heart shape, and toward the tip of the stem it narrows again into finely and sharply toothed, lanceolate forms.

The crowning glory of flowering plants, their revelation of essential being in the blossom, retreats entirely. The flowers bear no petals. The yellowish-green pollen flowers grow out into longer panicles and hang down within the upper foliage; the fruit flowers are whitish-green and hold themselves more densely clustered close to the stem.

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The entire foliage, the square, hollow-stemmed stalk, and the flowers are covered in stinging hairs. These are single-celled outgrowths of the epidermis, reinforced at the base by deposits of lime. They carry at their tip a silicified head, which snaps off at the slightest touch. The stinging hair pierces the skin like a hypodermic needle and releases a toxic cell sap that causes the burning sensation — *urticin*. This contains, among other things, substances (*histamine*, *serotonin*, *acetylcholine*) that normally occur only in human beings and animals.^[362] In the stinging hairs, a physiological process dies into the periphery of the plant — exactly as is characteristic of the blossom. One can therefore say with full justification: not only have the flowers of the stinging nettle been drawn down into the foliage, but its above-ground shoot is clothed from earliest youth in a kind of flowering process by the stinging hairs themselves.

Stinging nettles spread by means of stolons (*rhizomes*) into colonies reaching one to two metres in height. The runner-shoots are yellowish in colour, running just below — less often above — the surface of the ground, and send from their nodes tough, likewise yellowish root-strands down into the depth, from which a whitish fine root-system then threads through the living topsoil, richly branched. From the *rhizome* nodes, two small plants grow upward at each point. They press with a decided uprighting force and in strictly harmonious, geometrical order toward the light. Island-like, the shoots gather and close themselves off outwardly into a defensive sheath, enclosing within the densely shading foliage an interior space. The stinging nettle has an "inward working" of its own, which concentrates itself in this inner space, continues into the root zone, and in so doing harmonises the disordered life of the soil and transforms it into stable humus.

In the stinging nettle the wonder comes to pass that it raises within itself the polarity of root and blossom to a higher unity. The sulphur process moving from above downward and the sal substance-process moving from below upward remain in flow to a higher degree; both interpenetrate each other in mercurial heightening in the leaf. This process is comparable, at a higher stage of development, to the circulation of the blood. At its centre — the heart, which is at the same time the middle between above and below — the venous and the arterial bloodstream meet. Past and future meet in the present: the blood, which in the periphery on the one hand sacrifices forces into the physical activity of the body, while on the other

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laden with the stream of experience of deeds accomplished, reaches the centre as venous bloodstream. There a synthesis takes place, a heart-feeling rising from the unconscious up into consciousness. The venous blood transforms and renews itself in the heart — through the breathing of the lungs — into the arterial bloodstream, which streaming outward gives impulse to new activity. So too on the level of the plant: the stinging nettle "blossoms" from its centre, the leaf, out to the periphery of the whole plant. The earth-bound substances — potassium, calcium and iron — undergo their "upward purification," their etherization, not first in the final state of blossoming-forth, of dying into form, but rather the astral forces work through the sulphur in such a way that they impress the flowering process upon the whole activity of growth and hold it in flow. Through this the stinging nettle fulfils "its magnificent inward working," which makes it "similar to what the heart is in the human organism."^[363]

Therein lies, no doubt, the reason why Rudolf Steiner names no animal organ for the stinging nettle in order to ensure that the etheric is held in flow beyond the blossoming. The organ that would come into question for this is the heart. But the heart is no skin organ — it is a muscular, self-active organ. In it, metabolic process and sense process unite in the rhythm of the pulse-beat; they become one. The heart embodies the synthesis arising from the polarity of both processes. It is active inner-being and organ sheath in one. The stinging nettle fulfils an analogous function on the level of merely enlivened nature. Its thoroughly astralized body of formative forces enables it to transform the force-nature of the earthly substances potassium, calcium and iron — bound fast into the earthy-solid — upward into healing radiations that bring order to the living.

With regard to the preparation, the question is this: how can this unique capacity be raised into a force-manure that imparts to the soil and to the plants to be cultivated the capacity that belongs to the stinging nettle? How can the organic manures of the farm — through the addition of this force-manure — how can the soil itself, ultimately, become "inwardly sensitive," so that the building-up and breaking-down processes run "reasonably" in this higher sense, so that the soil individualizes itself toward precisely those plants one intends to raise? "It is truly something like a 'permeation with reason' of the soil that one will be able to bring about with this addition of *Urtica dioica*."^[364]

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This can be achieved when the aboveground shoot of the stinging nettle — deep green in stem and leaf, brought to blossom — is exposed to a polarity that lifts it beyond its own nature-bound process of type-conformant form-building. Through this, a renewed elevation occurs, the synthesis of a new substance within the living: the stinging nettle preparation. One mows stinging nettles, bends them together or better chops them roughly, and "wilts them lightly" (Figure 28).

One digs a pit not too deep into the fertile living topsoil, lays the mass within it, surrounds it with a little peat mulch, and covers it over again with earth. In this place it remains a whole year, exposed there to both the winter forces and the summer forces in turn. After a year one digs out the mass — shrunk considerably through decomposition and advanced humification — and holds in one's hands the finished preparation, a new, an astrally radiating materiality. The practical handling requires great attentiveness with regard to the right state of wilting; direct sunlight should also be avoided during the wilting. When the nettle mass is still too moist, unwelcome fermentation faults arise easily, and under too-strong light-exposure it turns black. It must be dried down in the shade,

best of all with the supply of warm air. To find it again in the soil after the year's period, old linen sacks are frequently used, or flat, thin-walled wooden vegetable crates, or drainage clay-pipes, into which it is stuffed. In the latter case one obtains a largely humified black mass.

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What holds for the other preparations to be buried in the earth applies with particular force to the stinging nettle preparation: whether a preparation has turned out more or less well does not depend on the degree of humification, but on the loose structure of the preparation, the pleasant smell, and above all on the surrounding soil being in a well-aerated, crumbly-living condition. What is decisive is that the peripheral forces conveyed through the earth can enter into relationship with — and be preserved within — the substances of the preparation plants that have been raised into the etheric.

All the manure preparations, with the exception of the valerian preparation, are introduced separately into the compost and manure heaps in holes 30–50 cm deep, at a spacing of 50 cm to 3 m depending on the size and length of the heaps. The stinging nettle preparation — standing so close to the heart's function — is customarily placed centrally on the back of the heap; the four siblings, offset from one another, have their places on the flanks. Their efficacy is an astrally radiating one — that is to say, one that qualifies itself in sense-perceptible appearance, but cannot be measured and quantified.

Alle Düngerpräparate, mit Ausnahme des Baldrianpräparates, werden separat in die Kompost- und Dunghaufen in 30–50 cm tiefe Löcher eingebracht, bei einem Abstand von 50 cm bis 3 m, je nach Größe bzw. Länge der Haufen. Das der Herzfunktion so nahestehende Brennnesselpräparat wird gewöhnlich mittig auf dem Rücken des Haufens eingebracht; die vier Geschwister haben, zueinander versetzt, ihren Platz auf den Flanken. Ihre Wirksamkeit ist eine astralisch Strahlende, also eine solche, die sich in der sinnlichen Erscheinung qualifiziert, nicht aber messbar quantifiziert.

All the manure preparations, with the exception of the valerian preparation, are introduced separately into the compost and manure heaps in holes 30–50 cm deep, at a spacing of 50 cm to 3 m depending on the size and length of the heaps. The stinging nettle preparation — standing so close to the heart's function — is customarily placed centrally on the back of the heap; the four siblings, offset from one another, have their places on the flanks. Their efficacy is an astrally radiating one — that is to say, one that qualifies itself in sense-perceptible appearance, but cannot be measured and quantified.

On the Question of Substance Transformation

Three distinct qualities of substance transformation come into consideration:

1 When an organic substance — coal or wood, for instance — is burned, one observes how its substance-composition disappears and a series of other substance compositions emerges as transformation products: gases and ash, for example. Conversely, a series of substances reacting with one another transforms into a new composition (compound) — carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulphur into protein, for example. The whole course of nature reveals, in all its appearances, a continuous transformation of substance.

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2 Certain inorganic elements — uranium, thorium, and others, as well as natural potassium salts (radioactive ⁴⁰K is present in potassium to approximately 0.12%) — emit measurable radiation in an arrhythmic sequence; in a decay series, transformation products

arise (isotopes as well as elements of lower atomic weight). These radiation processes withdraw themselves from direct sense-perception; they work, as it were, from below, out of sub-nature, upward into the course of nature. They give rise to illness and ultimately work toward death.

3 From the seed through to the full formation of the plant's forms, from the embryo through to the corporeal configuration of animal and human being, processes of building-up, breaking-down, and rebuilding take place in continuous substance transformation. Here a life-creating principle is at work — a supersensible being-nature that fashions for itself a sense-perceptible image within natural existence. Here the world of beings of a supra-nature works its forces into nature.

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In the foregoing citations, spiritual research has touched upon the mystery of transubstantiation. How can one approach the solution of this problem? Certainly not with the same mode of thinking with which one seeks to decode the mysteries of inorganic nature. The two quality-relationships cited above stand to one another in polar opposition. That of oxygen to nitrogen in the air is determinative for the breathing of animal and human being. Both substances constitute the element of air to a large degree; both are present in the air in a gaseous, inorganically inactive state. They stream around the plant shoot from without. The situation is different with the earthly substances potassium and calcium. Through the life organisation of the plant they are lifted out of their captivity in the physical form of substance — the "working material" — into the sphere of living efficacy. One can understand it thus: certain plants, medicinal plants, such as yarrow, chamomile, and stinging nettle, have the capacity, by virtue of their etheric body, to set in motion the organisation of the substances potassium and calcium — congealed into the physical — out of their bondage to form. In their outward appearance and their properties they are an imprint of their condition in early stages of evolution, still filled with life. As the mineral form is absorbed into the life processes of these plants, the thought readily arises that potassium and calcium become receptive, in a new way, to the working of the next higher member of the being — the etheric body of these substances. The spiritual researcher finds the essential reality of this etheric body in the supersensible world of the spirit, which borders as its lowest region upon the physical-sensory world. New developmental impulses of a soul-astral character, working from out of the future, can then enable these substances — gifted with their own proper etheric body — to open themselves to their members of being that are at home in a still higher region of the spirit. The earthly substances potassium and calcium become in this way "nitrogen-like," in that they themselves become bearers of soul-astral forces. They take on properties of nitrogen, which by its very nature is, in all life processes, the bearer of the type-revealing world of the astral. "Nitrogen is in truth the one that is the bearer of sensation."^[365] In living nature, nitrogen makes present, through protein formation, life processes that have their origin in an early earthly past, have passed through stages of development, and have now become part of the "Work" of creation.

The restoration of potassium and calcium to their etheric condition is brought about by their particular quality-relationship to hydrogen. As these

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It is hydrogen that, among the salt-formers, has descended most deeply into the condition of the purely earthly — and yet hydrogen is the one that is "related, as closely as is only possible, to the physical, and related, as closely as is only possible, to the spiritual."^[366] In its building-up activity within the organic realm it makes use of sulphur, and equally so in its breaking-down activity. "It carries everything that is in any way formed, living, astral, back up into the widths of the universe […] Hydrogen actually dissolves everything."^[367]

Now it is presumably this quality-relationship, just described, in yarrow, chamomile, and stinging nettle, through which hydrogen dissolves the boundness of potassium and calcium into form, and leads the astral that has congealed into this form out into the "indeterminate, chaotic realm of the universe."^[368] Through this, the etheric of potassium and calcium in these plants can come again into movement in such a way that it — mediated through sulphur — can become the bearer of a new world of forces streaming in from the future. Potassium and calcium transform themselves into nitrogen, insofar as they become in this sense bearers of this new astrality. One can then speak of atmospheric nitrogen as repeating what is past within the present. The earthly substances potassium and calcium, transformed likewise into bearers of astral forces, by contrast, enable what is future within the present.

But how can one ascribe to one and the same substance, nitrogen, two quality-workings of so polar a character? According to current scientific understanding there is only the one — the one that derives from nitrogen's inorganic, physico-chemical properties. If one allows only this mode of thinking to hold good, then the question is justified: why, in so complicated a fashion, produce such minute quantities of nitrogen, when nitrogen is present in the air in abundance? One need only shape the crop rotation in agriculture to be sufficiently rich in legumes, and have enough organic manure to hand, in order to secure the nitrogen requirement for reproductive growth. This is a view that opens up to the thinking-experience only a partial cross-section of reality. When the forces banished into the physical are enlivened in the plant through the plant's etheric organisation, and ensouled in the animal through the animal's astral body, they come into movement; they

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they are no longer subject to their purely physical laws, but to those higher laws of the enlivening etheric and the formative astral.

The transformation of dead inorganic materiality thereby brought about makes it possible for plant, animal and human being to embody themselves upon the earth. These embodiments are repetitions of a development from a primordially distant past; they are processes of iron necessity. Only the human being, by virtue of the incarnated spirit-soul, can determine the direction of his action as a development into the future, in freedom. But this means that through the force of the I he continually spiritualises the body-building forces and substances — transubstantiates them. This characterises the true evolution of humanity's future.

From spiritual research there lies before us, in Rudolf Steiner's *Agriculture Course*, a path-description of how, in free action — in the preparation of the biodynamic preparations — manuring substances can be produced that render the walls of the iron necessity of the macrocosm congealed into a work permeable to developmental impulses: that thus bring forces from the future to bear in the present.

The fact that, in the case of the threefoldness of the yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle preparations, the threefoldness of the earth or sal substances — the earth-metals potassium, calcium and iron — is subjected to a preparation through which they themselves, with the participation of hydrogen and nitrogen, become bearers of astral forces, is a process of transubstantiation. With this, the boundary set by nature is crossed. The working-quality of this kind of nitrogen is in this sense to be understood as polar to that which constitutes the evolutively determining formative force of ordinary nitrogen in the household of nature. The nitrogen produced through the preparation of yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle is one "that is extraordinarily useful for plant growth."^[369] Yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle preparations aim, as manures, in connection with the soul-development of the human being, to lay the foundation for a new developmental potential in the world that has become a 'work'. The handling of the preparations is a response to Rudolf Steiner's remark: "We stand [since the beginning of the 20th century; editor's note] before a great transformation of the inner nature of nature."^[370] This can only turn to the good when it goes hand in hand with a great transformation in the soul-formation of human beings. Where this does not take place, destruction arises.

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The Composition of the Oak Bark Preparation

The Oak, Its Bark and Outer Bark

Among the preparation plants, the oak — the pedunculate oak (*Quercus robur*) — is the most representative woody perennial plant of our latitudes. Its bark and outer bark are used for the preparation. This is all the more remarkable given that, with all the other preparation plants, the flower heads — or, as with the stinging nettle, on account of its flower-like nature, the entire shoot — are used for the preparation. The flower of the oak is monoecious and even less conspicuous than that of the stinging nettle. Only in the form of its leaves and in its fruiting body seated in a cup — the acorn — does the type of this tree reveal itself unmistakably. If one wishes to approach, in pictorial beholding, the uniqueness of the oak's tree-nature, one must turn one's gaze to the slow, gradual becoming of its mighty, self-asserting, sturdy-gnarled gestalt — and, against this background, to the substance-process that manifests on the one hand in the formation of bark and outer bark, and on the other in the hard, resistant heartwood. This substance-process radiates outward and inward from the living cambium zone and, as the end-product of plant becoming, approaches once more in each direction the mineral. Spiritual research points in this regard to the significance of the calcium process in oak bark and to how this keeps plants healthy: it "creates order when the etheric body is working too strongly."^[371] In the living zone — the bast of the bark — alongside tanning agents and other aromatic substances, an organic calcium compound forms in individual cells: calcium oxalate, which crystallises in the cell vacuoles and, in the outer bark, forms into crystal druses and, being poorly soluble in water, persists there for a long time.

After germination, the oak sends its taproot down into the depths, followed by lateral or heart roots that likewise penetrate to great depths. From these, powerful lateral roots strike out horizontally in all directions, which in turn drive so-called sinker roots down into the depths at their periphery.^[372] Fully grown, the oak forms — as a mirror image to its wide-spreading crown — a kind of equally mighty "root crown" into the depths of the earth. Its

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Its entire growth — and with it its substance-processes — speaks of this rootedness in the earth.

The shoot of the young oak climbs vertically upward with whorled branching and, in this growth-type, resembles that of other deciduous trees. Yet the archetypal image of the oak reveals itself unmistakably from youth onwards in the so characteristic, indented and lobed oak leaf. Only after some twenty years of its youth does the pedunculate oak's outward appearance change into the growth-form proper to it: the wide-spreading, irregularly open and light-filled tree crown (Fig. 29, p. 401). What had already announced itself in the form of the leaves from the very beginning takes hold of the whole tree with force in the decades that follow. The immense growth-force, which can persist even in a thousand-year-old oak, works in all its members as if dammed back — visible in how the leading shoots of the previous year are outgrown by lateral shoots, giving rise to the irregular course of the lateral branches that develop like trunks. Likewise the leaves pile up in clusters at the tip of each shoot; the trunk "dams itself" inward into the great hardness of the wood, outward into the condensing, durably adhering bark.

With advancing girth-growth, the so-called mirror bark — named for its smoothness and sheen — disappears after about twenty years, and in its place appears the characteristic fissured outer bark.

Referring to the particularly ideal calcium structure,^[373] Rudolf Steiner speaks of oak bark; the distinction made in botany between this and the outer bark goes unmentioned. This has led to differing views on which of the two — the mirror bark or the outer bark — is to be used for the preparation. Hoerner, in his thorough and comprehensive account, argues decisively for the mirror bark of the young tree: the bark that was once used as oak tanbark for curing hides.^[374]

In the botanical sense, this is the bark proper — the living tissue of the bast enclosed by the epidermis. In the present book, however, it is the outer bark that shall be given the floor. This will be set out more fully in what follows. The bark proper passes from sight the moment the oak grows into the form proper to its being. It extends into the outer bark as the annually renewing bast tissue dies off toward the periphery. What marks the transition to the outer bark is henceforth

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a secondary meristematic tissue — the cork cambium — whose cells protect the bast bark from external influences and cork up the dying bast tissue into outer bark. The outer bark builds itself from the inside outward through the annually dying-off corked layers of the bark tissue, these layers adhering to one another.^[375]

As a result of the girth-growth of the trunk and the spreading branches, the outer bark tears open into deep fissures. The cork cells protect the dead bast tissue from decay — and with it the calcium oxalate and a portion of the less volatile essential oils and aromatic compounds and their derivatives that have formed within the bark. The aromatic compounds in question are hydrocarbons whose end product is the highly polymerised resin. When Rudolf Steiner speaks of "the oak resin still being quite effective"^[376] — for as such a secretion the oak does not produce it — he certainly means the lower-polymerised intermediate stages on the way toward resin. These are, among other things, the readily volatile fragrant substances, akin to blossom secretions, or the aromatic hydrocarbons contained in plant oils. They arise during the devitalisation phase of the plant as it moves toward flowering. They "waft away" — partly by virtue of hydrogen, which has become the processual "sole sovereign" — into the indistinguishability of the cosmos;^[377] or they are, as in the case of the outer bark, less volatile, and are preserved for a longer period through the encasement of the cork. These "blossom-adjacent" substances owe their composition to the formative forces of the bark and its devitalisation toward the astralised form of the outer bark. Life has withdrawn from the outer bark, as is also the case in the process toward flowering. The forces of the astral remain preserved in the organic "structure" of the oak's outer bark, which encloses the blossom-kindred aromatic substance-formations as well as the crystallised calcium oxalate. The oak thus first creates within the outer bark the structure that lends calcium its plant-healing efficacy — and that can be made serviceable for soil and plants along the path of the subsequent preparation steps.

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Oaks do not begin to flower until the crown is fully formed.^[378] This is the case at around sixty years of age. One scarcely notices the flowering; only when, at this advanced age, the acorns fall in September and October does one become aware of the far-reaching change in the biography of the tree. Connecting with what has been considered above, the question arises: does not the oak flower and bear fruit long before it visibly flowers and bears fruit? In all tree-nature, and most representatively in the oak, the earth turns itself inside out.^[379] Does not this process of inversion already constitute a kind of flowering and fruiting process — only dammed back into trunk and branches, stuck, as it were, halfway along the way? If one takes a cross-section of an oak trunk, one can find in horizontal orientation the *Tria Principia* of Paracelsus reproduced in the formation of the trunk. In the outer zone of the trunk there appears, barely visible to the naked eye, the living layer of the cambium, which — concealed beneath the bark — envelops the tree like a green leaf. From this layer the conducting tissue of the *xylem* grows inward, drawing water and salts upward, and which — viewed horizontally — is, as it were, rooted in the living sapwood. Within the sapwood, as in the sorption complex of the soil, assimilates are stored and mobilised again. This is the zone of the "Sal" process. Toward the heartwood, the sapwood dies away; it mineralises, one might say, into heartwood through the deposition of wood substances such as lignins and tannin derivatives, as a protection against putrefaction.

Outward from the cambium arises the cellular tissue of the sieve tubes (*phloem*). This conducts the assimilates into all non-greening parts of the tree. Adjoining this is the cortex tissue or bast. The outer skin or epidermis finally offers protection against wind and weather. It brings the form of the plant to appearance. The bark harbours various cellular tissues, which in part contain chlorophyll — thus absorbing light — as well as individual cells that form calcium oxalate crystals in their vacuoles. Altogether, an intensive, dammed-up metabolic activity striving toward form prevails within the bark. Blossom-kindred substances, aromatic compounds such as tannins and their derivatives, are formed. In the image of the threefoldness of Sal, Mercury and Sulphur, one can recognise in the cross-section of the trunk, within the thin, supremely enlivened sheath of the bark, a compressed, dammed-up, mercurial shoot-growth that does not unfold into bud and

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leaf. This leaf-and-shoot character of the bark is supported by the fact that the leaf buds grow out of the bark, and the growth buds stand in connection with the cambium through the bark. The mineral inclusions and the arising of hydrocarbons — a sulphurisation — point toward a flowering process still dominated by growth forces and held back. The bark stands in connection with the wood body through the cambium, by way of the mercurial medullary rays.

Just as stem and leaf of the plant transform themselves into the blossom, so does the bark continue, as it were in metamorphosis, into the outer bark. This transformation takes place as, in the place of the epidermis, a secondary cambium, the cork cambium (*Phellogen*), forms. The cork-cell tissue arising from this binds together and encloses the outward layer of bark that dies away year by year, and with it the mineral inclusions contained therein, as well as the less readily volatile aromatic compounds.

Just as the fully formed blossom dies into form and colour and into the volatilising fragrance substances, so does the leaf-and-shoot growth of the oak die into the outer bark. In it, everything that was formerly lived through becomes rigid, dead form; what was green becomes earth-brown and reddish, and what was bound in readily volatile aromatic substances has drifted away. Seen thus, there completes itself in the outer bark a sulphurisation process — a flowering process still close to earth and unfinished. The substances have not yet been entirely lifted free of their physical lawfulness. Calcium, however — raised up into the life of the plant — enters into a bond with the sulphurous oxalic acid that has arisen from this life. It crystallises into calcium oxalate in various crystal forms: rhombohedral, rod- and needle-shaped, or octahedral in double pyramids. One distinguishes crystal sand, individual crystals, twins, druses, and spherites.^[380] The oxalic lime (calcium oxalate) arises in the cell plasma. In their early stage the crystals are always enclosed by a plasmatic sheath, which in the outer bark ripens and dies away. What remains in the outer bark of the manifold substance-compositions of the bark are sparingly volatile hydrocarbons and the calcium oxalate crystals. In the latter, the calcium is present in a structure that has received its impress from the living context of the oak. Life has withdrawn from the outer bark; the astral, however — which created this structure (form) — remains bound to the physical-material, and so too to the

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weniger hoch polymerisierten Kohlenwasserstoffen sowie mit den in diesen Lebenszusammenhang eingebetteten Kalziumoxalaten. Die Borke bleibt mit der Rinde fest verbunden. Den Prozess, der in der Borke zu Ende kommt, kann man vergleichen mit der Düngewirkung des Kompostes: Er teilt dem Boden etwas mit, «was die Neigung hat, sehr stark das Astralische mit dem Erdigen ohne den Umweg des Ätherischen zu durchdringen».^[381] Dieser Prozess vollzieht sich auf höchster Stufe in der Blüte. Unter der Übermacht des Sulfurisierungsprozesses, gleichbedeutend mit der astralischen Einwirkung, blüht sie auf, ihr Wesen im Bild dadurch offenbarend, dass sie gleichzeitig in dieses Bild von Form und Farbe hinein erstirbt. In der Blüte vollzieht sich eine vollständige Umwandlung des Physischen, des Erdenstofflichen. In der Borke vollzieht sich ebenso eine Art Blühprozess, der aber auf tieferem Niveau auf halber Strecke stehen bleibt. Es kommt nicht zu einer Stoffumwandlung, sondern zu einer sulfurisch-astralen Bewahrung der aus dem Leben der Rinde herausgefallenen, in eine bestimmte organische «Struktur» geprägte, organo-mineralische Stoffkomposition.

Richtet man den Blick auf borkenbildende Bäume, wie die Eiche, so kann man sich sagen: Die Borke ist Ausdruck eines die Jahreszeiten überdauernden erdnahen Blühprozesses, der – in Gleichzeitigkeit mit Rinde, Kambium, Splint- und Kernholz – dem Baum im Wechsel der Jahreszeiten Dauerhaftigkeit verleiht. So gesehen ist das Ausgangsmaterial für das Eichenrindepräparat ebenfalls eine aus einem blütenartigen Prozess hervorgegangene Stofflichkeit. Dies bekräftigt die Antwort Rudolf Steiners auf die Frage eines Zuhörers: «Kommt die ganze Rinde in Betracht?» «Eigentlich nur die äußere Rindenschichte, die zerfällt, wenn man sie ablöst.»^[382]

Was der Baumnatur allgemein eigen ist, eine starke Verdichtung der Astralität in der Baumkrone, kennzeichnet die Eiche ganz besonders. Sie ist darin der Brennnessel verwandt, allerdings im umgekehrten Sinn. Bei Letzterer ist ihre außerordentliche «Innenwirkung» charakteristisch. Bei der Eiche hingegen eine Art Außenwirkung, eine starke Anziehungskraft auf die Insektenwelt, ja gleichsam eine Wiege für viele ihrer Spezies. Im Wurzelbereich sind es die Larven einer Fülle von vor allem Käferarten, im Mull des hohlen Altstammes unter anderem die Larve des Hirschkäfers oder im Blattbereich die Gallwespen. Deren Behausung, die Galle, ist symptomatisch für das Wirken des Astralischen des Tieres. Die Gallwespe sorgt dafür, dass sich durch

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its hormonal action causes the two-dimensionality of the oak leaf to grow outward from the point of egg-laying into a pith gall — that is, into three-dimensionality. Within the gall that houses the larva, the leaf forms itself into a kind of spherical skin organ, a nourishment-tissue-rich interior that closes itself off against an exterior. Gall formations occur on other woody plants as well. The oak, however, is capable as a single host plant of producing over 100 different kinds of gall.^[383] Noteworthy is the high content of tannins and colorants in the galls, which again points to a premature sulphurization in the leaf zone, similar to what occurs in the bark and outer bark.

Only when one looks at the appearance of the pedunculate oak — at its particular substance-processes, its relationship to the world of insects and the peripheral forces — does one begin to approach an understanding of the spiritual researcher's statement that «dasjenige, was an Kalziumstruktur in der Eichenrinde vorhanden ist, das alleridealste» (what is present as calcium structure in the oak bark is the most ideal of all) is for producing, by way of a further-going preparation, a manure capable of «Pflanzenkrankheiten prophylaktisch zu bekämpfen» (combating plant diseases prophylactically).^[384]

The Domestic Animal Skull

Just as singular as the oak stands among the preparation plants, so apparently self-contained is the sheath organ from the animal kingdom that serves for the preparation of oak bark — the domestic animal skull: «Es ist fast einerlei von welchem der Haustiere.» (It is almost immaterial which of the domestic animals it comes from.)^[385] This statement of spiritual research harbours once again great riddles. With the other preparations, the sheath organ is strictly assigned to a particular animal family, such as the noble game, or to a particular animal species, the cow as domestic animal; here, however, in the case of the preparation of oak bark, the animal species plays no role — only the fact that it fulfils the essential quality of being a domestic animal. The particular characteristics of bodily constitution and soul-behaviour were addressed in the chapter «Die Haustiere – Organe im Hof- und Landschaftsorganismus» (The Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm and Landscape Organism) (p. 126 ff.). These are highly variable and differ substantially in form and orientation from their counterparts living in the wild. But what is it — across the boundaries of species, family and order — that makes an animal a domestic animal? Since the domestic animal was degraded to a mere utility animal in factory farming, the concept of domestic animal has become empty of content. It receives

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its weight again only when one considers that with domestic animals their coming-into-being, their openness of soul toward the human being, their capacity to render him service — all these are creations of the human being. The domestic animal owes its existence and will have its future through the devotion and love of the human being. It is these that continually give the animal something it does not have by nature. And this gift is what has formed itself into the bodily formation of the domestic animal, down into the physical shaping of the bone system. Just as the oak confers upon calcium in the bark an ideal structure, so does calcium and its compounds in the nearly dead skull bone — through the domestic animal. To this is joined the question: What is the situation, in this regard, with hybridised or genetically manipulated and digitally kept utility animals? Can such a utility animal skull still be accorded the quality of a domestic animal skull? The domestic animal must be newly recognised according to its unique being. Through the spirit and hand of the human being it must continually be raised a degree out of its mere animal-being. This is not merely a question of breeding, as it is understood today, but one of education. The domestic animal requires an education in order to become a domestic animal, just as the human being requires one in order to become a human being. To practise this education of the animal toward domestic-animal-being in a conscious and being-appropriate way is an art that raises the animal beyond its nature-inherited instincts. The domestic animal relinquishes, in a certain sense, the wisdom-filled instincts of its wild form. It lies in the responsibility of the human being to compensate for this loss — more than compensate. Because the animal has no I, it requires the educative I-guidance of the human being. This demands today — after the traditional practices of the peasant human-animal relationship have faded away — a knowledge of the animal's being through which the use itself once again gains an educational value. Biodynamic animal husbandry has this approach as its foundation. Where work is done in this sense of a deepened understanding on domestic-animal-being and -becoming, one may expect to find such skulls as fulfil the task intended for them in the preparation of the oak bark preparation. The identity of use and education was once vividly present in horse-keeping — for instance with the work horses harnessed before wagon or plough. After they had done their work their whole horse-life long under rein-guidance, biodynamic farming gladly made use of their skulls for the preparation. The work horse has (for now?) had its day. In general use today is the skull of the cow, which then also — with timely slaughter in autumn — provides the organ sheaths for

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the chamomile and dandelion preparation. Where circumstances require it, sheep or goat skulls are used as well.

The skull articulates into the facial skull and the braincase. In newborn animals, both still form a unified, approximately spherical shape — the shape the human being preserves throughout life. The facial skull then elongates during the animal's brief youth and thereafter dominates the head's form. The head is, in a certain sense, in danger of being overgrown by the metabolic forces. This phenomenon and its mastery appears with particular impressiveness in the antler-bearers, and differently again in cattle. The male deer, for instance, accomplishes each year anew a tremendous metabolic feat: from the braincase grows the richly blood-filled, velvet-skinned antler. This happens in the first half of the year. At the beginning of the second half-year, the power of the metabolic forces surging up into the head is expelled from the antler — it dies into the bony, interior-enclosing form of the branching tines and becomes a mighty sense organ, feeling its way into the warmth-light-air periphery. In winter it is shed. Not otherwise, and yet in polar contrast, is the situation with the head-extensions of cattle: the horns, which grow on year by year and at the same time die into the horn sheath. Through this inwardly directed sense organ, the tremendous metabolic activity pressing up toward the nerve-sense organisation is turned back into the body by the died-away horn sheath. Thus the cow preserves, in a way other than the deer, the nerve-sense forces of the head from the encroaching power of the metabolic forces.^[386]

The anatomical structure in the bodily formation and the skull is no different in domestic animals than in wild forms. And yet there is a telling difference in the manner of their shaping: it is highly variable; the facial skull remains somewhat shortened, sensory performances are lower, metabolic performances higher, the volume of the braincase is in part considerably reduced (see the chapter "The Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm-and-Landscape Organism," p. 126 ff.). These, however, are symptoms of a development held back in domestic animals — of a preservation of their youthfulness, of a condition that is, in a certain sense, more embryonic. This preserved

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It is this youthfulness that marks the essential nature of the domestic animal. Evolutively, it owes its more youthful being to the human being. This fact lays upon the human being the obligation to direct, out of knowledge of the being and out of love, the education of animals in keeping, feeding, and care accordingly.

As the animal sheath organ for the crumbled oak bark, the braincase in the skull of one of the largest domestic animals serves this purpose. This is enclosed by a mosaic of bones of the upper skull — some pre-formed from connective tissue, as in the skullcap (with the frontal bone, temporal and parietal bones), others from cartilage, as in the bones of the skull base and in part the occiput, as well as the bones that demarcate the braincase from the facial skull. Ossification comes about through bone cells that radiate outward in connective tissue and cartilages from individual centres and, through the deposits of calcium and magnesium phosphates, calcium carbonates, and calcium fluoride, cause the mobility of the ground tissue to stiffen. From this arise the flat cover bones, connected by bridges of connective tissue or cartilage. In the process of ageing, these eventually ossify — in the case of the cartilages into the more strongly formed bones, partly fusing with one another, that bound the braincase toward the facial skull. Ossification is a progressive dying into form. In a comparable way, the bark dies into the form of the outer bark. And yet, because it is an animal, this process of dying-away is held back by the etheric body. The life processes continue to flow to a degree; a constant breaking-down, transformation, and building-up of the bone substances continues to take place. How strongly the bones are still permeated by life processes is illuminated by the fact that one third of the bones consist of organic ground substance, *ossein*, and two thirds of the mineral salts named above (P, Ca, Mg, and F).^[387] The formative forces enliven and ray through the bones from the periosteum — the innervated and blood-supplied bone-skin lying on the outside.

From the foregoing reflections, including the morphological particularities mentioned, one will find no conclusive indication that would bring the statement of the spiritual researcher closer to understanding — namely, that for the preparation of oak bark a skull comes into question: "Almost regardless of which of our domestic animals."^[388] An answer will likely only be found when one examines the relationship between the human being and the animal since the Ice Ages

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and the great civilizations that followed them. Humanity lived then still in a dreamlike consciousness. One can call it a mythological consciousness as well. Out of it flowed the myths of the peoples — inspirations from a world experienced as spiritually and supersensibly real. It stood under the guidance of the inspired priesthood of the Mysteries. In these spiritual backgrounds must the becoming-domestic of animals be sought (cf. chap. "The Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm-and-Landscape Organism," p. 126 ff.). This consisted in the fact that the evolutively disposed instinctive life of the animals was gradually replaced by human guidance. This step of transformation out of the soul-spiritual consciousness of humanity at that time impressed itself upon the life body of the animals, and through this upon the physical body, and so also upon the stream of heredity. It helped the domestic animal to preserve its youthfulness, to keep its bodily constitution variable. In the last consequence one may assume that the secret of the becoming-domestic has found its deposit in the physical body — in the specific arrangement of the substances, in their "structure" — there, where life congeals fully into form. Once the form is created, life withdraws from it; it falls prey to death. This arrangement of substances, created by the formative forces of the domestic animal, is in each case a different one: in the tubular bones of the limbs, in the bones of the pelvis and the spine, and again a different one in the cranial bones enclosing the centre of the nerve-sense system. The predominant substance that builds the latter is calcium; it occurs in various compositions with phosphorus, carbon, oxygen, and fluorine. Its forces directed, as it were, toward a midpoint lend the braincase its form approaching the spherical. The compositional arrangement of calcium in the bones of the braincase is — so one may conclude — the expression of the soul-force interplay of the domestic animal, held youthful and stimulated by the human being. It is, at the animal level, a higher kind of substance-arrangement of calcium than that which is present at the plant level — as, for instance, in the bark of the oak. Seen in this way, the domestic animal skull preserves in its calcium compositions astral forces that have flowed to the domestic animal through the active devotion of the human being, and have taken the place of the lost instincts. They possess, in a higher sense, the capacity to work in a purifying, clarifying, and healing way upon proliferating life processes.

This attempt at a conceptual approach to understanding the starting materials of the oak bark preparation and the domestic animal skull must be deepened further. But even so, the riddle of the

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The preparation as such. This must be done by human hands — an artistic act!

The oak grows up in our landscapes; so too are found there all the preparation plants, and likewise the domestic animals — but under what conditions of life and environment? Everything within our power must we do to promote, in the shaping of the farm-and-landscape organism, their flourishing in keeping with their essential nature. This includes, wherever possible, the application of the preparations. In its arising, it is a synthesis of the substances and forces composing the landscape, and in its application taken as a whole it is a remedy for their harmonization.

The Preparation of the Oak Bark

In September we procure the bark of an oak grown, if at all possible, within the farm precincts, and a skull — preferably of an animal kept on the farm (Figure 29). In the case of older oaks with deeply fissured bark, it is advisable to scrape away the outermost, often lightly mossed layer with a drawknife and use only the younger bark layers lying beneath. The mass, already somewhat crumbling as it is stripped, is then chopped altogether into a friable, crumbly structure. From the domestic animal skull, after slaughter, the brain is removed through the foramen magnum, along with any remaining traces of flesh and skin still adhering to the outside. One then uses the upper part of the skull and fills the cranial cavity — through this very opening of the occipital bone through which the nerve cord of the spinal column passes into the cerebellum — with the bark mass. The opening is closed with a splinter of skull bone and sealed with clay.

In this first preparation step a first inversion takes place: something outer, the bark, becomes something inner, enclosed within a bony sheath that, already in the life of the domestic animal, stood closer to death than to life. Next to the brain, it served the becoming-conscious of instinct-guided sense impressions (Figure 29).

In the second step of the preparation, a second inversion of a nature process takes place, guided by the spirit and hand of the human being. The skulls, immediately after being filled with the plant substance, are buried shallowly in the ground at a place where there is much plant sludge and where atmospheric water — rain and snowmelt — flows in. In this earthy, moon-like watery environment they rest, and there they are subject to the autumn and

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Figure 29: The substance composition of the oak bark preparation in its passage through the winter half-year.

winter forces. The difficulty of fulfilling these conditions optimally has led to a great variety of approaches.^[389] A flexible way of proceeding is made easier by the following indication of Rudolf Steiner: we "now bury [the skull; author's note] in the earth and place […] peat moss over it and try, by directing some kind of channel, to bring as much rainwater as possible to the spot. One could even arrange it […] in a tub into which rainwater continually flows and flows out again […] placing in it such plant material as strongly promotes the constant presence of plant sludge."^[390] Both methods are practiced.

In spring the third step of the preparation takes place: the skulls are removed from their earthy-watery environment. Again an inversion occurs: the interior — the bark and outer-bark fillings — has received and concentrated the working of forces from without. What comes to appearance is a new substance, somewhat darker in colour on the outside and slightly earthified, yet still of a crumbly consistency. It is a new substance by virtue of the fact that it is endowed with the new property of a radiating astral efficacy, which "truly lends to compost and manure the forces to combat harmful plant diseases prophylactically, to arrest them."^[391]

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How can one follow this process in thought — the process that unfolds between plant sludge, the bony sheath of the skull, and the bark of the oak over the winter half-year within the earthly? Here an attempt at interpretation. The question is: how can the property of calcium — to draw together the forces of the etheric — be made serviceable? All too frequently, after a wet winter and spring followed by a suddenly setting-in period of sun-rich warmth, damaging foreign organisms such as aphids appear in masses, in colonies. They are a sign of etheric, rampantly proliferating growth. The cosmic-astral forces are too weak to shape the excess of growth-force into form. Here the contracting force of calcium can help — not, however, the ordinary calcium compound bound to the acid residue of carbonic acid (CaCO₃), but a calcium with a "structure" such as is present in the bark of the oak. This calcium oxalate — raised by the life processes of the oak and secreted by it into the bark — must first be brought, through the path of the preparation steps, to the point where it, as an addition to organic manures, maintains the healthy equilibrium between the living context of soil and plant and the instreaming astral forces of the sub-solar planets Venus, Mercury, Moon. This can be achieved in such a way that a condition of chaotically proliferating ethericity is produced. In the plant sludge this condition is present. It must be continuously maintained through the inflow of rain and snowmelt water. The atmospheric water contains oxygen, which ensures that the anaerobically proceeding decomposition processes do not tip over into putrefaction. Polar to the watery character of the plant sludge is the nature of the inflowing rain and snowmelt water, permeated as it is by cosmic forces. This water condenses in the wintry atmosphere from the gaseous state of the air into the form of the droplet, or crystallises into the snow crystal. In both states of being the water has its own centre. Into relation with this centre step the forces of the macrocosm, concentrating themselves in the watery sheath and bounding it into the form of the droplet or the snow crystal. When these water droplets now unite into a homogeneous mass of water within the earthly, they surrender their own centre to the centre of the earth's midpoint.

Wie lässt sich dieser Prozess gedanklich nachvollziehen, der sich zwischen Pflanzenschlamm, Schädelknochenhülle und der Borkenrinde der Eiche über das Winterhalbjahr im Irdischen abspielt? Folgend ein Deutungsversuch. Es geht um die Frage: Wie kann man die Eigenschaft des Kalziums, die Kräfte des Ätherischen zusammenzuziehen, nutzbar machen? Allzu häufig treten nach einem feuchten Winter und Frühjahr und einer plötzlich einsetzenden sonnenreichen Wärmeperiode massenweise schädigende Fremdorganismen wie Blattläuse in Kolonien auf. Sie sind ein Zeichen ätherisch-wuchernden Wachstums. Die kosmisch-astralen Kräfte sind zu schwach, um das Übermaß an Wachstumskraft in die Form zu gestalten. Hier kann die zusammenziehende Kraft des Kalziums helfen, nicht aber die gewöhnliche Kalziumverbindung, dem Säurerest der Kohlensäure (CaCO₃), sondern es bedarf dazu eines Kalziums mit einer «Struktur», wie sie in der Rinden-Borke der Eiche vorliegt. Dieses von den Lebensprozessen der Eiche emporgehobene und von ihr in die Rinden-Borke ausgeschiedene Kalziumoxalat muss auf den Weg der Präparationsschritte erst dahin gebracht werden, dass es als Zusatz zu den organischen Düngern das gesunde Gleichgewicht hält zwischen dem Lebenszusammenhang Boden-Pflanze und den einstrahlenden astralen Kräften der untersonnigen Planeten Venus, Merkur, Mond. Es kann dies in der Weise erreicht werden, dass ein Zustand chaotisch wuchernder Ätherizität erzeugt wird. Im Pflanzenschlamm liegt dieser Zustand vor. Er muss durch den Zufluss von Regen- und Schneewasser kontinuierlich aufrechterhalten werden. Das atmosphärische Wasser enthält Sauerstoff, der dafür sorgt, dass die anaerob verlaufenden Zersetzungsvorgänge nicht in Fäulnis umschlagen. Polar zur Wässrigkeit des Pflanzenschlamms ist die Beschaffenheit des zufließenden, von kosmischen Kräften durchsetzten Regen- und Schneewassers. Dieses kondensiert in der winterlichen Atmosphäre aus der Gasform der Luft in die Tropfenform oder kristallisiert zum Schneekristall. In beiden Zustandsformen hat das Wasser sein eigenes Zentrum. Zu diesem treten die Kräfte des Makrokosmos in Beziehung, konzentrieren sich in der Wasserhülle und begrenzen diese zur Tropfenform bzw. zum Schneekristall. Vereinigen sich nun diese Wassertropfen zur homogenen Wassermasse im Irdischen, geben sie ihr eigenes Zentrum dem Zentrum des Erdmittelpunktes hin.

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The cosmic forces concentrated in the droplets dissolve into the earthly and, in the present case, into the primordial chaos of the plant sludge. A kind of synthesis brings about equilibrium: the moon-like microbial decomposition process is brought into balance by forces of the presently active cosmos. One may assume that this equilibrium consists in the coming-together of the working of the sub-solar and super-solar planets.

Into this milieu of formlessly chaotic plant sludge and the rain or snowmelt water streaming over it, the domestic animal skulls filled with oak bark in the cranial cavity are submerged. Continuously the uniting etheric forces stream around the skull and penetrate the bony cranial vault. This vault exhibits a calcium structure formed by the higher astral forces of the domestic animals standing in the service of the human being. From the heart, which stands in relation to the Sun, the forces of the super-solar planets — Mars and Jupiter — work in the animal toward the head, while in the head itself the form- and structure-building forces of Saturn predominate.^[392] That is to say: the etheric forces chaotised in the plant sludge, brought into a kind of equilibrium by the rainwater, pass through the cranial vault and are there transformed by the less instinct-bound astral forces of the domestic animals into formative forces. The calcium of the cranial vault, structured by the astral body of the domestic animals, draws the etheric forces together and endows them with an upbuilding, ordering efficacy. In the bark, prepared as it is by the oak, the calcium is present on the one hand in such a substance-composition that it becomes receptive to the etheric streams of the plant sludge — transformed into formative forces through the mediation of the domestic animal skull. On the other hand, it lies in the nature of calcium to concentrate and preserve these received formative forces within the working-context of the oak's bark.

The domestic animal skulls with their filling remain throughout the winter half-year exposed to the earthly-cosmic forces streaming in through the earthy-solid and the watery. One may interpret this procedure as follows: on the one hand, it is during this time that the sub-solar planetary working — and in particular that of the Moon — is in any case strongest within the watery element of the plant sludge; on the other hand, the formative forces of the more distant periphery of the fixed stars, which work through the earthy-solid, unfold their greatest efficacy in the hard domestic animal skull congealed into form.

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The finished preparation is introduced into compost and manure heaps — just as the preparations already described — in the amount of a three-finger pinch per 1 to 2 m³ in the horticultural setting, per 8 to 15 m³ in the agricultural. What counts is not the substance but the radiation of forces. Here too, judgement ought to form itself out of what personal observation and experience teach.

In contrast to silica, Rudolf Steiner describes calcium as that which wants to draw everything «towards itself». «What calcium wants, lives in the plant realm.» «The calcareous is the general outward desire within the earthly.»^[393] In this quality of «desire», the inorganically dead calcium lives itself forth in a purely natural way. Through the life processes of plants — and of the oak in particular — it is step by step released from this bondage to the earthly. Out of this enlivened condition it is excreted into the bark in a state that approximates the mineral, yet impresses upon the calcium oxalate embedded in the bark tissue — in its «structure» — the stamp of the oak's formative forces organisation. Can one not see in this the meaning of the three inversion steps of the preparation described above: that the «desire-nature» of the dead calcium is reversed into its opposite? In its configuration of forces it transforms into a condition in which it no longer wants anything for itself, but instead mediates to the plants forces through which they can defend themselves against the disease-causing and damaging influences coming from without. The calcium in the lime is raised — through the processual steps of the preparation — out of its evolutively fixed states; from a taker it becomes a giver, a healer in the life of plants.

In summary one may say: as with all the preparations, the individual steps of composition work together not additively but multiplicatively. What arises are substances that are not variations of properties fixed by natural law and deriving from the past, but properties that make development possible within living contexts. In the case of the oak bark preparation, it is the newly won quality of strengthening the configuration of members of the plant's being — and thereby prophylactically counteracting plant diseases.

The natural substances and forces which, in a novel composition, produce a manure substance with such a quality, are the following:

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4. The oak's bark: The oak makes the flowering process a gesture of opening towards the cosmos — through its being «more earthly», which then expresses itself substantially in the bark as calcium oxalate.

5. The domestic animal skull: It has been metamorphosed through the guidance of the human being. In the wild animal, the spirit of the group soul is the shaping force; in the domestic animal, the spirit of the human being joins it.

6. The skull cavity, which harbours the brain and is surrounded by cerebral fluid, is a space lifted out of immediate contact with the earthly — a microcosmic image of the macrocosm.

7. In winter, the earth is spiritually wakeful, surrendered to itself.

In these four qualities a centripetal tendency of working speaks itself out, directed towards the earth. They appear in nature as separate. When they are brought into relationship with one another — both spatially and in time, on the basis of plant slurry and the atmospheric water streaming in during the winter half-year — the calcium process is endowed with the new property of therapeutically balancing one-sidednesses in the earthly realm.

The Composition of the Dandelion Preparation

In the search for a plant that is capable, through its own life processes, of bringing into being within itself «the right reciprocal interaction between silica and potassium — not calcium», spiritual research finds the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale).^[394] «The innocent, yellow dandelion — wherever it grows in a region, it is an extraordinary benefaction. For it is the mediator between the silica finely distributed homeopathically through the cosmos and what is actually needed as silica throughout the whole region. It is truly a kind of messenger from the heavens.»^[395] The dandelion is evolutively disposed to draw «silica in the right way» «from the entire cosmic surroundings». «For we must have silica within the plant. And it is precisely with regard to the uptake of silica that the earth loses its power in the course of time. It loses it slowly, which is why one does not notice it.»^[396] This silica «is of the greatest significance for plant

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growth».^[397] The «silicon contained in it is in turn transformed within the organism into a substance of extraordinary importance — one that at present is not counted among the chemical elements at all».^[398] Here the spiritual researcher points again to a riddle whose resolution the observation of the senses furnishes with individual phenomena that point towards a higher coherence — towards «the spiritual bond» (Goethe) — which as such, however, opens itself only to the thinking experience of spirit.

The Outward Appearance of the Dandelion

The dandelion reveals in all its members a wealth of phenomena that astonish and point to a singular character that sets it apart even from the particularity of the Compositae family (composites). It is a spring bloomer — a few yellow splashes of colour appear again towards early autumn. — Following the delicate white-violet veil of the cuckoo flower (Cardamine pratensis), the meadows, pastures, and roadsides cover themselves in April with a golden-yellow carpet of dandelions coming into bloom. This happens precisely at the moment when the earth breathes out its soul-spiritual being once more into the periphery from its wintry withdrawal. The sea of dandelion blossoms appears as an image of this reconnection of earth and cosmos. As quickly as it appeared at the end of March, so quickly does it vanish from sight at the end of April behind the neighbouring grasses and herbs now growing swiftly up around it. Through the whole year following the blossom, it concentrates and preserves the forces from cosmos and earth which then, under the rays of the ascending spring sun of the following year, cause the flower stalks to shoot upward suddenly overnight, wave upon wave. They carry the flower buds upward, which open on the broadly spreading receptacle and turn the basket full of ray florets towards the sun.

The growth form of the dandelion is pronouncedly threefold in root, stem, leaf, and blossom (Fig. 32, p. 423). This points to a powerful working of astral forces that lends the life-body of this "messenger from the heavens" its astonishing formative-force functions. Each of its members lives itself forth as a polarity of stasis (rest) and movement. It is astral forces that impress this contradiction into the etheric organisation of the dandelion. This holds, of course, in manifold modified, less

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marked ways for all flowering plants. The astral body of the plant, which rays in upon it from outside from the world of the supersensible, shapes — in a kind of inward working — the etheric forces, which are in constant movement, into formative forces. In accordance with the essential image of the plant, these restrain or dam back the life processes, or activate them toward vigorous growth. In cereals, for example, the stalk grows from one node — one point of growth-stasis — to the next. Out of this zone of stasis, a movement-impulse develops the next internode and the accompanying leaf, which sheaths the stalk as a leaf-sheath up to the following node. This inward working, rapidly dying into form, stands in polar contrast to an astral outward working. This expresses itself in the element of air, kept in motion through warmth. The principal constituent of air is mineralically dead nitrogen (79%), the physical bearer of astral force-working. One can say: with every breath of air that plays around the leaves, every gust of wind that sets them swaying back and forth, swings branch and bough to and fro, or sends a rye field streaming along in "swaying silver waves"^[399] — in all of this a movement-impulse is at work, the expression of an astral outward working.

The dandelion as a perennial herbaceous plant (lifespan approximately eight years) behaves in a quite different manner. It is governed through and through by the life-shaping astral inward working — comparable to the stinging nettle, yet in polar contrast to it. While the stinging nettle, asserting itself and presenting itself defensively outward, gives its magnificent inward working a protective sheath of its own, the outward appearance of the dandelion shows how completely it is given over both to earth and to cosmos. Although the astral organisation of the dandelion places the etheric forces powerfully in its service, its outward appearance is a model of surrendering will — not of self-will: "the innocent, yellow dandelion," as the spiritual researcher names it.^[400] An outward working in the sense described above scarcely touches it.

The Root

The polarity of dammed and moving life-force already marks the root with great power. This shows itself on the one hand in the strong downward-driving force of the taproot, which within the zone of humus-rich topsoil branches

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out from the humus-rich topsoil, while its root strands penetrate deep into the mineral subsoil, spreading out there only with their finest rootlets. Even pieces of the upper taproot can redevelop at both cut ends into the fully formed plant.^[401] The upper parts of the branching primary root, meanwhile, thicken in the topsoil into a turnip-like *rhizome root*. This is filled with a loose cell mass traversed by a network of interconnected tubes. These channels carry a white, mucilaginous milky sap that is held under pressure. Here a damming effect makes itself felt, one that can be followed all the way up into the flower stalks. Cut through the root, the leaf midrib, or the flower stalk, and the milky sap wells out at once; the entire dandelion plant stands continuously under heightened sap pressure (*turgescence*). One can also say: the etheric body of this plant stands under a constant "formative pressure" from the astral.

Shoot and Leaf

In contrast to the "sal pole" of the taproot, the mercurial middle of shoot and leaf in the dandelion — with the transition occurring in the upper root rhizome — dams itself into a pronounced leaf rosette (Figure 32, p. 423). The stem sits locked in the root neck and remains dammed for the whole of the plant's life, while the life-formative forces shoot with force into the spirally arranged, densely crowded leaves. The leaves lie close to the ground — in winter wholly so; in spring they raise themselves. The young leaves growing from the heart of the rosette stand erect, only to sink back gradually, as they age, down into the plane of the rosette, drawing nearer to the earth. While in this way new leaves — around a hundred of them — go on forming from spring through into autumn, the oldest ones die away on the underside of the rosette.

The high driving force of the leaves proceeds from the plastically prominent central rib, which likewise carries milky sap. To this the blade attaches itself, narrowing from top to bottom as it accompanies the long leaf stalk. In the leaf sequence, the blade is elongated and roundish in the upper portion from the cotyledons onward. Soon, however, the driving force strongly pressing outward into the blade meets the damming or form-force working inward from without. In powerful pointed teeth — "lion's teeth" — it thrusts outward, and as an equal and opposite reaction suffers deep indentations inward. The result is the image of a forceful, partially discordant on both sides, bizarre

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Figure 30: Stages of blooming, wilting, and the formation of the parasol sphere in seed-ripening (from: Bockemühl, Järvinen, 2005, p. 96).

margin-form of the elongated leaves. Only at the leaf tip does a harmonious equilibrium of driving force and formative force arrive, in the helmet-like equilateral triangular form.

The Blossom

The polarity of damming and movement makes even the taproot — thickened upward by the stasis of sap — into a member of the dandelion that seems to live itself forth as something self-contained. No less self-standing, indeed in heightening, the leaf rosette unfolds. The blossom, then, appears wholly set apart from this — without transition, in complete mastery of this polarity, lifted as it were above the earthly.

In the leaf axils at the heart of the rosette, the flower buds form as autumn draws near. They overwinter "underground," drawn into the earth in autumn by the contracting root neck. It is a last impulse of movement before the winter rest. In spring, however, in the April nights, the dandelion still develops a kind of vertically shooting stem. With the forces gathered and dammed across the later spring of the previous year, across summer, autumn, and winter, the flower buds shoot upward at the tip of the likewise sap-bearing, hollow, air-filled tubular stem. The flower bud is a small green rounded head, enclosed in several layers of scale-like involucral bracts. Under the warm rays of the rising day they open in succession and fold back downward. Only a few continue to enclose the ray-florets now unfolding from the receptacle (Figure 30).

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As the last of the involucral bracts lower themselves, 100 to 200 individual florets unfold on the widened receptacle — pressed closely together, radiant in golden yellow, a second rosette on a higher level, turned toward the heavens. They open successively from the margin inward toward the centre of the flower head. This head moves in keeping with the course of the sun. In the late afternoon, some of the involucral bracts raise themselves upright again; simultaneously the receptacle sinks, so that all the ray-florets stand gathered upward in a single bundle and are once more enclosed bud-like by the bracts. In fine weather this rhythmic opening and closing can repeat itself over several days; in rainy dullness the flower heads remain closed. After the flowering is over, some of the involucral bracts lift themselves one last time. In the seed formation now following, they hold the fullness of the blossoms tightly enclosed. Meanwhile the tubular stem continues to grow upward still, outpacing the grasses and herbs growing up around it. Within this last enclosure, an inversion takes place on the receptacle with respect to seed formation, in the following way: the seed sits with its head in the receptacle, while its opposite pole, where the finely threaded calyx leaves are seated, reaches upward toward the heavens. During seed ripening, a fresh impulse of movement stirs: from the calyx pole of the seed, a slender stalk grows, bearing at its tip the threadlike calyx leaves, the pappus. As it grows upward, these push the withered petals upward out of the involucral bract enclosure. After this longer preparation, the involucral bracts then fold back downward one final time; the receptacle vaults and rounds itself into a sphere, on which — borne on long stalks — the filigree "blowball" appears (Figure 30, p. 409). It is always fully formed in all its individual little umbels, since every seed-fruit has developed within the receptacle. Fully ripe, the seeds release themselves from the receptacle and sail off one by one on the next gust of wind.

The multiple opening and closing of the floret-encircled flower head, the movement of the receptacle, and the radiant outshining of the blossom-colony into the periphery — these are expressive gestures that point, in an image-like way, to the nearness of the working of the soul or astral body of this particularly highly developed composite plant. But not even that is all: once more it shines out during seed formation, transforming the hair-fine cotyledons into silvery gleaming little umbels that arrange themselves like stars into an image of the spherical form of the cosmos. The cotyledons, which ordinarily unfold in the earthly-watery, turn themselves inside out and turn toward the air,

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Warmth and light toward the cosmos. In a further heightening of all that has gone before, there arises for a few moments, within the permeable enclosure of the little umbels, an inner space filled with air and light. One may well ask whether this delicately outlined inner space is not the faithful sense-perceptible image of the dandelion's capacity to draw silica down from the cosmos — to be, as it were, "truly a kind of messenger from the heavens."

The Milky Sap

Alongside the dandelion, several other composite species — among them chicory (Cichorium intybus), prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola), perennial sowthistle (Sonchus arvensis), as well as the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae) — carry milky sap in their tissues. This is a white, milky emulsion that, in the case of the dandelion — and this is what makes it singular — runs uniformly through the whole plant in tubular channels. From the turnip-like swollen root, they reach through the stalk held back into the root collar, into the midrib of the leaves, and finally up through the air-filled flower stalk all the way to the receptacle. The milky sap binds together the members of the dandelion — which appear so markedly set apart from one another — into a whole. One stands before a riddle! Must this milky sap not be ascribed just as much a saline as a sulfurous nature — and how much more still a mercurial one? Does it not unite all three qualities within itself? Does the fundamental principle of the flowering plant even exist here — the refinement of the mineral-substantive and its etherization in the flowering process?

The milky sap is a secretion from the fused marginal cells of the interconnected milk channels. It is a mass of substance composed by the etheric organisation of this plant, containing in specific proportional relationships everything that then shapes itself into the highly specified forms of the taproot, leaf rosette, and composite flower head. Analysis reveals such a manifold of dissolved and suspended substances that it seems justified to say: here lies a primordial state of life in an appearance-form from the evolutive early periods of Earth development, in which the kingdoms of mineral, plant, and animal being had not yet separated from one another — a substance composition of omnipotent life. Individual substance-groups are subject, depending on site, to strong seasonal fluctuations — for example, inulin, a polysaccharide built up from fructose, which is almost entirely consumed with the growth of spring and toward autumn builds up again to high

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values. The spring root has the highest content of bitter substances, the August root the most *inulin*, the September root the most *taraxin*, the October root the most *lævulin*.^[402] The milky sap consists of a water-like base substance — the *Taraxacum* liquor — in which many mineral substances, among them potassium and silica, as well as organic compounds such as proteins, tannins, alkaloids, and vitamins are dissolved.^[403] The substances suspended in this solution in fine droplets are resins and, primarily, rubber with a colloidal protein protective sheath. In the ash of the whole plant one finds 7% silicic acid, 40% potassium oxide, 8% magnesium oxide, 28.6% sodium oxide, as well as traces of zinc, copper, manganese, and sulphur.^[404] The content figures of analytically detectable substances yield, beyond the mere fact of their presence, few indications that would allow one to discern a connection to the formative being. More information is obtained when one brings certain substance compositions into view — for example, active substances and their healing effects. But even these say nothing about the wholeness of the dandelion that brings these effects forth. As long as this whole was accepted as a given natural fact, the dandelion was regarded as an officinal medicinal plant. Now, since the active substances considered healing have been isolated and synthesised, or can be replaced by other synthetic substances, the dandelion has lost its honoured status as a medicinal plant. It will regain this status — and so will all other medicinal plants — only when one seeks to recognise the relational nexus of the substances to one another as a force-structure whose architect, under the direction of the astrality working from without, is the etheric or life body of the medicinal plant in question. The individual organic substance-compounds have indeed received their imprint through the wholeness of the etheric organisation, but they do not represent it in its full validity.

For that, one would need to come to know the composer who has created for himself a self-portrait in the outward appearance of the dandelion in this particular arrangement of substances. This composer as the great artist can be found only through knowledge of the spirit. Only spiritual research opens up the "spiritual bond"^[405] that binds the empirically found individual facts together in a meaning-giving way. Such a spiritual-scientific meaning-giving shows that in the dandelion — unlike in yarrow, chamomile, and stinging nettle —

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a relational nexus exists not between sulphur and the earth-bound substances potassium, calcium, and iron, but between silica and potassium. In living beings, potassium has the significance of connecting the etheric body with the physical body; in polar contrast to this stands silica. Unlike sulphur, silica creates a kind of sense-relationship between these two members of the human being and the cosmic-astral forces that work inward from the metabolic pole, the "farm individuality." This particular reciprocal interaction of potassium from below and silicic acid from above takes place, one may assume, in the milky sap that runs through the entire plant. Must one not see in this — in the context of the dandelion forming itself outward into its threefold, articulated appearance — the "mediator [between; author's note] the silicic acid distributed in a finely homeopathic way through the cosmos and that which is actually needed as silicic acid throughout the whole region"?^[406] Here the same question arises as with regard to the nitrogen of the air: silicic acid is, after all, abundantly available in the soil in solid, colloidal, and dissolved form — why then draw silicic acid in from the cosmos in so complicated a manner and, moreover, in such minute quantities? There are evidently two mutually polar states of activity of silicic acid, or rather of the silicon that determines its efficacy within it. The one state of being of silicic acid is quartz and the silicates. These are the outcome of the becoming and passing away of past conditions of the Earth. As rocks and as their weathering-products they form the mineral skeleton of the soils. To this earth-bound silicic acid, the root of the plant stands in relationship. The other state of activity of silicic acid makes itself felt at the metabolic pole above the earth — a "silicic acid distributed in a finely homeopathic way through the cosmos."^[407] One immediately thinks of meteoritic dust that has entered the Earth's sphere of attraction. Yet this trickles down to earth of its own accord. This mineral earthing cannot surely be what is meant. Rudolf Steiner's statement is that the "right reciprocal interaction of potassium and silicic acid in the plant must be present in order to draw in the cosmic."^[408] It is an active process, proceeding from the plant, which must be enlivened with the help of a suitably prepared manure.

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What is here referred to, among other things, as "cosmic silicic acid" designates an immaterial, etheric-astral condition. "We could gradually, by continuing to manure in a haphazard way, prevent the earth from absorbing what is active in the way of silicic acid, lead, mercury" — "what comes in from the cosmic periphery and must be taken up into plant growth."^[409] The earth loses its capacity to receive these cosmic substances. To counteract this loss, a specially prepared manure is once again needed: the dandelion preparation. It mediates to soil and plant the capacity that belongs to the dandelion in a quite particular way — to bring potassium and silicic acid into such a reciprocal relationship within the life processes of the plants that they acquire the capacity to draw in the "cosmic silicic acid." In the dandelion this reciprocal relationship comes about precisely through the fact that it lifts the two earthly substances taken up through the root — potassium and silicic acid — out of the inorganic-physical state into an etherised condition. The milky sap is in its omnipotence closer to its archetypal image, yet even in this form of appearance it is an image of the same as are its rhythm in stasis and movement and the intensification of that rhythm from the root, through the leaf rosette, culminating in the flower heads. The dandelion is "a kind of messenger from the heavens"; its appearance announces as much.

The silicic acid rayed in from the cosmos in this way, and taken up by the life processes of the plant, enters into relationship with the silicic acid absorbed from the earth, which stands in reciprocal relationship to the potassium. Only in this kind of synthesis will one find any approach to an understanding of this enigmatic state of affairs described by the spiritual researcher. Silicic acid contains silicon. "Silicon in turn is transformed within the organism into a substance of extraordinary importance — one that at present [that is, in 1924; note by the author] is not counted at all among the chemical elements."^[410] Is it this transformed substance through which the named substantialities of the cosmos become accessible to plant growth in a new way?

The dandelion unites within itself, as an evolutively earliest form of existence of life, the milky sap with a cosmic-earthly formative force brought to completion in the present. Its appearance speaks of this. Is it this synthesis that bestows upon the dandelion, above all in its outstanding flowering process, the unique property of the earthly-raying

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and the cosmic inraying silicic acid into one, and in doing so to transform the "silicon contained in the silicic acid" within the living into a "new substance"? An affirmative answer is suggested by the procedure of the further preparation of the dandelion and by the efficacy of the finished preparation.

At the starting point of the preparation stands the question: Can one capture the force-potential of the dandelion, concentrate it, preserve the concentrate, and deploy it in the form of a manure in such a way that it communicates itself to the soil and to the growing plants? In the fading of the dandelion this potential is extinguished. The last stirring of life is the transformation of the cotyledons into the stalked pappus, which bears the seed beneath its little parasol. Before this artful conclusion is reached, the life process of the dandelion — which attains its culmination in the flower heads — must be kept in flow. This in turn can only be accomplished through a sheath organ that derives from the next higher kingdom of nature, the animal kingdom. The animal places its life processes in the service of its soul-interior being and keeps them in flow through this. According to the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, the peritoneum — or more precisely the mesentery — of the cattle fulfils this task with respect to the flower heads of the dandelion.

The Peritoneum or Mesentery of the Cattle

It serves as sheath organ from the animal kingdom in the preparation of the flower heads of the dandelion. The peritoneum (*Serosa*, *Peritoneum*) lines the abdominal cavity and all the organs contained within it, as well as the pelvic cavity. In the abdominal and pelvic cavity it forms the boundary membrane of the metabolic pole in the proper sense. The thoracic cavity too — the centre of the rhythmic system with heart and lungs — is lined by a *Peritoneum*, the pleura. This, however, is strictly separated from the peritoneum by the diaphragm (*Diaphragma*). The *Peritoneum* is a skin organ turned inward and inverted into the inner world of the body. Its surface, facing the interior, is formed by squamous cells embedded in a basement membrane. This lies upon the connective and muscular tissue of the walls of the organ sheaths and of the body cavities respectively. When detached, one holds in one's hands a translucent, lustrous, membrane-like skin. This is traversed by a fine network of nerve fibres that centre in individual ganglia and ultimately converge in the great ganglion centre of the solar plexus (*Plexus solare*), which in cattle lies beneath the vertebral column at the boundary region

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of the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. These nerve plexuses belong to the autonomic nervous system, which divides into the *Sympathicus* and its polar counterpart the *Parasympathicus*. Their regulatory activity plays itself out deep in the unconscious.

The merely anatomical-functional consideration of the peritoneum sheds little light on its deeper significance. One notes a strong innervation, a film of moisture enabling the gliding of the organs within the abdominal and pelvic cavity — in particular the coiled mass of the small intestine — and the astonishingly high capacity for resorption of bodily fluid; together with the lymph and the lymph nodes it provides for detoxification — in the sense of a kind of digestion — of substances foreign to the body. This mode of consideration, confining itself to the more outward facts, immediately broadens when one asks after the significance of the strong innervation. An answer is given by the peritoneum itself. It is a sense organ, directed toward what accomplishes itself within the individual organs of this inner space in highly specific activities — and which simultaneously grasps the sum of these activities in unconsciousness as a whole and, proceeding from this whole, coordinates the organ activities and attunes them one to another.

Just as the outer skin and the four middle senses embedded within it — sense of warmth, sight, taste and smell —^[411]^[412] mediate to waking consciousness a sense-perceptible image of the reality of being, so does the inner skin of the peritoneum mediate the revelation of this essential reality itself — the latter in connection principally with the life sense. This announces dully the bodily states. It belongs, alongside the sense of balance, sense of movement, and sense of touch, to the lower, the will senses.^[413] By virtue of their proximity to the will, their activity rests in the deepest unconscious — that of deep sleep; it stands in immediate relation to the spirit-reality of being. The sense organ of the peritoneum therefore does not perceive an objective counterpart, but plunges into the essential revelations that find expression in the activity of the organs of the body cavities. Thus the activity of the bladder, as an organ of concentration and excretion, is a different one from that of the small intestine as an organ of ensheathing the digestive juices. Different again are the activities of the liver, pancreas, spleen, etc. The peritoneum is

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woven on the one hand into the essential being and the activity (efficacy, function) of each individual organ of the abdominal cavity, while at the same time mediating the sum of these activities to the main ganglion centre of the solar plexus. One can therefore also call the peritoneum, together with the smaller ganglion nodes and the great ganglion centre, the inner heaven. Other anatomical designations of the abdominal cavity ganglia that are evidently chosen by intuition — the "stellate ganglion" (Ganglion stellatum) as well as the Ganglion coeliacum (Coelum = heaven) — likewise point to the kinship with the macrocosm. "The body cavity is a heaven, a cosmic enclave.^[414] Here in the animal kingdom, and especially among the ruminants and among these above all in the cow, this relation to heaven finds its highest elaboration. In the act of rumination the cow does not perceive images of a sense-perceptibly given outer world, but rather, in the form of force-laden images, a revelation of the essential reality of being that underlies it.

In view of the relation of the peritoneum to the manifold autonomous activities of the organs of the abdominal cavity — each of which it sheaths individually — the question arises: which portion of it comes into consideration for the preparation? In his Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner names the bovine mesentery: "One gathers the yellow dandelion heads, lets them wilt a little, presses them together, sews them into bovine mesentery."^[415] To the question of what is to be understood by bovine mesentery, the answer follows: "The peritoneum is meant. By mesentery, to my knowledge, the peritoneum is understood."^[416]

These statements have given rise, to the present day, to the doubt in practice: does it depend primarily on the peritoneum, or specifically on the mesentery, which constitutes a part of the peritoneum? If the former is the case, then for the preparation the greater omentum (Omentum majus) offers itself far more readily and simply — less so the lesser omentum (Omentum minus), which connects liver and stomach in a double lamella. The greater omentum, likewise a double lamella of the peritoneum, lays itself like an apron between the ventral wall of the stomach and the convolution of the intestines. It swings down from the stomach to the underside of the abdominal cavity, forms a large loop there, turns back upward again and covers the intestinal mass like a warming protective shield.^[417] The mesentery (Mesenterium) behaves otherwise.

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Adhering to the bovine mesentery, directly below the vertebral column, it carries the entire convolution of the intestines. From both sides of the abdominal cavity, the single-layered peritoneum of the abdominal cavity folds together into a serous double lamella — the mesentery — in such a way that its sense-active surfaces face outward into the abdominal cavity (Figure 31). The serous double lamellae divide at the small intestine (*Jejunum*) and envelop it as a single lamella. The mesentery thus forms a fold-crown that follows the tightly packed loops of the small intestine through a considerable portion of the abdominal cavity. Between the two serous sheets of the mesentery lie the nerve strands (they branch into both sheets and stand in connection with the digestive activity in the small intestine), furthermore arterial and venous blood pathways (they sustain the intensive life processes in the intestine), lymph ducts (they take up through the intestinal mucosa [*Mucosa*] the digestive juices [*Chylus*]), lymph nodes (they work in a detoxifying manner), and finally connective tissue and fatty deposits. The mesentery, as part of the peritoneum, is thus constituted in its structure so that it is simultaneously a sense organ and an organ of activity. It mediates the digestive activity (outer world) to the total organism (inner world) and vice versa.

When one takes this activity-relation into view, the difference between the mesentery and the omenta (*Omentum majus* and *minus*) becomes clear. The concept "peritoneum" — which Rudolf Steiner mentions in the question-and-answer session of the course in connection with the mesentery — means something general,

Fasst man diesen Tätigkeitsbezug ins Auge, so verdeutlicht sich der Unterschied zwischen dem Gekröse und den Netzen (Omentum majus und minus). Der Begriff «Bauchfell», den Rudolf Steiner in der Fragenbeantwortung des Kurses im Zusammenhang mit dem Gekröse erwähnt, meint ein Allgemeines,

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as it were the idea of a comprehensive sense organ that plunges into the sense-darkness of metabolism, withdrawn from consciousness. The concept "mesentery" — which finds mention in the fifth lecture of the Agriculture Course — means something specific, a functional field on which the general translates into a highly specific activity: precisely one that is found in this completed form only in the digestive tract. Its uniqueness arises from the intimate connection with the "I-disposition" discussed in the chapter "The Cow" (pp. 146 ff.). This I-disposition's predisposition within the cow is prefigured in the long path of intensive digestive activity, culminating in rumination. The result of this digesting unlocking of substance is perceived by the serous peritoneum of the mesentery. It radiates as an astral force into the interior of the body and into the bloodstream, and is carried by this stream up into the nerve-sense pole of the head and into the horns set upon it, where it is dammed back. This triggers anew, at a higher level, a consciousness-impulse whose result in turn radiates back into the body cavity and communicates itself, through both serous lamellae of the mesentery, to the contents of the intestine. These contents are now pervaded by forces that have found their way from the cow's current life-activity to its supersensible reality of being. With excretion, this force-potential — the "I-disposition" — enters the outer world. It lends to cattle manure its uniquely enduring fertilising force. This occurrence, arising from the higher being of the cow, may count as a further indication that the peritoneum represents something "general," while the double-lamellar peritoneum of the mesentery is something specific. The latter fulfils, in that "inner heaven" — in the encircled cosmos turned inward — the core task: to mediate the digestive activity of the ruminant to the organism, and from the organism back again to the digestive system, which then becomes manure.

This occurrence — which draws in the whole being of the cow — is fulfilled by neither the greater nor the lesser omentum. Both have specific functions outside the digestive activity and the connected steps of transformation toward a higher working of forces. Both show, it is true, a similar anatomical structure — with a serous double lamella and the nerve, blood and lymph pathways lying between, lymph nodes and connective tissue, the last-mentioned, however, strongly reduced. Characteristic for the greater omentum is the net-like distribution of embedded fatty tissue. But what does this anatomical kinship say? The sense function is a fundamentally different one. It is one that — one may assume — bears upon the perception and steering of the harmonious interworking of the

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What happens in the rumen must stand in simultaneous reciprocal relation to what is taking place in intestinal digestion, and vice versa. Beyond this, the greater omentum is perceptively immersed in the fluid balance of the abdominal cavity and steers this through secretion and resorption. It also provides defence against substances foreign to the body. On account of this, and of its great mobility, the greater omentum has also been called "the great dishcloth of the abdominal cavity."^[418]

What speaks clearly for the bovine mesentery as sheath organ for the flower heads of the dandelion may be seen in what follows: as a highly evolved composite, the dandelion has the power to draw the substantive-essential being of silica in from the cosmos. The bovine mesentery, for its part, has the power — by virtue of its sense activity directed inward toward the working of substances in the small-intestinal digestion — to endow the still-immaterial silica with a kind of sentient inwardness. In order to make this potential — laid down as the result of evolutive becoming in the dandelion blossom and in the bovine mesentery — serviceable for plant growth, there is need once again of a preparation that springs from the knowledge of the spirit of the human being, and that, in the rhythm of the course of time, bridges the boundaries between the kingdoms of nature.

The appropriate time to pick — this holds for Central Europe — is a sunny day in April. The flower heads have opened in the early morning hours, blooming row by row from the outer edge inward and spreading their ray florets radially outward. Around ten o'clock in the morning a stage is usually reached where a small cluster of florets still stands together at the centre of the flower head. In the short span of roughly one hour before full bloom sets in, the flowers must be picked from their hollow stems and spread out to dry, or pre-dried with warm air. Picking in the afternoon, at full bloom, or during the advanced flowering season should be avoided because of the danger of premature transition to pappus formation and seed formation.

In the first preparation step, the flower heads — depending on their degree of dryness — are lightly moistened with an extract of dandelion leaves, pressed together somewhat, wrapped on all sides in folds of the mesentery, and tied into a small parcel with a hemp cord (no synthetic material). "Alternatively" to the mesentery, the greater omentum (*Omentum majus*) is frequently preferred on account of its easier handling; it is larger in surface area and as a rule less infiltrated with fat. It attaches at the stomach and otherwise stands in no direct connection with the intestinal loop.

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The enveloping in the mesenteric membrane brings about a first inversion of the nature process and with it a first step of emancipation from that process: the radiating, cosmos-directed gesture of the dandelion blossoms is now turned inward, filling an inner space. Different is the case with the peritoneum, which, like a "heavenly vault," had lined the abdominal cavity, enclosed all the abdominal organs — and in an artful manner the loops of the small intestine as well — and stood in sense-relation to the concealed activity of digestion: now it is turned outward. The double lamella or double serosa of the mesentery described earlier now unfolds, in a new manner, a sense activity directed both outward and inward. Directed inward, this sense activity — by way of the *serosa* of the lamella turned inward — bears upon a life-activity that has reached an evolutive high point in the flower heads of the dandelion, while the *serosa* of the lamella turned outward opens itself to the forces that ray in from cosmos and earth from without. Seen in this light, the unified sense-function of the bovine mesentery divides into a polar double-function. Untouched by this remain the connective-tissue sides of the two lamellae; they continue to adhere to one another and form, as it were, the connecting link between the polar spheres of perception.

The physical and life organisation of the dandelion is evolutively directed toward shaping a relational nexus between potassium and silica, culminating in the blossom. To this attaches itself the question of whether, in the connecting link just mentioned — as a kind of synthesis of this new inward-outward relationship — this relational nexus might not be kept in flow beyond the boundary that evolution has set to the development of the plant. Does the significance of the mesentery not lie precisely in this: that on the one hand, in its functional unity with small-intestinal digestion, and on the other by virtue of the function of its double lamella in the first preparation step, it brings two polar worlds of forces into relationship with one another? And is it not through this that the conditions are first created, within the earthly domain, for the dandelion's unique property of "drawing silica in from the cosmos"

Die physische und Lebensorganisation des Löwenzahns ist evolutiv darauf ausgerichtet, ein Beziehungsverhältnis von Kalium und Kieselsäure auszugestalten, gipfelnd in der Blüte. Daran knüpft sich die Frage, ob nicht in dem genannten Bindeglied, gleichsam als Synthese dieser neuen Innen-Außen-Beziehung, dieses Beziehungsverhältnis über die Grenze hinaus in Fluss gehalten werden kann, die evolutiv der Entwicklung der Pflanze gesetzt ist. Liegt nicht gerade darin die Bedeutung des Gekröses, dass es einerseits in seiner Funktionseinheit mit der Dünndarmverdauung und andererseits aufgrund der Funktion seiner Doppellamelle im ersten Präparationsschritt zwei polare Kräftewelten zueinander in Beziehung bringt? Werden nicht dadurch im Irdischen erst die Bedingungen geschaffen, dass die einzigartige Eigenschaft des Löwenzahns, die «Kieselsäure aus dem Kosmos hereinzuziehen»,

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to what is transferred through manuring to soil and plant life? These questions will only answer themselves out of the personal relationship that one builds up, in doing and thinking, to the things and beings. They arise in the face of the practice — here and there in use — of separating the two serosa lamellae, as a rule of the greater omentum, from one another in such a way that a kind of pocket is created, into which the flower heads are stuffed and the open ends are afterwards sewn shut. This means that the sheathing is only single-layered — that is, what comes into effect is the working of the peritoneum as something general (lining of the abdominal cavity) and not that of the mesentery as something particular.

The second step of the preparation has come to receive wider practical attention only since the publication, with the fifth edition of the Agriculture Course (Dornach 1975), of Rudolf Steiner's notes to the course lectures. In these he writes concerning the dandelion preparation: "Hang the mesentery in the air."^[419] In the fifth lecture of the course this is not mentioned in these words; instead, immediate reference is made to the third step: "It must then of course be exposed [the dandelion blossoms enclosed in the mesentery; editor's note] to the influence of the earth, to the influence of the earth in wintertime."^[420] And so it was widely practised in the following decades. Yet the question remained ever open — whether this means that the second step is omitted, or how the immediately following sentence is to be understood: "But now what matters is that one gain the surrounding forces by treating it in the same way as the other." The riddle resolves itself with the above quotation from the notes: "hang in the air." It interprets "the surrounding forces" — those that are active during summer in the air and warmth above the earth. The remark that "one treats it in the same way as the other" must therefore be understood in the same sense as in the case of the yarrow preparation, where the exposure of the preparation to the summer and winter forces was described in detail.

In the second step of the preparation, a second act of an inversion takes place — and with it a second act of emancipation from the naturally given course of events (Figure 32). What previously belonged to the inner being of the cow — indeed, owes its whole existence to its service — is now an organ of the outer world, in the service of the forces that ray in from the cosmic periphery.

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In the dandelion blossoms, by contrast — blossoms that in the outer world turn toward the cosmos and owe their whole existence to it — the inverse is now the case: they are enclosed in an animal organ sheath, within which the force-concentrate of the dandelion blossoms unites with the forces of the macrocosm, those forces transmitted to this concentrate through the organ sheath of the bovine mesentery.

What is now required is to dry the flower heads gathered in April sufficiently, to enclose them at once in the mesenteric flaps of a cow of middle age, preferably from the farm's own herd, and to hang the bound, ball-like package in the air, protected from birds. Throughout the summer half-year, until around Michaelmas, it remains suspended above the earth, exposed to the solar and planetary forces in warmth and air. These enter into interaction with the earthly substances potassium and silica, which in the blossom have been raised into the etheric condition. It is only at this level of the etheric, one may assume, that the "relational nexus of potassium and silica" — to which spiritual research points — can first arise: the nexus that endows the dandelion with the capacity, as "messenger from the heavens," to draw in cosmic silica. Let this stand as an attempt to show the living interconnection according to which the first step must of necessity be followed by the second — namely, the exposure of the mesenteric package to the atmospheric forces.

In the third step of the preparation, a third process of inversion and emancipation takes place (Figure 32, p. 423). What during the summer half-year was suspended above the earth — in the "belly of the farm individuality" — exposed to the peripheral forces of the planetary cosmos, is now exposed to forces that work from the sphere of the fixed stars, by way of the earth, in the earthy-watery. While in summer it is chiefly astral forces that ray in from the solar sphere and the planetary spheres, impressing themselves into the substance of the dandelion blossoms through the mediation of the animal organ sheaths, in winter it is above all I-forces, active in the earth from the higher spirit world, that form themselves into the blossom substance.

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The procedure in the third preparation step is as follows: after the beginning of autumn around Michaelmas, the ball-packages are taken down and buried in the earth, at a depth corresponding to the transition from the humus-rich topsoil to the clay- and fine-sand-richer subsoil. The pit is filled in again and, near the soil surface, fitted with a wire mesh as protection against dogs and foxes. Until the smell of the mesentery has dissipated toward winter, a wooden or stone cover may also be useful for this purpose.

In spring, around Eastertide, the preparation — whose mesenteric sheath is as a rule strongly rotted — is taken out and stored in clay vessels surrounded on all sides by peat dust. With the finished preparation, whose flower heads have largely preserved their structure, a new materiality has again come into being — or more precisely: a new substance-composition, as a point of reference for a force-potential of an entirely new kind. Along the path of its becoming, guided by the spirit and hand of the human being, it has been held within the living, and it unfolds its efficacy within the living.

Application and Efficacy

The dandelion preparation, like the other preparations, is a force-fertiliser. Like these, it works upon the "consonance of the creative, formative and form-giving World-Word,"^[421] which is to say — in relation to the preparations — upon the life, astral or soul forces, as well as upon the formative being- or I-forces; the latter confer upon plants, from the depths of the earth, the uprighting force

Im Frühjahr, um die Osterzeit, wird das Präparat, dessen Gekrösehülle in der Regel stark angerottet ist, herausgenommen und in Tongefäßen verwahrt, die allseitig mit Torfmull umhüllt sind. Mit dem fertigen Präparat, dessen Blütenköpfchen weitgehend ihre Struktur bewahrt haben, ist wiederum eine neue Stofflichkeit entstanden – oder besser: eine neue Stoffanordnung, als Bezugspunkt zu einem Kräftepotential ganz neuer Art. Es wurde auf dem Weg seiner Entstehung, gelenkt durch Geist und Hand des Menschen, im Lebendigen gehalten und entfaltet seine Wirksamkeit im Lebendigen.

Anwendung und Wirksamkeit

Das Löwenzahnpräparat ist wie die anderen Präparate ein Kräftedünger. Es wirkt wie diese auf den «Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes»^[422], das heißt, bezogen auf die Präparate, auf die Lebens-, Astral- oder Seelenkräfte sowie die formenden Wesens- oder Ichkräfte, welche Letztere den Pflanzen aus den Tiefen der Erde die Aufrichtekraft

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and confer upon the soil and the fruit-bearing plants that which incorporates itself as the "diaphragm-middle" between "head and belly" of the agricultural individuality.^[423] This holds in a singular way for the dandelion preparation. How many meaning-laden conditions must sound together to confer upon the blossom of the dandelion the capacity for a kind of sense-force — the power to draw silica in from the cosmic periphery? What a magnificent relational nexus must hold sway in the metabolism of the cow, to bring forth, through the mesentery, an organ that on the one side bears a sense-relation to the substances of the nutritive stream arriving from without, and on the other communicates the result of this perception to the astral being of the cow? The union of both — of the blossom and the peritoneal mesentery — creates a synthesis of a higher kind, a manure substance whose efficacy represents an intensification of the two polar qualities.

A new substance-composition comes into being within the living — a manure that sees to it, in still more intimate fashion, that the supersensible-astral organisation of cultivated plants imprints itself upon their etheric and, through this, upon their physical organisation. The plants become more capable of sense-perception and thereby more sensitive to the substances they need for their growth: "if the plant is in this way, in the finest way, permeated and lived through by silica, then it becomes sensitive to everything and draws everything toward it."^[424] It is further indicated that this periphery evidently does not refer only to the rooted soil-space of the individual plant, but extends into the neighbouring field, forest and adjoining meadow.^[425] This at first enigmatic statement can, in the light of present-day scientific knowledge, well be interpreted through the phenomenon of the symbiosis of plant roots with soil fungi (*Mycorrhiza*), whose mycelia — a network of cellular threads (*hyphae*) — link the root systems of plants with one another across considerable distances. The hyphae supply the plants with water (forest trees) and above all with mineral substances, while for their part benefiting from the plants' energy household. The phenomenon of mutually promoting cohabitation (*symbiosis*) of higher-developed organisms with lower ones can well be understood in the

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sense that dull degrees of sensitivity hold sway here — as, for example, in legumes, whose nitrogen-fixing performance can be markedly enhanced by organic manures. It is to be expected that the dandelion preparation makes a significant contribution here as well. But does the nature and efficacy of this new creation of substance out of spiritual research exhaust itself in that — in the continuation of a nature process? Sensory perception, in the present case, surely means making the astral organisation that works inward upon the plants from without, to a higher degree, the "former and shaper" of the etheric or life forces, and keeping these flowing as "creative agents." A preliminary stage of this takes place in the blossom of the dandelion. Through its rootedness in the earth (the ascending milky sap) and at the same time its inclination and opening toward the sun, it is endowed with the capacity to draw silica toward itself out of the cosmos. Through the preparation described — which is accomplished within the earthly sphere — the dandelion preparation is finally placed in a position to mediate to other cultivated plants, by way of organic manures, the capacity to draw toward themselves from the surrounding cultivated soils those earthly substances they need for healthy growth.

With the conventional concepts of scientific theory, such a migration of substance is unthinkable. It becomes more comprehensible when one learns to understand the soil itself — the diaphragm organ of the "farm individuality" — as a living context permeated by astral forces, into which the root immerses itself as it were as a sense organ. One can blunt this still weakly developed sense organ entirely by means of mineral salts (cf. the chapter "The Application of Nitrogen Salts," pp. 275 ff.), or one can educate this sense organ toward ever higher activity through the cumulative working of all the preparations named. And that is what it comes down to. Each one of them contributes a working-aspect to the development of the sense organization and thereby to "sensitivity" toward substances and forces: "If one works the soil in this way [...], then the plant becomes ready to draw things toward it from the wide periphery."^[426]

The dandelion preparation fertilises the soil with astral forces. These make the teeming life of the soil efficacious in such a way that the soil itself becomes plant-like. In this milieu of heightened soil fertility the answer to the question must be sought: Of what kind is the "sensitivity" stimulated by the dandelion preparation? It is a

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An inward working that does not proceed from any soul-interiority of its own — the plant has no such thing — but one that, out of the supersensible, has the power, by way of the plant's arrangement of substances, to draw earthly substances toward itself in a targeted way. But how do these substances come into motion? Must they not first be set flowing in the right way by the life organisation of plants growing in neighbouring fields, in meadows and in forests? That is: must the earthly substances not first be raised out of their physico-material condition into that of the formative forces? This riddle-question remains open!

The application of the dandelion preparation takes place, together with the four preparations described previously, as an addition in a kind of homoeopathic dosage to composts, farmyard manures, liquid manures, and slurry. The measure is a three-finger pinch per approximately 1 m² of a garden compost cell, up to 10 to 15 m² in the case of manure and compost windrows, deep-litter stalls, and liquid manures. The preparation should be carried out immediately after the heap is set up, in the case of liquid manures immediately after the container begins to be filled. Instead of being suspended in cloth bags, the preparation portions can also be kneaded together with clay into balls and added in this form to solid and liquid manures. Repetitions are recommended after each turning of the heaps, or after stirring and aeration of the liquid manures. The preparations dampen the decomposition processes that immediately start up again, and with them the excessive warming and the sharpness of the odours. Nitrogen and carbon remain "settled" in organic compounds. The dandelion preparation is furthermore a component of the "combined preparation" — an intensively prepared concentrate on the basis of farmyard manure free of bedding material. It is scattered in small quantities over the fresh manure before the daily mucking-out, or into the lying areas of cubicle loose-housing stalls.

Like each of the preparations, the dandelion preparation too calls for presence of mind in the doing. Only this — in the context of the wholeness of the farm — awakens questions, and with these a searching inner disposition. A path of cognition opens up that enlivens the initially merely executive doing into an artistic act.

A path of cognition opens up that enlivens the initially merely executive doing into an artistic act.

The Composition of the Valerian Preparation

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Last in the circle of the six manure preparations stands the valerian preparation. In application and function it occupies a rounding, singular place. In only a few words Rudolf Steiner characterises the being and efficacy of this preparation as follows: "so one can, if one imparts to the manure

in a quite delicate way this diluted juice of the valerian blossom, evoke in it that which stimulates it to behave in the right way towards what one calls phosphorus substance."^[427] This sentence already indicates that the juice pressed from the valerian blossom is subjected to no further preparation steps whatsoever, apart from the single measure that the mother tincture is to be diluted with warm water before application. The riddle of what is at stake here must be unlocked on the one hand through what the outward appearance of the valerian plant (*Valeriana officinalis*) reveals about it, and on the other hand through what spiritual research makes available as knowledge.

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back into the stem. In the following year, the metamorphosis of the leaves is less distinctly pronounced (Figure 33, p. 431).

Just as emphatically as in the form of the leaves, a metamorphosis of the substantive activity makes itself known in the transformation of the fragrant substances from the rootstock through the stem to the blossom — whose intensity of streaming fragrance is greatest at the point of fading. Just as form and colour address feeling through the sense of sight, so the sense of smell opens feeling to deeper layers of the workings of substances. In the dimmer mode of perception, smell leads more deeply toward the quality of those forces that are active in the living as astral forces. In valerian and stinging nettle they stand in polar relation to one another.

The outward appearance of the stinging nettle gives the impression that in its life organisation it is above all the chemical or sound ether and the life ether that are at work. These become formative forces through a higher elementally astral spirituality, and through this are in a position to bring about the particular substance-composition of this medicinal plant. It becomes the image of this inwardly directed compositional surplus-force of the astral. This shapes, on the one side, the substance-compounds strictly out to the periphery — such as the urticin in the stinging hairs — while on the other side a potential of withheld astral forces remains, which through the path of preparation have the capacity to set earthly material substances flowing again, to enliven and transform them.

Valerian is otherwise: it streams outward into air and warmth what, under astral influence, has formed itself as substance-compositions in its life processes within leaf, root-rhizome, and stem. In the case of the fragrance-poor stinging nettle, these formative forces configure the substances toward bearership of the "magnificent inward working." It preserves this force-quality behind the protective wall of its form, which appears outwardly as though sealed off. Valerian again otherwise: it streams out everything that its astral organisation has composed in substances through the working of formative forces. The appearance of the stinging nettle in its self-assertion and firmness — turned to image — points above all to the creative force of the life ether; that of the environment-open valerian, to the force of the warmth ether and light ether. Valerian is a giver of warmth and light.

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The Root

The valerian seedling first forms a taproot, which soon dies back. The stem remains initially compressed, and from it develops a loose leaf rosette. In the soil, at the transition to the root, it divides into several short, cylindrical *rhizomes* — a kind of vegetative fruit formation in the root zone — from which the roots reach outward and downward in strands, arching out in curves. They enclose spherically an inner space open at the bottom, divide themselves into fine rootlets, and so present the type of the "earthly root"^[428] (Figure 33). The rhizomes, in continuation of the air-filled stem, show cavities. At the transition to the slightly thickened root strands — which likewise contain aromatic substances — buds form toward autumn that grow out into new shoots. To this form of vegetative propagation is added the formation of runner shoots, which take root anew at their nodes.

The most striking feature of valerian is the strong, stupefyingly earth-heavy smell — the stench, really — that is dammed back in the rootstock and streams from it whenever it is wounded. Chemical analysis reveals across the substance-groups of carbohydrates, proteins, oils, alkaloids, resins, and so on, as well as organic acids and mineral substances, a far-reaching spectrum of compounds — one that corresponds quite closely to the diversity of medicinal indications on which valerian preparations exert their damping, healing effect. Simonis does, however, emphasise that "results adequately illuminating to the essential being of the plant have not yet been achieved."^[429]

The rootstock of valerian resembles a chemical kitchen within the living. Everything life-creating that is summed up in the *tria principia* of Paracelsus works here in the closest mutual engagement. In the language of spiritual science, it is the four kinds of ether — life ether and sound ether, light ether and warmth ether — that enliven the inorganic world of substances under the direction principally of the sound ether and life ether, the master-builders of the plant's physical organisation. The architect, however, who supplies the building plans, is the astral organisation working into time and space out of the supersensible. At a preliminary stage — one can say, still unrefined — the fullness of the substance-compositions concentrates in root and *rhizom*, which then, in progressive transformation, form the physically sense-perceptible gestalt of valerian. Even the sulphurous-imponderable element

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Figure 33: The valerian preparation in production and application.

of the warmth ether and light ether active in the flowering process descends into the root zone and, within the earthly gravity of the salt process, provides the "lightness" of the combustible essential oils and, through these, the strong development of fragrance. In rhizome and root-strands everything concentrates that the valerian has to offer in the way of substance compositions. It is consequently these that find medicinal application in disorders chiefly of the vegetative nervous system — in sleep disturbances, nervous states of excitation, and the like.^[430]

The Stem

The stem of valerian may with full justification be regarded as a member of this plant unto itself (Figure 33). While the dandelion never leaves its rosette stage and blossoms close to the earth as a basket full of flowers upon its own flower-stalk, the stem of the valerian rises vertically out of its loose rosette in spring,

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as though it sought to lift its inflorescence, at the greatest possible distance from the rootstock, up into the sphere of warmth, light, and air. The stem determines the gesture of this plant: as its governing member it connects the earth-capable root-work with the inflorescence turned toward the cosmos; just as the roots branch downward, so the stem branches upward into the fine branchlets of the cyme. The living and supporting tissue of the stem encloses an air-filled tube; on the outside it is multiply furrowed. Here once again the polar doubleness of astral working shows itself — impressing the growth forces from without into form, building space from within, and, by virtue of the nitrogen in the enclosed air of the stem's tube, ordering, re-ordering, and upwardly refining the substances in the temporal unfolding of the life processes. The astrality that governs the entire valerian plant refines the substance-activity in the upward growing of the stem from one pair of leaves to the next. The stem, too, releases — already refined toward flower — the characteristic fragrance of valerian oil, in which the aromas of various essential oils come together into a unity.

One can experience it as a phenomenon of a special kind: how the sap-streams of a perennial herb such as valerian are constituted. To begin with, the assimilation stream (*Phloem*) from the leaf rosette nourishes the growth of the rhizomes and roots, along with their substance compositions, in which the material structure of the whole plant is already present. As soon as the stem begins to shoot upward, these pre-formed substances flow into the ascending *xylem* stream and are, in air, light, and warmth, once again compositionally refined by the formative forces of the metamorphosing leaf region. Through them the essential archetype of the valerian — its *Wesensurbild* — takes shape in stem, leaf sequence, and inflorescence into outward, sense-perceptible appearance. The earthly gravity of the substances in the rootstock passes, through foliage and blossom, over into "lightness" and drifts away in fragrance.

Die Blattfolge

Als Sämling durchläuft der Baldrian alle Stadien einer Staudenpflanze — so begins the passage, and the translation must carry it into English with the same patient, enumerative precision.

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The Sequence of Leaves

As a seedling, valerian passes through all the stages of a herbaceous perennial. The first leaf after germination is long-stalked with a roundish-oval leaf blade. The following leaves lengthen, and the blade begins to articulate itself into unpaired, still roundish, lightly toothed leaflets along the margin. As the leafstalk extends, the leaflets develop into more oblong, tapering forms. In this phase the

leaflets stand erect and gather into a bouquet-like rosette. With the elongation of the stem, the pairs of leaves follow one another in decussate arrangement at strikingly large intervals (Figure 33, p. 431). The leaflets become progressively narrower, more pointed, and arrange themselves in pairs. Toward autumn the leaves shorten, the pinnation becomes denser, clasping the stem. Finally, with the coming into bloom, the leaves draw themselves back into the stem, and only the bracts remain — until these too disappear in full flowering. On boggy, shaded sites, valerian tends toward rampant growth.

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on the foundation of unerring intuitive beholding. The same formative forces of the "creating, forming and shaping World-Word" work in nature and equally, on a higher level, in the human being. When one attempts to think oneself into these phenomenon-grounded thought-pictures, one treads a path of cognition on which the connecting link hidden in the stem, from leaf to leaf, can reveal itself step by step as the "spiritual bond." It is the essential archetype of the plant-nature, which rays up from the depths of the earth along the Earth-Sun axis and unites itself with the etheric-astral formative forces raying in from the cosmic periphery.

Such is the living-into the principle of metamorphosis, which is active everywhere in nature and which can become a key of cognition precisely for what leads toward a progressive understanding of the preparation plants and toward the capacity to enliven, through the path of preparation, the relationship between soil and plant. Metamorphoses accomplish themselves in the mercurial connecting link between the substance-process of the root (the Sal, or earthly, pole) and that in the blossom (the Sulphur, or cosmic, pole). With regard to form, the reverse holds: the blossom dies into the highly differentiated forms of its organs through the working of earthly forces. The root, on the other hand, continues growing under the influence of cosmic forces at the root tip and shows — especially in the taproot — a more unified form (see also the chapter "The Composition of the Yarrow Preparation," p. 361 ff.). The agent of metamorphosis is the mercurial in-between; meditatively thinking-beholding one's way into it schools and enlivens thinking.

The Blossom

In contrast to the root of valerian, whose eminently strong astrality expresses itself in the composition of many and varied substances — above all essential oils, whose dull, in part foul-smelling fragrance is held back by the root bark — the blossoms stream this fragrance forth in a refined, purified form. Valerian has a long flowering time, reaching from the end of May (with full bloom in June/July) through to September. It begins with the opposite branching of the main shoot at the uppermost leaf nodes. This two-sided branching repeats itself several more times, so that the main shoot grows beyond the lateral branches. By this means the inflorescence takes on a domed to hemispherical form. Against the base of the lateral branches nestle the last pointed, pinnate foliage leaves of the leaf sequence. The opposite branching of the main shoot and the lateral branches

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continues, at last accompanied still by narrow, pointed bracts. In the inflorescence the branching reduces to the two lateral shoots. The central shoot dams up into a terminal flower bud. The lateral shoots overgrow this and end on a second tier again in a flower bud, which is in turn overgrown by two lateral shoots — and so this process repeats itself on a third tier. The individual florets — there can be up to 2,000 of them — gather together and form, closely compressed, the cyme or paniculate umbel. All the processes that play themselves out in valerian between the poles of earth and cosmos in a metamorphosis that builds upon itself end in the blossom: on the one hand expanding into the element of air in fragrance, on the other condensing toward the formation of seed.

The seed stands upright in the fork of the lateral branches. The ovary is inferior, which is why the cotyledons are situated at the upper end of the small seed. They remain sessile and in their ripening spread their delicate pinnate leaflets out in a wing-like fashion into a pappus, which — much as in the dandelion — carries the seed away on the wind.

The individual floret is inconspicuous, bringing its pale-pink colouring fully into its own only in the inflorescence as a whole. While the blossoms on the uppermost tier of the cyme are opening into flower, those on the lower tiers are fading and passing over into seed. This accounts for the strikingly long flowering time. The blossom shows, with its five petals — unequal in size and fused at the base into a tube — and with its three anthers, a marked asymmetry. Hoerner^[431] interprets this as "a sign of a very strong individualization, caused by an astrality reaching deep into the plant." This indication is further supported by the fact that the stem — or rather the vertical principle — dominates the form-building of valerian: a mark of the fact that the spiritual archetype of this plant, its very being, makes itself sense-perceptible in the vertical axis of earth and sun. This circumstance also bears witness to valerian's strong relationship to light and equally to warmth, apparent in the high content of combustible substances. Warmth is the primal element and the bearer of being in all that exists and becomes.^[432]

The valerian blossom is above all in its fading — and fully in its dried state — a potent source of fragrance. In all the floral organs nectaries are found, which contain substances of various kinds in differing consistencies. In liquid form these are various sugars, which at

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the base of the blossom, close to the style. Others are woven into the tissues of the style, the stigma and the carpels — above all, however, into the petals themselves. Their fragrant substances sublimate out of the solid-liquid, or colloidal, state into that of the gaseous. These are essential oils that have refined themselves step by step upward through the leaf sequence, rising from the already strongly sulphurised yet earth-bound root region, conducted by the stem, to pour themselves forth in the milder fragrance of the blossom.

The strong astrality — at work throughout the entire formative process of valerian — shows a kinship of being with that astrality which, in the animal, internalizes itself as soul-nature bound to the body. This is attested, among other things, by the powerful attraction valerian exercises on all manner of flying insects, beetles and so forth. One can say, in general terms: the fragrance streaming forth from the blossom is the purest form of appearance in which the being-revelation and efficacy of the formative forces manifest. In these, the earthly-material has been dematerialized to the highest degree. In its passage through the flowering process it has not merely been etherized, but so thoroughly permeated by astral force that it is capable both of drawing the most varied species of animals from a great distance toward their source of nourishment, and of touching the human soul more deeply than anything the eye can see.

The flower substances are, for the most part, highly complex compositions of carbon and hydrogen. Oxygen — which leads toward the earthly — recedes entirely. The substances are therefore highly combustible, leaving behind no ponderable ash: the carbon transforms itself into the gaseous state of carbon dioxide. The phenomenon of combustibility points to the fact that hydrogen is the bearer of the element of warmth — or rather of its supersensible correlate, the warmth ether. The chemist Rudolf Hauschka (1891–1969) draws attention to this: "If one were to baptize hydrogen according to its inner character, it would have to be called fire-substance."^[433] Rudolf Steiner characterizes hydrogen as that "material thing which stands so near to the spiritual on one side, so near to the material on the other side." "It carries everything that is in any way formed, living, astral — carries it back up again into the widths of the cosmos." "Hydrogen actually dissolves everything."^[434] In a workers' lecture^[435] Rudolf Steiner speaks of the supersensible being of hydrogen: "Certainly, in chemistry

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The hydrogen — which in chemistry is quite a different substance from phosphorus [...] What, then, is the hydrogen that is spread out everywhere in the world? — The hydrogen that is spread out in the periphery of the world, that is the world-phosphorus." Gunter Gebhard observes on this: "From present-day knowledge and the phenomena, hydrogen actually shows relationship only to warmth. Phosphorus, however, has its principal relationship to light. If we regard phosphorus as the physical expression of the warmth ether — which is simultaneously also the fire element — then this is the old Saturn-warmth, which still carries the light within itself. In the 'plunge' into matter, phosphorus and sulphur then appear today in the earthly."^[436]

The dissolving capacity of hydrogen — in the higher sense — makes itself felt morphologically when, toward the flower, the foliage vanishes as it were into the stem, and physiologically when the phase of protein formation is superseded by that of devitalization, of the formation of hydrogen-rich carbohydrates — fructose, essential oils, and the like. What is remarkable now is that valerian brings the fructifying tendency of the sulphuric to bear with great intensity precisely in its antipode — the root — and does so most strongly there. There, the fragrance remains dammed back within the bark. When one cuts into the root, it spreads a penetrating, dully earthy smell. In the flower, on the other hand — above all in wilting — it becomes earth-fleeting, smells more floral, and envelops the nearer surroundings in a cloud of scent. Expressed in image: the hydrogen process dissolves all formal determinacy of the substance compositions into the chaos of the cosmos's indistinguishability, into the primal state of warmth. Dominated by the stem principle, the substance-process of valerian — in formation as in dissolution, from above downward and back again — is powerfully charged through by strong astrality. This state of affairs, together with valerian's particular relationship to warmth, can awaken understanding for why the valerian blossom requires neither further preparation through an animal organ nor exposure to the forces of the cosmos and the earth across the course of the year. One would indeed hardly be able to find an animal organ appropriate to this plant. The essential nature of valerian is in this respect polar to that of the stinging nettle. Just as the nettle — by virtue of its "astral inward working" — creates for itself a sheath within which, along the path of the incarnating hydrogen process, new substances arise, so polar is the excarnating hydrogen process in the blossoms of valerian. This dissolves all formation into the primal state of warmth, whose intrinsic being to all existence

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Sheath and substance at once. Valerian lives forth an "astral outward working" that, in its outstreaming, acts sheath-forming. To this Gunter Gebhard adds: "In the stinging nettle it is sulphur and iron that become active. Both have an inward-centred quality. The nettle, 'permeating with reason,' shows a relationship to the microcosmic — the I-quality of reason. The earthly comes to expression in a quite particular way also in the rhizomes of the nettle. In the blossom of valerian, the substance-process dissolves into the cosmos; it strives toward cosmic light. Entirely so are also the roots of valerian, which — like light — ray themselves into the earth in straight lines, for long stretches without branching and with almost no secondary thickening. In the blossom the hydrogen working, in the root the light quality, which shows itself in phosphorus. In contrast to the nettle, which stands in relationship to the microcosmic I, valerian shows a relationship to the macrocosmic I."^[437]

Production and Application

Medically it is the rhizome roots of valerian that are used; in the canon of the other compost preparations, however, it is the blossoms, or blossom-related processes — as with stinging nettle and oak bark. In the blossom the plant dies on the one hand, manifesting its archetypal image in form, colour and fragrance; on the other hand, in the flowering process the earthly stream of substance comes alive.

The valerian blossoms are picked in June/July at the moment of greatest fullness of the false umbel, and immediately crushed by a suitable device (a shredder). In this process the cell sap — including the essential oils — passes out of the cell plasma and the cell vacuoles. It is separated from the remaining pomace by means of a fruit press. The pomace is then mixed with approximately as much water as was obtained in juice during the first pressing. This mash stands for one day and is then pressed again. By pressing twice in this way, approximately 1 litre of press juice is obtained from 2 to 3 kg of blossoms. It is filled into bottles and undergoes lactic acid fermentation. The gases arising in this process must be able to escape. After a fermentation period of approximately 6 weeks, the bottles are sealed with corks or rubber stoppers. Too much ingress of oxygen leads to faulty fermentation, through which the

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preparation becomes unusable. The bottles are stored in a dark, evenly tempered room — the preparation cellar. The juice remains usable for years.

With regard to the application of the blossom juice, Rudolf Steiner points out that it should be diluted "very strongly" in warm water.^[438] The indications that the spiritual researcher gives as a guiding thread for concrete action cannot be taken precisely enough; they hold good word for word. They are results of supersensible spiritual research brought into idea-forms, and they are pointers that illuminate the way of the act of will in advance, without, however, fixing it in rules. One must preserve the freedom to think these idea-forms again and again anew in their great contexts. And the more one strives to do so, the more freely will one be able to carry out in practice what has been grasped in spirit — in a manner appropriate to the matter at hand. The ideas of spiritual science found a new art of experimentation in practice; out of this grows the so necessary "personal relationship" that leads the idea-borne path of will more deeply into spirit-reality than the scientific-technological achievements are able to do that today direct agricultural practice from without.

How individually, and across the broadest spectrum, the facts of spiritual science are applied in practice in many and various ways — in part quite adventurously — is shown by the great eagerness to experiment. This is documented in the meritorious work of Stappung^[439] in worldwide practice. The results of spiritual research reveal their true cognitive value only in the practising activity.

Prior to the application of the valerian blossom extract comes the matter of "strong dilution" of the mother tincture. This is achieved when one drops into a given quantity of hand-warm water just enough blossom juice that the liquid, after five to ten minutes of stirring, carries the scent of valerian and shows something of the brownish colour of the juice. A point of reference for the quantity to be applied is determined — corresponding to the three-finger pinch of the solid preparations — as follows: 1 to 3 g = 1 to 2 cm³ per 5 to 8 litres of water per approximately 8 m³ of manure material. The liquid is sprayed over the heaps and windrows after setting up, or — divided into portions

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– poured into holes on the upper side. In the case of liquid manures (liquid manure, slurry), the diluted quantity of juice is best added in during stirring. Let it be emphasised once more: the best advisers are the thinking co-experience and one's own experimenting spirit.

The relationship of valerian to the element of warmth and its supersensible force-correlate, the warmth ether, has found its way into biodynamic practice also outside its function as a manure preparation — for instance in the face of the danger of late frosts in May. Immediately before these occur, a warmth sheath can be laid over fruit blossoms and over vulnerable vegetable seedbeds through fine misting of the valerian extract, diluted at 1 ml to 1 l of water; this prevents frost damage down to two to three degrees below zero.^[440] For general strengthening of plants in vegetable growing, it is also recommended at a dilution of 10 to 30 drops of valerian preparation to 3 l of water. In viticulture the valerian preparation has come to enjoy particular esteem.^[441]

Preliminary remarks on efficacy

The valerian blossom extract, when "introduced to the manure in a very fine way" after strong dilution in warm water, is meant to "call forth in it in particular that which stimulates it to relate in the right way to what one calls the phosphorus substance."^[442] This compressed, enigmatic statement, coming at the end of the sequence of the six manure preparations — after the naming of sulphur at the outset with yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle — now, with valerian, points toward the phosphorus substance. Both sulphur and phosphorus are closely related to one another. Both are, in a sense, embodiments of light and warmth. And yet they are two distinct substances. They stand side by side among the acid-formers in the Periodic Table of the Elements, but in the organic realm they behave in quite polar fashion. Sulphur occurs in inorganic nature in the many sulphides, the metal salts of sulphuric acid, as well as as elemental sulphur in volcanic deposits. As such it ignites at around 250°C and burns with a bluish flame to sulphur dioxide. Phosphorus is otherwise: it is extraordinarily reactive and therefore occurs

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not elementally. The representation as elemental phosphorus shows the astonishing phenomenon that, depending on temperature, it has five modifications of its mode of appearance. The first modification to arise is white phosphorus; it is poisonous, luminous in the dark, and stable only under water. On contact with air it ignites spontaneously at 44°C and burns with a brightly glowing, hot flame to phosphorus pentoxide (P₂O₅). Under exclusion of air and at elevated temperature, or under exposure to light, a second modification arises, red phosphorus; it is stable, does not glow, and is non-toxic. Three further modifications follow with substantially different properties: a light-red, a black, and a black amorphous phosphorus.

Phosphates are found in sedimentary rocks, but above all in the finest dispersion in crystalline primary rocks in the form of sparingly soluble apatite, a calcium phosphate with traces of fluorine and chlorine. Larger deposits of apatite are mined on the Kola Peninsula, Kirov. Apatite weathers under the action of acids and thereby regenerates the phosphorus balance of the soils. In sedimentary deposits, above all in North Africa, the phosphorites are found. These are slurried-together animal bones from the Tertiary. Ground, they can be applied as a relatively insoluble raw or soft-rock phosphate melioratively on phosphorus-poor sites.

Within the soil profile, the phosphorus content decreases from the metabolically active humic topsoil down into the subsoil. This phenomenon alone shows that losses through leaching are very slight — as a rule less than 0.3 kg per hectare. Many times greater are the losses through surface erosion (denudation).

The stability of phosphorus (HPO₄)^2– that has passed into solution through mineral weathering and decomposition of organic material is a consequence of its reactivity. It enters into new compounds above all with calcium, forming secondary calcium phosphates; furthermore it is absorbed by aluminium and iron hydroxides, which for their part form complexes with humic and fulvic acids. In suspension it occurs in soil colloids and adsorbed onto clay minerals and humus substances. Up to 80% of the organic phosphorus compounds are present in the form of phytates (calcium and magnesium salts of inositol hexaphosphoric acid); a further 5 to 10% are found in the nucleic acids of the cell nuclei of plants and microorganisms.^[443]

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It is striking that phosphorus, in finest distribution and strictest compositional order, permeates all kingdoms of nature and with them the physical organisation of the human being. If one restricts one's gaze to its physico-material mode of appearance, little is revealed about its being and its function in the household of nature. The picture changes when one widens the field of vision to include the plant kingdom and further upward still. There phosphorus, etherised into the phosphorus process, appears in metamorphoses wherever a tendency toward devitalisation prevails. This reveals itself to intuitive beholding immediately in the flowering process of plants, which is essentially a phosphorus working. Where this devitalisation reaches its culmination — in the wilting of the blossom and in seed formation — the phosphorus working comes especially to the fore.

Devitalisation means dying away and passing over into pure form. This is what phosphorus accomplishes physiologically. In the process of heredity it mediates the quality of form through the nucleic acids. So too does the light bound into grape sugar in photosynthesis, and its transference through cellular respiration to the phosphoric acid process of adenosine triphosphoric acid (ATP), bind the light wholly into the enduring form of root, stem, leaf, blossom and fruit. In like manner the phospholipids of *myelin* in the brain bring about devitalisation and create consciousness; or the phosphorus of apatite creates the enduring form of bone.^[444]

In deep concealment there are to be found, even within the process of growth, just as many localised zones of devitalisation as the plant has cells. These are the phosphorus-containing cell nuclei. They harbour, in the form of the nuclear protein — the nucleotides — the chromosomes, the mediators of the stream of heredity from generation to generation. The nucleus, enclosed by the nuclear membrane, represents in its relation to the cell plasma the pole of rest of the cell. Within it, on the basis of phosphorus, a higher principle holds sway than that which in plant, animal and human being assists toward the shaping of their respective outward appearance. It is the principle that, in enduring germinal quality, carries all the achievements of development from the past into the present and from the present on into the future. It is superordinate to this course of development; it is the spirit being of the plant itself, raying in from a higher supersensible region — that which in human consciousness lights up as the I-being. Thus *myelin* — these are phospholipids that ensheath the nerve fibres in the brain — stands in closest connection with

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The plant, as a purely living being, has no incarnated soul-nature and no proper being of its own — and therefore also no nervous system, which is to be regarded as the earthly foundation of the astral body. Yet, turning one's gaze upon the nucleus of the plant cell, the question arises whether this might not be regarded as an evolutive preliminary stage toward the formation of such a foundation. The nuclear acids RNA and DNA show a high phosphorus content in the phosphoric acid residues of the nucleotides. Just as in animal and human being the nervous system extends, with fine branching, into the living tissue, so within the individual cell there are to be found outside the cell nucleus, in the cell plasma, organelles such as the ribosomes^[445] and mitochondria, which, as tiny formed body-formations, stand in relation to plasma and nucleus alike. The mitochondria contain, like the nucleus, chromosomal structures from which it may be inferred that they have epigenetic functions. That is to say, they are the bearers and mediators of impressions that the cytoplasm has received from the present workings of Earth, Sun and planets, as well as from the measures of care, manuring and breeding by the spirit and hand of the human being. These are newly acquired properties arising out of present-being. One must proceed from the assumption that such epigenetic impressions accomplish themselves in the plants with every year of vegetation. In order to preserve the fruit of this "presentification" of the earthly-cosmic workings in the course of the year — for instance that of the preparation manuring — self-propagation is recommended, up to and including the breeding of farm-own varieties.

The Earth-Sun axis, into which the flowering plants articulate themselves, manifests in stem, stalk, culm, shoot, branch and trunk. In this Upright there holds sway, as a spiritual-essential reflection, that same force which on a higher level lives in the human being as I-activity in the will, and lights up in the awakening self-consciousness. The physical point of departure for the coming-into-efficacy of the I-forces in the human being — and in another manner in the beings of nature — is phosphorus: not as such alone, but always embedded in the corresponding substance-compositions, for example in the aforementioned nucleotides of the cell nucleus. With regard to the human being, Rudolf Steiner sets forth: "It is something very peculiar, how the human I, when we

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just as it now lives spiritually, psychically, organically, and also mineralisingly in the human being, a kind of — I would say — phosphorus bearer." "The phosphorising-through of the human organism is an activity of the I."^[446] Thus the phosphorus process, in its most labile state-form — adenosine triphosphoric acid (ATP) — directs principally the carbohydrate metabolism, the nuclear acids bound up with the nucleoproteins, the protein metabolism, and in the form of phosphatides the fat metabolism, in order finally, in connection with the phosphorus-bearing lime (apatite), to come to an end in the mineralisation process of bone formation.^[447] It is in each case different phosphorus compounds that impel the activity of the ether-kinds in relation to the members of the human being: the I lives in the warmth ether in relation to phosphorus; mediated through the warmth ether, it imprints itself, on the basis of sodium phosphate, into the astral body; through magnesium phosphate and the light ether, and through potassium phosphate and the chemical ether, it works in the etheric body; and on the basis of calcium phosphate and the efficacy of the life ether, it congeals into the solid form of the bone system, the "physical image of the I-organisation."^[448] In its direct relation to the spiritual kernel of being — the I — phosphorus helps to overcome one-sidednesses in the physiological processes and to balance out opposites.

In the centre of the cell the phosphorus process concentrates itself in the nucleotides, the hereditary bearers. These carry the past — the attainment of evolution — into the present. In this work of creation all former becoming out of the spirit gathers itself together; and at the same time it contains something germinal, out of which this creation continually renews itself in the present and receives impulses that carry these germinal forces into the farthest future toward a new becoming. These impulses the plasma of the plant cell takes up, in the day-night rhythm, from the in-raying light of the Sun, whose forces are modified through the working of the planets. The site of this presentification of the germinal is the cell- or protoplasm surrounding the nucleus. It contains, floating within it as it were in fine distribution, the already-mentioned organelles — the ribosomes and mitochondria, as well as the magnesium-bearing (not phosphorus-bearing) chloroplasts, in

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which chlorophyll absorbs the light and enlivens the earthly substantiality. The basic substance of the protoplasm is the cytoplasm: a water-clear, transparent, fluid-colloidal, largely homogeneous protein mass.

The cytoplasm is the movement pole of the cell. It streams, rotates around the cell vacuoles — or, in special cases, even circulates around the cell nucleus. The intensity of streaming depends on oxygen, the bearer of the etheric forces. It is sensitive to external stimuli; it ensures — depending on the weather, through the swelling and shrinking of the cell tissues — the closing and opening of the stomata, the movement of the flower heads of the composites in accordance with the course of the Sun, and so forth. It reacts, further, to the kind of manuring and to the tending hand of the human being. As the stamp impresses itself into the sealing wax, so do the astral forces pressing in from without impress themselves into the cytoplasm of the cell. In the science of botany, a "faculty of sensation" is attributed to the cell plasma.^[449] Yet no one names its specifically plant-like character — the boundary-drawing threshold to animal sensation. In the cell nucleus phosphorus prevails and determines its strict structures. The protein associated with it, the nucleoprotein, contains — as does all protein in principle — no phosphorus. Protein is associated with sulphur; it owes its substance-composing mobility to sulphur, which stands so close to phosphorus in kinship and yet is so polar in its properties. But sulphur is the mediator between the astral forces raying in from the periphery and the substances that build up the protein (C, O, N, H). Both — sulphur and phosphorus — bring about a harmonisation of the members of the human being. When, for instance, the astral body and with it the I sink too deeply into the etheric and physical organisation, then "sulphur works more upon the astral body, phosphorus more upon the I,"^[450] drawing each back out of that binding. Both are Mercuries between the higher spirit worlds and their earthly image — between what is spiritually germinal and what works itself out into physical appearance, into the Work. Both appear, in highest dilution, in all living activity — unified and yet in polar working-mode, repeating the past in the present and opening it toward the future. Both are, in high dilution, interwoven into the nucleus (phosphorus) and the plasma (sulphur) of the cell. Their

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Their efficacy is, as it were, a nature-given prototype of true homoeopathy, of the efficacy of the smallest entities.

Concerning the nature of hydrogen in its connection with phosphorus and sulphur, one can sum up the following: hydrogen has been characterised as the representative of the fire element, respectively of warmth ether. Warmth and light are still interwoven into hydrogen. On the path through the stages of evolution toward the Earth^[451] and the materialisation finally into the "earthy-solid," the warmth has condensed into sulphur and the light-nature into phosphorus. Sulphur, together with warmth, makes possible mobility and growth in the substantive — without sulphur, no metabolism — while phosphorus creates forms and, at the level of human consciousness, allows the substantively formed to become thought in the image. Light is experienced as thought in the soul process. When this enters consciousness, it shapes itself in language into word, into grammar.

Sulphur and warmth/movement, phosphorus and light/form — these are the respectively dominant relationships. Yet sulphur too shows in its radiantly yellow flame its nearness to light, and phosphorus in its ready inflammability its nearness to warmth. In the living realm sulphur governs metabolism, phosphorus — through the nuclear acids DNA and RNA — governs heredity.^[452]

In the valerian blossom the phosphoric process has refined itself to such a degree that it — so one may assume — through the phosphonucleotides of the ribosomes and mitochondria of the plasma, is endowed with the potency of a spiritually I-imbued formative force, one that opens out of the surplus forces of what is spiritually germinal in the earthly realm new developmental possibilities of plant becoming.

The Efficacy

One certainly goes wrong in seeing in the valerian preparation an organic phosphorus fertilizer. Valerian does not contain more phosphorus in its ash than other plants. What decides its efficacy is that in the valerian blossom there comes together a concentration of formative forces capable of shaping living contexts in such a way that within these the phosphorus can mediate forces which, out of the world of the purely spiritual, help the plant toward uprightness, toward an organismic being-of-its-own;

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or in Rudolf Steiner's words: that the "juice of the valerian blossom" stimulates the manure "to behave in the right way toward what one calls the phosphorus substance."^[453] This stimulation is necessary wherever organic materials are rotting, and this is the case with all manure preparation. In the autolytic breakdown and microbial decomposition of the accumulating plant and animal residues, the compositional order which the phosphorus substance had served disintegrates. The resulting chaos of substances stripped of their bearership now tends toward these substances falling back out of the living into the state of the inorganic. Nature itself intercepts this death-process to a certain degree through the formation of stable humus forms. This process takes place in the moist-watery and is governed above all by the moon forces. In the compact massing of organic material in the manure and compost heap, as well as in the liquid manure and slurry storage, it requires the steering measures by the hand of the human being named above.

Yet the efficacy of the valerian preparation goes beyond this. It does not exhaust itself in building the phosphorus released from the organic compounds back at once into the nuclear proteins of the microbes — thereby holding it in place for a time until it can be taken up by the cultivated plants. The microbial activity takes place in the moist-watery, least of all at first in the earthy-solid. The latter is only the case through the specialized activity of the soil animals, guided by an astral body. The efficacy of the blossom-juice of valerian appears by contrast as a general one — one that seizes all the sub-processes and brings them together, one that closes the proliferating metabolic activity of the manure heap into a self-contained whole. Under the influence of this preparation the manure heap develops into a kind of organism, in which the astral forces raying in from the periphery penetrate the chaos of decomposition. These forces form the astral organization of the manure heap, which — by virtue of the forces of the higher purely spiritual I-being dwelling within it — makes the phosphorus, now freed from all bonds, once again into a bearer. Through the addition of the valerian preparation there takes place a kind of re-endowment of the phosphorus, after it has, in its passage through the chaos of decomposition, shed its former spirit-bearership.

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Seen in this light, the valerian preparation fertilizes — through the organic manures, in the most intimate way — the life-formative processes that spread out horizontally across the surface in the soil-diaphragm organ and in the leaves of the plants, as well as, in the vertical, that which expresses itself as the spiritual-essential being of the heights and the depths in the stem force of the plants. Against the background of this world-cross, the elements of intuitive beholding must be sought through which confirmation can be found of what is already inwardly conclusive through itself in what has been researched on spiritual ground. In its own specific way, this holds for each of the preparations described.

For the results of anthroposophical spiritual science, the phenomena must first be created — in continuous thinking and doing — through which the truth of what has been cognized in the spirit is authenticated.

The Horsetail Preparation

It does not belong to the series of compost preparations; it stands for itself and is described by Rudolf Steiner in connection with the warding off of fungal diseases in the sixth lecture.^[454] For the preparation, field horsetail (*Equisetum arvense*) is the plant in question. It represents — alongside other equiseta up to the present day, alongside club-mosses and ferns — primordial forms of the plant kingdom. Precursor forms, such as those of the psilophytes, reach back to the end of the Silurian and the beginning of the Devonian — that is, to approximately the middle of the ancient era of the Earth (*Palaeozoic*). This is the time of the "Lemuris," the repetition within Earth evolution of the planetary pre-stage of "Old Moon."^[455] These primordial forms are water-born creatures that conquer dry land. The closeness to the element of water is shown — out of the abundance of the kindred flora of that time — by the genus *Equisetum*, which still exists today. This finds expression both in the site-conditions of its preferred habitats and in the intricate process of germination. One finds horsetail on loamy to clayey sites with waterlogging or impeding horizons.

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Figure 34: Field horsetail with shoot and underground rooted rhizome system.

The Form of Appearance

The outward appearance comes as a surprise amid the surrounding flora. The stem rises bolt-upright, articulated into individual stem-elements (internodes) that slot into one another like cylinders in a box (Figure 34).

The whorled, unbranched lateral branches show the same structure. They radiate upward at a slight angle from the horizontal. Stem and lateral branches are uniformly green and take over the function of

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leaves. What surprises is precisely the absence of leaves — and equally of flowers. Consequently no metamorphosis of form is to be perceived, except that the lateral branches are shorter at the base of the stem, then spread out, and taper again pyramidally toward the tip of the shoot. Leaf development is reduced to elongated, upward-pointed sheath-bracts that lie closely against the base of the stem-joints. In their hexagonal, box-like arrangement the silica-quartz principle that runs through the entire plant comes into its own — equally in the hexagonal shields that cover the anthers of the fertile cones. The whole plant is governed by the stem principle — whereas the ferns, which are of the same temporal origin, are governed by the leaf principle. The club-mosses occupy a middle position. What is so astonishing is the contradiction that the horsetail lives out. On the one side its closeness to the moist-watery in the substratum, on the other its strongly formed, silicified gestalt, which orders itself strictly into the vertical Earth-Sun axis. Field horsetail masters this contradiction.

If one seeks the generative pole of this plant, one finds it — in a few specimens separated from the vegetative part — in the form of reddish-brown, spindle-shaped cones, each seated on a shoot with a closely compressed sequence of stem-joints; at their base they are wrapped in a fringe of dark-brown leaf-tips. The cones present a picture similar to that of mushrooms shooting up out of the darkness of the earth. This makes field horsetail unique in the horsetail family, and so its efficacy against the fungal is comprehensible: in separating the fertile sporangiophore from the sterile green shoot, it sets the fungal gesture, so to speak, aside from itself. The other horsetails carry the sporangial spike at the tip of the green plant.^[456]

The Rhizome-Root Sphere, Vegetative and Generative Propagation

The vertical vegetative shoot continues in just such a sequence of stem-joints down into the depths of the earth (Figure 34, p. 449). Where it meets a waterlogging horizon — for instance at the boundary of the A-horizon (living topsoil) to the more clay-rich B-horizon (subsoil), or at groundwater — a lateral shoot branches off, growing on horizontally, following the boundary of the perched water.

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The rhizome shoots are air-bearing. From the rhizome nodes — and partly from the primary vertical shoots as well — secondary shoots grow upward into the light and ensure the propagation of the vegetative stand. The vertical rhizomes penetrate the compaction zone with great dynamism, to branch out again horizontally on a deeper water-bearing stratum. Even from depths of three to four metres they send their black-brown rhizome shoots upward from there (Figure 34, p. 449).

Field horsetail has no primary roots. Its fine, thread-like roots, directed downward into the depth, are shoot-borne; they arise from the internodes of the rhizome shoots. Toward late autumn, oval swellings form on the near-surface horizontal rhizomes — nutrient reserves for the spring growth, above all for the fertile reddish-brown sporangiophores that shoot up first. Such a one bears the hexagonal sporangia in a spindle-shaped arrangement. After the spores ripen, the fertile shoot dies away rapidly. The dust-fine spores are carried off by the wind and germinate as soon as they reach what is moist and watery. From the germinating spores a root-like tip emerges first; there then develops a greening, algae-like prothallium. "Up to this stage, field horsetail is a green water plant."^[457] The prothallia appear in two kinds. One kind of prothallium forms rounded spermatids that can move freely through the water with the help of two flagella. The other kind of prothallium forms egg-cells, which are fertilised by the free-swimming spermatozoa. After fertilisation, the shoot of the field horsetail — growing vertically both upward and downward — leaves the watery phase and joins itself to what is solid in the earth and to the forces of the sun. Both, the fertile and the vegetative shoots alike, develop from the rhizomes that press forward into the deeper zones of the soil and take root there.

The Aerial Shoot and the Silica Process

The infertile shoot of the field horsetail, striving upward into air, warmth and light, is stem through and through. True foliage leaves are absent; only rudimentary leaf-formations in the form of inconspicuous collar-like protective sheaths, grouped into whorls, lie at the base of the stem-joints. The ribbed stem-joints of the central shoot and the rich branching into the laterals arranged in whorls point — with regard to the uptake

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of silica, quartz and light — toward a sufficiently large surface area for the uptake of sunlight and the release of water vapour. The latter is so constituted that the high water-throughput of the field horsetail is assured. Its close relationship to the element of water comes to expression also in this: that it withdraws from the water streaming upward through the xylem vessels the silica that derives from the mineral weathering of the soil. The inorganic nature of this silica is enlivened through the life-giving working of the sun within the plant. One can say: the water, mediating the forces of the moon, makes the silica — in this plant that points back into the most ancient times of plant evolution — receptive once more to the present working of the sun. It is endowed with forces that establish a harmonious balance between what works from the moon-imbued past and what works from the earth-and-sun-imbued present. With this, the field horsetail stands in a polar opposition to the dandelion. If the dandelion, as a member of the composites, belongs to the most highly developed of plants, then the field horsetail belongs to those that stand at the very beginning of the evolution of land plants. In the field horsetail, silica links past stages of evolution to the present; in the dandelion, it links what evolution has achieved in the present to the future.

The life process of the field horsetail is a silica process, born out of the element of water and metabolically active. It moves from within outward toward the periphery of the living tissues. As the water evaporates through external warmth, the silica separates out and surrounds the whole stem-plant with a mantle of water-containing, amorphous silica. It is found in the epidermal cells as well as deposited between the cell membranes of these same cells. All states are traversed — from that of solution, through the plastic gel, to the hardened, amorphous, glass-like opal — a water-containing silicon dioxide (SiO₂ + H₂O). When the stem-herb of the field horsetail is incinerated, what remains after the black carbon skeleton has burned away is, at last, a white silica skeleton. It shows lens-like bulges that, in the living state, direct sunlight onto the chlorophyll arranged in rows.^[458]

The high silica content — 70% in the ash — shapes the rigid, ray-like appearance of the field horsetail. It makes it rough and brittle. The silica "lives" in the field horsetail in such a way "that it is entrenched there as in a fortress."^[459]

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Preparation and Application

The green shoots of the field horsetail are gathered around St. John's tide, at the height of its vegetative development, on a sunny day, and then spread out thinly in airy shade to dry.^[460] With regard to further processing, Rudolf Steiner states: "that one makes Equisetum arvense into a kind of tea, a fairly concentrated tea, which one dilutes and then uses as liquid manure for those fields […] [on which one; addition by the author] wishes to combat blight and similar plant diseases."^[461] Stappung has documented worldwide the diverse practices of tea preparation from horsetail herb — with respect to the duration of cooking and the subsequent fermentation into liquid manure, as well as cold fermentation of the fresh herb, application times, quantities and frequency, and whether the preparation merely prevents or also promises an effect in cases of acute fungal attack.^[462] From the sum of experience in tea preparation, the following recipe has emerged: "In ten to twenty litres of water, 200 to 300 grams of dried herb are simmered gently for about one hour. When using fresh herb, approximately 1.5 kg to the same quantity of water."^[463] The longer simmering time is necessary, on the one hand, to break open the heavily silicified peripheral cell tissue, and on the other, to hold this process within the universal primal element of warmth.

With regard to the form of application, Rudolf Steiner uses the term Jauche — liquid manure. This indicates that the horsetail tea, after the steeping phase, should be exposed to fermentation, through which a gradual breaking-down of the more resistant organic substances can take place. Through the formation of acids, the tea becomes liquid manure and is thereby preserved and usable for a longer period. Only when it passes into putrefaction and begins to stink — hydrogen sulphide, H₂S — should further use be discontinued. Cold fermentation of fresh horsetail material, as practised here and there, should likewise be avoided. With longer fermentation times, premature faulty fermentation as well as inadequate breakdown of the amorphous

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silica is unavoidable. The warming activity in the cooking process seems to be of essential significance for the silica to become effective.^[464]

The times of application are determined by whether the tea-liquid-manure is to be applied as a preventive measure or in an acute case. According to Rudolf Steiner's indication, it is primarily a prophylactic measure. The tea-liquid-manure works through the soil and, under conditions of excessive, persistently moist and watery conditions, reduces the fungal pressure on the plants. From this standpoint, it is advisable to apply the tea-liquid-manure over the entire agricultural and horticultural farm area at 100 l/ha, ideally on an annual cycle. Ideally this would happen three to four times a year: in late winter through to spring (March), in summer, and in autumn through to early winter (November). In any case, within the framework of crop rotation, crops particularly susceptible to fungal attack — such as cereals and certain root crops — should receive the preventive treatment. Direct spraying into the stands in acute cases, often in combination with stinging nettle liquid manure, can substantially contain the infestation. It is a measure that combats the infestation. The preventive treatment through the soil ensures that outbreaks are countered at their beginnings.

The Efficacy of the Horsetail Preparation

Applied preventively, the horsetail preparation unfolds its efficacy through the soil. When the soil comes into spring after what may already have been a wet autumn and a mild wet winter, the entire root zone is exposed with particular intensity to the force-radiations of the moon — especially at full moon and at lunar proximity (perigee). These are mediated through water and arouse in the soil a moon-like life that is akin to that watery vitality in which, in primal times, the lower stages of plant and animal life once developed. Displaced in time, this vitality works today in the world's oceans, and differently in rivers, lakes and ponds. This life — still close to its origins, little differentiated — stems from the Earth's geological age of early and middle Lemuria, the recapitulation of the development of the "Old Moon" that preceded Earth evolution.^[465] Geologically speaking, these are the ages

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of the *Proterozoic* and *Palaeozoic*. During this time of the predominance of moon forces, there were as yet no flowering plants. It was the age of spore-bearing plants, to which — alongside those already mentioned — the fungi also belong. In the soil forming itself out of the watery element, the moon forces and the sun forces enter into relationship with one another in alternating states. In the following age of the *Cenozoic* or *Tertiary* (Atlantis), the sun forces gain the upper hand; the flowering plants develop with their primary roots. In the *Neozoic*, the modern era of the earth, soils develop into humus-bearing mineral soils, and under the hand of the human being into cultivated soils.

When moon forces now predominate through sustained wetness, the cultivated soil is permeated one-sidedly by a moon-like vitality. This arouses precisely the lower plant and animal life of these earlier stages of evolution — and so in particular measure the growth of fungi. This happens not only in the soil, but a storey higher as well, in and upon the above-ground organs of the plant. What has its rightful place in the darkness of the soil creates for itself, unlawfully, a second soil in the air-space above the earth; the microbial life parasitises the living tissues of the plant. Even the presently working sun-forces can only partially check this proliferating alien life. One must seek a plant that can concentrate and work through so much sun-force that it renders the excess moon-life in the watery element harmless — indeed, in the sense of a synthesis, that can bring about a healthy relationship between the polarities of the moon-astrality working from out of the past and the sun-astrality raying in from the present cosmos. This capacity belongs to the horsetail as the outstanding representative of the transition from a water-born to an earth-born plant. As a tea-infused liquid manure it works in such a way that one relieves the earth of the excess moon-force, so that the horsetail tea «withdraws from the water its mediating force and gives the earth more earthiness, so that it does not absorb the greater moon-influence through the water present».^[466] This description points unambiguously to the preventive treatment of soils with the horsetail preparation. Living-along with the course of weather through the course of the year trains the consciousness to act with wise foresight. When the prophylaxis is carried out regularly from year to year, one forestalls the acute case. Nevertheless many experiences are described, above all

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from the vegetable garden, concerning the curbing of acute fungal attack and other calamities through the horsetail tea liquid manure.^[467] Long-term experimental trials on the preventive efficacy of the horsetail preparation do not exist. Controlled trials burst the boundaries of what is practicable. The certainty of efficacy — and this holds for all the preparations named — is the conceptual penetration of the results of spiritual-scientific research, together with the confirming experience that practice teaches.

The Canon of the Six Manure Preparations, Their Working-Together in the Formation of a New Middle — A Synopsis

The question arises of itself: whether the sequence of the six manure preparations, as Rudolf Steiner describes it in the Agriculture Course, is a contingent one or a consequential one. Everything speaks for the latter, when one takes into account both the particular properties of the source materials for the preparation and the efficacy of the preparations themselves in the successive building-up of the diaphragm-soil into an enlivened, ensouled and spirit-permeated wholeness between the cosmic heights and the depths of the earth.

The Series of Preparation Plants

The six preparation plants are characterised by the fact that between the blossom-sulphur pole and the root-salt pole, specific cosmic and earthly substance-relationships prevail — and what is striking is that the first three preparation plants, yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle, form a group of three, and likewise a group of three is formed by oak bark, dandelion and valerian (Figure 35).

Between them lies a hidden and at the same time objectified threshold of mutual passage toward a middle — the soil. Both threefoldnesses form a polarity. The first represents the more basic-alkaline, the earthly pole. On this side sulphur holds sway. In the inorganic realm it is an acid-former; in the organic it unfolds its cosmic nature, in that «on the path of sulphur the spirit enters into the physical of nature

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Figure 35: The series of preparation plants and organ sheaths in relation to the metabolic and nerve-sense system of the animal, and the formation of a middle between the forces of the heights and the depths.

works into it — sulphur is veritably the bearer of the spiritual».^[468] It dematerialises, as it were, in the life processes of plants the earthly substances of the alkalis (K, Na) and alkaline earths (Ca, Mg), as well as iron as a heavy-metal base. In the sequence of the first threefoldness, it is yarrow that, with its particular sulphur force, works upon the alkali metal potassium. In an extension of this process, chamomile brings in the alkaline earth metal calcium; and again it is stinging nettle that, with its sulphur force, works upon potassium and calcium alongside iron, transforming it into iron radiations. With these it leads across toward the hidden middle. Iron is in nature — reaching up to the human being — the metal of incarnation; it consolidates within the bodily organisation

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the working forces of the spiritually essential being. In the human being, iron concentrates in the blood, which, circulating, connects the heart with the periphery, with the bodily functions. In the bloodstream moving toward the heart — and, «pacified» by it, returning into the body — the spirit-soul of the human being experiences its being-incarnate within the body.

The heart recollects and unites what has impressed itself upon the blood in the bodily organs out to the periphery of the body. In the heart, the in-flowing and out-flowing blood finds a self-active sheath that, rhythmically pulsing, keeps the blood capable of life. The other pole is the kidneys, which in another, polar way render the blood once again fit for life. They form a space into which the blood, as an arterial stream, steps out from the vascular system and — lifted free of the earthly-material substance processes, sifted and refreshed by the activity of the kidneys — a harmonious balance is created between the earthly-material and the cosmic-spiritual. Only after this «testing of heart and kidneys» does the blood remain capable of life.

The situation is different with higher plants. They grow, each in its specific way — as the preparation plants in particular demonstrate — up out of the fertile soil, the «middle» between the heights and the depths. This middle is, as yet, only germinally disposed; it does not yet act independently out of itself in its functions with regard to silica, lime, clay and humus; it stands in need of education. This concerns above all the functions of clay, which in their seasonal rhythmics carry a predisposition toward a kind of heart-function, and those of humus, whose dynamic is closer to the kidney-function. The measures taken toward this education constitute the true art of farming.

Among the many measures that have been characterised, it is the manuring out of the spirit of the human being that opens the gate into the future. This fertilising education has to do with the enlivening of the earthly substances of the depths. In its service stands the first group of three — yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle — which helps the middle, the diaphragm, progressively toward degrees of functional self-sufficiency. These three medicinal plants have the power, in their life processes, to transform the earthly substances potassium and lime into nitrogen — that is, to endow them with the quality of becoming bearers of astral forces.

On the first group of three, Gunter Gebhard remarks: «Sulphur, as the element that fell directly from the element Fire into the element Earth, is the substance that leads the spiritual into the earthly; put briefly: sulphur is a being that can materially condense warmth — that is, where

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where this being acts, sulphur appears as substance. In this way, the first three preparations are those that further the incarnating of a spiritual principle (plant life). In the case of yarrow, it is potassium — which carries the fluid element entirely within itself, and which establishes the relationship to the etheric in particular (individual etheric body) — ; with chamomile, calcium draws the astral into the physical body that is permeated by the etheric body (it draws into itself, out of the cosmos, that which gives form to the plant); and with stinging nettle, finally, iron — which, in the case of human beings, has its close relationship to the incarnating of the I, and here, furthered by sulphur, leads the spiritual archetype of the plant into its physical appearance and maintains the "contact" with the primal plant in the sphere beyond the cosmos (the "permeation with reason"). With the first three preparations, the soil is developed in such a way that all four members of the human being that are connected with the physical appearing in the earthly are furthered for the plant.»^[469]

In the second group of three — oak, dandelion, valerian — the cosmic, the acid side, is more strongly emphasised. Sulphur is no longer explicitly named here, even though it is precisely one of the strongest acid-formers. This contradiction resolves itself when one bears in mind that in the case of the first group of three, sulphur is named as the element that mediates the spiritual to the physically living. In the form of sulphuric acid it has fallen away from this function and become earthly. In the second group of three, the concern is with the acid-working that has sunk down into the physical.

In the case of oak bark, calcium as an alkaline earth metal does stand in the foreground. But what is decisive for its function is the structure in which the calcium is present in the bark of the oak in the form of calcium oxalate. In passing through the life processes of the oak, it forms itself as the product of a flowering process that has been prematurely discharged into the bark and has run its course to completion. The calcium oxalate receives its «structure» (form) as a whole through the essential nature of the oak, and in particular through the sulphuric working of oxalic acid. Gunter Gebhard adds to this: «The oak, as a Mars-/iron-being, has its deeper relationship to the I, to the sphere behind the cosmos, where the spiritual archetypes also reveal themselves to the supersensible researcher. Calcium draws all the astral into itself; that form in the physical is possible at all has its ground in the astral, while how form shows itself is grounded in the I (in the idea), which works through the astral. The calcium oxalate of the oak draws

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the macrocosmic into the microcosm; and through the iron-force of the oak it establishes the connection with the spiritual archetype. When microcosm and macrocosm are in harmony with one another, the organism is healthy. The oak bark preparation maintains this harmony between these poles and thereby promotes, prophylactically, the health of the plant through the soil.»^[470]

In the oak bark and outer bark, then, the calcium is grasped, as it were from above, from the cosmic pole that lives itself forth in the oxalic acid process. In the dandelion this process intensifies: through its blossom, developed to the highest perfection, it draws in the «silica finely distributed through the cosmos» and brings it into relationship with the potassium enlivened in the milky sap. Once again it is the acid-working through which the forces of the cosmos impress themselves from above upon the dandelion and, through it, upon the soil.

Valerian commands the phosphorus process in the manner that has been characterized.

Thus the polar essential properties of the six preparation plants, in their working together, are disposed to create an all-encompassing synthesis — namely, the formation of a preparation of the becoming, sun-filled middle between the heights and the depths. Through the inner empowerment of this middle, the soil, the diaphragm, is able to develop toward ever greater self-activity. On the alkaline side, the threefoldness of yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle opens the forces of substance upward from below to the diaphragm-soil; on the acid side, the threefoldness of oak bark, dandelion and valerian opens the forces of substance downward from above. Valerian occupies a special position insofar as it, through the bearership of phosphorus, opens up the extra-cosmic sphere of spirit — the world of the archetypal images of essential being (Fig. 36, p. 462).

Gunter Gebhard adds to this: «In their chemical behaviour, the bases (alkalis) are substances that are 'luciferic' in character, while acids carry something essentially 'ahrimanic' within them. Likewise, sulphur is an image of the being of Lucifer, and phosphorus maps ahrimanic forces. Standing in the middle between these two polar adversary-powers is Christ as the representative of humanity, who, holding the balance between these powers of being, points the way for humanity into the future. In the 'agricultural individuality' this middle is laid out as the soil-diaphragm. It is henceforth placed in the hands of the human being to bring this life-germ of the middle to development.»^[471]

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The Series of Animal Organ Sheaths

These too articulate themselves, with inner necessity, into a first threefoldness — seen from the metabolic pole of the animal, moving toward the heart — and into a second threefoldness, from the anterior of the animal, the sense pole, toward the middle. In this connection Rudolf Steiner characterises the working of the planets in the animal in relation to the sun (Fig. 36, p. 462). He proceeds entirely from intuitive beholding, from the «form and colour-configuration, also with respect to the structure and consistency of its substance, from front to back — that is, from the snout toward the heart — which bears the Saturn, Jupiter, Mars workings; in the heart the Sun working; and behind the heart, toward the tail, the Venus, Mercury, Moon workings».^[472] The higher animal, then, articulates itself along the horizontal of the spine into the polarity of the working of the supra-solar planets in the nerve-sense pole and of the sub-solar planets in the metabolic pole. Both are oriented from opposing directions toward the heart.

With regard to the sequence of the sub-solar planets — Moon, Mercury and Venus — Rudolf Steiner draws, from out of his spiritual research, upon the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries. This holds equally for the characterisation of their macrocosmic spheres of working in the vertical orientation of the «agricultural individuality». Here the sequence runs from the earth downward into the depths: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn — and upward into the heights: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun.^[473] This primal wisdom, cultivated in the Mysteries and bound together with remnants of instinctive clairvoyance in human beings, faded into resonance in the world-picture of Ptolemy. In this world-picture — as in the one prevailing today, which goes back to Copernicus — the evolution of consciousness of humanity is mirrored. In the post-Atlantean cultural epochs of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian periods, a «heaven-consciousness» still lived in human beings as remnant. It was extinguished, and with the awakening to self-consciousness in the present it became the object-fixed earth-consciousness. The human beings of those early times still experienced the planetary spheres as filled with the deeds of the spiritual hierarchies who had taken the planets as their dwelling-place.

With the fading of this experience — it lived on pictorially in the mythologies — the astronomy of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians arose at the beginning of the third cultural age, in the third millennium. In the fourth cultural period it emancipated itself further, and passed over into the Ptolemaic world-picture

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Figure 36: The polar relationship of the sub-solar and supra-solar planetary workings to the animal organ sheaths, with regard to the development of the members of the being of the «Agricultural Individuality» and its threefold articulation according to body (from below), spirit (from above) and soul (rhythmic middle).

In the rising Age of the Consciousness Soul, the world-picture shrinks to what the outer senses can perceive. For Copernicus and his successors, awareness of a being-filled planetary sphere faded away, and what remained was the round matter-filled ball moving through space in calculable orbital sequences.^[474]

Each of these world-pictures is, as it were, a snapshot — a creation of the human being regarding the manner in which, through the ages, he has stood toward the world

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stands. Each is, in and of itself, justified and correct. Today's world-picture, grounded in Copernicus, takes account only of the quantitative aspect of the corporeal, not of the qualitatively being-filled sphere of working. The cosmos appears to the modern gaze as devoid of being and deed.^[475]

Attention is drawn here to the fact that the sequence of the animal organ sheaths is oriented from the periphery of the earthly and of the most distant cosmos toward a centre (Fig. 36).

Taking up the above passage on planetary working in the organism of the animal, the sub-solar planetary working of Moon, Mercury and Venus concentrates on the abdominal organs, from behind, toward the heart, and in doing so upon the kidney system in the widest sense. The kidney receives the in-raying forces of Venus.^[476] Closely bound up with these is the force-working of Mercury, and in the kidney-bladder system that of the Moon. The nature of the mercurial expresses itself in the strongly rhythmically shaped functions of the abdominal organs. In the kidney it is the processes of excretion and re-absorption. It separates out, in mercurial fashion, the primary urine from the arterial bloodstream, surveys this, regulates it afresh in terms of substance, and returns what has been harmonised — as usefully sifted — back into the blood.^[477] This process — a kind of fluid breathing — narrows in the function of the bladder to a pure excretory act of substances that have become unusable for the organism. Here the moon forces modify the working of Venus.

The situation is different with the food that has been taken in; it is surveyed in intestinal digestion. What cannot be utilised by the organism is excreted in a more solid consistency; this organic event too can be seen as an expression of lunar working. What, on the other hand, is secreted as fluid digestive juices into the lymph and blood vessels,

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makes itself felt in processes in which one may assume that the Venus-working is modified by that of Mercury. What takes place in the abdominal organs of human being and animal as Venus-kidney process, modified by Mercury and Moon — this finds itself again in the efficacy of the stinging nettle preparation. Here, one may say, the substance-transformation spoken of in the chapter "On the Question of Substance Transformation" (pp. 384 ff.) can take place within the organic life of the stinging nettle, in the interworking of potassium, calcium, hydrogen and iron radiation — the astralization of living materiality toward the new formation of nitrogen out of the life of the plant.

If one follows the series of sheath organs that — with one exception — are drawn from domestic animals for the preparation work, one finds at the beginning the deer's bladder (Illustration 26, p. 363). In the bladder the kidney process completes itself, in that it concentrates what has been sifted in the kidney and excretes it outward. In the spherical form of the bladder, the fluid element is given shape after the image of the mediator of moon forces. In the preparation process it takes up the sun-nature of the yarrow blossoms, in which the earthy element of the potassium salt has been sublimated into the living.

Further toward the interior of the abdomen follows the intestine. Its end, the large intestine, processes microbially a portion of the remaining food residues and excretes what can no longer be made use of. This too is a process that stands under the influence of the Moon. The beginning of the intestine is formed by the small intestine, a long tube laid in loops with an inwardly almost boundless surface. Here the Venus-working provides for the sifting of the nutritive substances — excreting toward the large intestine on the one side, and secreting the digestive juices into the lymph and blood vessels on the other. This is supported and modified by the working of Mercury. It makes itself felt in the rhythmic movement-processes of peristalsis, the intestinal villi, extending to the dynamics of glandular secretion and the substance-streams passing through the intestinal walls. The Mercury forces place themselves as mediator between the working of Moon and Venus. They adapt themselves on the one hand to the ever-changing conditions; on the other hand the Mercury-working crosses boundaries that separate an inside from an outside.

Into the small intestine the chamomile blossoms are stuffed. Their sun-nature has placed the calcium and potassium of the earthly into a condition that — extending the refreshing, enlivening working of the yarrow preparation — is conducive to healthy growth. This is well to be understood in the sense that the essential archetype of the plants can express itself unadulterated in the earthly image through every phase of growth.

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The stinging nettle preparation, third in the alliance, reaches in its efficacy already close to the Sun-force-governed middle — that is, to the hidden heart-function of the soil. The astral "inward working" of the stinging nettle is so permeated by reason/I-force that it can dispense with an animal organ-sheath. It too is able to process the earthly salt-formers potassium and calcium within their organic processes, and beyond this to transform iron into a beneficent iron-radiation. It seems that a Venus-efficacy is expressing itself here. In conjunction with yarrow and chamomile it ensures that the earth-salts potassium and calcium transform themselves into higher stages of efficacy, and additionally it calls forth the Mars-character of iron into radiant activity. The Venus-working, understood inwardly, creates in the living realm free spaces for new possibilities of becoming; it practices renunciation. One can say: it does not nourish — it makes nourishment possible. In this sense the iron-radiations of the stinging nettle preparation are to be understood. The working of the Venus-sphere does not itself bring them forth; rather it enables the stinging nettle to work as a preparation in such a way that it regulates the iron-balance in the diaphragm-soil to a salutary measure — the kind of measure that is likewise maintained in the heart-and-circulatory system.

The "alkaline triad" makes the soil earth-capable for the Sun-forces; it unlocks the earth-forces for plant growth. It builds, from below, the physical body of the diaphragm. The triad of oak bark, dandelion and valerian preparation stands otherwise. Through it, the cosmic substance-process — which stands in relation to the supra-solar planetary spheres — comes into its own.

The outward appearance of the oak, its powerful reserve in growth, the hardness of its wood and so forth, bears the stamp of Mars-working. It grows slowly, persistently — just as the orbit of Mars around the Sun, at nearly two years (the sidereal orbit amounts to 687 days), takes longer than that of the sub-solar planets Venus (225 days) and Mercury (88 days). The domestic animal skull is likewise a powerful expression of Mars-working in form. The brain-cavity is, however, filled with a substance shaped by Moon-forces: the brain. In the preparation, the calcium oxalate of the bark, structured by the Mars-forces of the oak, takes its place. The same forces that shaped the skull — and that rayed through the Moon-nature of the brain — now imprint themselves upon the calcium of the oak bark. As the oak bark preparation, it works, unlike the chamomile preparation, preventively against infections from without.

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The question of which organ-sheath can enclose the dandelion blossoms connects itself with the domestic animal skull as sheath for the oak bark. Can there be, beyond the skull, any organ-sheath at all through which the preparation of the dandelion blossoms can be carried further? The head, in its strictly delimited forms and its outwardly directed sense organization, finds no continuation — except, at least to some degree, among the antler-bearers, not the horn-bearers. The head stands over against the world with its senses. The continuation of the nerve-sense activity must be sought on a higher level. It is found, uniquely developed, among the ruminants: the sense organization of the cow turns away from the head, back over the heart, and continues, in the sensory-supersensible activity of the peritoneum, on a higher level in a certain sense (Figure 35, p. 457). The cow turns toward the outer world with its head-sense organs comparatively dully, but toward its inner world with its lower senses — above all the life sense of the peritoneum — comparatively brightly. Through its intelligence-damming horns at the head, it extends its intelligent being into the bodily sheath. The sense activity in the head and that in the body stand in reciprocal relation. Where the former works to make sensory-consciously aware, the latter works to empower supersensibly.

It is thus the mesenteric peritoneum which, in the digestive activity of the cattle, perceives the forces working from out of the spirit. This sense activity of the peritoneum, which in the cattle is directed inward toward the material, directs itself — with the enclosure of the dandelion blossoms — outward toward the silica «finely distributed in the cosmic periphery». One must assume that it is the higher, etheric condition of the silica that is here addressed. The peritoneal sheath draws this silica-substance to itself in a sense-active manner and unites it with the potassium of the milky sap, sublimated in the blossoms. The substance-process in the dandelion from below, and the peritoneal sheath from above, point to a comprehensive Jupiter-activity. As all planets are working-places of hierarchical beings,^[478] so on Jupiter it is beings of wisdom. On Jupiter, wisdom is substantial.^[479] When one brings before oneself the outward appearance and the substance-processes of the dandelion (cf. pp. 406 ff.), it becomes apparent in this highly developed plant how the wisdom-filled Jupiter-working extends from the root, through the leaf rosette, the blossom and its

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radiant yellow through to the white of the «dandelion clock» — made anschaubar. Among the flowering plants, the colours yellow and white are attributed to the Jupiter-working: «for the force of Jupiter, which supports the cosmic sun-force, brings forth in the blossoms the white and the yellow colour».^[480] The Jupiter-wisdom which, in the dandelion, images itself outward — it turns, encompassed by the inner «heaven» of the peritoneum, inward into the wisdom-filled forming and function of the abdominal organs. The dandelion preparation forms the synthesis of this Jupiter-working that has assumed form and function in the earthly realm. The working-power of this synthesis may be seen in that whereby «the plant becomes sensitive to everything and draws everything to itself».^[481] One can therefore say: the dandelion preparation mediates to the organic manure, by way of the cosmic silica, the essential wisdom-substance of Jupiter, which lives itself forth in the plants as a becoming force of sentience.

When one now encloses the blossoms of the dandelion — so strongly stamped by the Jupiter-working — in the sheaths of the peritoneal mesentery, the receptivity for the silica «finely distributed in the cosmic periphery» remains in flow. Through the preparation and the organic manures, the fruit of this capacity reaches the plants — yet it now works in the opposite direction; it makes the plants «sensitive» to the earthly substances they need for growth. What had already intimated itself as an effect of the oak bark preparation appears in the dandelion preparation at a higher level. The living context of diaphragm–soil–plant is, as it were, ensouled. As the working of the first triad of preparations opens up the earthly substances and forces to the root pole of the plant, so the second triad opens up the substances and forces of the extra-terrestrial cosmos to the blossom pole.

At the highest level, finally — one can say — the valerian preparation stimulates, by way of the organic manures and by way of the phosphorus freed through the processes of breakdown, in such a manner that this phosphorus can once again become in the living realm the physical bearer of a spiritual-essential being within the earthly.

For reasons other than those applying to the stinging nettle, the valerian requires no enclosure in an animal organ. It possesses the capacity to purify the phosphorus — out of the dynamic, earth-bound, living substance-activity in the root rhizomes — upward through the vertically aspiring stem, and in the blossom to raise it into a condition of pure receptivity for revelations of

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Valerian is of a nature such that it stands in strong relation to light and warmth. The substance compositions that have formed in the course of the plant's growth under the working of the sun and of the sub- and supra-solar planets dissolve in the dying-back of the plants. In each of the breakdown processes, warmth is released. Ultimately, everything that has arisen out of spirit transforms back into the element of warmth, the origin of all being. What had come into existence disappears physically; it is, as a spiritual achievement, inscribed into the inner warmth, the warmth ether — like a memory written into the whole living planetary system.^[482] Here the Saturn principle comes into its own; like a cosmic memory, it is the keeper of the past — of the great evolutionary context between the origin of the becoming of humanity and the Earth^[483] and the being of the present. Outwardly this finds expression in the fact that the Saturn sphere encloses and delimits the solar system on all sides as a sheath of warmth. Has not the Saturn principle created a reflected image of itself in the valerian? Wherever the valerian preparation is applied, it creates a Saturnian warmth-sheath that demarcates an exterior from an interior.

When the valerian preparation is sprayed onto a dung- or compost-heap, it works upon this heap in the same sheath-forming manner as the animal sheath-organs of the other preparations. One may assume that it gives not only the breakdown-process a bounding sheath, but equally the radiations that emanate point by point from the other preparation substances introduced into the heap — holding them, in this way, within the heap. The warmth-sheath produced by the valerian preparation is woven of outer warmth (the element of warmth) and inner warmth (the warmth ether). It can be understood as an organ that receives the in-raying of the star-cosmos and finds, in the phosphorus that emerges from the Saturnian breakdown-processes, a receptive physical bearer.

Just as the round of preparations is opened in spiritual consequence by the yarrow preparation, so it is concluded by the valerian preparation. This reflection can awaken an understanding that the canon of the six manuring preparations, which stand in the service of a wholeness that is in the process of becoming, requires no extension or completion. This canon is

So wie der Reigen der Präparate in spiritueller Konsequenz von dem Schafgarbenpräparat eröffnet wird, so wird er beschlossen durch das Baldrianpräparat. Diese Betrachtung kann ein Verständnis dafür erwecken, dass der Kanon der sechs Düngerpräparate, die im Dienste einer werdenden Ganzheit stehen, keiner Erweiterung oder Vervollständigung bedarf. Dieser Kanon ist

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so composed that it creates a harmonious consonance. The wholeness is the middle between the heights and the depths; its becoming means the "enlivening of the earthy-solid itself." The consonance "sounds forth" through the spirit-guided work of the human being, through unconditional willing.

The Manuring Preparations in Their Effect upon Wholeness

Each of the six manuring preparations contributes a developmental potential toward the forming of a "seventh" — that of the becoming middle, of the diaphragm organ standing under the influence of the sun. It is the soil that first makes possible the existence of all life on earth. Within it, the planetary and stellar radiations standing under the dominion of the sun unite with the depth-forces of the earth that ray upward from below. This mutual working-into-one-another is the accomplished work — grown into deed — of past ages of the earth. It continues to work in the wisdom-filled collaboration of the kingdoms of nature. To recognize this boundlessly relational heritage forms the foundation for the shaping of the farm in biodynamic agriculture.

From this recognition, the methodical principle derives: now out of the spirit of the human being, to translate — in spirit-guided work — the accomplished work encountered at a given site (a farm) according to the laws that physically-become nature itself prescribes, and that are active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. Out of this there arises in miniature, as an artistic creation, what the earth is in the large: a self-contained organism. This principle — of repeating the past, in the present, out of the force of the awakening consciousness soul of the human being — is the first step. The second step opens the gate to a path of development into the future. It takes up again, by way of repeating the past, the methodical principle that has been lost to it in chemo-technical agriculture. This second step lifts agriculture — made fruitful by the ideas of spiritual research — onto a higher level. It places the human being of the present before an enormous challenge: that of free, self-determined action out of the inner empowerment of the consciousness soul. This challenge confronts everyone who seeks to cultivate a spiritually wakeful relationship with the biodynamic preparations. In their making and application, the end — what has become — turns into a beginning of a becoming into the future. The end consists of products from the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and further of the working of the rhythms of the solar year as currently given, and finally of the states of the four elements: earth, water, air

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and warmth. This evolutive end is brought into relational nexuses according to ideas — by the insights of spiritual research — ideas that cannot be found in nature as it has become, that acquire the character of law only gradually, through application. These ideas initiate an inversion of the past into the future. Out of this arises the question of how the phenomena of this inversion can be grasped at all by natural science. The concepts one has always refer only to what can be measured, counted and weighed — to the past, not to what is becoming. Here, in the knowledge of nature, an abyss-deep chasm opens between the lifeless, quantity, and the qualitative appearances of living, ensouled and "inspirited" nature.

Everything qualitative lives itself forth in polarities — in the contrasts between being and appearance, spirit and matter, light and darkness, and so on. The synthesis of these polarities cannot be found through objective contemplation; it is accomplished through thinking and feeling intuitive beholding that points the will in its direction. The synthesis takes place in the interior, in the spirit-knowledge of the human being. That is the great challenge! The merely analytical mode of thinking directed only toward the lifeless evades this challenge. It lacks the concepts that give the concept of quality an objective, evaluative content. Evaluative concepts include the factor of "time"; they set thinking in motion, make it picture-forming, and thus experienceable. In this way, one enters a path on which the force of thinking can become mediator between what is sense-perceptible and what has been researched, free from the senses, out of the spirit. Only by striving to let both fields of phenomena — the sensory and the spiritual-supersensible field — mutually illuminate one another in vigorous thinking, can evaluative judgment attain objective power of expression.

From this preliminary observation there arise unlimited possibilities for a sure formation of judgment in grasping what is essential, which expresses itself in qualities. In each individual case this judgment must be individually won. What has been won as an individual truth will, before long — through exchange and correction — establish itself as a real and effective contribution to the general spiritual-cultural life of humanity.

The canon of the six biodynamic preparations, added to the freshly arising organic materials on the farm, works — supported by manifold experience and experimental findings — progressively in time; they work in a development-promoting way upon the living context of soil and plant. Three evolutive, mutually-transitioning steps can be characterised:

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1. The preparations impress themselves upon the decomposing organic masses of the compost and manure heaps — each in the specific mode of working of its radiations, and all of them together as a whole. They convey to the more or less irregularly proliferating breakdown an overarching, organising principle. This directs the complex processes of substance-breakdown and substance-buildup into the right channels, and helps the compost or manure heap to close itself off into an organism, unfolding a life of its own. Experience teaches that the decomposition processes proceed more harmoniously. This can be established above all from the comparatively rapid transformation of a caustic into a mild smell. Experimental comparative investigations confirm the settling of the physiological and biological sequences — temperature, sorption capacity, earthworm population, for instance — into a condition of healthy equilibrium.^[484]^[485]

2. The workings of the preparations have, after a corresponding period of storage of the manure heaps, been absorbed into those heaps as a whole. The prepared manures have developed into an omnipotence of their efficacy within the living — one that surpasses their merely nature-given mode of working. Through their application to the soil they progressively order and stabilise the totality of all soil processes toward a higher level of fertility, in convergence with the rhythms of the solar year. This is striking and experimentally demonstrated across many parameters, most convincingly in the maintenance of a comparatively higher humus level alongside simultaneously higher microbiological activity, in a deepening of the humus-enriched soil profile,^[486]^[487]^[488] as well as in the population of earthworms and other soil animals.

3. Just as the workings of forces of the biodynamic preparations as a whole confer upon the organic manures a higher, not merely nature-given degree of enlivening, so these in turn confer it upon the soil, and through the soil upon the growing plants.

In the final consequence, it is the task of the preparations to establish the cosmic-earthly conditions of growth and fruit formation in a site-specific

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to individualize, in the course of the year, toward those plants that are actually being cultivated. Their mode of working moves in the direction of bringing the degree of enlivening of the soil closer to the living quality of the plant. Together these two form, as a synthesis, the middle of the polar working of the forces of earth and cosmos. The all-surpassing significance of the manuring of the soil comes fully into its own here. It determines, in progressive development, how the cultivated plants articulate themselves vertically and horizontally — with root, stem, leaf, blossom and fruit — into this trinity of the heights and the depths and of the middle that is coming into being. The plants are seized by an organizing force through which they open themselves to the conditions of growth of their environment.

The precipitation of all this finds manifold confirmation in practical experience and in scientific investigation:

The plant tends to form itself ideally in accordance with its species-specific disposition.
The root opens up a deeper soil volume, branching more finely and evenly.^[489]
Shoot growth passes more markedly through the stages of leaf metamorphosis and therewith through the refinement of substance-building.
The physiological processes in the formation of food crops — whether in the root, stem, leaf, blossom or seed domain, as well as in the fruits of orchard trees — come to rest in ripeness. The food crops ripen fully and remain storable for longer.
The substance compositions structure and refine themselves from the base toward the blossom; this above all in the domain of proteins — for example, the ratio of pure protein to crude protein — of essential oils, and so on.
Yield formation, balancing out extremes, moves toward an optimum of yield.^[490]

Directly accessible to perception are the more pronounced taste and fragrance proper to each food crop, the nuancing in colouring, in consistency, as well as the higher digestibility and longer storability. Equally revealing is a remark frequently heard from customers: "We need less to feel satisfied." Taken all together, this characterizes an expanded nutritive value that works in a healing manner upon the bodily, soul and spiritual development of the human being. In

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the preparation manuring stands in the service of a progressive development of the Earth and of the human being. It lends to agricultural and horticultural work a new, a higher meaning. Its practice leads in reality to a new working- and researching-disposition, to a new artistry. The impulse toward this manuring does not spring from an external occasion or even from the fulfilment of a norm, but from an impulse that has become a matter of the heart. The more this is the case, the freer and therewith the more individually artistic becomes the deed of its practice. The significance of the biodynamic preparations for Earth and human being can only open itself on the path of knowledge of the spirit; this challenge will appear to many as too demanding. But if one engages with it without prejudice, one soon becomes aware that the source which calls to action is not to be sought outside in the world, but purely within oneself. The results — the idea-forms — of spiritual research are this source. It spreads light over what one at first still does groping in the dark. The inner certainty, however, grows gradually in the alternating thinking and doing of these ideas. Here it is "not a matter of momentary success, but of unconditional working."^[491] "For no failure is ever decisive for the truth of a spiritual impulse whose working has been inwardly seen through and taken hold of."^[492]

The theme of agriculture conceived as an art does not live in the present. And yet art, since the age of the great Zarathustra — inaugurator of the ancient Persian culture and founder of arable farming in the 5th/6th millennium BC — was most profoundly immanent in the development of agriculture. Only in the course of the natural-scientific-materialist age since the mid-19th century, and its fosterling, agrarian industrialism in the 20th/21st century, has every still-remaining element of artistic inner disposition fallen victim to the scientific-technological ratio. In the prehistoric early time of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian great ancient civilizations, religion, art, and what later became science,

were still undivided, concealed together in a dull atavistic-clairvoyant experience. These great ancient civilizations stood, as was shown at the outset, under the guidance of the Mystery-being, in which the wisdom-teachings from the past were as living as an awakening consciousness for Promethean impulses toward the future. Out of this all-encompassing sacramentalism — still wholly turned toward the spiritual world — sacred art released itself, emancipating itself step by step through metamorphoses in each of the succeeding cultures, in the course of humanity's evolution of consciousness, into pure artistic creations. Art established itself progressively as an independent cultural factor alongside religion. In these ages down into the modern era, agriculture was the cultural foundation from which artistic creations sprang. This held most fully for the beginnings of sacred art, with the cultivation of domestic animals and cultivated plants. Further steps of emancipation are then the building of the Egyptian pyramids — descending, as it were, out of the spiritual world and inverting themselves into the earthly — then Greek art, which gave divine realities human form, and after Christ the art of the Middle Ages, with its cathedrals striving upward from below and the devotedly inward gaze of the human being in sculpture and painting.

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A tremendous step of emancipation came about from the modern era onward in the development of the consciousness soul striving toward individuation, and as one of its hallmarks, through the emergence of the natural sciences. These emancipate themselves from religion and from the sacred art still close to it. The originally all-unified differentiates itself into the threefoldness of religion, art, and lastly science. The scientific path of cognition took over the lead; art and religion had no place in it any longer. They became cultural accessories. In agriculture this process unfolded very slowly and at the end precipitously. In the course of it, the sources of moral action ran dry within her. The concepts that science carries into agriculture from outside, in the form of technologies, are concepts of feasibility; they are abstract, cold, dead — and the traces they leave behind are a devastated, cleared-out earth surrendered to ugliness. With the fading of the traditions, people will "fertilize the fields with science."^[493]

But how, if these concepts — insofar as they do not stem from theories but simply and without prejudice reflect sense-given facts — could be warmed and weighted by entering into the spirit-soul

Wie aber, wenn diese Begriffe, sofern sie nicht Theorien entstammen, sondern schlicht und unbefangen sinnlich gegebene Tatsachen reflektieren, dadurch erwärmt und gewichtet werden könnten, dass sie in der Geistseele

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of the knower coming alive in an inner life of their own? That would be the task of a new science-conception adequate to reality, were it to extend the well-worn, quantifying principle toward the sources of art that lie in the spiritual-soul nature of the human being. These sources are nothing other than what the spirit, stirred by what is sense-perceived, speaks as idea to the soul. In the experience of this idea something moral reveals itself, in which spirit-experience and sense-experience fuse into a unity. This primal source of moral action must be opened up by the human being striving toward freedom — that is, toward the development of the consciousness soul.^[494] The path of uniting science and art, out of the force of the human I striving toward self-knowledge, into a higher whole — that path Goethe pressed forward along in a lifelong struggle. Rudolf Steiner made it accessible, as a path of schooling for the soul, to every human being willing to walk it.^[495]

In the experience of the idea, the head-thought becomes heart-thought; one lives in a thought-picture that keeps growing and is an offer to the will — to grasp it in freedom and let it become deed outwardly. In this will toward deed, the spirit dwelling within the idea awakens as a purposeful moral force. In this is where the task of science is to be sought into the future: that the thinking soul becomes conscious of its spiritual aim. Christian Morgenstern puts it in the words: "whoever does not know the goal cannot have the way."^[496] The path toward this goal is an artistic one. The goal lies in the future. One will have to develop a science that gives far-sightedness into the future, that points the spiritual aims out to the human being toward an artistic creating. If he remains true to these aims through all resistances, moral forces are released through which he can meet the development-hindering being-power of evil with open visor, and devote all his striving to the being-powers of the good, to the advancement of humanity. The path toward the goal is the art that forms itself out of a rightly understood — that is, phenomenon-faithful — science. If one confines oneself in science to a thinking in dead abstract concepts, technologies arise that certainly have their present-oriented, yet restricted to the purely physical-sensory

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meaning. Art, on the other hand, needs idea-pictures that fill the soul with life and can grow within it. When one shapes these lived thought-pictures outwardly, the work of art arises — one that places itself alongside nature, yet does not copy it, but in the spiritual grasping and experiencing of the idea of the archetypal image, the type or being, seeks to re-create it artistically in image. Goethe, guided by the phenomena that the plant kingdom offers to the eye, sought the archetypal phenomenon that spiritually underlies all plant formations. He grasped it in the idea of the "archetypal plant" — spiritually, imaginatively, with such concreteness that he was able to say: "with this model [of the archetypal plant; author's note] and its key one can then go on inventing plants to infinity, which must be consistent; that is, which, even if they do not exist, could nonetheless exist, and are not merely painterly or poetic shadows and semblances, but possess an inner truth and necessity. The same law will prove extensible to everything living."^[497]

The key to an "inventing to infinity" out of the spirit of the archetypal phenomenon — and to shaping what is invented into a work of art — can be found, in connection with Goethe, in the idea-forms of anthroposophical spiritual science. These idea-forms are, seen in this light, themselves artistic creations out of supersensible cognition. They have the peculiarity of coming alive in thinking, of becoming soul-experience in feeling, and of transforming matter through the will. The work of art arising from this no longer places itself merely alongside nature; rather, these enlivened ideas have the power to reshape the reality of nature artistically, in the mirror of the human soul's development. The will inspired in this way continues into the inner nature of nature and begins to set flowing again the work that has congealed into calculability. In biodynamic farming this takes place in three stages, moving from a way still more determined by nature toward one proceeding purely from the spirit.

1. Stage: Artistic creating in the sense of the rebirth of the craft-like

One should bring before oneself the activity of the sculptor. His tools — those he needs in order to shape the image of the work of art to be created in stone — are the stone, the chisel, and the hammer. The idea leading toward the goal lives

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in him. It is no different for the farmer, whatever goal his activity may be directed toward at any given moment. If he pursues the goal of tilling the field, he needs plough, cultivator, and harrow to prepare the seedbed; equally so in the care of the crops — with weeder harrow and hoe — and further at harvest, where the concern is a swift, sure, and soil-sparing gathering-in. The idea-picture guiding the farmer in all these activities lives in him, and the field, the plants, the weather and so on tell him what needs doing, just as the stone tells the sculptor where and how he must set the chisel and how forceful the stroke should be. Since the farmer, however, lives and works with enlivened and ensouled nature — that is, with what is in a being-way and gives itself its own form and makes itself into a work of art — nature is for the farmer, at the level of craft, the great teacher. What the farmer needs is a science of the sources from which his teacher draws and creates: whether in arable farming and horticulture, in animal husbandry and pasture management, in fruit growing and silviculture, and in landscape shaping. It must be a science of what is perpetually becoming and dying, which of necessity determines the farmer's aim. And his art consists then in this: through his craft work, out of lived wisdom — knowledge that is felt and knowing — to create the relational contexts through which, in all their diversity, the cultivated plants, the domestic animals, and the cultivated soils can unfold in their ideal form. The art of craft in farming places itself in the service of nature to the utmost degree. It is a vying with what nature as the great artist of its work of creation sets before us. The concern is

to inwardly rejoice through the work processes, out of living experience of the idea, and let them flow into one another;
to permeate the farm to its last corner with consciousness;
that a fine-tuned attentiveness lives in all the work — one that recognises what is untidy, ugly, bungled, mistaken, and lets this become a spur to direct all the more forcefully the sense of beauty and love of deed toward what serves the realisation of the spiritual aim;
that everything and each thing stands in harmonious relationship to everything else, and that the radiance of beauty mirrors the inner disposition of the people who work there;
not to let craft-artistic creating degenerate into mere task-completion.

All this must be learnt afresh from the ground up. In this regard we stand at the very beginning. It is simply a matter of — without ifs or buts, with the fire

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of the spirit — forging a sword of ideas, with it to dig up the earth, and in patience to await the fruits of transformation: those ripening in me, and those ripening in the earth.^[498] This working-disposition can only be newly won by each individual through spiritual-moral schooling. Each must learn to be a model for the other. Where this happens even in the beginning, the foundation is laid for flourishing collaboration — for the social art of true community-building.

2. Level: Artistic Creating from the Wholeness into the Members

At this level, nature is only in a very limited sense the master. What she teaches are relational contexts between the things and beings of nature — for example, the coexistence of blossoms and insects, the relationship between earthworm activity and soil fertility, the grouping of animals and plants into biotopes, and so on. In these webs of relationship, reason holds sway; an overarching whole lives invisibly within them, one that unfolds in the world of the senses into a sum of individual appearances. This wholeness appears nowhere in nature to the senses — it appears only in the human being, who carries this essentially whole thing as his I within himself. The human being has the possibility, through advancing self-knowledge, to recognise himself as a spirit being, and with this capacity to penetrate cognitively also into the unmanifest wholeness-being that reveals itself in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms through the wisdom-filled wealth of relationships.

With regard to the rich web of relationships of a healthy agricultural operation, this creative wholeness — derived from the human being — was addressed as organism, as the body of the farm individuality. Nature places at the disposal of this organism, as the "What," the entire wealth of her relationship-rich creation; but the "How" — how this creation is to be composed into the higher whole of the farm organism — nature does not tell one. This must light up intuitively as a living idea within the human being. The synthesis of the "What" and the "How" is an artistic act. It plays out, on the one hand, in the inner experience of the personal relationship one builds up toward the things and beings of the farm whole. On the other hand, the artistic act is found in the way that — out of the ideas grasped in the spirit — the farm individuality, or rather its body, the farm organism, articulates itself into organs and into measured and rational relational nexuses.

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The organ-articulation into livestock, pasture, arable, garden, fruit, forest, and hedgerow husbandry — and their manifold sub-articulations — serves, on the one hand, the useful purpose of food supply; on the other, it ennobles the cultural landscape; it provides for the aesthetics of the human living-space. The human being shapes agriculture, bodily-physically and spiritually-soulfully, in his own image. He can find himself again in the work of art he has created.

Even with this second step of artistic creating, there remains a wide gulf between idea and reality. One still tends to lean upon the great model of nature and to be satisfied with the fact that one farms in a "nature-near" or "biological" way. This resembles one who already fancies himself an artist by copying the sensory-objective world of nature. Certainly, nature provides the tool and gives instruction on how to deploy it rationally according to her rules — but what the organism- or individuality-idea derived from the human being shapes from this by human hands is something new; it is a work of art that transcends the nature-given.

This work of art is not finished; it continues to form itself in consonance with the development of a true understanding of the spirit. Where in earlier times this had been brought near to the human soul, as it were from without, through the religious institutions — churches and monasteries — as contents of faith, it can now and in the future be grasped from within, in the awakening to the reality of the spirit, and find outward artistic expression. What was once church and monastery must henceforth live as an I-borne spirit impulse, rising upward in the soul. The art of a farming reborn out of the spirit does not emancipate itself from science. On the contrary — it will grow together with science into a new unity. Art will enliven the sciences, and through this it will become more conscious of its spiritual aim.

3rd Stage: Artistic Creating as a Pure Creative Act out of the Spirit

The core essential character of biodynamic farming — and this holds precisely with regard to the practice of a new artistic approach to the things and beings of nature — becomes graspable only through anthroposophical spiritual science, and in particular through the Agriculture Course of Rudolf Steiner. Here nature and science are placed entirely in the service of knowledge of the spirit. This concerns above all the question of manuring and the preparation and application of the biodynamic

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preparations. These owe their origin to an artistic process that is kindled at the experience of the idea-forms of anthroposophical spiritual science. What is uniquely particular to this process is that here the arrangement of substances found in nature — which, as Rudolf Steiner sets out, are built up "in the sense in which Christ has gradually arranged them"^[499] — is now placed, in its beginnings, into human hands. It is set within human freedom to carry out this arrangement from that very same source of spirit. If at first these are only indications from the spiritual researcher, one is nonetheless so guided that in these aims one can divine how deeply they are rooted in the grounds of spirit. The intuiting of a spiritual aim that points into the future can, precisely in artistic fulfilment, brighten into certainty of spirit. For this, however, it is required that at each individual step taken in the making and application, the attention is directed at the same time toward the great interconnections within which the preparation-activity unfolds. The co-experiencing of such interconnections in the here and now of earthly conditions creates, for the successive preparation steps, something like a sheath. So for instance when one calls to mind the cow — whose significance in the context of the cosmos grows immeasurably, as the bestower of most of the organ sheaths — or the herbs whose blossoms are used; or the seasons and the place where the preparations are buried or exposed to the working of the elemental; or finally the working of sun, planets and stars, which encloses the whole process from every side. The entire periphery stands as godparent to each individual preparation step. The attempt to sense this in the doing awakens a new art, a new kind of artistic creating — one that does not merely place itself alongside nature the way a sculpture or a painted image does, raising nature above itself out of one's own archetypal experience, yet remaining semblance — but an artistic creating that dives into nature and awakens in it new impulses of becoming.

In an artistic way there arises in the preparations described a substance-spirit union that points a path of development from nature toward a supra-nature, while the supposedly fertilising salts taken from lifeless nature open the gates to sub-nature, to the life-hostile forces of the sub-sensory.

Manuring in biodynamic farming aims to open up the working of nature to the forces of a supra-nature. One can

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des Letzteren Begriff, vom Standpunkt des Landbaus, mit der Idee der «landwirtschaftlichen Individualität» zusammenzudenken. So wie diese «ihr Wesen erfüllt», wenn sie als solche «aufgefasst wird»,^[500] so fulfils the individuality of the human being, the I, with substance-of-being in the degree to which it spiritualizes its members — physical body, etheric body and astral body — through the force of the I; that is, frees them from their bondage to nature. The fulfilment-of-being of the I constitutes the human being's path of development across the incarnations. The more the I living in the body advances in the consciousness of its spirit-nature, the more it can extend itself, out of the surplus-force of its being, over extra-human nature and — transforming that nature through goal-directed activity — learn to «apprehend a farm as a kind of individuality». This apprehending is truly an inauguration into the future: namely, to implant the idea of development — now proceeding from the human being awakening to a higher humanity — into the become-being of nature. It means at the same time, out of the force of the higher I, to renounce what the body-bound, self-seeking I wills for itself. Therewith the path is shown by which Christianity can strike roots anew in the work upon the earth. This forward-looking vision grounds the inner disposition from which the farmer can give to nature in love what it does not have — a gift through which the working of the nature beings at a site can individualize itself into a higher whole.

In this sense one can regard the preparations and the organic manures in which they come to efficacy as means of education and evolution, through which a farm can fill itself with being and become a real individuality. In this individuality the forces of the heights and the depths individualize themselves into the work of art of the middle — the fertile soil.

But this same inner disposition, spoken of here, is also what enables the human being to recognize the nature and significance of working-together with a view to a future-directed, creative community-building. The becoming agricultural organism as the body of the farm individuality, and the social organism as the body of a human community that feels itself united in the being of Christ — these are the two halves of one and

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the same reality. This union alone constitutes the total work of art. The disposition toward such a work is present, in germinal form, on every farm in the world where work proceeds from such an inner disposition; it is recognizable and can be lived.

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Acknowledgements

What moved me from the hidden depths of my destiny took form through the encounter with very many people. All of them contributed penny by penny to the forming within me of a picture of the world that pointed me, out of the understanding of the past, through metamorphoses of that same past, into the future. To all of them, thanks be spoken. More than one among them became for me a signpost — to step courageously through the gate of cognition of anthroposophical spiritual science, and in this way to recognize, in broad outline, the overflowing abundance of tasks that the future places before the earthly human being. That I was able to take hold of such a future task, even in its first beginnings, I owe to the all-encompassing work of Rudolf Steiner.

Further thanks are due to all those who helped me to take my at first still uncertain steps toward such future aims. In the agricultural sphere these were Joseph Blockhuys, Ernst Becker, Hans Jörg Graf von Bothmer, Wolfgang Schaumann; in the field of natural science, Herbert Koepf, Jochen Bockemühl and Georg Maier; and in the sphere of social shaping, Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff, Rolf Kerler and Albert Fink. A lifelong friend and counsellor to me was Georg Glöckler, to whom I owe many insights into the human being and into the world. Finally, thanks are due to Gunter Gebhard for his exceedingly understanding review of the manuscript and for supplementary suggestions. In the same spirit my thanks go to Hans-Christian Zehnter, who carried out the editorial work with fine-grained feeling. Great thanks are owed to the co-workers of the Dottenfelder Hof who gave themselves selflessly to the typescript, and likewise to the graphic artists Ivana Supan and Mathias Buess.

A particularly great thanks is spoken to Lieselotte Klett, my wife, who for decades co-shaped what this book speaks of, who followed its coming-into-being with a lovingly critical eye, and who kept my back free for hours of quiet in the always work-filled life of the farm.

Last of all, a great thanks is spoken to Dr. Peter Schnell and the Software AG Stiftung for the financial support through which the publication of this work first became possible.

Manfred Klett

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485

Life of Manfred Klett

Manfred Klett was born in 1933 in Tanganyika, present-day Tanzania, on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. His school years were spent, among other places, at the Schule Schloss Salem and, after the Second World War, at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart, with a one-year student exchange in England. A course of study at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart came to a premature end through an accident. During a year-long working stay in north-eastern Syria he resolved to become a farmer. An apprenticeship was followed by the study of agriculture at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, culminating in a doctorate in soil science. A further four years were devoted to research at the Institute for Biodynamic Farming Methods on the theme of "Manuring and Food Quality." The year 1968 marked the founding of the Dottenfelderhof farm community (five families) and, shortly thereafter, of the Dottenfelderhof School of Agriculture. After twenty years of biodynamic building work together with his wife and five children, he took over the leadership of the "Agricultural Department of the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum" in Dornach, Switzerland. After fourteen years in that post and a further eight years as a freelance collaborator at the in the meantime refounded "Section for Agriculture," he returned to the Dottenfelder Hof and took up teaching once more at the School of Agriculture there. Alongside this he has, for twenty-one years, been tending the village project Juchowo in Poland — an attempt to create in eastern Europe a nursery in which the "formation of the Earth" (Novalis) presents itself as a social task, and in which "the social question" may find an answer in the formation of the Earth.

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Subject Index

+++ Status 27 April 2026: This subject index is not part of the printed version! It is in ongoing development / expansion / review. You are warmly invited to participate +++

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar A

A

Arable farming 45, 53, 65, 66, 107
Field horsetail (Equisetum) 253
- Spraying 253, 356
- and silica 253
Field horsetail (see horsetail preparation) 448
Agrarian industrialism 29, 30, 71, 79, 81, 82, 176, 190
Etheric-astral in the compost heap 293, 296
- in the plant 224, 251, 362
Etheric-living at an elevated level 116
Etheric-proliferating 284
Etheric poverty in the tree-root zone 302
Etheric body (life organisation) 41, 98, 100, 104, 235, 268
Caustic lime in the compost heap (quicklime) 283, 284
Apple 125
Astral body (soul organization) 44, 49, 99, 111, 268, 303
Astrality
- Astral body and illness 99, 250
- The astral and the plant 111, 225, 250, 362
- Astral richness in the tree-crown zone 125, 302
- Astralization of the air 221
Atmosphere 22, 102, 276
Atmosphere (airy periphery) 102, 103, 118, 121
Breathing
- of the human being 91, 241
- of animals 116, 119
- and meditation 152 (as "thinking-through" in rumination)
- and metabolism 91
- and leguminous plants 241
- Breathing (air-breathing phase in compost) 292
Sowing / sowing time 214, 230, 240, 241
- Nutritive force, reproductive power 230, 253
- Rain, full moon 244
- Moon phases 244, 253
Excretion
- in the plant 217
- of nutritive substance in the brain 89, 90
Excretions (human) 323, 324
Excretions (animal) 133, 142, 145, 149, 157, 287, 303
Spraying of the liquid preparations 356

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar B

B

Bacteria
- In soil and manure 214, 218, 252, 292, 296, 306
- Activity in manure 296, 306
Bacteria (intestinal and nodule bacteria) 241, 296
Valerian flowers 434
Valerian preparation 427
Peritoneum (mesentery) 154, 157
Peritoneum (mesentery of the cow) 157, 331, 415
Farmer
- as meditant 68
- and science 82, 86
Farmer / peasant culture 30, 71, 76, 86, 184
Peasant philosophy 43, 169
- Rules and their wisdom 232
Tree, accumulator of astrality 125, 302
- Formative layers 302
- in contrast to the herbaceous plant 302
Tree (fruit tree) 58, 66, 301, 302
Tree-crown zone and tree-root zone 302
Farm community 162, 163, 165, 172, 173, 177, 181, 185
Farm organism 34, 35, 80, 81, 162, 175, 178, 181, 185
Bees (honeybee) 123, 124, 130, 131
Image-forming methods (copper chloride crystallization) 317, 318
Biodynamic preparations 289, 310, 325, 328, 334, 336, 344
Leaf and blossom warmth for the plant 224, 237
Flower colour — planets 224
Soil
- Lime content 211, 283
- Silica content 211, 284
- Clay addition 210, 211
- as organ 95
- Permeation by reason 333
- Iron content and de-ironing 285
- Geological foundation 205
Soil / soil cultivation 45, 205, 207, 213, 219, 220, 227, 230, 233
Soil fertility 29, 201, 203, 238, 242
Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) 253, 310
Stinging nettle preparation 379

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar C

C

Chamomilla off. (chamomile) 339, 360, 372
Chaos in the seed and its periphery 290
Chaos (in the composting process) 290, 294, 351
Chemically active in the soil 263

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar D

D

Damping process 284
Stable humus 218, 221, 224, 238, 295, 296
Perennial plants 202
Threefold nature of the human being 88, 89, 90, 92, 114
Fragrance 224, 363
Manure
- Treatment 304, 305, 309
- Personal relationship 287, 303
- Becoming reasonable 333
- Preparations 326, 334, 360
Manuring 259, 267, 273, 280, 286, 303, 323
The manuring question 259, 271
Dung heap 307
Manure site 307
Straining of the preparation liquid 351 (during the stirring process and spraying)

E

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar E

E

Edelwild 112
Edelwildblase (Hirschblase) 332, 339
Eiche, Eichenrinde 339, 389
Eichenrindepräparat 389
Eichbaum und Marsperiode 211, 224
Eingraben der Präparate 347, 349
Einjährige Pflanze 44
Einsäuern (Silofütterung) 148
Eisengehalt im Boden und Enteisenung 285
Eisen, Strahlung der Brennnessel (erst in späteren Kapiteln im Buch ausgeführt)
Eiweiß
- Molekularstruktur 265, 362
- und Samenbildung 362
- im tierischen und pflanzlichen Organismus 362
Elementarwesen 114, 116, 121, 125
Elemente
- über und unter der Erde 93, 101
- Qualitätsverhältnisse 103
Elektrizität 264
Elektrische Futterkonservierung (nicht erwähnt)
Embryonalleben 44, 215
Entitäten, Wirkung kleinster 326, 348
Equisetum arvense (Ackerschachtelhalm) 253
- Tee 253
Erdboden als Organ 95
Erdpflanzengeruch und Baumgeruch (nicht erwähnt)
Ernährung 36, 153
Erzeugungsbedingungen (Industrie/Landwirtschaft) 30, 32, 38
Esparsette
Esel 137, 138, 139

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar F

F

Fäkalienverwendung 323, 324
Farben und Planeten 224
Feldmaus 245, 246
Feuer als Zerstörer der Fruchtbarkeit 245
Frostgare 208
Frostwirkung 208
Fruchtfolge 235, 237, 238, 239, 241, 242, 250, 253, 254, 255, 257
Früchte
- Aroma und Planetenwirkung 224, 225
Fütterung der Tiere 148, 150, 151, 305
Futterkräuter
- Eigenschaften 249
Fütterungsmethoden 136, 148, 263, 299

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar G

G

Gehirn (Kräfte und Stofflichkeit) 89, 90, 129
Geflügel (Hausgeflügel) 131, 132, 133
Geist und Stoff 268
Geistesforschung 160, 329
Gekröse vom Rind 154, 331, 415
Geologische Grundlage des Bodens 205
Gesteinsmehle 281, 282, 283, 284, 285
Gestirnkonstellationen 207
Geweihbildung und Hornbildung 113, 155
Gründüngung 231, 298, 302

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H

Hackfrüchte 248, 254
Halmfrüchte 247, 253
Handarbeit und ihre Bedeutung 108, 109, 248
Haustiere 126, 127, 128
Hederichbekämpfung 247, 255
Heilen der Pflanzennatur 250
Heilmittel 341
Heu, Bedeutung als Futter 67
Hornbildung 155, 345
Hornkieselpräparat 348, 350
Hornmistpräparat 344, 350
Hülsenfrüchte (Leguminosen) 241, 256
Humus / Humusbildung 221, 223, 238, 287, 295
Humus, Finsterniswirkung 225
Humusbildung im Haushalt der Natur 223, 297
Hund 140, 141

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar I

I

Ich-Anlage (Rind) 156, 157
Ich-Organisation 160
Ichorganisationskraft
- Jauche und Dung 156, 157
Impfversuche bei Böden
Individualität, landwirtschaftliche 88, 97, 101, 201, 271
Industrie (Polarität zur Landwirtschaft) 27, 30
Insekten 122, 123
Insektenbekämpfung 250
Insekten und Pflanze 123, 124
Irdische Kräfte und Substanzen im Organismus 235, 236
Irdische Wirksamkeit in der Pflanze 225

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar J

J

Jahreszeiten 206, 213, 220, 228
Jauche 309, 311
Jupiter 211, 224

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar K

K

Kalk als Begierdenhaftes 211
Kalk als Heiler
Kalkgehalt des Bodens 211, 283
Kalk im Kompost 284
Kalk-Typus
- Kalk und Kiesel
- Gestaltungskraft, Zusammenwirken 211, 212
- und nahe Planeten 211
- Wirksamkeit in der Pflanze 212
Kambiumschicht im Baum 302
Kamille (Chamomilla off.) 339, 360, 372
Kamillenpräparat 372
Kamilleprozeß im Organismus 341
Kartoffel, Kartoffelgenuß 248, 254
Katze 140, 141
Kiesel (Quarz) 211, 348
Kiesel im Boden 211
- und Equisetum 253, 448
- und ferne Planeten 211
- und Kalk 211
- und Lichtwirkung 225
- Löwenzahn 339, 405
Kieselsubstanz, Kieselsäure 209, 318
- Kieselpräparat im Kuhhorn 348
- und Wärme 349
- und Wurzelhaftes 357
Kieselzerkleinerung 349
Klee 238, 241, 249, 256
Knochensystem der Tiere 117
Kochen der Nahrungsmittel
Kohlenstoff als Träger natürlicher Gestaltungsprozesse 288
Komposthaufen 287, 289, 290
- Umgraben 291
- zur Wiesendüngung 299
Kompostierung / Kompost 287, 299, 360
Konservierung durch Elektrizität
Konservierung durch Säuerung 148
Kosmisch-qualitative Analyse 156
Kosmische Einwirkung durch Regen gefördert
Kosmisches im Kieseligen 211
- in der Pflanze 216, 224, 362
- und Irdisches, Ton als Vermittler 212
Kräfte, lebendige im Düngemittel 312, 313
Kraftströmungen im Organischen 265
Kristallisationskraft der Erde im Winter 207, 208, 231
Kuh / Rind 146, 149
Kuhhorn 155, 345
- Alter, Größe, Geschlecht 345
- Gebrauch von Pferdemist 307
- Gebrauchszeit 347
Kieselpräparat 348
- Aufbewahrung 349
- Zeit der Benützung, Verteilung, Vergraben 347, 349, 356

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar L

L

Agriculture, individuality 88, 94, 97, 101, 201, 202, 203, 271, 327
Larva 122, 296, 302
Living forces in the fertilising agent 312, 313
Legumes 78, 239, 240, 241, 249, 256, 298
- as nitrogen gatherers 78, 241
- fruit formation 241, 256
- and the inhalation process 241
Linseed 97
Light-and-shade trial 313, 314, 315, 317, 320, 321
Dandelion 331, 339, 342, 405
Dandelion preparation 405
Air 103, 118, 121, 206, 275
Lucerne 239, 240, 242, 249, 256

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar M

M

Mars, Marsperiode 211, 224
Maschinen in der Landwirtschaft 29, 31, 37, 77, 182, 183, 233
Mastviehfütterung 134
Meditation 68, 152, 173
- und Atmung 91, 152
- Medizinisches 55, 89, 318, 364
Menschliche Fäkalien 323, 324
Menschlicher und tierischer Organismus 98, 99, 265 *
Merkur, nahe Planeten 211
Milchbildung 36, 158
Milchviehfütterung 222, 256
Minderwertigwerden der Produkte 226, 317
Mineralische Düngemittel 77, 274, 281
Mist (Stallmist) 145, 154, 157, 304, 305, 307
Mist
- Belebung des Erdbodens 185, 204
- Entstehung im tierischen Organismus 145, 154, 303
- Rührwerk 304
- Verteilung 174, 304
Mist, Zusatzpräparate 310, 360
Möhre als Futter 97, 256
Mond 211
- Belebung der Erde im Ätherischen 252
- und Reproduktionskraft 244
Mondphasen 108, 244, 253
Mondwirkung, zu starke 252
Mondwirkung in der Pflanze 252
Mondwirkung im Tier 309
Mondwirkung und Unkraut 244, 245
Muskelsystem des Tieres 117, 266
Mysterium von Golgatha 59, 60, 61

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar N

N

Nahrungsaufnahme beim Tier 149
Nährkraft und Aussaatzeit 230
Naturwissenschaftliche Sektion und Versuchsring
Nehmen und Geben in der Natur 19, 113, 124, 159
Nematoden 247, 255
Neumond

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O

Obstbau / Obstbaum 53, 58, 66, 108, 301, 302
Obstbaum 302
Obstsorten, Erzeugung
Organismusprinzip 34, 38, 39, 51, 52, 61, 63, 70, 80, 158, 162, 188

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P

Pansenverdauung 150, 151
Parasiten 251, 252
Persönliches Verhältnis zum Dünger 287, 303
Pferd 137, 138, 139, 140
Pfefferbereitung 244
- Feldmaus 245
- Insekten 245
- Unkraut 244
Pferdemist für Kuhhörner
Pflanze, irdische und kosmische Wirksamkeit 225, 250, 262
Pflanze, Reproduktions- und Nährkraft 230, 253, 299
Pflanzenkost
Pflanzenkrankheiten 250, 251, 253
- Prophylaxe 250, 252
Pflanzennatur 286
Pflanzzeiten und Planetenumlauf
Pflaume
Pflug / Pflügen 45, 64, 231, 232, 233
Planeten 211, 224, 358
- ferne und Dauerpflanzen 211
- ferne und Kiesel 93, 211
- nahe und einjährige Pflanzen 211
- nahe und Kalk 211
- Umlauf und Pflanzzeiten
- Wirkung und Aroma der Früchte 224, 225
Planetenwirkung und Farbe 224
Planetenwirkung in Blatt und Blüte 224
Planetenwirkung im Tier 143, 244, 309
Planetenwirkung in der Wurzel 211, 212
Planetarisches Leben im Zusammenhang mit dem Irdischen 211, 224, 358

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar Q

Q

Qualität der Produkte 35, 226, 317, 318, 319
Quarz 93, 211, 282, 348, 349
Quarzpräparat im Kuhhorn 348, 349
Quarzzerkleinerung 349
Quecke 231, 248, 250, 253

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar R

R

Raubbau in der Landwirtschaft 336
Reblaus
Regen als Förderer kosmischer Einwirkung
Regenwurm 115, 116, 223, 296
Regenwurm, Regenwürmer 115, 116, 117, 223, 224, 230
Regulierung des Waldes *Reiz- und Nährwert der Stoffe im Boden
Reproduktionskraft und Aussaatzeit 230, 253
- und Nährkraft 230, 253
- beim Unkraut 244
- und Schädlingsbekämpfung
Rhythmus / rhythmische Mitte (Boden) 91, 92, 95, 203, 328
Rohkost
Rotlaufseuche
Rührvorgang (Präparate) 351, 352, 353, 354, 355
Rübennematode 255
Rühren, Kuhhornmist 351
- mit Rührwerk 304, 353, 354

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar S

S

Saatfrüchte und Leguminosen 256
Salz in der Nahrung
Salz zur Konservierung
Samenbildung, Samenkraft 286, 287
Saturn, Saturnperiode 224
Saturnkräfte und Wärmezustand 224
Sauerstoff als Lebensträger 109, 292
Schädlingsbekämpfung 250, 251
- durch Konzentration
- vom moralischen Gesichtspunkt
Schachtelhalmpräparat 448, 453, 454
Schaf 143, 144, 145, 306
Schafgarbe 361, 362, 364
Schafgarbenpräparat 361
Schwefel 361, 362
- der Schafgarbe 361, 362
- als Vermittler zwischen Geistigem und Physischem 362
Schwein (Hausschwein) 134, 135, 136
Schwein und Fütterung 136
Soziale Dreigliederung 73, 84, 85, 187, 188
Sonnenblume 240
Sonnenwirkung in der Pflanze 224, 225
- am Tier
- differenziert durch Tierkreis
Sprühapparat 356
Stalldünger 304, 305, 307
Stallfütterung 148, 305
Stapelmist 307
Sternkunde und Sternwirkungen 207, 211
Stickstoff 78, 79, 275
- Bedeutung und Einfluß 78, 241, 275
- Beständigkeit
- im Dunghaufen 305, 309
- Empfindlichkeit
- Entstehung in der Pflanze 241
Stickstoff / Stickstoffsalze 79, 275, 276, 278
Stickstoffgehalt des Düngers 305, 309
Stickstoff als physischer Träger der Astralität 279, 292, 297
Stickstoffsammler 241
Stoffwechsel, Substanzen und Kräfte 91, 265, 272
Sträucher und Säugetiere
Substanzverdichtung 261, 263
Substanzverwandlung 294, 341
Substanzverwandlung im Organismus 154, 294

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar T

T

Terrestrische Kräfte 205
Tier 99, 111, 113
- Knochensystem 117
- Mond- und Sonnenwirkung 143, 309
- Muskelsystem 117, 266
- Nahrungsaufnahme 149
- Organismus in seiner Gliederung 99, 100
- und Pflanze innerhalb der Landwirtschaft 65, 67, 303
Tierfütterung 148, 150, 305
Tierkreis 267
Tierwelt (Wildfauna) 112, 113
Tiefstallmist 305, 306
Tomate 311
- Frostwirkung 208
- Kultur
Ton 209
- Beigabe im Boden 205
- Vermittler zwischen Kalk und Kiesel 94, 211
- Vermittler zwischen Kosmischem und Terrestrischem 212
Tonmineralien 94, 209, 210
Torf im Boden
Torfmull im Komposthaufen 290
Trockenschnitzel

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar U

U

Über und unter der Erde in ihrer Wechselwirkung 93, 95
Übersommerung (Präparate) 349
Überwinterung (Präparate) 347
Umwandlung von Elementen 263
Ungezieferbekämpfung 135
Unkraut 214, 242, 246
Unkrautregulierung (mechanisch) 246
Unkrautsamenveraschung (Pfefferbereitung) 222, 244
Unterricht, landwirtschaftlicher 184
Urtica dioica (Brennnessel) 253, 339

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V

Valeriana officinalis (valerian) 339
Vegetarian diet
Venus 211
Venus in Scorpio
Digestion (cattle) 150, 153
Combustion in the organism
Condensation of substance 261, 265
Dilution (horn manure) 351
Heredity
Enlivening of the earth 280, 360
Rationalising the manure 333
Experiments, suggestions 313
Trial plots, size
Trial plants (wheat and sainfoin) 314
Kinship of the insect world and the plant 123, 124
Putrefaction (insect pepper)
Vitality in the soil 314
Birds (bird world) 118, 121
Bird world 118, 121
Bird breeding and insect breeding
Full moon 244
- and rain

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar W

W

Forest 110
Warmth 103, 260
- and silica
Warmth transformation in the organism (chilling)
Warmth condition and Saturn 224
Water 102, 208
- as distributor of moon forces 252
- above and below the earth 102
Hydrogen and its working 275, 295
Hydrogen content in the fertilizer
Chicory 249
Viticulture 53, 175
Wheat (tendency toward seed formation) 314
Rumination 150, 151
Meadow manuring with compost 299
Winter grain 207, 230
Worms and larval life in the soil 115, 116
Root of the tree 302
Root forms as expression of cosmic and terrestrial workings 96, 314
Root nutrition 217
Root growth 216, 314
Root warmth for the plants

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar X

X

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar Y

Y

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar Z

Z

Goats 143, 144
Breeding of cultivated plants 45
Breeding of preparation plants
Diaphragm organ (soil) 95, 203
Twofold structure of the animal organism

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9 | Gesamtglossar 0-9

0-9

Film contributions

Celebration of the book publication by Manfred Klett

In Manfred's honour, a small celebration on 18 July 2021 brought together some of his companions along the way, who today likewise belong to the best-known figures in the biodynamic movement. With joy and relief it was celebrated that Manfred Klett had completed and published his new book "Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst".

Click here for the talk

|zurück zu Manfred Klett ◁

Book presentation of "Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst" by co-editor Ueli Hurter

Seen here is the head of the Sektion für Landwirtschaft at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Ueli Hurter. Ueli was also co-editor.

"So that what one places into the hands of the younger generation can be handed on at a level at least as good as, if not further developed than, what one received from the preceding generation. And that, expressed now in economic terms — both in terms of farm economics and national economics — is precisely something to which the author points, that here at the core lies something that is actually what the whole economy is searching for: namely a regenerative economy.

We find ourselves today in an overall situation with our planet Earth where we urgently and quickly and in many places need approaches and initiatives that lead into an economy that does not merely consume, that is not merely burdensome, that does not merely leave a negative impact behind, but that is regenerative — and agriculture naturally, through its closeness to the life processes, but then understood as biodynamic agriculture: if it grasps this, then it can actually become an impulse-giver, an inspirator, for the whole economy.

This is worked out in this book and it is a call for the future generations to work it out still more clearly, to engage with it and thereby not only remain within agricultural contexts, but to bring it into the overall economic and overall social dialogue."

Click here for the transcribed talk

zurück zu Manfred Klett ◁

References

↑ Rendering of Rudolf Steiner's words at the laying of the foundation stone of the Rosicrucian temple of the lodge Malsch "Franz von Assisi", from memory by Hilde Stockmeyer; from: Rudolf Steiner: Bilder okkulter Siegel und Säulen, GA 284, Dornach 1993, p. 113.
↑ Siehe hierzu z.B.: Mathias Forster, Christopher Schümann: Das Gift und wir, Frankfurt a.M. 2020, 448 S.
↑ BSE: Abkürzung für «Bovine spongiforme Enzephalopathie», auch als «Rinderwahn» bekannte Tierseuche, die vor allem auf eine Fehlfütterung von Rindern mit tierischen Eiweißen zurückzuführen ist.
↑ «Wir sind auf einer Mission: zur Bildung der Erde sind wir berufen» (We are on a mission: we are called to the formation of the earth), Novalis (1772–1801, Dichter der deutschen Romantik), Blüthenstaub, § 32.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtscht, GA 327, Dornach 1999.
↑ Das Schloss Koberwitz existiert noch heute und ist seit 1997 Sitz der polnischen Gemeindeverwaltung von Kobierzyce.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Kunst und Kunsterkens, GA 271, Dornach 1985, siehe insbesondere die Vorträge vom 15. und 17. Februar sowie 5. und 6. Mai 1918.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 28. Oktober 1909, S. 76.
↑ Das Verhältnis von Ideenerleben und Bodenfruchtbarkeit wird ausführlich im zweiten Teil des Buches behandelt.
↑ Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen 1980, S. 834 ff.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Nationalökomischer Kurs, GA 340, Vortrag vom 25. Juli 1922, Dornach 2002, S. 33.
↑ Rudolf Steiner gave this price-orientation the following formulation in his Kernpunkten der sozialen Frage: The price must be so arranged «that every worker receives, as an equivalent for a product, as much as is necessary to satisfy all the needs of himself and those belonging to him, until he has again produced a product of equivalent labour. Such a price relationship cannot come about through official decree, but must arise as the result of the living cooperation of the associations active within the social organism» (GA 23, Dornach 1976, S. 132)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989; Ders.: Aus der Akasha-Chronik, GA 11, Dornach 2018.
↑ Ebd.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989; Ders.: Aus der Akasha-Chronik, GA 11, Dornach 2018.
↑ Ebd.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Dornach 1995, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989, S. 273 ff. – A dating of the post-Atlantean, respectively post-glacial cultural epochs becomes more possible the further they advance in gaining contours within historical documents. These, however, are only the outer expression of a consciousness-constitution prevailing among human beings of the respective time. The human being has his origin in the spirit-cosmos: he develops his consciousness in the encounter with the physical-sensory world. In this world of time and space, however, there work forces that likewise stem from the spirit-cosmos and have their specific sources each in the twelve regions of the zodiac. From these twelve regions there ray in, mediated through the Sun, the impulses that assist humanity toward ever new stages of becoming conscious of human and world existence. These impulses it is that, through the creative work of human beings, give a cultural epoch its particular character. The Sun requires, on its ecliptic path in retrograde movement (precession), 25,920 years for a passage through the zodiac (the Platonic World Year). In each 1/12 of this period of revolution, that is in 2,160 years, it receives the workings of forces of one zodiacal region. From this measure of time there results the duration of a cultural epoch (cf. Elisabeth Vreede: Astronomie und Anthroposophie, Dornach 1980, S. 100 ff.). Each of the twelve regions of the zodiac bears a sign, a constellation, that has a name going back to ancient wisdom-teachings. Thus the ancient Indian culture, the first of the sevenfold sequence of the post-Atlantean cultures, stands under the "sign of Cancer," indicating that the ending Atlantean age (Neozoic) is involving and a new one, the post-Atlantean (Quaternary), is evolving. The subsequent ancient Persian culture stands under the sign of "Gemini," pointing to the polarity of light and darkness, and so forth. In the many studies that Rudolf Steiner devotes to the cultural epochs in his written and lecture work, he characterizes the levels of consciousness that humanity wins for itself in the progressive taking hold of earthly conditions. The transitions from one to the next of these epochs are gradual. They result from the arising and the ebbing of the ruling spirit-impulses from the zodiacal regions. This holds as well for the fourth post-Atlantean period. For this period, however, Rudolf Steiner gives at the same time a dating of beginning and end, one that has an astronomically grounded reference to a specific year in relation to the zodiacal region of Aries. The beginning of the Greco-Roman cultural epoch falls accordingly in the year 747 B.C. and its end, after the completion of 2,160 years, in the year 1413 A.D. (Rudolf Steiner: Die tieferen Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit, 12. Juni 1917, Publikation in Vorbereitung). On the basis of these figures, which are related to a cosmic rhythm, the dates for the preceding great ancient civilizations can be calculated, as well as those that follow them and that in 1413 A.D. commenced with the present Age of the Consciousness Soul.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110, Dornach 1991, S. 120.eit.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Dornach 1995, Vortrag vom 29. Mai 1908.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Matthäus-Evangelium, GA 123, Vortrag vom 1. September 1910, Dornach 1988, S. 27.
↑ Ebd., S. 28f.
↑ Walther Hinz: Zarathustra, Stuttgart 1961, 271 S.
↑ Markus Osterrieder, Peter Guttenhöfer: Die Durchlichtung der Welt: Altiranische Geschichte, Bildungswerk Beruf und Umwelt, Kassel 2008, 60 S.
↑ Karl Heyer: Von der Atlantis bis Rom, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Abendlandes, Band I, Stuttgart 1997, 254 S.
↑ Manfred Klett: «Die Entstehung der Kulturpflanzen und das Saatgut als das Kulturerbe der Menschheit» (The origin of cultivated plants and seed as the cultural heritage of humanity), in: Manfred Christ (Hrsg.): Bedrohte Saat, Basel 2010, 328 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, GA 9, Kap. IV. «Leib, Seele und Geist» (Body, soul, and spirit), Dornach 2003, S. 57 f.
↑ Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, S. 68.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Okkulte Geschichte, GA 126, Vortrag vom 28. Dezember 1910, Dornach 1992.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989, S. 280f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Okkulte Geschichte, GA 126, Vortrag vom 28. Dezember 1910, Dornach 1975, S. 42.
↑ Emil Bock: Urgeschichte. Das Alte Testament und die Geistesgeschichte der Menschheit I, Stuttgart 1951, S. 151.
↑ Ebd., S. 160.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Orient im Lichte des Okzidents, GA 113, Vortrag vom 28. August 1909, Dornach 1982.
↑ Rudolf Steiner:Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995, S. 172f.
↑ Näheres siehe: Rudolf Steiner:Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen im Zusammenhange mit der germanisch-nordischen Mythologie, GA 121, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1910, Dornach 2017.
↑ Frank Teichmann:Der Mensch und sein Tempel: Griechenland, Stuttgart 1980, S. 79. – Zum Organismus-Gedanken siehe auch: Renatus Derbidge (Hrsg):Rudolf Steiner: Organisches Denken, Basel 2020, 256 S.
↑ Eos (Ancient Greek Ἠώς, Ēōs), goddess of the dawn in Greek mythology; corresponds to Aurora in Roman mythology.
↑ Rudolf Steiner:Vor dem Tore der Theosophie, GA 95, Vortrag vom 1. September 1906, Dornach 1990, S. 107.
↑ Rudolf Steiner:Die Theosophie des Rosenkreuzers. GA 99, Vortrag vom 4. Juni 1907, Dornach 1985, S. 135.
↑ Vergil:Sämtliche Werke, Heimeran 1975.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995, S. 172f.
↑ In Greek mythology, the two figures Prometheus and Epimetheus stand for independent, active, forward-looking thinking (promethean) and for backward-turned, more passive, receptive thinking (epimethean).
↑ Will Richter (Hrsg.): Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella: De res rustica, 5. Buch. 10. Kapitel: Über den Obstbau, S. 605–630, München und Zürich 1981.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. Das fünfte Evangelium, GA 148, Vortrag vom 5. Oktober 1913, Dornach 1992, S. 63.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Vortrag vom 13. April 1912, Dornach 1996, S. 178f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1908, Dornach 1985, S. 25.
↑ Ebd., S. 26. — In Exodus 3:13–15, the passage reads as follows in the standard translation: «Moses said to God: 'If I come to the people of Israel and say to them: "The God of your fathers has sent me to you", and they ask me: "What is his name?" — what shall I say to them?' God answered: 'I am who I am', and added: 'Say to the people of Israel: "The I-am-here has sent me to you: the Lord! He is the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob." For "Lord" (He-is-here) is my name for all time. With this name shall the coming generations also address me when they pray to me.'»
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1908, Dornach 1985, S. 31.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Markus-Evangelium, GA 139, Vortrag vom 21. September 1912, Dornach 1985, S. 146.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Von Jesus zu Christus, GA 131, Vortrag vom 8. Oktober 1911, Dornach 1988, S. 100.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 22. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995.
↑ Alfred W. Crosby: Die Früchte des weißen Mannes – Ökologischer Imperialismus 900–1900, Frankfurt, New York 1991, 280 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie, soziale Dreigliederung und Redekunst, GA 339, Vortrag vom 12. Oktober 1921, Dornach 1984, S. 29.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft, GA 23, Dornach 1976.
↑ Walter Weber (Hrsg.): Johann Valentin Andreae: Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreuz Anno 1459, mit Beiträgen von Rudolf Steiner und Walter Weber, Basel 1987, 224 S.
↑ From: Wilhelm Abel: Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1967, p. 265.
↑ Ebd., S. 202.
↑ Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: Von Jesus zu Christus, GA 131, Vortrag vom 13. Oktober 1911, Dornach 1988, S. 194 ff.; sowie Emil Bock: Die Boten des Geistes, Stuttgart 1967, S. 55.
↑ Johann Valentin Andreae: Allgemeine und Generalreformation der ganzen weiten Welt – beneben der Fama Fraternitatis, des löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreuzes, an alle Gelehrte und Häupter Europa geschrieben, Kassel 1614.
↑ Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling: Lebensgeschichte, München 1968.
↑ Edward John Russel, John August Voelker: Fifty years of field experiments at the Woburn Experimental Station, Rothamoted Monographs on Agricultural Science, London 1936.
↑ Ernst Klapp: Lehrbuch des Acker- und Pflanzenbaus. Berlin, Hamburg 1967, 611 S.
↑ Justus von Liebig: Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikulturchemie und Physiologie, Braunschweig 1840.
↑ Asmus Petersen: Schultz-Lupitz und sein Vermächtnis, Stiftung Ökologischer Landbau (SÖL), Sonderausgabe Nr. 38, 2. Aufl. 1992, 66 S. Mit Vorworten von Gerhardt Preuschen und Wolfgang Schaumann.
↑ Heraclitus (pre-Socratic philosopher, approximately 520–460 BC), Fragment DK B 53: "War is the father of all things, the king of all things. Some it makes gods, others men,
↑ Friedrich Aereboe: Allgemeine landwirtschaftliche Betriebslehre, Berlin 1920.
↑ According to information from the Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte e.V. Ffm.
↑ Laut Auskunft der Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte e.V. Ffm.
↑ Cf. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Questio 10, Proemium.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethes Werke, "Urworte Orphisch," Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 1, Munich 1978, p. 359.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft, GA 23, Dornach 1976.
↑ Cf. in particular: Rudolf Steiner: Die großen Fragen der Zeit und die anthroposophische Geisterkenntnis, GA 336, Basel 2019; and idem: Zu sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen, GA 332b, Dornach, Basel 2020.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, S.103.
↑ Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, S. 42.
↑ Ibid., S. 43.
↑ See especially: Andreas Suchantke: Metamorphose: Kunstgriff der Evolution, Stuttgart 2002, 332 pp.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Die Erkenntnis des Menschenwesens nach Leib, Seele und Geist. Über frühe Erdenzustände*, GA 347, Vortrag vom 9. August 1922, Dornach 1995, S. 53.
↑ Ebd., S. 61.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.
↑ Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924.
↑ Ibid.
↑ The supposition is that formation is predominantly a winter process and dissolution (weathering) a summer process.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.
↑ Ibid.
↑ Cf. the research of Gerhard Jentzsch at the Chair for Applied Geophysics at the University of Jena.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, insbesondere Vortrag vom 16. Juni 1924. – For this concept of nutrition and feeding see in particular the lecture of 16 June 1924.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: An Outline of Esoteric Science, GA 13, chapter "The Members of the Human Being", Dornach 1989.
↑ See e.g. Astronomia magna oder die ganze Philosophia saga der Großen und Kleinen Welt (1537/38): «Denn alle creata seind buchstaben und bücher, des menschen herkomen zu beschreiben.» (For all created things are letters and books to describe the origin of man.) – From: Theophrast von Hohenheim gen. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, 1. Abteilung, hrsg. von Karl Sudhoff, München-Berlin 1929, Bd. XII, S. 32.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 12, München 1987.
↑ Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, S. 147.
↑ Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst, GA 27, Dornach 1991, S. 35.
↑ Vgl. hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Dornach 1999, GA 327, insbesondere die Vorträge vom 7., 10. und 14. Juni 1924.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 68f.
↑ Leonard Jentgens: Vom Altersklassen-Einheitsforst zum naturgemäßen Dauerwald, Borchen 2015, 60 S.
↑ Walther Cloos: Werdende Natur, Dornach 1966, 141 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, Dornach 2020, darin der Brief «Der Mensch in seiner makrokosmischen Wesenheit» (The human being in his macrocosmic being).
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 97.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 193.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924.
↑ Ibid., lectures of 2, 3, 4 November 1923.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Dornach 1985.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 19. Oktober 1923.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 27. Oktober 1923.
↑ Siehe z.B.: Einhard Bezzel und Roland Prinzinger: Ornithologie, Stuttgart 1990, S. 269.
↑ Ernst-Michael Kranich: Wesensbilder der Tiere. Einführung in goetheanistische Zoologie, Stuttgart 2004, 386 S. – Siehe auch die Aussagen Rudolf Steiners in: Die Welt der Vögel, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Hans-Christian Zehnter, Basel 2015, 288 S. sowie in: Die Welt der Tiere. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Hans-Christian Zehnter, Basel 2007, 182 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 19. Oktober 1923.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 3. November 1923.
↑ Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, Seite 31. Siehe auch ders.: Säugetiere und Mensch, Stuttgart 2012, 1255 S.
↑ Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, Seite 31. Siehe auch ders.: Säugetiere und Mensch, Stuttgart 2012, 1255 S.
↑ Siehe hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, Vortrag vom 26. Oktober 1923, GA 230, Dornach 1993, S. 73. Siehe auch: Hans-Christian Zehnter (Hrsg.) Warum singen Vögel?, Zürich 2018, 240 S.
↑ Hans Steiner: «Die Lebensgemeinschaft des Apfelbaums» (The living community of the apple tree), Der Obstbau Nr. 3–5, 1958.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 183/84.
↑ Norbert Bennecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere , Stuttgart 2000, 470 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 3. November 1923.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Natur- und Geistwesen – ihr Wirken in unserer sichtbaren Welt, Vortrag vom 2. Februar 1908, vormittags, GA 98, Dornach 1996.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, GA 102, Dornach 2001, Vorträge vom 16. Mai 1908, 1. Juni 1908, 4. Juni 1908.
↑ Christian Morgenstern: Wer vom Ziel nichts weiß, Aphorismen, Piper, München 1964, S. 89.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 28. November 1923. – Siehe auch: Rudolf Steiner: Die Welt der Bienen, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Martin Dettli.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 28. November 1923.
↑ Beate und Leopold Peitz: Hühnerhalten, Stuttgart 1995, 187 S.
↑ Ebd.
↑ Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 59.
↑ Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.
↑ Ibid., p. 226.
↑ Ibid., p. 348.
↑ Bernhard Grzimek: Grzimeks Tierleben, Enzyklopädie des Tierreichs, Band 13, Säugetiere 4, München 1971, S. 470.
↑ Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, S. 247.
↑ Norbert Benecke: *Der Mensch und seine Haustiere*, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.
↑ Bernhard Grzimek: *Grzimeks Tierleben, Enzyklopädie des Tierreichs*, Band 13, Säugetiere 4, Augsburg 2000, S. 375.
↑ Ebd., S. 377.
↑ See e.g.: Rudolf Steiner: *Natur- und Geistwesen – ihr Wirken in unserer sichtbaren Welt*, GA 98, Vortrag vom 7. Juni 1908, Dornach 1996, S. 96–97.
↑ Anita Idel: Die Kuh ist kein Klimakiller, Marburg 2012, 210 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, Seite 59.
↑ Siehe z.B.: Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Vortrag vom 6. April 1912.
↑ Klaus Löffler, Gotthold Gäbel, Helga Pfannkuche: Anatomie und Physiologie der Haustiere, Stuttgart 2018, 375 S.
↑ Rolf Krahmer, Lothar Schröder: Anatomie der Haustiere, Leipzig 1985, S. 201ff.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, pp. 96 ff.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 16. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 201.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, S. 98.
↑ Ebd., S. 99.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italienische Reise, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 11, München 1978, S. 269; Ausspruch von Bauern auf Sizilien, 19. April 1787.
↑ Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg): Fragmente 1, Bd. 1, Heidelberg 1957, S. 35.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1979.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.
↑ See Rudolf Steiner: Soziale Ideen, soziale Wirklichkeit, soziale Praxis, GA 337a, Studienabend vom 16. Juni 1920, Dornach 1999, pp. 220f.
↑ Trauger Groh, Steven Mc Fadden: Farms of Tomorrow Revisited, Community Supported Farms – Farm Supported Communities, Kimberton 1997, 312 pp.
↑ Tom Petherick: Biodynamics in Practice, Life on a Community owned Farm, Sophia Books, The Square, Forest Row 2010, 128 pp.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I, Vers 1973, Hamburger Ausgabe, Dramatische Dichtungen, Bd. 1, München 1976.
↑ Siehe z.B. Rudolf Steiner: Wahrspruchworte, GA 40, Dornach 1998.
↑ Needs arise from the depths of the body's unconscious and from the more light-filled substrata of soul-spiritual experience. They are rooted in the will, in which the spiritual ground of the human being — the I — lives. In bodily need, hunger and thirst for example, the impulse stirs to compensate an imbalance in the functional activities of the bodily organs. The soul-spiritual need strives to free itself from its bondage to bodily processes and to place itself freely in the service of ethico-moral ideals. Thus needs are, by their content, spiritual in nature; the means of their satisfaction are a task of economic life.
↑ Siehe hierzu z.B.: Rudolf Isler, Ueli Hurter: Assoziatives Wirtschaften. Was verstand Rudolf Steiner unter einer wirtschaftlichen Assoziation?, Dornach 2019, 96 S.; sowie: Stefan Leber (Hrsg.): Die wirtschaftlichen Assoziationen, Beiträge zur Brüderlichkeit im Wirtschaftsleben, Band 2, Stuttgart 1987, 352 S.
↑ Betriebsgemeinschaft Dottenfelderhof, Bad Vilbel, Deutschland.
↑ On this term see Rudolf Steiner: Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft 1923/24, GA 260, Dornach 1994, Nr. 11 der Statuten, S. 53.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Gemeinschaftsbildung, GA 257, Vortrag vom 27. Februar 1923, Dornach 1989, S. 116.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 8, München 1972, «Zweites Buch».
↑ Adalbert Graf von Keyserlingk: Koberwitz 1924, Stuttgart 1974, S. 70.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaft und soziale Frage, in: Luzifer – Gnosis 1903–1908, GA 34, Dornach 1987, S. 213: «Das Heil einer Gesamtheit von zusammenarbeitenden Menschen ist um so größer, je weniger der einzelne die Erträgnisse seiner Leistungen für sich beansprucht, das heißt, je mehr er von diesen Erträgnissen an seine Mitarbeiter abgibt, und je mehr seine eigenen Bedürfnisse nicht aus seinen Leistungen, sondern aus den Leistungen der anderen befriedigt werden.» (The well-being of a totality of cooperating human beings is the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the yields of his own achievements, that is to say, the more he gives away of these yields to his co-workers, and the more his own needs are met not out of his own achievements but out of the achievements of the others.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd. – Siehe auch: Stefan Leber (Hrsg.): Das soziale Hauptgesetz, Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Arbeit und Einkommen, Stuttgart 1986, 280 S.
↑ John 8:32.
↑ See, among others: Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, GA 23, Dornach 1976; and idem: Zu sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen der Gegenwart, GA 332b, Dornach 2020.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl: «Elemente und Äther – Betrachtungsweisen der Welt» (Elements and ether – modes of contemplation of the world), in: Ders. (Hrsg.): Erscheinungsformen des Ätherischen. Wege zum Erfahren des Lebendigen in Natur und Mensch, Stuttgart 1985, S. 11–56.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl: Ebd.
↑ J.W. Goethe: Faust, Part Two, line 6922, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 3, Munich 1976.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl: Ibid.
↑ See, for example, Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ See, for example, Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.
↑ A phenomenon that is scarcely any longer to be observed in modern varieties bred for high nitrogen tolerance.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 6. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 23.
↑ Die Griechen nannten den Kristallhimmel Uranos (griech. Οὐρανός, Ouranos; lat. Uranus, Coelus oder Caelum, Himmelsgewölbe). Der Kristallhimmel kommt in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie vor. In der esoterisch-okkulten Tradition bewahrt er die Früchte einer vorhergehenden Evolutionsreihe auf. Er umfasst das Himmelsgewölbe und den Fixsternhimmel.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 49.
↑ Willi Laatsch: Dynamik der Mitteleuropäischen Mineralböden, Dresden und Leipzig 1957, 280 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 11 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 82f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, p. 47.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., p. 46.
↑ Ernst Haeckel: Generelle Morphologie, Band II: Allgemeine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, 1866/1906.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Wilhelm Troll, Karl Höhn: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1972, 994 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.
↑ Gerhard Geisler: Pflanzenbau, Berlin-Hamburg 1988, 2. Aufl., S. 132.
↑ Wilhelm Troll, Karl Höhn: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1972, S. 499.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 14 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 155.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 55.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Notizen im Anhang, S. 274.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 59.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, S. 192.
↑ Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Inst. f. Biol.-Dyn. Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.
↑ Johannes Klein: Der Einfluss verschiedener Düngearten in gestaffelter Dosierung auf Qualität und Haltbarkeit pflanzlicher Produkte, Inst. f. Biol.-Dyn. Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.
↑ Ilias Samaras: Nachernteverhalten unterschiedlich gedüngter Gemüsearten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung physiologischer und mikrobieller Parameter, Dissertation, Gießen 1977.
↑ Herbert Koepf, Bo D. Petterson, Wolfgang Schaumann: Biologische Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1980, 303 S.
↑ Wilfried Kamphausen: «Qualität im biologisch-dynamischen Obstbau» (Quality in biodynamic fruit cultivation), in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, 377 S.
↑ Paul Doesburg et al.: «Standardisation and performance of a visual Gestalt evaluation of biocrystallisation patterns reflecting ripening and decomposition processes in food samples». '<Biological Agriculture & Horticulture: An International Journal for sustainable Production Systems, 2014, S. 1–18.
↑ See e.g. Rudolf Steiner: Der Jahreskreislauf als Atmungsvorgang der Erde und die vier großen Festeszeiten, GA 223, Dornach 1990.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, discussion of questions, 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 109.
↑ Chaotization means the transference of the formed into the unformed condition. In the present case this means: to break open mechanically, loosen, and mix the soil structure that had grown through complex life processes over the course of the preceding year (soil tilth); to stir it up, to displace the soil particles vertically and horizontally. The living topsoil shaped by life is brought by degrees toward the inorganic condition of a spatial side-by-side. This mechanical chaotization prepares the soil for the reception of the in-raying formative forces of winter and the newly enlivening planetary and solar formative forces of the coming spring.
↑ Walter Feuerlein: Geräte zur Bodenbearbeitung, Stuttgart 1971, S. 40.
↑ Ebd., S. 39.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst, GA 27, Dornach 1991, S. 25 f.
↑ Siehe auch: Hermann Poppelbaum: «Begriff und Wirkungsweise des Ätherleibs» (Concept and mode of operation of the etheric body), in Jochen Bockemühl (Hrsg.): Erscheinungsformen des Ätherischen, Stuttgart 1985, S. 179–195.
↑ Hermann Poppelbaum: Ebd.
↑ Ernst Marti: Die vier Äther – zu Rudolf Steiners Ätherlehre, Stuttgart 2016, 60 S.
↑ Gerhard Geisler: Pflanzenbau. Ein Lehrbuch – Biologische Grundlagen und Technik der Pflanzenproduktion, Berlin-Hamburg, 1988, S. 506.
↑ Eduard von Boguslawski: Ackerbau, Grundlagen der Pflanzenproduktion, Frankfurt 1981, S. 237 f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 80.
↑ Ebd., S. 80.
↑ Ebd., S. 71.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 80.
↑ Ebd., S. 80.
↑ Ebd., S. 71.
↑ Wolfgang Holzner, Johann Glauninger: Ackerunkräuter: Bestimmung, Biologie, Landwirtschaftliche Bedeutung, Graz 2005, 264 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 155 f.
↑ Ebd., S. 156.
↑ Lilly Kolisko: «Der Mond und das Pflanzenwachstum» (The moon and plant growth), in Gäa Sophia, Bd. II, Dornach 1927, S. 349–357.
↑ Hartmut Spieß: «Chronobiologische Untersuchungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung lunarer Rhythmen im biologisch-dynamischen Pflanzenbau» (Chronobiological investigations with particular consideration of lunar rhythms in biodynamic plant cultivation), Schriftreihe Institut für Biologisch-Dynamische Forschung, Bd. 3, Darmstadt 1994, 272 S.
↑ Jürgen Appel: «Unkrautregulierung ohne Herbizide. Erfahrungen auf Betrieben der biologisch-dynamischen und organisch-biologischen Wirtschaftsweisen» (Weed regulation without herbicides. Experiences from farms working in the biodynamic and organic-biological modes), Schriftreihe Lebendige Erde, Darmstadt 1982, 113 S.
↑ Ebd.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.
↑ Ebd., S. 155.
↑ Helmut Voitl, Elisabeth Guggenberger, Josef Willi: Das große Buch vom biologischen Land- und Gartenbau, Wien 1992, 367 S.
↑ Siehe z.B. Rudolf Steiner: Meditative Betrachtungen und Anleitungen zur Vertiefung der Heilkunst, GA 316, Dornach 2003, Vortrag vom 3. Januar 1924, S. 33 f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft*, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 109.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 11.
↑ Ebd., S. 20.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Von der Natur zur Unternatur» (From nature to sub-nature), Dornach 1998, S. 255 ff.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, GA27, Dornach 1991, S. 20).
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, Kap. X. «Wissen und Handeln im Lichte der Goetheschen Denkweise» (Knowing and acting in the light of Goethe's way of thinking), GA 1, Dornach 1987, S. 171.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, Kap XVI. «Goethe als Denker und Forscher» (Goethe as thinker and researcher), GA 1, Dornach 1987, S. 274.
↑ Cited in Jos Verhulst: Der Glanz von Kopenhagen, geistige Perspektiven der modernen Physik, Stuttgart 1994, p. 15.
↑ Ibid., p. 17.
↑ Ibid., p. 173.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der freien Waldorfschule Stuttgart,2. Bd., GA 300b, Konferenz vom 21. Juni 1922, Dornach 2019, S. 152.
↑ Martin Rozumek, Peter Buck (Hrsg.): Das Chemische und die Stoffe, Zugänge zur Chemie, Dornach 2008, Kap.: «Einleitung», S. 7.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 64f.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, GA 9, Dornach 2003, S. 50.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflektionen, Nr. 720, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 12, München 1987.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 42.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 47.
↑ Manfred Klett: Die boden- und gesteinsbürtige Stofffracht von Oberflächengewässern, Arbeiten der Landwirtschaftlichen Hochschule Hohenheim, Bd. 35, 1965, S. 42.
↑ Martin Hartmann et al. (2015): Distinct soil microbial diversity under long-term organic and conventional farming, ISME Journal, 9, S. 1177–1194.
↑ Christoph Felgentreu, Kirsten Engelke: Konzepte zur Erhaltung der Bodenfruchtbarkeit, Deutsche Saatveredelung AG, Lippstadt.
↑ Lexikon der Biologie, https: www.spektrum.de.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen, Erdenleben und Sternenwirken, GA 354, Vortrag vom 9. August 1924, Dornach 2000, S. 154.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 73.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 192.
↑ Ebd., S. 192.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 122.
↑ Helmut Snoek, Horst Wülfrath: Das Buch vom Steinmehl, Entstehung, Verwendung und Bedeutung im Land- und Gartenbau, Hamburg 2000, 144 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 94.
↑ Ibid., discussion of questions, 12 June 1924, p. 117.
↑ Georg Wagner: Einführung in die Erd- und Landschaftsgeschichte, Öhringen 1960, 694+208 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, S. 91.
↑ Krafft von Heynitz, Georg Merckens: Das biologische Gartenbuch, Stuttgart 1994, 351 S.
↑ In Bezug auf die praktische Handhabe der Kompostbereitung sei auf die einschlägigen Publikationen der oben genannten Autoren verwiesen; sowie auf Friedrich Sattler, Eckard von Wistinghausen: Der landwirtschaftliche Betrieb, Biologisch-Dynamisch, Stuttgart 1989, 333 S.; sowie auf Herbert Koepf, Wolfgang Schaumann, Manon Hacius: Biologisch-dynamische Landwirtschaft: Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 1996, 368 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 90.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl: Vom Leben des Komposthaufens, Dornach 1981, 67 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 92.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Grundelemente der Esoterik, GA 93a, 30. September 1905, Dornach 1987, S. 44 f.
↑ Siehe hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, Kap. «Die Weltentwicklung und der Mensch» (The evolution of the world and the human being), GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Krafft von Heynitz: Kompost im Garten, Stuttgart 1999, 127 S.
↑ Oral communication from Matthias Guépin, lecturer at Emerson College (GB) and adviser in Kenya.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 15 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 184.
↑ KTBL: Faustzahlen für den ökologischen Landbau, Darmstadt 2015, 760 S.
↑ KTBL: Faustzahlen für den ökologischen Landbau, Darmstadt 2015, 760 S.
↑ Herbert Koepf, Bo D. Petterson, Wolfgang Schaumann: Biologische Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1980, 303 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 47.
↑ Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Darmstadt 1968, 117 S.
↑ Wilhelm Troll: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1959, 927 S.; Gerbert Grohmann: Die Pflanze, Berlin 2013, 448 S.; Jochen Bockemühl: «Bildebewegungen im Laubblattbereich höherer Pflanzen» (Formative movements in the foliage-leaf region of higher plants), Elemente der Naturwissenschaft Nr. 4: 7–23, 1966.
↑ Ehrenfried Pfeiffer: 1899–1961, pioneer of applied anthroposophical research; developed, proceeding from indications by Rudolf Steiner for the investigation of formative forces, the method of sensitive copper chloride crystallisation; prepared, together with Guenther Wachsmuth (1893–1963) under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner, the horn manure preparation for the first time in 1922/23. Until the end of the 1930s, together with Guenther Wachsmuth, in the leadership of the research laboratory at the Goetheanum. From the end of the 1930s onwards, farmer and agricultural consultant in the USA.
↑ Alla Selawry, Olleg Selawry: Die Kupferchloridkristallisation in Naturwissenschaft und Medizin, Stuttgart 1957, 232 S.
↑ Friedrich Vincenz von Hahn: Thesigraphie, Wiesbaden 1962, 244 S.
↑ H. Krüger: Kupferchloridkristallisationen, ein Reagenz auf Gestaltungskräfte des Lebendigen, Weleda – Schriftenreihe 1/1950.
↑ Magda Enquist: Strukturveränderungen im Kupferchloridkristallisationsbild von Pflanzen durch Alterung und Düngung, Lebendige Erde 3, 1961.
↑ Bo D. Petterson (1967): Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Kristallisationsmethode mit Kupferchlorid nach Pfeiffer, Lebendige Erde 18 (1): S. 15–31.
↑ Paul Doesburg, Machteld Huber, Jens-Otto Andersen, Miriam Athmann, Guus van der Bie, Jürgen Fritz, Uwe Geier, Joop Hoekman, Johannes Kahl, Gaby Mergardt & Nicolaas Busscher (2014): «Standardization and performance of a visual Gestalt evaluation of biocrystallization patterns reflecting ripening and decomposition processes in food samples», Biological Agriculture & Horticulture: An International Journal for Sustainable Production Systems, DOI: 10.1080/01448765.2014.993705.
↑ Ernst Klapp: Lehrbuch des Acker- und Pflanzenbaus, Berlin-Hamburg 1958, 503 S.; Edward John Russel: The World of the Soil, London 1957, 242 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S.122: «Man muss die Erde direkt beleben, und das kann man nicht, wenn man mineralisierend vorgeht, das kann man nur, wenn man mit Organischem vorgeht, das man in eine entsprechende Lage bringt, sodass es organisierend, belebend auf das Feste, Erdige selber wirken kann.» (One must enliven the earth directly, and that one cannot do if one proceeds in a mineralizing way; one can only do it if one proceeds with what is organic, bringing it into such a condition that it can act in an organizing, enlivening way upon the solid, earthly itself.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vorträge vom 12. und 13. Juni 1924.
↑ Christian von Wistinghausen et al.: Anleitung zur Anwendung der biologisch-dynamischen Feldspritz- und Düngerpräparate , Arbeitsheft 2, Darmstadt 2005, 92 S.
↑ Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.
↑ Ueli Hurter et al. (2018): Biodynamische Präparate-Praxis weltweit – Die Fallbeispiele, Darmstadt, 364 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie – Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 58: «Wir stehen auch vor einer großen Umwandlung des Innern der Natur.» (We also stand before a great transformation of the inner being of nature.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Verhältnis der Anthroposophie zur Naturwissenschaft. Grundlagen und Methoden, GA 75, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1920, Dornach 2010.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 58: «Wir stehen auch vor einer großen Umwandlung des Innern der Natur.» (We also stand before a great transformation of the inner being of nature.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1979, S. 42.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 120.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 120.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, in: Goethes Werke. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, hrsg. v. Rudolf Steiner, Band 1, in: Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Berlin und Stuttgart 1887 (Reprint Dornach 1975).
↑ «Das Tier wird durch seine Organe belehrt; der Mensch belehrt die seinigen und beherrscht sie» (The animal is instructed by its organs; the human being instructs his own and masters them), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, «Aus dem Nachlass – Über Natur und Naturwissenschaft» (From the literary estate – On Nature and Natural Science).
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde, GA 107, Dornach 1988, Vortrag «Evolution, Involution und Schöpfung aus dem Nichts» (Evolution, involution, and creation out of nothing), 17. Juni 1909.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Metamorphose der Pflanze, Stuttgart 1985, S. 39.
↑ Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, GA 27, Kap. V. «Pflanze, Tier, Mensch», Dornach 1991, S. 35.
↑ Ebd.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.
↑ Die folgende Darstellung ist eine überarbeitete Fassung von Beiträgen des Verfassers in Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft– Gedanken, Erfahrungen, Forschungsergebnisse, eine Werkstattarbeit, Dornach 2007, S. 93–107.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Faust-Problem. Die romantische und die klassische Walpurgisnacht, GA 273, Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethes Faust, Bd. II, Vortrag vom 27. Januar 1917, Dornach 1981, S. 75.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, A 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 99.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 49.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 5. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 62: «So sehen Sie, dass wir durchaus jetzt, wo wir in die Zeit des sprießenden, sprossenden Lebens kommen, nicht sprechen können von geistdurchwobener Materie wie im Winter für die Erde, sondern wie wir sprechen müssen von materiedurchwobenem […] Geist.» (So you see that now, when we come into the time of sprouting, burgeoning life, we can by no means speak of spirit-interwoven matter as we do in winter for the earth, but how we must speak rather of matter-interwoven […] spirit.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 82: «Das Kieselige ist der allgemeine äußere Sinn im Irdischen.» (The siliceous is the general outer sense within the earthly.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 47/48.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 12. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 62.
↑ Cf. Theodor Schwenk: Das sensible Chaos, Stuttgart 2010, 216 S.
↑ Vgl. Theodor Schwenk: Das sensible Chaos, Stuttgart 2010, 216 S.
↑ Bernd Roßlenbroich: Die rhythmische Organisation des Menschen: Aus der chrono-biologischen Forschung, Stuttgart 1994, 163 S.
↑ Notizbuch Nr. 52, 1921; siehe auch Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 104, S. 63.
↑ Paul Schatz (1898–1979): Anthroposophisch orientierter Mathematiker, Techniker und Erfinder.
↑ A. John Wilkes: Das Flowform-Phänomen: Die verborgene rhythmische Energie des Wassers, Stuttgart 2008, 239 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 104.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung. – Gunter Gebhard: Geologe und Biologe, langjähriger Oberstufenlehrer an der Waldorfschule Überlingen; jetzt Dozent für goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft und Waldorfpädagogik in Russland und in landwirtschaftlichen Ausbildungsstätten in Deutschland.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 102.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen. Erdenleben und Sternenwirken. Über die Gerüche, GA 354, Vortrag vom 24. August 1924, Dornach 2000, S. 154.
↑ Ilias Samares: Nachernteverhalten unterschiedlich gedüngter Gemüsesorten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung physiologischer und mikrobiologischer Parameter. Forschungsring für biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise, Darmstadt 1980, 153 S.
↑ Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Darmstadt 1968, 117 S.
↑ Johannes Klein: Der Einfluss verschiedener Düngungsarten in gestaffelter Dosierung auf Qualität und Haltbarkeit pflanzlicher Produkte. Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.
↑ Uli Johannes König: «Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungsergebnisse zum Nachweis der Präparatewirksamkeit» (Scientific research findings on the evidence of preparation efficacy) in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, S. 157 f.
↑ Uli Johannes König: «Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungsergebnisse zum Nachweis der Präparatewirksamkeit» (Scientific research findings on the evidence of preparation efficacy) in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, S. 157 f.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl und Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 153 S. – A study designed to guide the reader from intuitive beholding toward knowledge of the essential being.
↑ Erdmuth-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 S.
↑ Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners, Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenach 2017, 2 Bd. (Bd. 1: 632 S.; Bd. 2: 116 S.).
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 126: «Diese Schafgarbe ist – eigentlich ist es ja jede Pflanze – ein Wunderwerk, aber wenn man wieder eine andere Blume anschaut, dann kommt einem das ganz besonders zu Herzen, was für ein Wunderwerk diese Schafgarbe ist; sie ist ein ganz besonderes Wunderwerk.» (This yarrow is – really every plant is – a marvel, but when one looks again at another flower, then it comes home to one most particularly what a marvel this yarrow is; it is a quite special marvel.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 126.
↑ Ebd., S. 129.
↑ Ebd., S. 126.
↑ Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.
↑ Ebd., Notizblatt Nr. 9 im Anhang, S. 271: «Der Humus gestaltet das Untere durch die Erde.» (Humus shapes the lower realm through the earth.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft*, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 126.
↑ Ebd., S. 128.
↑ Ebd., S. 128.
↑ Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: *Von Seelenrätseln*, GA 21, Kap. «6. Die physischen und die geistigen Abhängigkeiten der Menschen-Wesenheit» (6. The physical and spiritual dependencies of the human being), Dornach 1983, S. 158: «In die Sinne erstreckt sich die Außenwelt wie in Golfen hinein in das Wesen des Organismus.» (Into the senses the outer world extends, as into gulfs, into the being of the organism.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 13 June 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 128.
↑ Ebd., S. 129.
↑ Ibid., p. 127.
↑ Ibid., p. 127.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 47.
↑ Ebd., S. 59.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Notizblatt Nr. 9 im Anhang, S. 271: «Der Humus gestaltet das Untere durch die Erde.» (Humus shapes the lower realm through the earth.)
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Menschheitszukunft und Michaeltätigkeit», Dornach 1998, S. 94f. – The stage of "efficacy" is described by Steiner in the context of Michael's activity and the future of humanity as the living-effective, as distinct from mere physical determinacy on one side and full spiritual revelation on the other.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 44.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 129.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl und Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.
↑ Ebd., S. 82.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 130.
↑ Matthias König, mündliche Mitteilung.
↑ Ebd., S. 130.
↑ Ebd., S. 129.
↑ Ebd., S. 131.
↑ Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, S. 320.
↑ Ibid., pp. 131–132.
↑ Ibid., p. 133.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 74.
↑ Ebd., S. 75.
↑ Ebd., S. 76.
↑ Ebd., S. 76.
↑ Ibid., lecture of 13 June 1924, p. 137.
↑ Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, p. 58.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 134.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 134: «In Bezug auf dasjenige, was dann als Kalzium zutage tritt, ist dasjenige, was an Kalziumstruktur in der Eichenrinde vorhanden ist, das alleridealste.» (With regard to that which then comes to light as calcium, that which exists as calcium-structure in the oak bark is the most ideal of all.)
↑ Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 S.
↑ A thorough study by Jan Albert Rispens exists, devoting a whole chapter to the question of bark and outer bark. He summarises: bast and assimilating cork parenchyma represent what is properly leaf-like; the dying cork bark and outer bark, the flower and fruit organ of the trunk. — Jan Albert Rispens: Bäume verstehen lernen, Stuttgart 2018, S. 157.
↑ Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 147.
↑ Cf. ibid., lecture of 11 June 1924, S. 75: «in das Ununterscheidbare des Weltenalls» (into the indistinguishable of the cosmos).
↑ Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.
↑ See: Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 12 June 1924, S. 90.
↑ Hermann von Guttenberg: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik, Berlin 1952, 641 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 94.
↑ Ebd., Fragenbeantwortung vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 147.
↑ Eduard Strasburger: Lehrbuch der Botanik, Stuttgart 1978, S. 422.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 134.
↑ Ebd., S. 135.
↑ On the organic formations that serve in the higher animal kingdom to balance an unequal relationship between the polar systems, see among others: Friedrich A. Kipp: «Bezahnung und Bildungsidee des Organismus» (Dentition and the formative idea of the organism), in: Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, S. 167 f.; sowie Andreas Suchantke: «Polarität und Dreigliederung im Tierreich» (Polarity and threefold articulation in the animal kingdom), in: ders.: Metamorphose – Kunstgriff der Evolution, Stuttgart 2002, S. 137 f.
↑ Rolf Krahmer, Lothar Schröder: Anatomie der Haustiere, Leipzig 1985, 368 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 133.
↑ Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners, Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenach 2017, 2 Bd. (Bd. 1: 632 S.; Bd. 2: 116 S.).
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 135.
↑ Ebd., S. 135.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 60.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 11 June 1924, pp. 82/83.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 137.
↑ Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Ebd., S. 135.
↑ Ebd., S. 136.
↑ Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust II, Verse 4656.
↑ Ibid., p. 137.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf der Spurensuche der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, S. 97.
↑ Werner Christian Simonis: Heilpflanzen und Mysterienpflanzen, Wiesbaden 1991, p. 280.
↑ Ibid., p. 282.
↑ Erdmuth-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 pp.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I, verse 1939.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni, Dornach 1999, S. 137.
↑ Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Ebd., S. 123–24.
↑ Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Willi Aeppli: Sinnesorganismus, Sinnesverlust, Sinnespflege; Stuttgart 1967; sowie
Dietrich Rapp, Hans-Christian Zehnter: Die zwölf Sinne in der seelischen Beobachtung – Eine Exkursion, Münchenstein 2019, 253 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie ein Fragment, GA 45, Dornach 2002.
↑ Willi Aeppli: Ebd.; sowie: Dietrich Rapp, Hans-Christian Zehnter: Ebd.
↑ Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, S. 105.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 137.
↑ Ebd., Fragenbeantwortung vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 175.
↑ Ulrike Remer-Bielitz: Dokumentation zum Rindgekröse; Forschungsring, Materialien Nr. 8, Darmstadt 2001.
↑ Johannes W. Rohen: Funktionelle Anatomie des Menschen, Stuttgart-New York 1993, S. 287.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Anhang, S. 293.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 137.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Der Mensch in seiner makrokosmischen Wesenheit» (The human being in his macrocosmic being), Dornach 1998.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 138.
↑ Ebd., S. 138.
↑ Ebd., S. 138.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 138.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 56.
↑ Werner Christian Simonis: Heilpflanzen und Mysterienpflanzen, Wiesbaden 1981, S. 696.
↑ Ebd., S. 593.
↑ Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate , Stuttgart 2019, S. 340.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Kap. «Die Weltentwicklung und der Mensch» (The evolution of the world and the human being), Dornach 1989, S. 157 ff.
↑ Rudolf Hauschka: Substanzlehre, Frankfurt/Main 1966, S. 51.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 75/76.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, GA 351, Vortrag vom 20. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 72.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.
↑ Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S. Siehe auch: Ueli Hurter et al. (2018): Biodynamische Präparate-Praxis weltweit – Die Fallbeispiele, Darmstadt, 364 S.
↑ Krafft von Heynitz, Georg Merckens: Das biologische Gartenbuch, Stuttgart 1994, 351 S.
↑ Pierre Masson: Gartenbau und Landwirtschaft biodynamisch, Aarau 2015, 224 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.
↑ Friedrich Scheffer, Paul Schachtschabel: Lehrbuch der Bodenkunde, Berlin 2018, 772 S.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.
↑ Ribosomes are built up from ribosomal RNA. They originate in the nucleolus within the cell nucleus and form in the plasma the organelles for protein formation (cosmologically, the nucleolus is an equivalent of the Earth within the microcosm of the cell). The cell nucleus corresponds to the Moon sphere, and the cell membrane to the Saturn sphere. The mitochondria possess their own naked DNA, multiply in their own rhythm, and have above all the task of cellular respiration by means of the iron-containing cytochromes. Cosmologically, the mitochondria stand in relation to Mars.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, GA 313, Vortrag vom 15. April 1921, Dornach 2001, S. 91.
↑ Friedrich Husemann, Otto Wolff: Das Bild des Menschen als Grundlage der Heilkunst, Band II: Zur allgemeinen Pathologie und Therapie, Stuttgart 1991, S. 394.
↑ Ebd., S. 395.
↑ Hermann von Guttenberg: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik, Berlin 1955, S. 15.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, GA 313, Vortrag vom 12. April 1924, Dornach 2001, S. 44.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 167.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Vgl. auch: Jean-Michel Florin (Hrsg.): Biologisch-dynamischer Weinbau, Dornach 2020, S. 154 f.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, S. 105.
↑ Ebd., S. 107.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 83.
↑ Christian von Wistinghausen, Wolfgang Scheibe, Eckhard von Wistinghausen: Anleitung zur Herstellung der biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Arbeitsheft Nr. 1, Stuttgart 1998, 96 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, Dornach, 1999, S. 167.
↑ Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.
↑ Christian von Wistinghausen, Wolfgang Scheibe, Eckhard von Wistinghausen: Anleitung zur Herstellung der biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Arbeitsheft Nr. 1, Stuttgart 1998, S. 71.
↑ Siehe hierzu: Ulrich Meyer: «Optimierung der Kieselsäure-Extraktion aus Equisetum arvense – Ergebnisse für die alltägliche Praxis» (Optimization of silicic acid extraction from Equisetum arvense – results for everyday practice), in: Ulrich Meyer, Peter Alsted Pedersen (Hrsg.): Anthroposophische Pharmazie, Berlin 2016, 807 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, GA 327, lecture of 14 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 167.
↑ Walter Stappung: *Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung*, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 11 June 1924, Dornach, 1999, p. 64.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Personal communication.
↑ Gunter Gebhard: Personal communication.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 60.
↑ Ibid., p. 44.
↑ Cf. Elisabeth Vreede: Astronomie und Anthroposophie, Dornach 1980, p. 75; the same author: Über den Planeten Merkur, in: Kalender Ostern 1942–1943, Arlesheim; and the same author: Texte über Planetensphären in den Rundschreiben 1927–1930 (edited by Liesbeth Bisterbosch and Frauke Roloff, October 2020). — In the course of this emancipation of human consciousness toward an awakening self-consciousness turned toward the earth, it becomes understandable that a confusion of the Venus and Mercury spheres took place. This confusion concerns not the planetary body as such, but their supersensibly force-bearing spheres of working — that for which, since primordial times, these two heavenly bodies, Venus and Mercury, have stood as spiritually and soul-actively working entities.
↑ Lievegoed devoted a thorough study to the polar threefoldness of the manure preparations in their relation to planetary working and the life processes in plant and animal (Bernhard C.J. Lievegoed: Planetenwirken und Lebensprozesse in Mensch und Erde, Stuttgart 2002, 82 pp.). It describes how in the life processes of the preparation plants, a representative of the supra-solar planets stands in a polar working-relationship with one of the sub-solar planets — Saturn with the Moon, Jupiter with Mercury, Mars with Venus — with the Sun in the centre in each case; how the forces of this polar working, through the enveloping by the animal organs exposed to the winter and sun forces, are amplified in their reciprocal interaction and preserved; and how from this there becomes comprehensible what Rudolf Steiner has described as refreshingly enlivening, health-bringing, mutually attuning, sensitising processes in soil and plants.
↑ See: Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, p. 239.
↑ See: Michaela Glöckler: «Das Nieren-Blasen-System und das Schafgarbenpräparat» (The kidney-bladder system and the yarrow preparation); in: Manfred Klett und Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Frage der Düngung im biologisch-dynamischen Landbau, Dornach 1994.
↑ See for example: Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110, Dornach 1991; and: Die geistigen Wesen in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1996.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhänge, Bd. V, GA 239, Vortrag vom 9. Juni 1924, Dornach 1985, S. 166.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 55.
↑ Ibid., lecture of 13 June 1924, p. 138.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhänge, GA 239, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1985, S. 172.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
↑ Jochen Bockemühl: Vom Leben des Komposthaufens, Sonderdruck Elemente der Naturwissenschaft Nr. 29: S. 1–67, Dornach 1978.
↑ Herbert Koepf: Landbau, natur-und menschengemäß. Methoden und Praxen der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1984, 270 S.
↑ Ebd., 1980.
↑ Uli Johannes König: Ergebnisse aus der Präparateforschung, Schriftenreihe Band 12, Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1999, Loseblattsammlung.
↑ Paul Mäder et al.: Erkenntnisse aus 21 Jahren DOK-Versuch. FiBL Dossier: Bio fördert Bodenfruchtbarkeit und Artenvielfalt, Frick 2000, 16 S.
↑ Uli Johannes König: Ergebnisse aus der Präparateforschung, Schriftenreihe Band 12, Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1999, Loseblattsammlung.
↑ Ebd., siehe die dortige Literaturzusammenstellung.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Ansprache vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 234.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Jahreskreislauf als Atmungsvorgang der Erde und die vier großen Festeszeiten. Die Anthroposophie und das menschliche Gemüt, GA 229, Vortrag vom 28. September 1923, Dornach 1923, S. 117.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 21.
↑ See Rudolf Steiner: Die Philosophie der Freiheit, GA 4, Dornach 1995.
↑ See Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.
↑ Christian Morgenstern: Werke und Briefe. Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Band II, Lyrik 1906–14, Stuttgart 1992, S. 213 f.
↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethes Werke. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, hrsg. v. Rudolf Steiner, Band 1, in: Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Berlin und Stuttgart 1887 (Reprint Dornach 1975): «Einleitung zum ersten Band» (Introduction to the first volume), S. XXXI.
↑ Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Wirkenskräfte im Zusammenleben von alter und junger Generation; Pädagogischer Jugendkurs, GA 217, Dornach 1988.
↑ Steiner Rudolf: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.
↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 42: «Nun, eine Landwirtschaft erfüllt eigentlich ihr Wesen im besten Sinne des Wortes, wenn sie aufgefasst werden kann als eine Art Individualität für sich, eine wirklich in sich geschlossene Individualität.» (Now, an agriculture truly fulfills its essential nature, in the best sense of the word, when it can be conceived as a kind of individuality unto itself, an individuality truly self-contained within itself.)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | 0-9

[1] Rendering of Rudolf Steiner's words at the laying of the foundation stone of the Rosicrucian temple of the lodge Malsch "Franz von Assisi", from memory by Hilde Stockmeyer; from: Rudolf Steiner: Bilder okkulter Siegel und Säulen, GA 284, Dornach 1993, p. 113.

[2] Siehe hierzu z.B.: Mathias Forster, Christopher Schümann: Das Gift und wir, Frankfurt a.M. 2020, 448 S.

[3] BSE: Abkürzung für «Bovine spongiforme Enzephalopathie», auch als «Rinderwahn» bekannte Tierseuche, die vor allem auf eine Fehlfütterung von Rindern mit tierischen Eiweißen zurückzuführen ist.

[4] «Wir sind auf einer Mission: zur Bildung der Erde sind wir berufen» (We are on a mission: we are called to the formation of the earth), Novalis (1772–1801, Dichter der deutschen Romantik), Blüthenstaub, § 32.

[5] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtscht, GA 327, Dornach 1999.

[6] Das Schloss Koberwitz existiert noch heute und ist seit 1997 Sitz der polnischen Gemeindeverwaltung von Kobierzyce.

[7] Rudolf Steiner: Kunst und Kunsterkens, GA 271, Dornach 1985, siehe insbesondere die Vorträge vom 15. und 17. Februar sowie 5. und 6. Mai 1918.

[8] Ebd., Vortrag vom 28. Oktober 1909, S. 76.

[9] Das Verhältnis von Ideenerleben und Bodenfruchtbarkeit wird ausführlich im zweiten Teil des Buches behandelt.

[10] Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen 1980, S. 834 ff.

[11] Rudolf Steiner: Nationalökomischer Kurs, GA 340, Vortrag vom 25. Juli 1922, Dornach 2002, S. 33.

[12] Rudolf Steiner gave this price-orientation the following formulation in his Kernpunkten der sozialen Frage: The price must be so arranged «that every worker receives, as an equivalent for a product, as much as is necessary to satisfy all the needs of himself and those belonging to him, until he has again produced a product of equivalent labour. Such a price relationship cannot come about through official decree, but must arise as the result of the living cooperation of the associations active within the social organism» (GA 23, Dornach 1976, S. 132)

[13] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989; Ders.: Aus der Akasha-Chronik, GA 11, Dornach 2018.

[14] Ebd.

[15] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989; Ders.: Aus der Akasha-Chronik, GA 11, Dornach 2018.

[16] Ebd.

[17] Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Dornach 1995, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908.

[18] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989, S. 273 ff. – A dating of the post-Atlantean, respectively post-glacial cultural epochs becomes more possible the further they advance in gaining contours within historical documents. These, however, are only the outer expression of a consciousness-constitution prevailing among human beings of the respective time. The human being has his origin in the spirit-cosmos: he develops his consciousness in the encounter with the physical-sensory world. In this world of time and space, however, there work forces that likewise stem from the spirit-cosmos and have their specific sources each in the twelve regions of the zodiac. From these twelve regions there ray in, mediated through the Sun, the impulses that assist humanity toward ever new stages of becoming conscious of human and world existence. These impulses it is that, through the creative work of human beings, give a cultural epoch its particular character. The Sun requires, on its ecliptic path in retrograde movement (precession), 25,920 years for a passage through the zodiac (the Platonic World Year). In each 1/12 of this period of revolution, that is in 2,160 years, it receives the workings of forces of one zodiacal region. From this measure of time there results the duration of a cultural epoch (cf. Elisabeth Vreede: Astronomie und Anthroposophie, Dornach 1980, S. 100 ff.). Each of the twelve regions of the zodiac bears a sign, a constellation, that has a name going back to ancient wisdom-teachings. Thus the ancient Indian culture, the first of the sevenfold sequence of the post-Atlantean cultures, stands under the "sign of Cancer," indicating that the ending Atlantean age (Neozoic) is involving and a new one, the post-Atlantean (Quaternary), is evolving. The subsequent ancient Persian culture stands under the sign of "Gemini," pointing to the polarity of light and darkness, and so forth. In the many studies that Rudolf Steiner devotes to the cultural epochs in his written and lecture work, he characterizes the levels of consciousness that humanity wins for itself in the progressive taking hold of earthly conditions. The transitions from one to the next of these epochs are gradual. They result from the arising and the ebbing of the ruling spirit-impulses from the zodiacal regions. This holds as well for the fourth post-Atlantean period. For this period, however, Rudolf Steiner gives at the same time a dating of beginning and end, one that has an astronomically grounded reference to a specific year in relation to the zodiacal region of Aries. The beginning of the Greco-Roman cultural epoch falls accordingly in the year 747 B.C. and its end, after the completion of 2,160 years, in the year 1413 A.D. (Rudolf Steiner: Die tieferen Entwicklungsimpulse der Menschheit, 12. Juni 1917, Publikation in Vorbereitung). On the basis of these figures, which are related to a cosmic rhythm, the dates for the preceding great ancient civilizations can be calculated, as well as those that follow them and that in 1413 A.D. commenced with the present Age of the Consciousness Soul.

[19] Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110, Dornach 1991, S. 120.eit.

[20] Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Dornach 1995, Vortrag vom 29. Mai 1908.

[21] Rudolf Steiner: Das Matthäus-Evangelium, GA 123, Vortrag vom 1. September 1910, Dornach 1988, S. 27.

[22] Ebd., S. 28f.

[23] Walther Hinz: Zarathustra, Stuttgart 1961, 271 S.

[24] Markus Osterrieder, Peter Guttenhöfer: Die Durchlichtung der Welt: Altiranische Geschichte, Bildungswerk Beruf und Umwelt, Kassel 2008, 60 S.

[25] Karl Heyer: Von der Atlantis bis Rom, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Abendlandes, Band I, Stuttgart 1997, 254 S.

[26] Manfred Klett: «Die Entstehung der Kulturpflanzen und das Saatgut als das Kulturerbe der Menschheit» (The origin of cultivated plants and seed as the cultural heritage of humanity), in: Manfred Christ (Hrsg.): Bedrohte Saat, Basel 2010, 328 S.

[27] Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, GA 9, Kap. IV. «Leib, Seele und Geist» (Body, soul, and spirit), Dornach 2003, S. 57 f.

[28] Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, S. 68.

[29] Rudolf Steiner: Okkulte Geschichte, GA 126, Vortrag vom 28. Dezember 1910, Dornach 1992.

[30] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989, S. 280f.

[31] Rudolf Steiner: Okkulte Geschichte, GA 126, Vortrag vom 28. Dezember 1910, Dornach 1975, S. 42.

[32] Emil Bock: Urgeschichte. Das Alte Testament und die Geistesgeschichte der Menschheit I, Stuttgart 1951, S. 151.

[33] Ebd., S. 160.

[34] Rudolf Steiner: Der Orient im Lichte des Okzidents, GA 113, Vortrag vom 28. August 1909, Dornach 1982.

[35] Rudolf Steiner:Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995, S. 172f.

[36] Näheres siehe: Rudolf Steiner:Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen im Zusammenhange mit der germanisch-nordischen Mythologie, GA 121, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1910, Dornach 2017.

[37] Frank Teichmann:Der Mensch und sein Tempel: Griechenland, Stuttgart 1980, S. 79. – Zum Organismus-Gedanken siehe auch: Renatus Derbidge (Hrsg):Rudolf Steiner: Organisches Denken, Basel 2020, 256 S.

[38] Eos (Ancient Greek Ἠώς, Ēōs), goddess of the dawn in Greek mythology; corresponds to Aurora in Roman mythology.

[39] Rudolf Steiner:Vor dem Tore der Theosophie, GA 95, Vortrag vom 1. September 1906, Dornach 1990, S. 107.

[40] Rudolf Steiner:Die Theosophie des Rosenkreuzers. GA 99, Vortrag vom 4. Juni 1907, Dornach 1985, S. 135.

[41] Vergil:Sämtliche Werke, Heimeran 1975.

[42] Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 30. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995, S. 172f.

[43] In Greek mythology, the two figures Prometheus and Epimetheus stand for independent, active, forward-looking thinking (promethean) and for backward-turned, more passive, receptive thinking (epimethean).

[44] Will Richter (Hrsg.): Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella: De res rustica, 5. Buch. 10. Kapitel: Über den Obstbau, S. 605–630, München und Zürich 1981.

[45] Rudolf Steiner: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. Das fünfte Evangelium, GA 148, Vortrag vom 5. Oktober 1913, Dornach 1992, S. 63.

[46] Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Vortrag vom 13. April 1912, Dornach 1996, S. 178f.

[47] Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1908, Dornach 1985, S. 25.

[48] Ebd., S. 26. — In Exodus 3:13–15, the passage reads as follows in the standard translation: «Moses said to God: 'If I come to the people of Israel and say to them: "The God of your fathers has sent me to you", and they ask me: "What is his name?" — what shall I say to them?' God answered: 'I am who I am', and added: 'Say to the people of Israel: "The I-am-here has sent me to you: the Lord! He is the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob." For "Lord" (He-is-here) is my name for all time. With this name shall the coming generations also address me when they pray to me.'»

[49] Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1908, Dornach 1985, S. 31.

[50] Rudolf Steiner: Das Markus-Evangelium, GA 139, Vortrag vom 21. September 1912, Dornach 1985, S. 146.

[51] Rudolf Steiner: Von Jesus zu Christus, GA 131, Vortrag vom 8. Oktober 1911, Dornach 1988, S. 100.

[52] Rudolf Steiner: Das Johannes-Evangelium, GA 103, Vortrag vom 22. Mai 1908, Dornach 1995.

[53] Alfred W. Crosby: Die Früchte des weißen Mannes – Ökologischer Imperialismus 900–1900, Frankfurt, New York 1991, 280 S.

[54] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie, soziale Dreigliederung und Redekunst, GA 339, Vortrag vom 12. Oktober 1921, Dornach 1984, S. 29.

[55] Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft, GA 23, Dornach 1976.

[56] Walter Weber (Hrsg.): Johann Valentin Andreae: Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreuz Anno 1459, mit Beiträgen von Rudolf Steiner und Walter Weber, Basel 1987, 224 S.

[57] From: Wilhelm Abel: Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1967, p. 265.

[58] Ebd., S. 202.

[59] Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: Von Jesus zu Christus, GA 131, Vortrag vom 13. Oktober 1911, Dornach 1988, S. 194 ff.; sowie Emil Bock: Die Boten des Geistes, Stuttgart 1967, S. 55.

[60] Johann Valentin Andreae: Allgemeine und Generalreformation der ganzen weiten Welt – beneben der Fama Fraternitatis, des löblichen Ordens des Rosenkreuzes, an alle Gelehrte und Häupter Europa geschrieben, Kassel 1614.

[61] Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling: Lebensgeschichte, München 1968.

[62] Edward John Russel, John August Voelker: Fifty years of field experiments at the Woburn Experimental Station, Rothamoted Monographs on Agricultural Science, London 1936.

[63] Ernst Klapp: Lehrbuch des Acker- und Pflanzenbaus. Berlin, Hamburg 1967, 611 S.

[64] Justus von Liebig: Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikulturchemie und Physiologie, Braunschweig 1840.

[65] Asmus Petersen: Schultz-Lupitz und sein Vermächtnis, Stiftung Ökologischer Landbau (SÖL), Sonderausgabe Nr. 38, 2. Aufl. 1992, 66 S. Mit Vorworten von Gerhardt Preuschen und Wolfgang Schaumann.

[66] Heraclitus (pre-Socratic philosopher, approximately 520–460 BC), Fragment DK B 53: "War is the father of all things, the king of all things. Some it makes gods, others men,

[67] Friedrich Aereboe: Allgemeine landwirtschaftliche Betriebslehre, Berlin 1920.

[68] According to information from the Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte e.V. Ffm.

[69] Laut Auskunft der Gesellschaft für Agrargeschichte e.V. Ffm.

[70] Cf. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Questio 10, Proemium.

[71] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethes Werke, "Urworte Orphisch," Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 1, Munich 1978, p. 359.

[72] Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft, GA 23, Dornach 1976.

[73] Cf. in particular: Rudolf Steiner: Die großen Fragen der Zeit und die anthroposophische Geisterkenntnis, GA 336, Basel 2019; and idem: Zu sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen, GA 332b, Dornach, Basel 2020.

[74] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999.

[75] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, S.103.

[76] Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, S. 42.

[77] Ibid., S. 43.

[78] See especially: Andreas Suchantke: Metamorphose: Kunstgriff der Evolution, Stuttgart 2002, 332 pp.

[79] Rudolf Steiner: *Die Erkenntnis des Menschenwesens nach Leib, Seele und Geist. Über frühe Erdenzustände*, GA 347, Vortrag vom 9. August 1922, Dornach 1995, S. 53.

[80] Ebd., S. 61.

[81] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.

[82] Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924.

[83] Ibid.

[84] The supposition is that formation is predominantly a winter process and dissolution (weathering) a summer process.

[85] Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Cf. the research of Gerhard Jentzsch at the Chair for Applied Geophysics at the University of Jena.

[88] Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, Dornach 1995, lectures of 10 and 12 June 1924.

[89] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, insbesondere Vortrag vom 16. Juni 1924. – For this concept of nutrition and feeding see in particular the lecture of 16 June 1924.

[90] Rudolf Steiner: An Outline of Esoteric Science, GA 13, chapter "The Members of the Human Being", Dornach 1989.

[91] See e.g. Astronomia magna oder die ganze Philosophia saga der Großen und Kleinen Welt (1537/38): «Denn alle creata seind buchstaben und bücher, des menschen herkomen zu beschreiben.» (For all created things are letters and books to describe the origin of man.) – From: Theophrast von Hohenheim gen. Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, 1. Abteilung, hrsg. von Karl Sudhoff, München-Berlin 1929, Bd. XII, S. 32.

[92] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 12, München 1987.

[93] Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, S. 147.

[94] Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst, GA 27, Dornach 1991, S. 35.

[95] Vgl. hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Dornach 1999, GA 327, insbesondere die Vorträge vom 7., 10. und 14. Juni 1924.

[96] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 68f.

[97] Leonard Jentgens: Vom Altersklassen-Einheitsforst zum naturgemäßen Dauerwald, Borchen 2015, 60 S.

[98] Walther Cloos: Werdende Natur, Dornach 1966, 141 S.

[99] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[100] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, Dornach 2020, darin der Brief «Der Mensch in seiner makrokosmischen Wesenheit» (The human being in his macrocosmic being).

[101] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 97.

[102] Ebd., Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 193.

[103] Ebd., Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924.

[104] Ibid., lectures of 2, 3, 4 November 1923.

[105] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd.

[106] Rudolf Steiner: Die Apokalypse des Johannes, GA 104, Dornach 1985.

[107] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 19. Oktober 1923.

[108] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 27. Oktober 1923.

[109] Siehe z.B.: Einhard Bezzel und Roland Prinzinger: Ornithologie, Stuttgart 1990, S. 269.

[110] Ernst-Michael Kranich: Wesensbilder der Tiere. Einführung in goetheanistische Zoologie, Stuttgart 2004, 386 S. – Siehe auch die Aussagen Rudolf Steiners in: Die Welt der Vögel, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Hans-Christian Zehnter, Basel 2015, 288 S. sowie in: Die Welt der Tiere. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Hans-Christian Zehnter, Basel 2007, 182 S.

[111] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 19. Oktober 1923.

[112] Ebd., Vortrag vom 3. November 1923.

[113] Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, Seite 31. Siehe auch ders.: Säugetiere und Mensch, Stuttgart 2012, 1255 S.

[114] Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, Seite 31. Siehe auch ders.: Säugetiere und Mensch, Stuttgart 2012, 1255 S.

[115] Siehe hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, Vortrag vom 26. Oktober 1923, GA 230, Dornach 1993, S. 73. Siehe auch: Hans-Christian Zehnter (Hrsg.) Warum singen Vögel?, Zürich 2018, 240 S.

[116] Hans Steiner: «Die Lebensgemeinschaft des Apfelbaums» (The living community of the apple tree), Der Obstbau Nr. 3–5, 1958.

[117] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 183/84.

[118] Norbert Bennecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere , Stuttgart 2000, 470 S.

[119] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993, Vortrag vom 3. November 1923.

[120] Rudolf Steiner: Natur- und Geistwesen – ihr Wirken in unserer sichtbaren Welt, Vortrag vom 2. Februar 1908, vormittags, GA 98, Dornach 1996.

[121] Rudolf Steiner: Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, GA 102, Dornach 2001, Vorträge vom 16. Mai 1908, 1. Juni 1908, 4. Juni 1908.

[122] Christian Morgenstern: Wer vom Ziel nichts weiß, Aphorismen, Piper, München 1964, S. 89.

[123] Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 28. November 1923. – Siehe auch: Rudolf Steiner: Die Welt der Bienen, herausgegeben und kommentiert von Martin Dettli.

[124] Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 28. November 1923.

[125] Beate und Leopold Peitz: Hühnerhalten, Stuttgart 1995, 187 S.

[126] Ebd.

[127] Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.

[128] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 59.

[129] Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.

[130] Ibid., p. 226.

[131] Ibid., p. 348.

[132] Bernhard Grzimek: Grzimeks Tierleben, Enzyklopädie des Tierreichs, Band 13, Säugetiere 4, München 1971, S. 470.

[133] Norbert Benecke: Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, Stuttgart 1994, S. 247.

[134] Norbert Benecke: *Der Mensch und seine Haustiere*, Stuttgart 1994, 470 S.

[135] Bernhard Grzimek: *Grzimeks Tierleben, Enzyklopädie des Tierreichs*, Band 13, Säugetiere 4, Augsburg 2000, S. 375.

[136] Ebd., S. 377.

[137] See e.g.: Rudolf Steiner: *Natur- und Geistwesen – ihr Wirken in unserer sichtbaren Welt*, GA 98, Vortrag vom 7. Juni 1908, Dornach 1996, S. 96–97.

[138] Anita Idel: Die Kuh ist kein Klimakiller, Marburg 2012, 210 S.

[139] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, Seite 59.

[140] Siehe z.B.: Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Vortrag vom 6. April 1912.

[141] Klaus Löffler, Gotthold Gäbel, Helga Pfannkuche: Anatomie und Physiologie der Haustiere, Stuttgart 2018, 375 S.

[142] Rolf Krahmer, Lothar Schröder: Anatomie der Haustiere, Leipzig 1985, S. 201ff.

[143] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, pp. 96 ff.

[144] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 16. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 201.

[145] Ebd., Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, S. 98.

[146] Ebd., S. 99.

[147] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Italienische Reise, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 11, München 1978, S. 269; Ausspruch von Bauern auf Sizilien, 19. April 1787.

[148] Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg): Fragmente 1, Bd. 1, Heidelberg 1957, S. 35.

[149] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1979.

[150] Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.

[151] See Rudolf Steiner: Soziale Ideen, soziale Wirklichkeit, soziale Praxis, GA 337a, Studienabend vom 16. Juni 1920, Dornach 1999, pp. 220f.

[152] Trauger Groh, Steven Mc Fadden: Farms of Tomorrow Revisited, Community Supported Farms – Farm Supported Communities, Kimberton 1997, 312 pp.

[153] Tom Petherick: Biodynamics in Practice, Life on a Community owned Farm, Sophia Books, The Square, Forest Row 2010, 128 pp.

[154] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I, Vers 1973, Hamburger Ausgabe, Dramatische Dichtungen, Bd. 1, München 1976.

[155] Siehe z.B. Rudolf Steiner: Wahrspruchworte, GA 40, Dornach 1998.

[156] Needs arise from the depths of the body's unconscious and from the more light-filled substrata of soul-spiritual experience. They are rooted in the will, in which the spiritual ground of the human being — the I — lives. In bodily need, hunger and thirst for example, the impulse stirs to compensate an imbalance in the functional activities of the bodily organs. The soul-spiritual need strives to free itself from its bondage to bodily processes and to place itself freely in the service of ethico-moral ideals. Thus needs are, by their content, spiritual in nature; the means of their satisfaction are a task of economic life.

[157] Siehe hierzu z.B.: Rudolf Isler, Ueli Hurter: Assoziatives Wirtschaften. Was verstand Rudolf Steiner unter einer wirtschaftlichen Assoziation?, Dornach 2019, 96 S.; sowie: Stefan Leber (Hrsg.): Die wirtschaftlichen Assoziationen, Beiträge zur Brüderlichkeit im Wirtschaftsleben, Band 2, Stuttgart 1987, 352 S.

[158] Betriebsgemeinschaft Dottenfelderhof, Bad Vilbel, Deutschland.

[159] On this term see Rudolf Steiner: Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft 1923/24, GA 260, Dornach 1994, Nr. 11 der Statuten, S. 53.

[160] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Gemeinschaftsbildung, GA 257, Vortrag vom 27. Februar 1923, Dornach 1989, S. 116.

[161] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 8, München 1972, «Zweites Buch».

[162] Adalbert Graf von Keyserlingk: Koberwitz 1924, Stuttgart 1974, S. 70.

[163] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaft und soziale Frage, in: Luzifer – Gnosis 1903–1908, GA 34, Dornach 1987, S. 213: «Das Heil einer Gesamtheit von zusammenarbeitenden Menschen ist um so größer, je weniger der einzelne die Erträgnisse seiner Leistungen für sich beansprucht, das heißt, je mehr er von diesen Erträgnissen an seine Mitarbeiter abgibt, und je mehr seine eigenen Bedürfnisse nicht aus seinen Leistungen, sondern aus den Leistungen der anderen befriedigt werden.» (The well-being of a totality of cooperating human beings is the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the yields of his own achievements, that is to say, the more he gives away of these yields to his co-workers, and the more his own needs are met not out of his own achievements but out of the achievements of the others.)

[164] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd. – Siehe auch: Stefan Leber (Hrsg.): Das soziale Hauptgesetz, Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Arbeit und Einkommen, Stuttgart 1986, 280 S.

[165] John 8:32.

[166] See, among others: Rudolf Steiner: Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, GA 23, Dornach 1976; and idem: Zu sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Fragen der Gegenwart, GA 332b, Dornach 2020.

[167] Jochen Bockemühl: «Elemente und Äther – Betrachtungsweisen der Welt» (Elements and ether – modes of contemplation of the world), in: Ders. (Hrsg.): Erscheinungsformen des Ätherischen. Wege zum Erfahren des Lebendigen in Natur und Mensch, Stuttgart 1985, S. 11–56.

[168] Jochen Bockemühl: Ebd.

[169] J.W. Goethe: Faust, Part Two, line 6922, Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 3, Munich 1976.

[170] Jochen Bockemühl: Ibid.

[171] See, for example, Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[172] See, for example, Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.

[173] A phenomenon that is scarcely any longer to be observed in modern varieties bred for high nitrogen tolerance.

[174] Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 6. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 23.

[175] Die Griechen nannten den Kristallhimmel Uranos (griech. Οὐρανός, Ouranos; lat. Uranus, Coelus oder Caelum, Himmelsgewölbe). Der Kristallhimmel kommt in Dantes Göttlicher Komödie vor. In der esoterisch-okkulten Tradition bewahrt er die Früchte einer vorhergehenden Evolutionsreihe auf. Er umfasst das Himmelsgewölbe und den Fixsternhimmel.

[176] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 49.

[177] Willi Laatsch: Dynamik der Mitteleuropäischen Mineralböden, Dresden und Leipzig 1957, 280 S.

[178] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 11 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 82f.

[179] Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, p. 47.

[180] Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., p. 46.

[181] Ernst Haeckel: Generelle Morphologie, Band II: Allgemeine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, 1866/1906.

[182] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[183] Wilhelm Troll, Karl Höhn: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1972, 994 S.

[184] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.

[185] Gerhard Geisler: Pflanzenbau, Berlin-Hamburg 1988, 2. Aufl., S. 132.

[186] Wilhelm Troll, Karl Höhn: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1972, S. 499.

[187] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 14 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 155.

[188] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 55.

[189] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Notizen im Anhang, S. 274.

[190] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 59.

[191] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, S. 192.

[192] Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Inst. f. Biol.-Dyn. Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.

[193] Johannes Klein: Der Einfluss verschiedener Düngearten in gestaffelter Dosierung auf Qualität und Haltbarkeit pflanzlicher Produkte, Inst. f. Biol.-Dyn. Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.

[194] Ilias Samaras: Nachernteverhalten unterschiedlich gedüngter Gemüsearten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung physiologischer und mikrobieller Parameter, Dissertation, Gießen 1977.

[195] Herbert Koepf, Bo D. Petterson, Wolfgang Schaumann: Biologische Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1980, 303 S.

[196] Wilfried Kamphausen: «Qualität im biologisch-dynamischen Obstbau» (Quality in biodynamic fruit cultivation), in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, 377 S.

[197] Paul Doesburg et al.: «Standardisation and performance of a visual Gestalt evaluation of biocrystallisation patterns reflecting ripening and decomposition processes in food samples». '<Biological Agriculture & Horticulture: An International Journal for sustainable Production Systems, 2014, S. 1–18.

[198] See e.g. Rudolf Steiner: Der Jahreskreislauf als Atmungsvorgang der Erde und die vier großen Festeszeiten, GA 223, Dornach 1990.

[199] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, discussion of questions, 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 109.

[200] Chaotization means the transference of the formed into the unformed condition. In the present case this means: to break open mechanically, loosen, and mix the soil structure that had grown through complex life processes over the course of the preceding year (soil tilth); to stir it up, to displace the soil particles vertically and horizontally. The living topsoil shaped by life is brought by degrees toward the inorganic condition of a spatial side-by-side. This mechanical chaotization prepares the soil for the reception of the in-raying formative forces of winter and the newly enlivening planetary and solar formative forces of the coming spring.

[201] Walter Feuerlein: Geräte zur Bodenbearbeitung, Stuttgart 1971, S. 40.

[202] Ebd., S. 39.

[203] Rudolf Steiner: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst, GA 27, Dornach 1991, S. 25 f.

[204] Siehe auch: Hermann Poppelbaum: «Begriff und Wirkungsweise des Ätherleibs» (Concept and mode of operation of the etheric body), in Jochen Bockemühl (Hrsg.): Erscheinungsformen des Ätherischen, Stuttgart 1985, S. 179–195.

[205] Hermann Poppelbaum: Ebd.

[206] Ernst Marti: Die vier Äther – zu Rudolf Steiners Ätherlehre, Stuttgart 2016, 60 S.

[207] Gerhard Geisler: Pflanzenbau. Ein Lehrbuch – Biologische Grundlagen und Technik der Pflanzenproduktion, Berlin-Hamburg, 1988, S. 506.

[208] Eduard von Boguslawski: Ackerbau, Grundlagen der Pflanzenproduktion, Frankfurt 1981, S. 237 f.

[209] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 80.

[210] Ebd., S. 80.

[211] Ebd., S. 71.

[212] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 80.

[213] Ebd., S. 80.

[214] Ebd., S. 71.

[215] Wolfgang Holzner, Johann Glauninger: Ackerunkräuter: Bestimmung, Biologie, Landwirtschaftliche Bedeutung, Graz 2005, 264 S.

[216] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 155 f.

[217] Ebd., S. 156.

[218] Lilly Kolisko: «Der Mond und das Pflanzenwachstum» (The moon and plant growth), in Gäa Sophia, Bd. II, Dornach 1927, S. 349–357.

[219] Hartmut Spieß: «Chronobiologische Untersuchungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung lunarer Rhythmen im biologisch-dynamischen Pflanzenbau» (Chronobiological investigations with particular consideration of lunar rhythms in biodynamic plant cultivation), Schriftreihe Institut für Biologisch-Dynamische Forschung, Bd. 3, Darmstadt 1994, 272 S.

[220] Jürgen Appel: «Unkrautregulierung ohne Herbizide. Erfahrungen auf Betrieben der biologisch-dynamischen und organisch-biologischen Wirtschaftsweisen» (Weed regulation without herbicides. Experiences from farms working in the biodynamic and organic-biological modes), Schriftreihe Lebendige Erde, Darmstadt 1982, 113 S.

[221] Ebd.

[222] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.

[223] Ebd., S. 155.

[224] Helmut Voitl, Elisabeth Guggenberger, Josef Willi: Das große Buch vom biologischen Land- und Gartenbau, Wien 1992, 367 S.

[225] Siehe z.B. Rudolf Steiner: Meditative Betrachtungen und Anleitungen zur Vertiefung der Heilkunst, GA 316, Dornach 2003, Vortrag vom 3. Januar 1924, S. 33 f.

[226] Rudolf Steiner: *Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft*, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 109.

[227] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 11.

[228] Ebd., S. 20.

[229] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Von der Natur zur Unternatur» (From nature to sub-nature), Dornach 1998, S. 255 ff.

[230] Rudolf Steiner: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, GA27, Dornach 1991, S. 20).

[231] Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, Kap. X. «Wissen und Handeln im Lichte der Goetheschen Denkweise» (Knowing and acting in the light of Goethe's way of thinking), GA 1, Dornach 1987, S. 171.

[232] Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, Kap XVI. «Goethe als Denker und Forscher» (Goethe as thinker and researcher), GA 1, Dornach 1987, S. 274.

[233] Cited in Jos Verhulst: Der Glanz von Kopenhagen, geistige Perspektiven der modernen Physik, Stuttgart 1994, p. 15.

[234] Ibid., p. 17.

[235] Ibid., p. 173.

[236] Rudolf Steiner: Konferenzen mit den Lehrern der freien Waldorfschule Stuttgart,2. Bd., GA 300b, Konferenz vom 21. Juni 1922, Dornach 2019, S. 152.

[237] Martin Rozumek, Peter Buck (Hrsg.): Das Chemische und die Stoffe, Zugänge zur Chemie, Dornach 2008, Kap.: «Einleitung», S. 7.

[238] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 64f.

[239] Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, GA 9, Dornach 2003, S. 50.

[240] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflektionen, Nr. 720, Hamburger Ausgabe, Bd. 12, München 1987.

[241] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 42.

[242] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 47.

[243] Manfred Klett: Die boden- und gesteinsbürtige Stofffracht von Oberflächengewässern, Arbeiten der Landwirtschaftlichen Hochschule Hohenheim, Bd. 35, 1965, S. 42.

[244] Martin Hartmann et al. (2015): Distinct soil microbial diversity under long-term organic and conventional farming, ISME Journal, 9, S. 1177–1194.

[245] Christoph Felgentreu, Kirsten Engelke: Konzepte zur Erhaltung der Bodenfruchtbarkeit, Deutsche Saatveredelung AG, Lippstadt.

[246] Lexikon der Biologie, https: www.spektrum.de.

[247] Rudolf Steiner: Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen, Erdenleben und Sternenwirken, GA 354, Vortrag vom 9. August 1924, Dornach 2000, S. 154.

[248] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 73.

[249] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 192.

[250] Ebd., S. 192.

[251] Ebd., Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 122.

[252] Helmut Snoek, Horst Wülfrath: Das Buch vom Steinmehl, Entstehung, Verwendung und Bedeutung im Land- und Gartenbau, Hamburg 2000, 144 S.

[253] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 12 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 94.

[254] Ibid., discussion of questions, 12 June 1924, p. 117.

[255] Georg Wagner: Einführung in die Erd- und Landschaftsgeschichte, Öhringen 1960, 694+208 S.

[256] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.

[257] Ebd., Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, S. 91.

[258] Krafft von Heynitz, Georg Merckens: Das biologische Gartenbuch, Stuttgart 1994, 351 S.

[259] In Bezug auf die praktische Handhabe der Kompostbereitung sei auf die einschlägigen Publikationen der oben genannten Autoren verwiesen; sowie auf Friedrich Sattler, Eckard von Wistinghausen: Der landwirtschaftliche Betrieb, Biologisch-Dynamisch, Stuttgart 1989, 333 S.; sowie auf Herbert Koepf, Wolfgang Schaumann, Manon Hacius: Biologisch-dynamische Landwirtschaft: Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 1996, 368 S.

[260] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 90.

[261] Jochen Bockemühl: Vom Leben des Komposthaufens, Dornach 1981, 67 S.

[262] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 92.

[263] Rudolf Steiner: Grundelemente der Esoterik, GA 93a, 30. September 1905, Dornach 1987, S. 44 f.

[264] Siehe hierzu Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, Kap. «Die Weltentwicklung und der Mensch» (The evolution of the world and the human being), GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[265] Krafft von Heynitz: Kompost im Garten, Stuttgart 1999, 127 S.

[266] Oral communication from Matthias Guépin, lecturer at Emerson College (GB) and adviser in Kenya.

[267] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 15 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 184.

[268] KTBL: Faustzahlen für den ökologischen Landbau, Darmstadt 2015, 760 S.

[269] KTBL: Faustzahlen für den ökologischen Landbau, Darmstadt 2015, 760 S.

[270] Herbert Koepf, Bo D. Petterson, Wolfgang Schaumann: Biologische Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1980, 303 S.

[271] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 47.

[272] Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Darmstadt 1968, 117 S.

[273] Wilhelm Troll: Allgemeine Botanik, Stuttgart 1959, 927 S.; Gerbert Grohmann: Die Pflanze, Berlin 2013, 448 S.; Jochen Bockemühl: «Bildebewegungen im Laubblattbereich höherer Pflanzen» (Formative movements in the foliage-leaf region of higher plants), Elemente der Naturwissenschaft Nr. 4: 7–23, 1966.

[274] Ehrenfried Pfeiffer: 1899–1961, pioneer of applied anthroposophical research; developed, proceeding from indications by Rudolf Steiner for the investigation of formative forces, the method of sensitive copper chloride crystallisation; prepared, together with Guenther Wachsmuth (1893–1963) under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner, the horn manure preparation for the first time in 1922/23. Until the end of the 1930s, together with Guenther Wachsmuth, in the leadership of the research laboratory at the Goetheanum. From the end of the 1930s onwards, farmer and agricultural consultant in the USA.

[275] Alla Selawry, Olleg Selawry: Die Kupferchloridkristallisation in Naturwissenschaft und Medizin, Stuttgart 1957, 232 S.

[276] Friedrich Vincenz von Hahn: Thesigraphie, Wiesbaden 1962, 244 S.

[277] H. Krüger: Kupferchloridkristallisationen, ein Reagenz auf Gestaltungskräfte des Lebendigen, Weleda – Schriftenreihe 1/1950.

[278] Magda Enquist: Strukturveränderungen im Kupferchloridkristallisationsbild von Pflanzen durch Alterung und Düngung, Lebendige Erde 3, 1961.

[279] Bo D. Petterson (1967): Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Kristallisationsmethode mit Kupferchlorid nach Pfeiffer, Lebendige Erde 18 (1): S. 15–31.

[280] Paul Doesburg, Machteld Huber, Jens-Otto Andersen, Miriam Athmann, Guus van der Bie, Jürgen Fritz, Uwe Geier, Joop Hoekman, Johannes Kahl, Gaby Mergardt & Nicolaas Busscher (2014): «Standardization and performance of a visual Gestalt evaluation of biocrystallization patterns reflecting ripening and decomposition processes in food samples», Biological Agriculture & Horticulture: An International Journal for Sustainable Production Systems, DOI: 10.1080/01448765.2014.993705.

[281] Ernst Klapp: Lehrbuch des Acker- und Pflanzenbaus, Berlin-Hamburg 1958, 503 S.; Edward John Russel: The World of the Soil, London 1957, 242 S.

[282] Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.

[283] Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie, Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.

[284] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S.122: «Man muss die Erde direkt beleben, und das kann man nicht, wenn man mineralisierend vorgeht, das kann man nur, wenn man mit Organischem vorgeht, das man in eine entsprechende Lage bringt, sodass es organisierend, belebend auf das Feste, Erdige selber wirken kann.» (One must enliven the earth directly, and that one cannot do if one proceeds in a mineralizing way; one can only do it if one proceeds with what is organic, bringing it into such a condition that it can act in an organizing, enlivening way upon the solid, earthly itself.)

[285] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vorträge vom 12. und 13. Juni 1924.

[286] Christian von Wistinghausen et al.: Anleitung zur Anwendung der biologisch-dynamischen Feldspritz- und Düngerpräparate , Arbeitsheft 2, Darmstadt 2005, 92 S.

[287] Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.

[288] Ueli Hurter et al. (2018): Biodynamische Präparate-Praxis weltweit – Die Fallbeispiele, Darmstadt, 364 S.

[289] Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.

[290] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[291] Rudolf Steiner: Theosophie – Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung, GA 9, Dornach 2003.

[292] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 58: «Wir stehen auch vor einer großen Umwandlung des Innern der Natur.» (We also stand before a great transformation of the inner being of nature.)

[293] Rudolf Steiner: Das Verhältnis der Anthroposophie zur Naturwissenschaft. Grundlagen und Methoden, GA 75, Vortrag vom 17. Juni 1920, Dornach 2010.

[294] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 58: «Wir stehen auch vor einer großen Umwandlung des Innern der Natur.» (We also stand before a great transformation of the inner being of nature.)

[295] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924.

[296] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1979, S. 42.

[297] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 120.

[298] Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.

[299] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlage zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 15. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 120.

[300] Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.

[301] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen, in: Goethes Werke. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, hrsg. v. Rudolf Steiner, Band 1, in: Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Berlin und Stuttgart 1887 (Reprint Dornach 1975).

[302] «Das Tier wird durch seine Organe belehrt; der Mensch belehrt die seinigen und beherrscht sie» (The animal is instructed by its organs; the human being instructs his own and masters them), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen, «Aus dem Nachlass – Über Natur und Naturwissenschaft» (From the literary estate – On Nature and Natural Science).

[303] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde, GA 107, Dornach 1988, Vortrag «Evolution, Involution und Schöpfung aus dem Nichts» (Evolution, involution, and creation out of nothing), 17. Juni 1909.

[304] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Die Metamorphose der Pflanze, Stuttgart 1985, S. 39.

[305] Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman: Grundlegendes für eine Erweiterung der Heilkunst nach geisteswissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen, GA 27, Kap. V. «Pflanze, Tier, Mensch», Dornach 1991, S. 35.

[306] Ebd.

[307] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[308] Rudolf Steiner: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.

[309] Die folgende Darstellung ist eine überarbeitete Fassung von Beiträgen des Verfassers in Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft– Gedanken, Erfahrungen, Forschungsergebnisse, eine Werkstattarbeit, Dornach 2007, S. 93–107.

[310] Rudolf Steiner: Das Faust-Problem. Die romantische und die klassische Walpurgisnacht, GA 273, Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethes Faust, Bd. II, Vortrag vom 27. Januar 1917, Dornach 1981, S. 75.

[311] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, A 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 99.

[312] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 49.

[313] Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 5. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 62: «So sehen Sie, dass wir durchaus jetzt, wo wir in die Zeit des sprießenden, sprossenden Lebens kommen, nicht sprechen können von geistdurchwobener Materie wie im Winter für die Erde, sondern wie wir sprechen müssen von materiedurchwobenem […] Geist.» (So you see that now, when we come into the time of sprouting, burgeoning life, we can by no means speak of spirit-interwoven matter as we do in winter for the earth, but how we must speak rather of matter-interwoven […] spirit.)

[314] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 82: «Das Kieselige ist der allgemeine äußere Sinn im Irdischen.» (The siliceous is the general outer sense within the earthly.)

[315] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 47/48.

[316] Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, GA 229, Vortrag vom 12. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 62.

[317] Cf. Theodor Schwenk: Das sensible Chaos, Stuttgart 2010, 216 S.

[318] Vgl. Theodor Schwenk: Das sensible Chaos, Stuttgart 2010, 216 S.

[319] Bernd Roßlenbroich: Die rhythmische Organisation des Menschen: Aus der chrono-biologischen Forschung, Stuttgart 1994, 163 S.

[320] Notizbuch Nr. 52, 1921; siehe auch Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Nr. 104, S. 63.

[321] Paul Schatz (1898–1979): Anthroposophisch orientierter Mathematiker, Techniker und Erfinder.

[322] A. John Wilkes: Das Flowform-Phänomen: Die verborgene rhythmische Energie des Wassers, Stuttgart 2008, 239 S.

[323] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 104.

[324] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung. – Gunter Gebhard: Geologe und Biologe, langjähriger Oberstufenlehrer an der Waldorfschule Überlingen; jetzt Dozent für goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft und Waldorfpädagogik in Russland und in landwirtschaftlichen Ausbildungsstätten in Deutschland.

[325] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 102.

[326] Rudolf Steiner: Die Schöpfung der Welt und des Menschen. Erdenleben und Sternenwirken. Über die Gerüche, GA 354, Vortrag vom 24. August 1924, Dornach 2000, S. 154.

[327] Ilias Samares: Nachernteverhalten unterschiedlich gedüngter Gemüsesorten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung physiologischer und mikrobiologischer Parameter. Forschungsring für biologisch-dynamische Wirtschaftsweise, Darmstadt 1980, 153 S.

[328] Manfred Klett: Untersuchungen über Licht- und Schattenqualität in Relation zum Anbau und Test von Kieselpräparaten zur Qualitätshebung, Darmstadt 1968, 117 S.

[329] Johannes Klein: Der Einfluss verschiedener Düngungsarten in gestaffelter Dosierung auf Qualität und Haltbarkeit pflanzlicher Produkte. Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1968.

[330] Uli Johannes König: «Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungsergebnisse zum Nachweis der Präparatewirksamkeit» (Scientific research findings on the evidence of preparation efficacy) in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, S. 157 f.

[331] Uli Johannes König: «Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungsergebnisse zum Nachweis der Präparatewirksamkeit» (Scientific research findings on the evidence of preparation efficacy) in: Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Vertiefung der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Dornach 2007, S. 157 f.

[332] Jochen Bockemühl und Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 153 S. – A study designed to guide the reader from intuitive beholding toward knowledge of the essential being.

[333] Erdmuth-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 S.

[334] Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners, Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenach 2017, 2 Bd. (Bd. 1: 632 S.; Bd. 2: 116 S.).

[335] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 126: «Diese Schafgarbe ist – eigentlich ist es ja jede Pflanze – ein Wunderwerk, aber wenn man wieder eine andere Blume anschaut, dann kommt einem das ganz besonders zu Herzen, was für ein Wunderwerk diese Schafgarbe ist; sie ist ein ganz besonderes Wunderwerk.» (This yarrow is – really every plant is – a marvel, but when one looks again at another flower, then it comes home to one most particularly what a marvel this yarrow is; it is a quite special marvel.)

[336] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, S. 126.

[337] Ebd., S. 129.

[338] Ebd., S. 126.

[339] Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 53.

[340] Ebd., Notizblatt Nr. 9 im Anhang, S. 271: «Der Humus gestaltet das Untere durch die Erde.» (Humus shapes the lower realm through the earth.)

[341] Rudolf Steiner: *Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft*, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 126.

[342] Ebd., S. 128.

[343] Ebd., S. 128.

[344] Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: *Von Seelenrätseln*, GA 21, Kap. «6. Die physischen und die geistigen Abhängigkeiten der Menschen-Wesenheit» (6. The physical and spiritual dependencies of the human being), Dornach 1983, S. 158: «In die Sinne erstreckt sich die Außenwelt wie in Golfen hinein in das Wesen des Organismus.» (Into the senses the outer world extends, as into gulfs, into the being of the organism.)

[345] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 13 June 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 128.

[346] Ebd., S. 129.

[347] Ibid., p. 127.

[348] Ibid., p. 127.

[349] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 47.

[350] Ebd., S. 59.

[351] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Notizblatt Nr. 9 im Anhang, S. 271: «Der Humus gestaltet das Untere durch die Erde.» (Humus shapes the lower realm through the earth.)

[352] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Menschheitszukunft und Michaeltätigkeit», Dornach 1998, S. 94f. – The stage of "efficacy" is described by Steiner in the context of Michael's activity and the future of humanity as the living-effective, as distinct from mere physical determinacy on one side and full spiritual revelation on the other.

[353] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 44.

[354] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 129.

[355] Jochen Bockemühl und Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.

[356] Ebd., S. 82.

[357] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 130.

[358] Matthias König, mündliche Mitteilung.

[359] Ebd., S. 130.

[360] Ebd., S. 129.

[361] Ebd., S. 131.

[362] Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, S. 320.

[363] Ibid., pp. 131–132.

[364] Ibid., p. 133.

[365] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 74.

[366] Ebd., S. 75.

[367] Ebd., S. 76.

[368] Ebd., S. 76.

[369] Ibid., lecture of 13 June 1924, p. 137.

[370] Ibid., lecture of 10 June 1924, p. 58.

[371] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 134.

[372] Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.

[373] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 134: «In Bezug auf dasjenige, was dann als Kalzium zutage tritt, ist dasjenige, was an Kalziumstruktur in der Eichenrinde vorhanden ist, das alleridealste.» (With regard to that which then comes to light as calcium, that which exists as calcium-structure in the oak bark is the most ideal of all.)

[374] Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 S.

[375] A thorough study by Jan Albert Rispens exists, devoting a whole chapter to the question of bark and outer bark. He summarises: bast and assimilating cork parenchyma represent what is properly leaf-like; the dying cork bark and outer bark, the flower and fruit organ of the trunk. — Jan Albert Rispens: Bäume verstehen lernen, Stuttgart 2018, S. 157.

[376] Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Fragenbeantwortung vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 147.

[377] Cf. ibid., lecture of 11 June 1924, S. 75: «in das Ununterscheidbare des Weltenalls» (into the indistinguishable of the cosmos).

[378] Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, 154 S.

[379] See: Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 12 June 1924, S. 90.

[380] Hermann von Guttenberg: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik, Berlin 1952, 641 S.

[381] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 12. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 94.

[382] Ebd., Fragenbeantwortung vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 147.

[383] Eduard Strasburger: Lehrbuch der Botanik, Stuttgart 1978, S. 422.

[384] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 134.

[385] Ebd., S. 135.

[386] On the organic formations that serve in the higher animal kingdom to balance an unequal relationship between the polar systems, see among others: Friedrich A. Kipp: «Bezahnung und Bildungsidee des Organismus» (Dentition and the formative idea of the organism), in: Wolfgang Schad (Hrsg.): Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft, Band 3: Zoologie, Stuttgart 1983, S. 167 f.; sowie Andreas Suchantke: «Polarität und Dreigliederung im Tierreich» (Polarity and threefold articulation in the animal kingdom), in: ders.: Metamorphose – Kunstgriff der Evolution, Stuttgart 2002, S. 137 f.

[387] Rolf Krahmer, Lothar Schröder: Anatomie der Haustiere, Leipzig 1985, 368 S.

[388] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 133.

[389] Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners, Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenach 2017, 2 Bd. (Bd. 1: 632 S.; Bd. 2: 116 S.).

[390] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 135.

[391] Ebd., S. 135.

[392] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 60.

[393] Rudolf Steiner: Ibid., lecture of 11 June 1924, pp. 82/83.

[394] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Dornach 1999, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, S. 137.

[395] Ebd., S. 137.

[396] Ebd., S. 135.

[397] Ebd., S. 136.

[398] Ebd., S. 137.

[399] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust II, Verse 4656.

[400] Ibid., p. 137.

[401] Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf der Spurensuche der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, S. 97.

[402] Werner Christian Simonis: Heilpflanzen und Mysterienpflanzen, Wiesbaden 1991, p. 280.

[403] Ibid., p. 282.

[404] Erdmuth-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Stuttgart 2019, 512 pp.

[405] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust I, verse 1939.

[406] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni, Dornach 1999, S. 137.

[407] Ebd., S. 137.

[408] Ebd., S. 137.

[409] Ebd., S. 123–24.

[410] Ebd., S. 137.

[411] Willi Aeppli: Sinnesorganismus, Sinnesverlust, Sinnespflege; Stuttgart 1967; sowie
Dietrich Rapp, Hans-Christian Zehnter: Die zwölf Sinne in der seelischen Beobachtung – Eine Exkursion, Münchenstein 2019, 253 S.

[412] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophie ein Fragment, GA 45, Dornach 2002.

[413] Willi Aeppli: Ebd.; sowie: Dietrich Rapp, Hans-Christian Zehnter: Ebd.

[414] Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, S. 105.

[415] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 137.

[416] Ebd., Fragenbeantwortung vom 14. Juni 1924, S. 175.

[417] Ulrike Remer-Bielitz: Dokumentation zum Rindgekröse; Forschungsring, Materialien Nr. 8, Darmstadt 2001.

[418] Johannes W. Rohen: Funktionelle Anatomie des Menschen, Stuttgart-New York 1993, S. 287.

[419] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Anhang, S. 293.

[420] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., S. 137.

[421] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993.

[422] Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1993.

[423] Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, «Der Mensch in seiner makrokosmischen Wesenheit» (The human being in his macrocosmic being), Dornach 1998.

[424] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 138.

[425] Ebd., S. 138.

[426] Ebd., S. 138.

[427] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 138.

[428] Rudolf Steiner: Ebd., Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, S. 56.

[429] Werner Christian Simonis: Heilpflanzen und Mysterienpflanzen, Wiesbaden 1981, S. 696.

[430] Ebd., S. 593.

[431] Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate , Stuttgart 2019, S. 340.

[432] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Kap. «Die Weltentwicklung und der Mensch» (The evolution of the world and the human being), Dornach 1989, S. 157 ff.

[433] Rudolf Hauschka: Substanzlehre, Frankfurt/Main 1966, S. 51.

[434] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 75/76.

[435] Rudolf Steiner: Mensch und Welt. Das Wirken des Geistes in der Natur. Über das Wesen der Bienen, GA 351, Vortrag vom 20. Oktober 1923, Dornach 1999, S. 72.

[436] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.

[437] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.

[438] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.

[439] Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S. Siehe auch: Ueli Hurter et al. (2018): Biodynamische Präparate-Praxis weltweit – Die Fallbeispiele, Darmstadt, 364 S.

[440] Krafft von Heynitz, Georg Merckens: Das biologische Gartenbuch, Stuttgart 1994, 351 S.

[441] Pierre Masson: Gartenbau und Landwirtschaft biodynamisch, Aarau 2015, 224 S.

[442] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.

[443] Friedrich Scheffer, Paul Schachtschabel: Lehrbuch der Bodenkunde, Berlin 2018, 772 S.

[444] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.

[445] Ribosomes are built up from ribosomal RNA. They originate in the nucleolus within the cell nucleus and form in the plasma the organelles for protein formation (cosmologically, the nucleolus is an equivalent of the Earth within the microcosm of the cell). The cell nucleus corresponds to the Moon sphere, and the cell membrane to the Saturn sphere. The mitochondria possess their own naked DNA, multiply in their own rhythm, and have above all the task of cellular respiration by means of the iron-containing cytochromes. Cosmologically, the mitochondria stand in relation to Mars.

[446] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, GA 313, Vortrag vom 15. April 1921, Dornach 2001, S. 91.

[447] Friedrich Husemann, Otto Wolff: Das Bild des Menschen als Grundlage der Heilkunst, Band II: Zur allgemeinen Pathologie und Therapie, Stuttgart 1991, S. 394.

[448] Ebd., S. 395.

[449] Hermann von Guttenberg: Lehrbuch der allgemeinen Botanik, Berlin 1955, S. 15.

[450] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Gesichtspunkte zur Therapie, GA 313, Vortrag vom 12. April 1924, Dornach 2001, S. 44.

[451] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[452] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.

[453] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 13. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 139.

[454] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 167.

[455] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[456] Vgl. auch: Jean-Michel Florin (Hrsg.): Biologisch-dynamischer Weinbau, Dornach 2020, S. 154 f.

[457] Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der Präparatepflanzen, Dornach 2005, S. 105.

[458] Ebd., S. 107.

[459] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 83.

[460] Christian von Wistinghausen, Wolfgang Scheibe, Eckhard von Wistinghausen: Anleitung zur Herstellung der biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Arbeitsheft Nr. 1, Stuttgart 1998, 96 S.

[461] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 14. Juni 1924, Dornach, 1999, S. 167.

[462] Walter Stappung: Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.

[463] Christian von Wistinghausen, Wolfgang Scheibe, Eckhard von Wistinghausen: Anleitung zur Herstellung der biologisch-dynamischen Präparate, Arbeitsheft Nr. 1, Stuttgart 1998, S. 71.

[464] Siehe hierzu: Ulrich Meyer: «Optimierung der Kieselsäure-Extraktion aus Equisetum arvense – Ergebnisse für die alltägliche Praxis» (Optimization of silicic acid extraction from Equisetum arvense – results for everyday practice), in: Ulrich Meyer, Peter Alsted Pedersen (Hrsg.): Anthroposophische Pharmazie, Berlin 2016, 807 S.

[465] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[466] Rudolf Steiner: *Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture*, GA 327, lecture of 14 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 167.

[467] Walter Stappung: *Die Düngerpräparate Rudolf Steiners – Herstellung und Anwendung*, Rüfenacht 2017, Bd. I + II: 748 S.

[468] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 11 June 1924, Dornach, 1999, p. 64.

[469] Gunter Gebhard: Persönliche Mitteilung.

[470] Gunter Gebhard: Personal communication.

[471] Gunter Gebhard: Personal communication.

[472] Rudolf Steiner: Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture, GA 327, lecture of 10 June 1924, Dornach 1999, p. 60.

[473] Ibid., p. 44.

[474] Cf. Elisabeth Vreede: Astronomie und Anthroposophie, Dornach 1980, p. 75; the same author: Über den Planeten Merkur, in: Kalender Ostern 1942–1943, Arlesheim; and the same author: Texte über Planetensphären in den Rundschreiben 1927–1930 (edited by Liesbeth Bisterbosch and Frauke Roloff, October 2020). — In the course of this emancipation of human consciousness toward an awakening self-consciousness turned toward the earth, it becomes understandable that a confusion of the Venus and Mercury spheres took place. This confusion concerns not the planetary body as such, but their supersensibly force-bearing spheres of working — that for which, since primordial times, these two heavenly bodies, Venus and Mercury, have stood as spiritually and soul-actively working entities.

[475] Lievegoed devoted a thorough study to the polar threefoldness of the manure preparations in their relation to planetary working and the life processes in plant and animal (Bernhard C.J. Lievegoed: Planetenwirken und Lebensprozesse in Mensch und Erde, Stuttgart 2002, 82 pp.). It describes how in the life processes of the preparation plants, a representative of the supra-solar planets stands in a polar working-relationship with one of the sub-solar planets — Saturn with the Moon, Jupiter with Mercury, Mars with Venus — with the Sun in the centre in each case; how the forces of this polar working, through the enveloping by the animal organs exposed to the winter and sun forces, are amplified in their reciprocal interaction and preserved; and how from this there becomes comprehensible what Rudolf Steiner has described as refreshingly enlivening, health-bringing, mutually attuning, sensitising processes in soil and plants.

[476] See: Lothar Vogel: Der dreigliedrige Mensch, Dornach 1979, p. 239.

[477] See: Michaela Glöckler: «Das Nieren-Blasen-System und das Schafgarbenpräparat» (The kidney-bladder system and the yarrow preparation); in: Manfred Klett und Markus Hurter (Hrsg.): Zur Frage der Düngung im biologisch-dynamischen Landbau, Dornach 1994.

[478] See for example: Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110, Dornach 1991; and: Die geistigen Wesen in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1996.

[479] Rudolf Steiner: Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhänge, Bd. V, GA 239, Vortrag vom 9. Juni 1924, Dornach 1985, S. 166.

[480] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 55.

[481] Ibid., lecture of 13 June 1924, p. 138.

[482] Rudolf Steiner: Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhänge, GA 239, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1985, S. 172.

[483] Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Dornach 1989.

[484] Jochen Bockemühl: Vom Leben des Komposthaufens, Sonderdruck Elemente der Naturwissenschaft Nr. 29: S. 1–67, Dornach 1978.

[485] Herbert Koepf: Landbau, natur-und menschengemäß. Methoden und Praxen der biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaft, Stuttgart 1984, 270 S.

[486] Ebd., 1980.

[487] Uli Johannes König: Ergebnisse aus der Präparateforschung, Schriftenreihe Band 12, Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1999, Loseblattsammlung.

[488] Paul Mäder et al.: Erkenntnisse aus 21 Jahren DOK-Versuch. FiBL Dossier: Bio fördert Bodenfruchtbarkeit und Artenvielfalt, Frick 2000, 16 S.

[489] Uli Johannes König: Ergebnisse aus der Präparateforschung, Schriftenreihe Band 12, Institut für biologisch-dynamische Forschung, Darmstadt 1999, Loseblattsammlung.

[490] Ebd., siehe die dortige Literaturzusammenstellung.

[491] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Ansprache vom 11. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 234.

[492] Rudolf Steiner: Der Jahreskreislauf als Atmungsvorgang der Erde und die vier großen Festeszeiten. Die Anthroposophie und das menschliche Gemüt, GA 229, Vortrag vom 28. September 1923, Dornach 1923, S. 117.

[493] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 20. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 21.

[494] See Rudolf Steiner: Die Philosophie der Freiheit, GA 4, Dornach 1995.

[495] See Rudolf Steiner: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?, GA 10, Dornach 1992.

[496] Christian Morgenstern: Werke und Briefe. Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Band II, Lyrik 1906–14, Stuttgart 1992, S. 213 f.

[497] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethes Werke. Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, hrsg. v. Rudolf Steiner, Band 1, in: Kürschners Deutsche National-Litteratur, Berlin und Stuttgart 1887 (Reprint Dornach 1975): «Einleitung zum ersten Band» (Introduction to the first volume), S. XXXI.

[498] Vgl. Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Wirkenskräfte im Zusammenleben von alter und junger Generation; Pädagogischer Jugendkurs, GA 217, Dornach 1988.

[499] Steiner Rudolf: Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit, GA 15, Dornach 1987, S. 66.

[500] Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft, GA 327, Vortrag vom 10. Juni 1924, Dornach 1999, S. 42: «Nun, eine Landwirtschaft erfüllt eigentlich ihr Wesen im besten Sinne des Wortes, wenn sie aufgefasst werden kann als eine Art Individualität für sich, eine wirklich in sich geschlossene Individualität.» (Now, an agriculture truly fulfills its essential nature, in the best sense of the word, when it can be conceived as a kind of individuality unto itself, an individuality truly self-contained within itself.)

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Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/en

Table of Contents

Foreword

Vorwort

Part One

The Polarity of Industry and Agriculture

The Ancient Indian Culture

The Ancient Persian Culture

The Cultures of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia

The Greco-Roman Culture

The Culture of the Modern Era

The cultural streams of agriculture up to the Turning Point of Time

The Event of the Turning Point of Time, the Mystery of Golgotha

Point and Periphery

The organism principle in the modern era

The New Germs

The Fourfold Nature of the Human Being and the Self-Containedness of the Farm Organism

The Image of the Fourfoldness of the Farm Individuality

The Physical Organisation

The Life Organisation

Crop Rotation in Arable Farming and Market Gardening:

The Re-integration of Market Gardening into the Farm and Village Organism:

The Re-integration of Fruit Growing into the Farm and Village Organism:

The Integration and Preservation of Meadows and Pastures:

The planting of hedgerows, copses and tree islands:

The forest:

The Soul Organisation, or the Astral Body of the Agricultural Organism

The Wild Animal Species — Organs of the Farm-and-Landscape Organism

Domestic Animals — Organs in the Farm-and-Landscape Organism

The Honeybee

Domestic Poultry

The Domestic Pig

Horse and Donkey

Dog and Cat

Sheep and Goat

Das Rind (*Bos taurus*) gilt nach gängiger Auffassung als Nachkomme des Ur- oder Auerochsen (*Bos primigenius*).[134] "Modern zoological domestic-animal research regards [...] today with certainty only one wild bovine, the aurochs, as the sole ancestral form of domesticated cattle."[135]

Position within the Farm Organism

Stellung im Betriebsorganismus

Manifest Appearance and Knowledge of the Essential Being

Oral Digestion

Rumen Digestion and Rumination

Rumination: A Perceiving and Sifting of Substances and Forces

Small and Large Intestine Digestion

The Threshold from the Outer World to the Inner World

The Significance of the Horns and Hooves

Cosmic-Qualitative Analysis and I-Disposition

Surplus Performances

Renunciation

The Cattle Herd and the Farm Organism

Spiritual Research as Mediator between Being and Appearance

Aspects of the Social Question

On the Formation and Capacity for Action of Agricultural Farm Communities

Willing in Freedom, the Path toward the Initiative Community

Feeling in Equanimity — the Path toward a Living Sense of Right

Thinking in Human Fellowship (Brotherhood), the Path toward Solidary Economic Life

On the Spiritual Development and Leadership of an Agricultural Farm Community

The Spiritual Aim of Striving

The Practice of Working Together

The Morning Work-Meeting

The Farm Organism and the I-Willed Work of the Human Being

Impulses of Biodynamic Farming for the Development of the Social Organism

Willing in Freedom

Feeling in Equality

Thinking in Brotherhood or Fellow-Humanity

Part Two

The Agricultural Individuality and the Three Pillars of Soil Fertility

First Pillar:

On the Nature of Soil Cultivation in Connection with Soil Development in the Course of the Year

The Soil

The Winter Process and Soil Cultivation

The Formation of Frost Tilth

Bearership and Preservation of the Cosmic Formative Forces in the Course of the Year

In Spring

Crust Formation and Skin Tillage

Der Sommerprozess und die Bodenbearbeitung

Stubble Breaking, Mulch Cultivation, Humus Building, and the Activity of the Soil Animal World

Fruit Formation and Ripening

The implements for summer mulch cultivation

Das Rind (Bos taurus) gilt nach gängiger Auffassung als Nachkomme des Ur- oder Auerochsen (Bos primigenius).^[134] "Modern zoological domestic-animal research regards [...] today with certainty only one wild bovine, the aurochs, as the sole ancestral form of domesticated cattle."^[135]

The Horn Manure and Horn Silica Preparations — Manufacture, Application and Efficacy^[309]