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Manfred Klett: Das Organismusprinzip (engl.)
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
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On the Concept of the Organism
Materialistic thinking, directed solely towards sensory-physical bodily nature, cannot grasp the concept of the organism. Only parts appear, which belong collectively to a body. One finds in the parts no causal occasion to unite themselves collectively into this or that body. How, then, can one approach wholeness — and with it the concept of the organism? To this end, one must direct the gaze of thinking towards the kingdoms of nature that build upon one another and, beyond these, towards the human being. Along this path, the concept of organism gains contour ever more distinctly, until it finally finds its completion in the human being. Against this background, it may be characterised in general terms as follows: the organism has as its starting point a germ, which encloses an unmanifest. As soon as this germ finds the conditions for its development, its unmanifest reveals itself in flowing transitions through stages of its unfolding into sensory perceptibility. The unmanifest reveals itself, image-like, in stages within the stream of time. The organism appears in its completion when it gives itself an outer gestalt and inwardly articulates itself into organs. The unmanifest, being-like force creates not only an outer and inner in relation to gestalt and the world of organs, but the organs themselves show a form-side directed outward and an activity-side directed inward — the latter communicating with the functions of all the organs. Within the organism, the formative forces work out of a wellspring of being, which is unmanifestly sovereign over the life and death of the bodily organism. The organism ages and dies; it renews itself in its spatial and temporal gestalt through reproductive germinal forces.
How Does the Concept of Organism Fulfil Itself in the Mineral Kingdom?
Looking towards the inorganic-lifeless nature of the mineral, one finds none of the above-mentioned criteria realised within it. Setting aside the fossils of prehistory, the only resonance that might point to a recent formative process arising from germinal states is the process, occurring within the chaos of amorphous colloidal conditions in the soils, of the new crystallisation of the «secondary clay minerals». They form an intermediate state between form and substance — they are physiologically active, they age — in the transferred sense of the word — and pass over either into more enduring crystalline form-states or weather back into colloidal states of chaos. The roots of plants, with their root hairs — living, colloidal, respiratory- and sorption-active outgrowths of the root hairs — enter into connections with the clay minerals. When one draws young seedlings out of the fine-crumbling, loose soil, clay particles remain densely clustered on the roots. They are drawn into the life-activity of the plants.
By and large, the phenomena of the mineral kingdom present themselves to us in the physical states of the «elements» — the Solid, the Liquid, Air, and Warmth. These states appear in the firmly-structured form of the rocks, the congealed order of the crystals, as well as in the moved forms of the liquid: in the streaming river, the ocean wave, or the resting pond. The transparent air becomes directly perceptible through the pressure-sensation of the wind, or it appears indirectly — for example, through moving leaves or drifting clouds. Quite otherwise with Warmth, which expands form-like through a more of warmth and contracts through a less. The named form-states dissolve, from the element of the Solid towards Warmth, into force-laden movement — to the point where Warmth, in heating the Solid, can transfer it into liquid form
or can carry the Liquid over into the state of the air-like, of gas. Conversely, through the absence of Warmth, through the working of cold, the air-like can be condensed into the liquid, or the latter compacted into ice. All formations and transformations of form-states in the mineral kingdom are chemical-physical in nature and come about through external workings of forces (Fig. 1).
The Mineral — An Excursus into Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
Anthroposophical spiritual science unveils the essential being and genesis of the mineral kingdom, the world of the rocks.[1] This has fallen out from earlier life-states of the becoming Earth, in form and substance, as dead, inorganic formations — as a corpse, one might say. The mineral presents itself to sense-perception purely as «physical body» (Fig. 1); in composition and structure it is a physical image of once-universal life-processes. The bearer of this former life — the «etheric body» of the mineral (Fig. 1) — lives in the lowest of the supersensible worlds, in the elemental world of the «astral plane» (Third Hierarchy), which reaches towards the Sun and encompasses the planetary spheres. From these spheres and from the Sun, the etheric forces stream towards the Earth and «wash around» the minerals in their forms from without.
The forms of the rocks, of the crystals in their superabundance, are the work of a world of beings that belongs to the lower Devachan. This world-sphere stands above the elemental world of the astral plane. It encompasses the three groups of beings of the Third Hierarchy — the «Spirits of Wisdom, of Movement, and of Form». Their seat is in the Sun; and there spiritual research finds also the astral body of the minerals. The efficacy of the beings of the Sun-sphere penetrates the planetary-elemental spheres and becomes, in its reflected image, a «work» in the sense-perceptible, object-world. The work
ing of the Spirits of Form bestows gestalt upon all that is in the process of becoming — in image — allowing it to congeal into form, into the work. The manifoldness of forms — including the colour-demarcations of the minerals — is like an imprint of their astral body, resting in cosmic heights.
The physical body of the minerals stands in direct relation with the creator-beings of the «upper Devachan» — the «Thrones» of the First Hierarchy.[2] Within this group of beings there is found the «group soul or the I» of the world of the mineral. Thus, in a threefold gradation, the members of the human being of the minerals lift themselves up into the named supersensible worlds. This result of spiritual research widens the gaze towards a deeper understanding of the seemingly inexhaustible variability of form and substance in the world of rocks and their crystalline composition. Such a field of vision — expanding into the supersensible spirit-worlds — can awaken, in the sense-perceptible contemplation of mineral nature, a spiritual-moral feeling. In every stone, indeed in every grain of sand, one can behold the physical imprint of a member of the human being which, in the supersensible realm of the macrocosm, unites with etheric and astral body into the wholeness of an organism — indeed, with group soul into the germinal disposition of an individuality.
The centre of this formation is, in a certain sense, peripheral. In relation to the inorganic world of substance, one can speak only of a system of forces that, proceeding from an external cause, brings forth external effects. The concept of organism, however, is characterised by the fact that an inner being assimilates itself to the peripheral outer workings.
For the mineral kingdom, the concept of system is appropriate. It permits, in a point-by-point mode of observation, definitive and thereby calculable statements. The natural laws that express themselves in the relational context of the elemental states are final. They can be abstracted in thought and combined at will into new systems not found in nature. From this arise technical mechanics,
control engineering, and the chemotechnologies in the widest sense — such as the synthesis of biocides (herbicides and pesticides, etc.), chemopharmacy, synthetic materials, and much else besides.
Abb.1 The relationship of the mineral to life, soul and spirit
How does the organism principle fulfil itself in the plant kingdom?
With the concept of system — that is to say, with the mathematical processing of a sum of data — the world of appearances of the plant cannot be grasped, however firmly the materialistic cast of thought clings to this belief. Yet the organism principle, too, presents its difficulty, when one follows strictly the appearances of the senses. What presents itself to these is a succession of appearances that reveal themselves one after another, in transitions, in the stream of time. Each of these appearances stands by itself as a single instance and gives conceptual account only of what has become, not of what is in the process of becoming. There are seeds that in their outer form can scarcely be distinguished from a grain of sand. The contemplation of the plant seed, with its inconspicuous outer coat, yields no indication of the unmanifest held within it. If one places a seed, however, in moist earth, it enlarges — in contrast to the grain of sand — its volume through the uptake of water. In this swelling there stirs into life, in a first step, something hidden within it, and soon a further step: the seed-coat breaks open at one end and the germinal shoot comes forth. This stage too is a mere appearance of form, which gives no account of what is further to become of it. So it is that, in the further course of this coming-into-appearance — stage by stage, downward the root in the soil, upward stem and leaf sequence in air, warmth and light — that which lay concealed in the seed reveals itself in stages of metamorphosis. With great surprise, this unmanifest comes to fulfilment in the bursting-open of the flower buds. In colour and form once more transformed, gathered together in organ-like compactness, the blossom appears. With the radiant unfolding of the blossom and the developmental stages that have preceded it, that which was spiritually concealed as a being-like archetypal image of form within the seed unveils itself outwardly as image.
Were one to remain, in the contemplation of the plant, at the level of the mere succession of sense-appearances, one would expose oneself to the danger of conceiving the plant as a composite system. This is indeed the case when one declares the macroscopic sense-appearances to be subjective and regards the microscopic cellular structure — or the genome of the individual cell and its functions — as alone the objectively efficacious. Both, however, are appearances of form only at different levels; to the latter, moreover, there attach themselves model-like representations that transfer system-thinking onto living nature.
The unmanifest, out of which the appearances come forth one by one, has two creative sources. The one, the earthly, is the seed, in which, as it were contracted to a single point, «the form of the plant spiritually»[3] lives. From it, the genus, family and species of the plant reproduces itself into ever-new appearance in the succession of generations. The second source is the extra-terrestrial cosmos — the Sun, the planets and the fixed stars. Their forces set in motion the spiritually self-contained plant-form that rests within the seed. The first movement-step takes place with germination, through the lunar forces in conjunction with the element of the watery in the earthly. As soon as the seedling turns green, it is the Sun and planetary forces that — working through the elements of air and warmth — touch the growing plant as if only from without, and, together with the dissolved salts of the earth streaming upward peripherally from below, release physiological life processes that congeal into the forms of the developing plant-gestalt. Cosmos and Earth must work together if the spiritual form of the plant, its archetypal image, is to become image in the physically sense-perceptible gestalt.
The all-governing power in the becoming of the plant lies concealed in the rays of the Sun — and this in a twofold sense:
On the one hand, the Sun's rays penetrate life-engendering into the greening leaves and draw out of these, through the root,
against the force of gravity, the earthly stream of salts upward. In so doing, the plant overcomes step by step, in the leaf sequence of the stem, the autonomous lawfulness of the earthly substances and articulates these into the life processes. It is the light of the Sun, and it alone, that lifts the earthly substance within the plant out of its captivity in space into the processual happening in time. From the unmanifest of Earth and cosmos together, sunlight creates as synthesis the plant-growth that steps into visibility, presenting itself in ceaseless metamorphosis of form.
On the other hand, there are at work within sunlight forces of yet another kind, proceeding from the planetary Sun-cosmos. These do not work physiologically — building up, transforming and breaking down substances within the life processes — but compositionally, giving form in accordance with the archetype of the plant's archetypal image. They do not penetrate into the material activity of the plant, but touch it, as it were, only from without. They give to the plant, in root, stem, leaf sequence and blossom, its overall gestalt. In equal measure they imprint every cell in relation to its function within the wholeness of the plant — so, for example, the composition and form of the proteins, carbohydrates, the colouring, the aromatic substances, and so on. The tentative gesture of this mere touching of the plant is evident in the fruits — for instance in their fine down, or in the deeper colouring of an apple where the Sun's rays fall directly upon it. If one wishes to speak of the plant as an organism, this concept fulfils itself only when one directs one's gaze toward the being-nature of the cosmos and toward the forces at work within sunlight. Only in the sensible-supersensible beholding together does the image of a unity arise. The plant is, in its space-time gestalt, image of a being-like wholeness, which forms itself through forces working from without inward. Thus cosmic working brings the form-archetypal image pre-formed in the seed to full unfoldment as image in the sense-perceptible gestalt of the plant.
Abb. 2 The relationship of the plant to the physical, to life, soul and spirit
The Plants — An Excursus into Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
The mineral, subject to purely physical laws, reveals in its earthly-sensory garment the working of the Thrones, the lowest member of the First Hierarchy.[4] The plant is endowed, in addition to its physical body — which has advanced to a second stage of development — with an etheric or life body: a creation of the Spirits of Wisdom, the first member of the Second Hierarchy (ibid.); these radiate their light over the whole earthly existence of the plant-beings together with the Spirits of Movement and of Form. It is not only the wisdom-filled interworking of all life processes, not only the movement of the ascending and descending saps, nor — in connection with the planets — the movements of the leaves spiralling upward around the stem, but it is the forms of root, stem, leaf and blossom that make the plant into the image of its physical and etheric body. This latter is supersensible and, with the etheric forces streaming toward it from the Sun, from the planets and from the elemental kingdoms, participates in shaping the appearance of the plant. The forces of the living — gathered together as it were in sunlight — penetrate into the life processes of the growing plant, into its cellular tissue, and configure the substances of the elements (earth, water, air/light and warmth) into the ensouled, moved, form-building and form-transforming plant substance. When the sun's rays strike the surface of the greening plant leaf, the forces that build physiological substance separate from the formative forces that ray in likewise with the sunlight. These shape not only the forms of the plant's outward appearance, but — so one may assume — equally the bounding membranes of the plant cells, the annual rings of trees, and so on. The plant possesses no inner life of its own; it is a streaming life held in forms. The formative forces
stream toward it from the Sun (Second Hierarchy, Fig. 2). They modify themselves through the «astral body» of the plants, which has its spirit-existence in the elemental world, the sphere of the Third Hierarchy. «The 'astral body' is in every being that which gives the impulse toward movement»[5]. It is that which brings about consciousness.
The higher hierarchical beings do not work with their forces directly upon the plants. They unfold their efficacy through «messengers» — the four groups of «elemental beings». These are beings whose development has been held back. «They form themselves by being, as it were, irregular, severed-off parts of group souls.»[6] Each of these groups is, in a being-way, connected with one of the four elements and with its specific materiality. In accordance with the life-lawful directives of the etheric body, they build bridges of relationship to the physical world of substance. These relationships are, for instance in the structure and life functions of root, leaf, stem, blossom and seed, as though conjured into fixity — and release themselves again from this bondage when the plants wither and pass away. Thus the relationship of the life processes of growth to the form-building activity of coagulation is subject to a constant metamorphosis. This phenomenon is shown with particular impressiveness by the yarrow (*Achillea millefolium*), so strongly governed by formative forces — the «thousand-leaved» plant. Its leaf blade is not closed as a flat surface, but dissolves on both sides of the leaf stalk into many individual lance-shafts, each tipped with several lance-points. It appears as though the stem principle reaches out through the leaf stalk and takes hold of the entire leaf blade. In the lower leaves (Fig. 2, left) the lance-shafts and their points are strongly succulent, full of swelling life; yet a little higher in the leaf sequence (Fig. 2, right) the formative forces overwhelm the swelling and chisel the lance-shafts and their points into fine, precise contours.
Both sources of force, the life-building and the formative, stream to the plant
— endowed with its own etheric body — out of the sun-sphere; and so too a third source of force: that of the group soul of the plants. Its radiation bestows upon the plant, rooted in the earth, its Upright — the alignment of root, stem and seed-vessel along the Earth-Sun axis. This radiation does not stream to the plants from the cosmos directly, but indirectly, by way of the earth, by way of quartz-silica and the silicates.[7] The quartz-silica receives the radiation of the fixed-star cosmos and rays it back. The silicate clay minerals take it up, preserve it, and mediate it to the roots of the plants. The behaviour of lime in this connection Rudolf Steiner compares «with the world of human desires»; the lime, «it wants to seize everything, […] that lives in the plant». The quartz-silica «is the distinguished gentleman who wants nothing at all», it «wrests it from the lime». «The clay mediates between the two.»[8] What the silicate-crystalline structures of the clay receive from the flint as cosmic radiation and mediate, through the root of the upward-growing plant, as upright-force — this Rudolf Steiner characterises with the words: «But what one must first know is that [everything clayey] is the promoter of the cosmic upward streaming.»[9] This manifests in the salt-water stream (xylem), which ascends against the central axis of the stem and, through the «lightness» of the etheric, unwinds itself from the heaviness of the earthly[10] (Fig. 2, red). Following the upward stream of the xylem, ranged toward the periphery of the stem, lies the sheath of the gossamer-thin, ever-green, living cambium (Fig. 2, green). In it one may surmise, in the manner of an image, a manifestation of the archetypal image of the plant type, or of the group soul. To the cambium adjoins the descending stream of assimilates — the phloem — which lets the root grow downward into the depths, into the darkness of the earth (Fig. 2, yellow). Finally, the Upright is enclosed by a form-sheath: a silicified skin, as in the grasses (cereals), or a lime-rich bark (rind) as in the oak (Fig. 2, blue). In all its living quality woven in wisdom, its
animated metamorphic flux and its manifold variety, the plant world approaches the fulfilment of the organism principle. It is the image-expression of a wondrous consonance of cosmos and earth. Yet it still lacks the step toward inwardness!
How Does the Organism Principle Fulfil Itself in the Animal Kingdom?
The animal differs from the plant in that what in the latter works from without, in the former works from within. It acts out of its inner organization, out of the soul element dwelling within it (Fig. 3). The animal moves from place to place, following its senses, seeking its nourishment in that which, out of the living, has taken on form — the plant, upon which the cow feeds — or out of the soul element — the prey animal that nourishes the wolf. What has passed through the digestive organs it excretes. Its developmental goal is the living-out of its soul element, of its desires, passions and drives. Depending on genus and species, this occurs in ways instinct-wisdom-filled. In every animal, the soul element has, to a high degree, been absorbed into the gestalt of the body and into its organs. As the flowering plant, in the course of its growth, articulates itself threefold outwardly — with root, stem-leaf and blossom — so in the animal this principle of threefold articulation, in a higher development, is active from within and reveals itself outwardly in its largely self-enclosed bodily form. Most pregnantly, both in the lower animal forms and in the most highly developed, do the two poles of this threefold articulation come to expression: the head or nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system. The mediating third — the rhythmic circulation of the blood directed from the heart, and the lung breathing in rhythm — does not form an independent middle in the animal kingdom (Fig. 3). This middle is distorted in manifold ways and blurs
either more into the head pole (bird) or the metabolic pole (cow). Among the non-mammals, from the lower animals up through the world of birds, the tendency prevails that one of these three members gains the power of formation over the body. In the worms, for example (earthworm), the nerve-sense and rhythmic system — the articulation of the body segments — is wholly subordinated to the metabolic function of the long intestinal tube. With the fishes it is otherwise; here the rhythmic system dominates all bodily functions from head to tail-tip — so the rhythmic arrangement of the bones and scales. The structure of the body of the fish, as also that of the snake, stands in the service of a rhythmic bodily mobility that has congealed into the physical. Yet another extreme of one-sidedness is presented by the world of birds, most strikingly in the songbirds. They are wholly head. All bodily functions press together into the head. The rhythmically moved wings with their plumage fuse with the head, as do the functions of the metabolic-limb system — for example in the nodding movement of the head in walking and pecking, in the gathering of food in the crop, and in the exceedingly rapid digestive activity. Only with the mammals does the nerve-sense activity, centred in the head, become polarized with that of the metabolic-limb organization. The rhythmic system gradually releases itself from its bondage to the two poles and becomes the bearer of a dull soul-experience bound to the perception of the senses. These perceptions are bound either to the wakeful senses of the head pole — the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the smelling nose — or to the more subconscious senses of the metabolic-limb pole: the sense of touch, the life sense, the sense of movement, and the sense of balance. In the former case we are dealing with mammals whose head rises above the horizontal of the spine — for example the horse pricking its ears, the deer taking sight. If, how-
ever, the head sinks below this horizontal, as for instance in the grazing ruminants, they are given over more to the dull bodily senses. In the act of rumination they then raise the head above the horizontal of the spine and, with a concentrated, dream-wakeful gaze, reflect upon the fodder pre-digested in the forestomachs and finally in the rumen. In the course of the evolution of the animal kingdom, the comprehensive soul element of the animal realm — encompassing all in primordial times — has increasingly splintered into the countless genera, families, species and so on. Each 'soul-splinter' has fashioned for itself a highly specialized body whose profile of activity is, to a very large extent, bodily prefigured without degrees of freedom. Whether worm, beetle, fish, bird or mammal — all animals possess an ensouled inwardness that forms the body into an organism and encloses it on all sides with a skin: a wholeness that articulates itself in manifold variations into the three organ systems already described. In every representative of the animal kingdom the organism principle realizes itself in the earthly realm. The study of the morphology and physiology of its three organ systems yields information about the functional relationship to that highly specific soul element which forms the organism into a wholeness. The organism principle realizes itself in the animal kingdom and is largely exhausted in its countless form-configurations. Setting aside those animals which, as 'domestic animals', have in former times turned in a being-way towards the human being, all animal species — from the single-celled organisms to the mammals — are, in their desire-and-drive nature, fixed upon their inner and outer organs. Through these they enter into relationship with their surroundings, find or create their living space (habitat) and experience themselves within it. This relationship of the limitedness of animal nature Goethe expresses in the words: "The animal is instructed by its organs; man instructs his and masters them."[11]
Fig. 3 The relationship of the animal to the physical, to life, soul and spirit
The Animal — An Excursus into Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
The astral body, which in the case of plants touches and forms them from the astral plane — colouring and shaping them as it were from without (Fig. 2) — has in the animal plunged more deeply into its physical existence. Out of its stellar origin — hence the designation 'astral body' — it impresses spirit-formed images into the etheric or life body. With these force-bearing images it shapes, as the architect thereof, the physical body into the gestalt of the animal and inwardly into its articulation in organs. As a consequence, the idea of the organism first fulfils itself in its physical elaboration in the animal kingdom. The animal is animal by virtue of being the bearer of an astral body (Fig. 3); it experiences and moves within this and moves through it. This self-experience justifies us in speaking of an animal soul. Working with formative forces, it creates the particular and specific work of art of the physical bodily forms of the genera and species of the animals. In these works of art a cosmic heritage is held captive within earthly form. The desire-and-drive nature of the animal, in connection with the natural conditions of its living space, determines to a large extent the perfection of its gestalt, its one-sided potential for activity, and above all its nerve-sense and metabolic organization. The bodily organism of the animal is the revelation of a development that has come to its conclusion. That is what constitutes the tragedy of the animal. What it experiences is its ever-recurring past.
A glance at the senses of the animals and their experience:
In his theory of the senses, Rudolf Steiner speaks of 12 senses in the human being. According to their sequence in mediating from lower to higher degrees of consciousness, 4 lower, 4 middle and 4 upper senses are distinguished.[12] By means of his astral body the animal attains a dream-consciousness. For waking consciousness, or self-consciousness, it lacks the three uppermost senses: the word sense, the sense of thought and the I-sense.
The soul life of the animal is strictly bound to its bodily senses. These are sense-gateways through which the consciousness-conferring astral body receives, on the one hand, impressions from the deep substrata of bodiliness — perceived only in the most extreme dullness — and on the other, impressions that open outward toward the world. The latter help the animal toward its proper dream-consciousness. Depending on the animal species and kind, it is in each case particular senses that decisively dominate the being and activity of the animals. In the case of the 4 body-oriented lower or will senses, the experience of the lower animal forms still approaches closely the plant-like sleeping consciousness. A few characteristics of the animal's sense organization are briefly set out as follows: The «sense of touch», for instance, governs the dull experience of the light-shy earthworm. It feels its way, over the entire surface of its body, through the surrounding earth. In so doing it experiences its own being in connection with the elemental being-element that is active in the earthy-solid.
The animal's «life sense» slumbers, so to speak, in the animal's general feeling of being — in hunger and thirst, or, for example, in the experience of the buzzard as it traces its circles, wings outstretched and motionless, in the warmth of the thermal updraft on a sun-bright day. But in the moment that the animal's well-being is disturbed — say by a slight pain, or in the anxiety of a movement of flight — the life sense becomes a dreaming experience.
The dominance of the «sense of movement» over other senses is developed in great diversity throughout the animal kingdom. One has only to look at the arrow-swift zigzag flight of the swallows, the squirrel darting from branch to branch and leaping from bough to bough. In this capacity for movement, the instinctive elasticity and the sense of pressure of its corporeality, a sense is active — unconsciously — that determines the animal's feeling of being.
The 4th of the lower senses, the «sense of balance», is already in full
function in the higher animals shortly after birth. It already leads over toward the middle senses, in that in the ear it possesses a sense organ: the three semicircular canals standing at right angles to one another. This organ endows the animals with such a degree of instinctive certainty in maintaining balance that without external compulsion they do not stumble or fall — as, for example, the ibex on the rocky ledge, the horse in the elegance of its walk, trot and canter.
In the 4 lower will senses or night senses just described, the soul element of the animals lives itself forth in the darkness of dull instincts. In the 4 middle senses — the feeling senses of the higher animal world — it dawns upward toward a dreaming consciousness. This too is body-bound, yet in such a way that the sense qualities they mediate (smell, taste, light, warmth) have themselves contributed evolutively to the structure and function of their sense organs: «Were not the eye sun-natured, never could it behold the sun.»[13] The soul-astral element of the animals secures for itself, through its feeling senses, a broader field of activity and therewith a more extended living-space and experiential space, whose territorial boundary the nightingale, for example, sings, the deer marks with scent-substances, and so on.
Ascending in the sequence of the 4 middle senses, the measure of feeling-determined actions broadens. The group soul of the animals seeks out its nature-given living space and reshapes it according to its needs.
The «sense of smell» is the lowest of the feeling senses. In most of the higher animal species it is developed with greater experiential intensity than the senses that follow above it. The soul-astral emanations of bodies stimulate in the strongest degree the elongated olfactory organ that governs the facial skull: the keen nose tells the fox whose trail he follows; the dog's nose still scents its own kind days later; the snout of the pig, rooting through the earth, smells out what is palatable. The sense of smell is the animal's chief instrument through which, in the subtle-substantial realm of the air, the astral-spiritual quality of its surroundings brings itself — as in a dream — to lived experience.
The sense of taste opens to the animal a different reality. Through the food it takes in and through its digestion, it experiences the dissolution of the material-corporeal into the watery state. It tastes the outer world and experiences it in a being-way, in its liquefaction. This process is enacted in a wholly unique manner in the plant-eating ruminant. The cow is disposed, down into the depths of its 3 forestomachs — above all in the rumen — and fully in the act of rumination, to taste. It experiences itself in a tasting analysis of its environment. The experience of this analysis lends to cow dung its high manuring power for the soil.
Whereas the sense of taste reaches down deep into the darkness of the animal body, the facial or visual sense — the sense of sight — is directed outward toward the form-surfaces of things and beings, toward the brightness of colours passing into one another. One may describe the sense of sight as a colour-surface sense, whereby colour determines itself through the relation of light and darkness. Every delimitation of form in objective perceiving is already a conceptual determination. The capacity for this — the exercise of the sense of thought — is absent in the animal. What, then, does the animal perceive through its visual sense, through the eye? It can only be something that stands in relation to its astral body. This excludes every conceptual determination. Rather, it must be both permitted and necessary to assume that the desire-and-drive nature of the animal's astral body extends itself into the sense of sight and thus into all its senses, and that what is active in the sense becomes directly a conscious experience. Accordingly, one ought not to speak of «sense-appearance» in the animal's case, but of a sense organ mediating fragmentary spiritual efficacy. In the light-colour workings of the eye, the animal finds, in a certain sense, the goal of its desire. Seen thus, the astral being of the animal lives, in accordance with its soul-bodily boundness, in direct being-relationship with its surroundings. From this the wisdom-filled accomplishment of all its activities would also become comprehensible.
— When one looks into an animal's eyes, a soul element meets one in purity and immediacy. When one looks into the great eye of a cow, one is received from unfathomable depths by a gaze that dreams mildly upward. When one does the same with a bird of prey, one is almost startled back. One believes oneself to be looking into the inexorability — yes, the tragedy — of a primordially ancient past that still lives on. Assuredly, the seeing eye makes the animal one degree more wakeful and more independent of its body. And yet it is always only a moment; it passes, the next must follow and pass in turn, and so on.
The highest of the feeling senses is the «warmth sense»; it feels warm-cold differentiations. One may see in it the sense for the fluctuations of the «warmth organism» and «the blood, the most refined in the [bodily] organism»[14] as its organ. In cold-blooded animals the warmth sense is awakened only through external warmth — as in the butterfly, which after the coolness of the night can unfold its wings only with the first warming rays of the sun. The same holds for the lower animal world in the soil in springtime. In warm-blooded animals the warmth sense is directed toward the constant maintenance of blood-warmth. In it the soul-astral element experiences every deviation from the norm, whether chilling or fever. In the individual animal species this body-specific norm varies in height. In its function of maintaining blood-warmth, the warmth sense is directed, as it were, both outward and inward: on the one hand toward the external or foreign warmth released through the oxidative combustion processes of foodstuffs, on the other toward the «working-through» of this warmth by the «world-system of the astral body»[15] dwelling within the animal.
Among the four higher senses of the human being, the vertebrate has developed only the lowest of these — the sense of hearing or tone sense — fully, and the next higher, the «word sense» as sense of sound, only in fragmentary fashion. The source of tone is movement: the sound of a stone striking the ground, the rustling of the
leaves in the wind, the hoof-beat of a horse, in the human hand the bow drawing across the strings of the violin. In the elements of the physical (earth, water, and air) vibrations are set in motion, and on the higher, soul-near level of the sense of hearing, tones. It is the view of science that the vibration alone is the objective, while the heard tone is the subjective phenomenon derived from it, secondarily produced. Yet both are manifestations of one and the same moving principle on the different levels of the physical and the soul element. The tone sense unites both levels. Its organ in the human being and in the vertebrate is the ear, deeply embedded in the facial skull. As the eye looks outward, so the ear hears inward. Both are works of art built in the most wondrous manner according to physical laws, whose creator are the formative forces of the shaping astral body and the streaming etheric body. The ear is so built that the invisibly moving reveals itself in what is moved, the soul-astral element reveals itself in the tone; this process makes it comprehensible that a process initially purely physical, taken hold of by life processes, transforms itself upward and disappears, and the moving principle appears on a higher level sensibly-supersensibly as tone. The tone sounded by the sense organs of the vertebrates resonates with their astral being. — With regard to the invertebrates — insects, spiders, beetles and so forth — we enter a world poor in hearing and in sound. The sense of hearing is rudimentarily developed, in favour of the sense of smell and the all-round vision of the compound eyes. The sounds arise peripherally through the mechanical friction of wing-cases, legs, and the like. They lack inwardness. More than all other senses, the «sense of sound» appears across the entire animal kingdom as though shattered into pieces. Soul-splinters of a primal unity appear embodied in the animals. Their sounds are the expression of their shattered soul-enchantment. One rightly sees in these sounds the means of communication among
their kind, or calls of warning. One may understand their calls — the trilling of the lark, for instance — in a wider sense as a proclamation directed toward the cosmic origin that unites them. The responsibility of the human being must consist in gathering together, at every site of an agricultural operation, the fragments of the highly specific sense-faculties and the wisdom-guided instinct-directed activities of the domestic animals and the wild-animal fauna — in all their diversity — into an organic whole of a higher order. This wholeness is a product of life past and a means by which the human being works into the hands of the future.
The animal has an astral body; through it, the animal experiences itself in degrees of a dreaming consciousness. It cannot rise beyond this. The path toward the development of self-consciousness is barred to it. In earthly existence it has no I. The I, however, exists as the «group-soul I» of the animal species in the sphere immediately adjacent to the sensory world — the sphere of the elementary-planetary world, the «astral plane», the sphere of activity of the Third Hierarchy (Fig. 3). The group-I touches the animal only from without; it does not raise the animal upright — the animal remains in the horizontal. Only the pole of the waking senses, head and neck, lifts itself some distance above the line of the spine. To supersensible perception, according to Rudolf Steiner, the group-I appears «along the spine of the animal somewhat like a brightly shining streak»[16] (Fig. 3, red). With birth, the individual animal detaches itself from its group soul — «it cuts itself off» — and with death it reunites with it once more.[17]
«But the animals are only placed upon the Earth from out of the universe. They participate in the earthly with their dull consciousness; with their arising, their growing, with everything that they are, so that they can perceive and move — through all this they are not earthly beings. […] They are guests upon the Earth.»[18]
The Human Being — An Excursus into Anthroposophical Spiritual Science
The essence of what is spread out in nature as the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms — unfolded in their respective separateness under the guidance and direction of the three hierarchical spheres named above — has lived since the primordial beginnings of the «Logos», the spiritual germ of humanity.[19] What has densified step by step in a being-way into the forms of nature — behind it stood, under the guidance of the spiritually hierarchical beings, the development of the human being. He accompanied the evolution of the kingdoms of nature without prematurely giving himself a fixed gestalt. He first received into himself the fruits of the becoming of mineral, plant, and animal nature after these had attained their ripeness. These fruits of evolution yielded the physical-spiritual material out of which the beings of the Hierarchies built up the human body. He encloses within himself everything that had gone before in physical-living and soul-astral development. In all of this the human I was involved, still resting in the womb of the Hierarchies. Only very late did it detach itself from its primordial spiritual foundations and, descending gradually, embodied itself in the body thus prepared. The working of the I gave to the human gestalt the Upright; it bestowed upon him, between his head and his metabolic organs, an independent middle — the heart as the seat of the I — it stretched the hind legs of the animal and enabled the feet to a springy walking and striding over the earth. It lifted the arms and hands out of the earth-bound heaviness of the forelimbs and helped them toward free, self-activating movement — the love of doing. The bodily birth of the I gave the human being a form fashioned in the image of God. This form the ancient Greeks chiselled in stone in the magnificently harmonious, archaic-monumental figures of the Kouroi — for example, along the temple road to the Temple of Hera
(Heraion) on Samos. The spiritual-ensouled birth of the I was accomplished through the Mystery of Golgotha. It means that the future development of the human being consists in becoming conscious of his origin in the spirit, as well as in reworking that which lives as nature in his body and around him, and in assimilating it to his higher I-hood.
Out of the spirit of his I, the human being has developed the capacity to think 'development' itself. This encompasses a primordial past in which the germinal seed of man still lay in the womb of the highest Divinity, and a future in which the I-hood of man finds its way back, with full waking consciousness, to its spiritual origin. From such a contemplation there arises, of necessity, both the idea and the reality of repeated earth-lives.
The Bodily Organism of the Human Being
Just as the bodily organism of the animal delimits itself outwardly into a gestalt (form) and articulates itself inwardly into organs, so too does the body of the human being — with the decisive difference that in the latter, the rhythmic organ-system of lung and heart inserts itself as an independent member between the nerve-sense pole and the metabolic-limb pole. This coming-to-independence of the middle carries with it the far-reaching consequence that the soul of the human being, upon this clearly articulated organic foundation, attains the capacity of thinking, feeling and willing. In the animal, consciousness flares up with each perception of the senses and is extinguished again when that perception ceases. The human soul is able to hold fast what has been perceived, through thinking, in thoughts; to inwardly sense it in feeling; and to advance toward deed through willing. That which in the three organ-systems stands in unbroken reciprocal interaction — bodily, and below the threshold of consciousness —
reveals itself, on the level of the soul element, in thoughts, feelings and impulses of will. As these interact, self-consciousness arises, as it were, as their synthesis. Out of it, ideas blaze forth that, in living experience, awaken ethically and morally charged impulses of action. The human being raises himself up out of his body, upward to his humanness, to the consciousness of his origin in the spirit, to his ever-progressing conscious participation — advancing through self-knowledge and world-knowledge — in the being and working of the higher Hierarchies named above. For this raising of himself out of body-boundness — so that the soul does not exhaust itself merely in the momentary perception of sense-impressions — the human being is indebted to his spiritual kernel of being, to the I descending into the body, which activates the three faculties of the soul and gathers them into unity, into self-consciousness.
In I-consciousness the human being first arrives at himself. He becomes conscious of the possibility of his self-determination in freedom. He becomes conscious of the fact that he does not possess a finished, self-enclosed existence, as the animal does, but that — aware of his own imperfection — he knows himself to be on a path, advancing in free self-determination along his own developmental way. This developmental way is individual. Every human being treads it, guided by the spirit-impulses of his I-being, as an individuality.
The I of the human being is all-encompassing; as a purely spiritual being it stands above the soul element that brings consciousness. It interpenetrates the soul into its most hidden depths, liberates it ever more from the body, and spiritualises it toward ever higher levels. It impels the forces of thinking, feeling and willing, kindles in the soul forces of enthusiasm and the will to carry out also in deed what has been recognised as necessary. Just as the I — the kernel of being of the human being — creates an I-organisation for itself within the soul, so too does it create such an organisation within the domain of the life-body and of the physical body. The I descending into the soul is the impulse-giver for the development of the
human being. It works formatively upon the body, in order to raise it toward ever higher spirit-bearing capacity.
The I-force places the human bodily organism in waking consciousness into the Upright, into the Earth-Sun axis. When the I, together with the soul, releases itself from the body in sleep, the body lays itself into the horizontal. The animal finds itself lifelong in this horizontal position, in a dream-like consciousness. Only the vertebrates unfold a higher wakefulness. This becomes apparent when individual animal species carry the head above the horizontal line of the spine. In the human being the I rays through the three members of the human being of the organism and creates for itself, in a bodily-soul-spiritual way, a centre-point in the heart. The I of the animal, the «group soul» of an animal species,[20] lives, as already mentioned, as a spiritual entity in a region of the supersensible bordering upon the sensory. It is not incarnated in the individual animal; it touches it only from without. One expression of its efficacy is the formation of herds among the vertebrates (cattle, sheep, goats, horses, among others), among the colony-forming insects (wasps, ants and others) and finally, uniquely, in the bee colony.
Even in the plant, which roots in the solid element of the earth, a distinct resonance of its higher spiritual being lives. Its soul-nature touches it, as already indicated, from without, and conjures the spiritual form of the plant — resting within the seed — into the sense-perceptible appearance of the spiral arrangement of the leaves around the vertical stem, as well as of the buds and the petals. The Upright of the stem striving toward the sun, from the root upward into the seed, is the image of a force that lives in a second, still higher region of the spirit-world as the «I of the plant»[21] (Fig. 2). Goethe, proceeding purely from observation, drew attention to this particular formative principle in the plant kingdom as the «vertical and spiral tendency». He said: «Seek not anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson.»[22] In the actively practised act of observation, idea (concept) and sensory percep-
tion stand in a thinking reciprocal relation. The sense-appearance stirs the concept from without, and from within the concept lends to it its determinacy of content.
The human bodily organism is, by virtue of the I-being that holds sway over it, the most perfect and at the same time the only one that carries forward the development of the organism principle. In the animal, the soul element has congealed into the material form. To that extent its body, in its one-sidedly defined character, is more perfect than that of the human being. The latter, however, is open to development and possesses the potency for a progressive spiritualisation of his materially and earthly-bound bodiliness. The human bodily organism is a product of nature and at the same time one of his spirit-soul.
The Concept of Organism in Agriculture
Right up until the middle of the twentieth century, the concept of organism was still the generally accepted mode of expression for describing a healthy, many-sided agricultural operation. In terms of farm economics, the aim was the measured, site-specific integration of arable farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, fruit growing, meadow and pasture husbandry, as well as silviculture and water management. The agricultural organism developed in this many-sidedness of its organs since the early Middle Ages and was, whether as village community or individual farm, the culture-bearing foundation of Western-Christian farming. It developed out of the «organism in natural growth»[23] and by degrees came to its first great cultural flowering. This Christian mind-soul culture endured for as long as the old peasantry and with it the village culture maintained their existence. In the course of agricultural industrialisation, the agricultural organism broke apart into separate pieces. In its place stepped systems thinking in the form of monoculture and intensive livestock keeping. The revitalisation of agriculture
presupposes as its first step the repetition of the principle of integration of mutually attuned farm branches. On this foundation of repetition, the basis of a new cultural flowering can come into being — one that proceeds, no less than from nature, above all from the organismic bodily constitution of the human being. When one seeks a spiritual conception of an agricultural operation and the practical measures for its formation arising therefrom, Rudolf Steiner's statement «The human being is made the foundation»[24] takes on particular weight. This indication is preceded, as its ideal guiding thread, by the other: «Only a farming that can be grasped as a kind of individuality unto itself, a truly self-contained individuality, fulfils its being in the best sense of the word».[25]
What is hereby said is that one can derive neither the concept of the farm individuality nor that of its bodily self-containedness — that is, the organism to be formed out of the things and beings of nature — from mere knowledge of nature alone. One is called upon to approach both these concepts, «the kind of individuality» and its bodily «self-containedness», from the science of the human being as given by anthroposophical spiritual research and from self-knowledge according to body, soul and spirit.
A plant cultivation in all its diversity of species, an animal husbandry standing in reciprocal interaction with this, and the tending of the site-specific wild flora and fauna — together, through the shaping of the farm, these create a wholeness that seeks to do justice to both concepts. In turn, they fulfil the requirements concerning the being-appropriate nourishment of the human being. This nourishment must be so constituted that the organismic bodily foundation can become the capable vessel for the progressive spirit-soul individuation of the human being.
The concept of organism, when it is mentioned at all in scientific circles, is thought additively in ecology as a system of relationships. What is
meant by this, Rudolf Steiner extends in the Agriculture Course with the concept of the «organism in natural growth». One may describe this concept through the naturally given community of plants and animals at a particular site — a natural order that establishes itself of its own accord. The science of ecology describes the relational connections of this floristic and faunistic community, taking into account climatic, geomorphological, petrographic, pedological and hydrological factors. The human being, however, as a rule remains outside. If he is mentioned at all, he is assigned the role of a disruptive factor.
As cited above, the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner proceeds precisely from the human being. It extends the principle by which nature proceeds in organism formation «in natural growth» into that through which the bodily organism of the human being can become the bearer of soul and spirit. This step is a step in development that can only be taken by the thinking and acting human being. It means that the high stage of development in the bodily formation of the human being — according to head or nerve-sense system, chest or rhythmic system, and belly or metabolic-limb system — is made into the ideal-methodical principle of the organismic shaping of the agricultural operation. It is anthroposophy, and in particular the Agriculture Course, that mediates this recognition and its setting-into-work.
The Head Pole or Nerve-Sense System of the Agricultural Organism
The head is the pole of rest of the human being, the seat of the waking senses, of the central nervous system, of the brain swimming in the cerebral fluid, surrounded by the bones of the cranial vault and those of the facial skull. It is morphologically pure form and physiologically pervaded by formative and thereby dying forces. It is nearer to death than to life. It requires constant intensive circulation of blood in order to compensate for the excess of breakdown processes. Its tendency to become inorganic without cease finds expression in the hardening of the cranial bones, in the cerebral fluid that separates itself out of the living, in the high breakdown activity of the enlivening respiratory oxygen into the poisonous carbon dioxide, and — speaking in soul-terms — in the cooling to the cold of the intellect. The brain, with its nerve strands pervading the whole human being, is, by virtue of its nearness to death, the consciousness-making pole of the human being.
When the gaze turns to that region of the earth in which the processes and forces corresponding to the nerve-sense system of the human being predominate, it is the forces pressing upward out of the depths of the earth, out of the mineral nature of the rock world. The mineral structure of the earth's crust constitutes itself to the greatest extent through the silica-bearing quartz-silica (SiO2) and the silicates, which, increasing with depth, hold sway over the interior of the earth. On the other side stands lime (CaCO3), which comes more to the surface. Between the two poles the silicates mediate, among which the micas incline more toward the silica side, the feldspars more toward the lime side. Both, feldspar and mica, are the primary minerals for the formation of clay, of the clay minerals. It is they that represent above all a kind of physiological equilibrium between silica and lime.
Quartz-silica is to a certain degree the representative of the crystalline. It is transparent, allows water no entry, and for this reason weathers in temperate latitudes scarcely at all. Through the union of silicon, which represents the cosmic pole, with oxygen, there arise quartz and the silicates related to it, which constitute the earth's crust predominantly. Among the great wealth of forms belonging to this crust, quartz-silica stands as representative, mediating to the soil the in-rayings of the distant sphere of the fixed stars, of the «crystal heaven» of the ancient Greeks. It receives the crystal-forming formative forces and radiates them back into the earthly realm, where they unfold their effects.[26] This occurs pre-eminently in wintertime, in the time of bitter frost. In winter the earth rests within itself; it is «a self-contained being».[27] What takes place within the earth at this time can be compared with what happens in connection with thought-formation in the brain. The function of the brain is like that of a mirror, through which the hidden forces of thinking become conscious in the form of thoughts.
In the Agriculture Course Rudolf Steiner places particular emphasis on the polar sense-function of silica and lime: «The siliceous is the general outer sense in the earthly, the calcareous is the general outer desire in the earthly, and the clay mediates between both»; and silica is «the distinguished gentleman who wants nothing at all»,[28] just as the senses of the human being — like the eye, which is silica-bearing and without self-will transparent to the world of appearances.
Polar to silica, Rudolf Steiner designates lime as the «craving fellow»[29] who wants to seize everything for himself. Lime (CaCO3) and the lime-related rocks are opaque, with the exception of calcite in its purest crystallised form. The masses of lime heaped up toward the earth's surface have a great affinity for the element of water. They absorb it, as they strive to absorb everything that silica reflects of cosmic radiation, or what in the warmer
season of spring rays in from the sub-solar planets Moon, Venus, Mercury.
At the earth's surface, in the living soil, the calcareous minerals vie with the silicates. The former are subject, under the influence of warmth, air and water, to weathering considerably more rapidly than the silicates and quartz in particular. This breakdown of the lime-bearing rocks, their dissolution in the watery element, releases a stream of substance which, in connection with the in-raying formative forces of winter in the further course of the year, comes together in new form-configurations within living and ensouled nature. In the forms of the sprouting plant world the spirituality of the winter-happening realises itself during the summer half-year. These form-appearances are what stimulate the senses of the human being and allow thoughts to ripen — thoughts that become the microcosmic image of the macrocosmic happening in the course of the year.
The largely self-enclosed bodily organism of the «farm individuality», touched upon above, is rooted with its head pole — standing, as it were, on its head — in the element of the solid, in the depths of the earth. Whether the creative spirit of the human being is able to hinder this macrocosmic happening within the «organism in natural growth», or — in the sense of a site-specific individualisation — to heighten it, will become evident in the further consideration of the rhythmic member of the living soil.
The metabolic activity in the «belly» of the agricultural organism
Polar to the depths of the earth, the metabolic pole of the farm individuality rises above the level of the earth into the atmospheric periphery. The pole of rest below is met by the chaos of movement above. What moves is the warmth raying in with the light; what is
moved is the air, and the vapours of water that have become air-like. Air is perceived through pressure upon the skin; it is invisible to the eye and becomes perceivable only indirectly — through the trembling leaf upon the tree, through whirling dust, the breaking of waves, the drawing clouds, the streaming rain, the drifting snowflakes, and so forth. Already through the finest differences of warmth, distinct bodies of air come into being, which show themselves in gusts of wind, in whirls, in mightily towering thunderclouds and cloud-fronts. These warmth-air bodies are invisible, being-filled organs that reveal themselves in the ever-changing forms of the clouds. They enclose within themselves all that the earth sends forth — water vapours, gases, aerosols, warmth itself — and release it again; what in connection with sunlight and lightning discharges creates and again dissolves substance-compounds. It is a fullness of phenomena that, in the great as in the small, determine the large-scale climatic and the local weather conditions — and that today, through the climate change encompassing the whole earth, come ever more sharply into view. In the atmospheric periphery of the earth one encounters, in each particular, something that appears to follow lawfulness, yet in the whole, in its infinite reciprocal interactions, something irrational — indeed, a metabolic activity. Nothing remains the same even for a single moment.
The latter holds equally for the human metabolism — for digestion, for instance. The intestinal bacteria bring about the breakdown of the absorbed nourishment. Were it not for the regulating glandular activity of the intestine, the human organism would soon be dissolved into its inorganic components.
The steering of the metabolic activity comes about, on the one hand, from afar through the radiations of light and warmth from the sun, and on the other hand, from close at hand, through the plant world growing upward into the near-ground air layer. The cosmic irradiations occur in the rhythms
of day and night, and in those of the course of the year from spring through summer, autumn, and winter. These rhythms arise — seen geocentrically — through the orbits of the sun, the planets, and the fixed stars around the earth. They determine the large- and small-scale climatic weather-activity, the high- and low-pressure regions, periods of warmth and cold, rain- and snowfalls, thunderstorms, and so forth. Each of these events releases a metabolic activity specific to itself: no raindrop, no snowflake without a dust-grain blown through the air serving as condensation nucleus; hence the cleansing effect of precipitation. No lightning and thunder without an oxidation of atmospheric nitrogen. One may turn the question around and ask whether the cleansing and digesting metabolic activity of the air-envelope is impaired not only by emissions from industry, agriculture, and fossil fuels — that is, by an excess of substance-particles — thereby leading to weather extremes, but through the interactions of these substance-particles with the electromagnetic radiations of the globally encompassing information technologies.
On the other hand, the plant, rooting in the earth, grows upward into the metabolic pole of the air- and warmth-envelope, towards the sunlight. On the one side, the outer metabolic activity of the surroundings imprints itself within the plant; on the other, it is sun and planets that release within it metabolic processes which continue forth into the atmospheric periphery. The plant draws carbon dioxide from the air for its gestalt-building metabolism and releases oxygen. It thereby secures, with regard to breathing and nourishment, the existence of the human being and the animal. It breathes in the nitrogen of the air, and through its organic residues promotes the metabolic activity of the living topsoil. The roots (among them valerian) as well as leaves and above all the blossoms emit a fullness of aromatic substances which serve as nourishment for the existence of the ensouled animal world, for the flying insects
living in the element of warmth and for the bird world living in the element of air.
In the metabolic-limb pole of the human being, the will lives and works in a state of unconsciousness. Yet this will is spirit — the spirit of his higher nature, of his I, which lives itself forth in the bodily organism as this particular individuality. It is this hidden spirit of the human being who, as microcosm, has developed out of the macrocosm through stages of evolution. It is the spirit that forges together and holds in efficacy the life processes — occurring in the spatial side-by-sideness and temporal succession of all things — in the harmony of their sounding-together. In the macrocosm, this harmony lives itself out in the rhythms of the seasons and reveals its signature above all in the life-appearances above the earth in relation to the atmospheric periphery. Here too spirit holds sway — the spirituality that lives itself forth as the efficacy of the beings of the Hierarchies[30] (see chapter «Wie erfüllt sich der Organismusbegriff im Mineralreich?») in all appearances of the macrocosm and of the earth. It interpenetrates all realms of being which individualize themselves naturally at every site of the earth — in the depths in stillness, in the heights in movement. This polarity grounds the particularity of every agricultural organism. The movement above the earth creates chaos in the world of substance; in the depths reigns constancy; the middle seeks in self-reliance the transcending equilibrium.
Since the end of the 19th century, the human being has been intervening worldwide in this macrocosmic polarity — for the most part disruptively — with intelligent arbitrariness, above all in the regions above the earth. In the course of the 21st century, this disruption has broken through the macrocosmic regulative and has dissolved itself into the chaos of climatic extreme events. To this the unrestrained exploitation of all the earth's resources has contributed. The main actor here is agriculture: with regard to the «illness» (contamination) of the metabolic pole,
what stand in the foreground are, among other things, the outgassing of nitrogen oxides (including nitrous oxide, NO2) as a consequence of the denitrification of primarily synthetic nitrogen fertiliser salts, as well as the wind-borne aerosols arising from the totality of synthetic plant-treatment agents — herbicides, pesticides, and others. All of these are constructs conceived out of abstract model-thinking, whose effects are death-bringing; that is to say, they carry the head pole and death-pole of the earthly depths beyond the rhythmic middle and into the metabolic-limb pole, where they assert themselves. Against this background the question arises anew: what measures, proceeding from the knowledge of the polarity of the heights and the depths, are to be taken in order to bring this polarity — in the organ of the middle, the fertile living soil — to a transcending equilibrium.
The Rhythmic Middle in the Organism of the Farm Individuality
Measured against the vast dimensions of the heights and the depths, the living soil as the zone of interpenetration of both forms a tissue-thin layer — a skin — which Rudolf Steiner compares to the human diaphragm.[31] The diaphragm is a muscular organ that forms a dividing wall towards the abdominal organs. When one seeks out the functions of the soil-diaphragm organ, one finds that these follow, on the one hand, the macrocosmic rhythms of day and night and of the seasons; and on the other hand, this organ of the middle carries the physiological predisposition toward a rhythm of its own. For it contains within itself, in germinal form, the disposition toward both a heart-activity and a lung-activity. The soil-diaphragm organ demarcates itself morphologically and physiologically both from the head pole — the unweathered rocky substratum below — and from the aerial periphery above. Downward it is sensorially active through its quartz-silica content in the sand fraction; upward it is metabolically active through its lime and humus content. The heart-function of the soil, the sun within the soil, is fulfilled by the clay; it is
the «middle of the middle». Clay mediates between silica and lime, and grounds its cosmic nature through the bond it enters into with the most earthly of all substances — humus. The heart-functions of clay in the living soil are: the balancing of the force-relationships between quartz-silica and lime, and the guiding of the circulation of substances through the soil water. Humus, by contrast, is — in the widest sense (nutrient humus and stable humus) — the bearer of soil respiration. It is subject to the building-up and breaking-down wrought by bacterial and animal soil life, and through this ensures the exchange of air. This exchange takes place as it does in animal and human being alike. The living soil breathes in oxygen from the near-ground air layer and releases carbon dioxide. The soil as diaphragm organ bears within itself the potency for the development of a member that becomes increasingly independent between the Heights and the Depths. All measures of agricultural activity must be directed above all toward shaping the rhythmic middle into the central organ of the agricultural organism. The image-forming activity of the human spirit creates in space and time the bodiliness that «fills itself with being»[32]. This being Rudolf Steiner names the «farm individuality». As already mentioned, the concept «individuality» — derived from the human being — speaks to the kernel of being of the human spirit, the «I»: this can, through self-knowledge and by means of anthroposophical spiritual science, grasp this concept, give it an experienceable content of ideas, and from this fertilise its impulses of will. These lend to the daily work in field and byre an ethico-moral weight. What has thus become spiritual experience in conscious apprehension, what deepens and strengthens inner disposition, what awakens enthusiasm and love for the deed — this streams as a self-created quality, hidden from the outer senses, toward the soil, the plants and the animals of the farm. Through such work on the earth, impulsed out of spiritual research, the intimation of Rudolf Steiner may prove itself true:
«We stand [since the beginning of the twentieth century] before a great transformation of the inner nature of nature»; it is connected «with the transformation of human soul-formation [...]»[33]. The negative consequences make themselves felt with sufficient force in the «emptiness of being» of the materialistic view of nature and its technological implementation, as well as in the fragmentation of social life.
When, however, a community of collaborating human beings acts out of the inner contemplation of the organism and individuality-thought, and seeks — supported by the results of spiritual research — to establish new relationships between the things and beings of the farm, it opens itself with spirit, heart and hand into the «inner nature of nature» of the farm. It works «filling-with-being»[34].
The Rhythmic Processes of the Soil-Diaphragm Organ, in Spring and Summer
From spring onward into high summer, the rhythmic activity opens itself above all to the atmospheric metabolic forces and enters into temporal reciprocal interaction with these. With the permeation by light, by warmth, by air and by moisture of the uppermost loosened soil layer, the lower plant and animal soil life in spring begins suddenly to unfold. Through bacterial «living-construction» larger and more stable soil crumbs are formed. In the living topsoil, processes of building-up predominate (inbreathing of oxygen), occasioned on the one hand by the rapid proliferation of bacteria in colonies, and on the other by the equally swiftly unfolding and active world of soil animals. Polar to this spontaneous unfolding of life, yet standing in its service — working upward from below out of the head pole — are the breaking-down death-forces (exhalation of CO2). These provide for the mineral weathering and the bacterial
breakdown of the store of life accumulated in previous years, the humus. In both cases salts are released. They pass into solution in the soil water, migrate in part downward into the depths of the head pole, but for the greater part are retained by the soil colloids, clay minerals and humus substances, or are drawn into the pull of the plant roots.
This life-creating, building-up activity in spring reaches, through early summer into high summer, somewhat deeper soil layers. There arises the coarse- and fine-porously structured tilth, comparable to the pulmonary alveoli, ready to receive large quantities of air in the zone of the oxygen-dependent plant roots, or large quantities of water at times of heavy rain. Just as the grain of corn, bearing future life within itself, ripens in high summer in air and warmth, so the soil tilth matures into a kind of lung of the soil. In this connection the following image may present itself: the earth breathes out in spring the four groups of elemental beings[35] that had concealed themselves within her over winter. Through their efficacy in the elements of warmth and air, in the water-vapours and in the solid earth, they create in the upward-growing plants the image of their archetypal image. But also the formation of the soil tilth in the boundary zone of soil and air is their work. The essential nature of the metabolic activity in the summer half-year above the earth is the mutual interweaving of the elements earth and water within the elements air and warmth.
The «elemental beings» are, by the nature of their activity, beings of relationship. They are of a supersensible spiritual kind and mediate the efficacy of the named spiritual hierarchies and of «the group souls of the plants and animals» to the elements of the physical earth which underlie all being — to water, to air and to warmth. That the rocks, which are in general congealed relationship-systems of various minerals, and these in turn of various substances; that in plant, animal and human being physiological processes unfold in the organs and between these, and so forth — all this is the work of such elemental
beings. They are the bearers of spirit-permeation in all being. If attention is directed, in feeling contemplation, to the «between» of the phenomena — for example, of various animal species in their activity-behaviour in relation to the elements — the being-relationship may become mediately perceptible as intimation: the delicate earthworm, working the solid earth; the trout, holding its place in the clear water of the stream against the current and feeling out the flowing water with its coat of scales, or darting flashing through the water; the swallow, generating eddies around itself in arrow-swift flight and living itself out with every wing-beat in the element of air; or the bee, living in the element of warmth, seeking the blossom in eager activity and appearing for one moment as though belonging to it. Each of these phenomena is, in experience, like a bridge-building toward the world of elemental beings.[36]
The Rhythmic Processes of the Soil-Diaphragm Organ, in Autumn and Winter
In late summer, and wholly so in autumn, the spring-summer process reverses itself into its opposite. The process of exteriorisation, which expressed itself in the visible forms of the soil tilth and of the plant world, transforms itself into a process of interiorisation. The soil life dies, the plants wither, the leaves detach themselves from the trees. One beholds the life falling prey to death and feels how it becomes spiritualised and returns again into the earth. This return or inbreathing of the world of elemental beings lends to light, to warmth and to air an intimate degree of inwardness and at the same time earthly weight. An image of this is shown by the dying leaves, breaking into earth-colours in one last blossoming, as likewise by the mists lying over the lowlands in September, the
golden light in October and the stormy, cloud-laden November.
In the soil-diaphragm organ, this activity likewise leads to a densification which, as in seed formation, represents a substantial process of interiorisation; it is the formation of stable humus. In stable humus, the living soil forms out of itself a kind of seed, the universal seed, which contains the germ of the 'generally-plant-like' — that is, of what remains of the plant in purely vegetative organs prior to seed formation. Root, stem, leaf and blossom return withered to the soil and transform themselves within it, in accordance with nature's own working, into a material new-creation: stable humus, or, as the old alchemists named it, the 'universal seed of the Earth'. Like the individual seed of the plant, it contains a nutritive tissue which, germinating in spring, mediates the generally-plant-like principle to the new growth. As the plant seed perishes in germinating, so does the universal seed, humus. The rhythmic principle of coming-into-being and passing-away, immanent in the very essence of the soil-diaphragm, owes what it is to the metabolic processes working in from above.
With the onset of winter, the autumnal activity comes to rest. Warmth yields to cold, the air densifies, the moisture within it crystallises into snowflakes. The head pole or sense pole of the Earth opens itself to the in-raying of the fixed-star sphere.[37] United with these forces streaming in from the cosmos, the head-silica pole works upward out of the depths of the Earth, awakens sense processes in the soil-diaphragm organ, and brings to the metabolic activity above the Earth a partial death by causing the elements Earth, Water, Air and Warmth to separate from one another and to pass into a condition of separate existence. The rhythmic and metabolic member is interpenetrated from below by forces of death. Death, however, means that the spirituality which, in the course of the year, has congealed into the shaping of fertile soil and of the upward-striving plants, becomes
free. From the farthest heights downward, and from the depths upward, the Earth spiritualises itself. As the individual seed of the plant and the universal seed, humus, carry over the imprinted formative forces of the previous year into the year to come, so the liberated spirituality of the winter half-year passes into the stream of physical substance that makes the ascending life of the summer half-year earthly. In the winter months, above all in January and February,[38] the sense life in the soil-diaphragm organ of the agricultural organism becomes active. As the eye does not lay claim for itself to the impressions it receives, so too acts the 'outer sense in the earthly', the silica. It mediates the received radiations of the cosmos through the clay in a 'cosmic upward streaming'[39] to plant growth and renders it sun-like. Different is the action of lime, which only becomes active toward spring: it draws into itself the back-radiations of the silica. Thus there stand within the living soil, in temporal succession, polar to one another, a sense-nature and a desire-nature. Mediating between both poles are the clay minerals, derived from silicates — among them mica and feldspars — as their weathering products. They are, in the form of clay, the mineral counterpart to humus. The clay minerals possess a hexagonal crystalline lamellar structure so thin that it appears, when considered geometrically, as though it were the materialised idea of a plane. Between these lamellae there adhere, among other things, the dissociated alkaline and alkaline-earth metals, such as potassium, calcium, magnesium and so forth. In the course of weathering, these interlayer minerals pass gradually into solution. The clay swells through water-absorption; in dry conditions it shrinks again and leaves cracks in the soil. Through its lamellar structure, clay possesses, with regard to plant growth, a unique quality that is at once earthly and cosmic. On the one hand it binds the earthly-saline substances that have passed into solution — those named above — and conveys them to the plant roots. On the other, it is the great me
diator of the crystal-forming forces of the cosmic heights, back-radiated from the silica-quartz, to the plants. In view of these cosmic-earthly properties, one may find a point of access to Rudolf Steiner's remark that clay possesses the capacity to wrest from lime the cosmic back-radiations which the desire-nature of lime attempts to seize for itself.[40] The fact that it is precisely the clay which is able to bind the substances of limestone and of limestone-related rocks that have gone into solution, as interlayer minerals, to the silicate lamellar structure — this fact may illuminate this indication of the spiritual researcher.
In transcending their opposition, clay and humus tend to unite into the clay-humus complex. They are thereby the true functional bearers of the fertility-forming middle of the living soil. Clay is the cosmic form-giver within the soil, and physiologically the promoter of «the cosmic outward streaming» from below upward in plant growth. Humus is «the end-product of the earthly with the earthly»[41]. It engenders a working that is without light.[42] One may say: clay mediates, from out of the «middle» and from the winter-side, the formative forces of the heights to the plants; humus, by contrast, mediates the forces of the depths, which during the summer half-year predominately hold sway over the processes of substance within the soil.
The soil-diaphragm organ is the organ of the middle within the agricultural organism; year after year it repeats the creative event of an evolution that continues to work forth from the past. Does there lie within this middle — now become the present «work», poised between the heights and the depths — the germ of a metamorphosis of its becoming into the future? What task falls to those human beings who have awakened to I-consciousness at this turning point?
The organism principle in biodynamically oriented farming
The «organism in natural growth» designates the site-specific «Oikos» touched little or not at all by human hands. This «house of nature» is today conceived as having been composed of territories once released from primeval forests, steppes, deserts or ice. Still experienced in isolated instances as late as the Middle Ages (Goddess Natura!), humanity in pre-Christian times knew «nature as a comprehensive, primordial being [...] spanning the cosmos with all its stars»[43]. It was the nomadic pastoral peoples, still dreaming their way entirely within the spirit-nature, together with hunting and gathering humanity, who made use of what nature gave. Under the guidance of the priestly wisdom of the Mysteries, humanity came to settle in fixed places. With the scratch plough arose the first step in the taking-into-culture of the soil-diaphragm organ, as well as the cultivation of grain bred from grasses (wheat, barley), the transformation of wild herbs into vegetable species, and of wild-growing, predominantly arboreal Rosaceae into fruit trees, and so forth. A number of animal species thrived under the hand of the human being into domestic animals. Where this occurred, the «organism in natural growth» was absorbed, at a first stage of development, into a culture-organism created by the human being. This development took place above all in the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations of the Orient.
Europe awoke only with the rising of Christianity to a still spirit-guided consciousness of its embeddedness within a wild forest-nature scarcely yet touched. This awakening accomplished itself, as it were, in time-lapse. The forests were cleared in the two great clearing-periods of the sixth/seventh and twelfth centuries, and upon the newly cultivated surfaces there gathered the cultivated plants and domestic animals bequeathed by the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations. This cultural heri-
tage appears again in a first repetition at a higher level: from the scratch plough comes the turning plough, from the breeding-works of antiquity the landrace varieties, from the domesticated animals the landraces. The once loosely scattered hamlet-settlement became the village, with the church at its centre and the enclosed circumference of the village bounds. Within Western-Christian peasant farming a second great metamorphosis accomplished itself — towards the largely self-enclosed organism of the village bounds, and later that of the individual farms forming a parish[44]. This self-enclosure arose through the integration, and therewith the reciprocal interaction, of arable farming, animal husbandry, meadow and pasture husbandry, horticulture, fruit growing and silviculture.
The organism principle has taken on a new gestalt in agriculture with and through Christianity. As a cosmic-earthly impulse it has gradually transformed the whole human being — his bodily, soul and spiritual constitution. This transformation released a second metamorphosis, and with this a third step in the development of the organism principle. The following historical excursus may illuminate this great upswing in the shaping of the cultural landscape, which persisted throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, and whose tragic decline continued through the course of the modern age into the present. Europe transformed its wilderness-nature into cultural landscapes, which articulated themselves into village-organisms as well as into hamlet-like parishes and feudal farmsteads. Urban development set in only later, as a continuation of the palatial settlements, as individual village-organisms became central market-towns.
The impulses proceeding from Christianity were threefold in nature:
1. Throughout the Middle Ages and the times that followed there ran the quietly hidden-working stream of 'esoteric Christianity', connecting itself to primordial Christianity and turning towards the cosmic primal ground of the Mys-
tery of Golgotha. It emerged first in legends, fairy-tales and the like, in a language of images, then more concretely — for example in the Arthurian and Grail-stream — out of the hidden into the light of outward historical existence. This held good especially for the School of Chartres as well as for the countless shrines of Michael-cult. The mission of Irish-Scottish monasticism fed itself from this same source, as did the high art of the painters Raphael, Grünewald and many others.
2. Opposed to this first stream stood the second: the stream of exoteric or Petrine Christianity. This received its essential character through Roman intellectual culture and through its early recognition as state religion by Emperor Constantine the Great (280–337). It is strictly hierarchically articulated, stands as a spiritual power among the mighty, enters the world in a missionising way, creates for itself with the institution of the Church a firmly anchored place, cultivates a splendid cultus accessible to all people, and is entangled in worldly affairs.
3. In the interpenetration and synthesis of both streams there unfolded from the early Middle Ages onward a third element between them: 'folk Christianity' in deeply spiritual, inwardly heartfelt disposition. The high folk-art of the High Middle Ages bears manifold witness to this. The overwhelmingly peasant population lived and worked, out of the force of the I-awakening, in a relationship that felt the spiritual in nature and cosmos. The organism of the village-organisms shaped by human hands — with the church at their midpoint, the village community gathered around it, and the village bounds
as their circumference — became an artwork formed into nature itself.
Folk Christianity, deeply rooted in the folk-life, continued on into the modern age in its closing resonance. Its two polar spiritual sources, however, lost their inspiring and sustaining power. Esoteric Christianity, which had flowered once more historically in the thirteenth century in the social work of the Order of the Temple, continued after that order's violent destruction to work secretly in smaller circles; it emerged once more into outward efficacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, as well as in individual personalities working from the hidden depths, such as Paracelsus, Jacob Böhme, Angelus Silesius and others.
In contrast, exoteric Christianity with its institutions came to a full unfolding of power and emancipated itself increasingly from the spirit of its origin. Two symptoms that in this respect rang in the modern age may be named: on the one hand, the destruction of the Order of the Temple — mentioned above as acting from spiritual sources — at the beginning of the fourteenth century; and on the other hand, the equally church-decreed death by fire of a true representative of folk Christianity, namely Jeanne d'Arc (1410/12–1431).
The repressive exoteric power of the Church against heretical strivings continued in the fifteenth century with the Inquisition. It prepared, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the uprising of the peasants — the Peasants' Wars of 1524/25 — which were directed against the absolute guardianship of Church and nobility. A sign of the peasants' powerlessness was their heavy toll in blood. This calamity continued through the sixteenth century in the religious wars of the Counter-Reformation and culminated in the seventeenth century in the terrible devastations of the Thirty Years' War. These affected above all the peasant population — the erstwhile bearer of folk Christianity — as well as the desolation of the village-organisms,
indeed of whole landscapes. The martial raging in the name of Christ struck Central Europe in the very heart.
With the power-impulses of an exoteric Christianity increasingly misunderstanding itself, the fate of folk Christianity — of the spiritualised mind soul — was sealed. In the following eighteenth century, the century of the Enlightenment, what had been inherited could be continued only in tradition, that is, in gradual rigidification. Roman private law replaced the last remnants of the Germanic common-property law. The dissolution of social cohesion in the village-organisms accelerated in the nineteenth century. The essential being of nature had long since ceased to speak to human beings. The demanding necessity of nature, its iron lawfulness, was experienced as external determination in labour and awakened the need for freedom. Following this, the farms and villages emptied themselves in waves of emigration and migration. The natural sciences placed the human being over against nature — a «liberation act»; they made him a spectator. Out of the spectator-consciousness, the physical laws were intellectually filtered out from the whole of nature, translated into the construction of machines, and with these, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the still morally involved, acting human beings were rationalised out of agriculture.
The inner disposition which in the Middle Ages, out of the spirit of folk Christianity, had helped the organism principle to come into existence on a higher level — shaping entire landscapes — has gone under. In its place, agnosticism increasingly stepped forward. The force of the mind soul permeated by Christ, which once formed wholenesses, has become fragmented inwardly, and thereby in its outward deeds as well. Yet at the same time, on the foundation of this death-process, humanity has acquired the force for becoming self-conscious — and therewith the capacity to rediscover within itself, in freedom, the essential being of Christian existence and becoming.
What has been lost cannot be restored from the same impulses out of which it arose. Humanity has stepped beyond this phase of development. It has awakened to self-consciousness and therewith to free self-determination into the future. Whoever as a farmer seeks a new relationship to the earth and to the cosmos must ask, first, what the conditions are that underlie agricultural production out of living and ensouled nature, and second, what measures are to be taken from these insights, through which they may become, in a new way, culture-bearing and development-inaugurating. The answer runs: the farmer must endeavour, in knowledge of self and world, to set his whole cosmos of ideas into movement, so as to grasp anew in spirit the universality of the organism principle; only then can he let what has been recognised be verified through its translation into practice — through the deed, through the doing. The translation into practice signifies the beginning of a third metamorphosis, which necessarily presupposes, at every new founding of a farm, the repetition of the past developmental steps on a higher level. In the place of the Church as the source of moral action steps the I of the human being, awakened in self-consciousness. And in the place of the once instinctively and wisdom-filled work conducted within the village bounds steps the knowing gaze directed toward the essential being of the soil, of the plants, animals and the cosmos at the given site. With the third metamorphosis there comes about a rebirth of agriculture. What in the old village shaped itself as a polarity between point (Church) and periphery (village bounds), as it were from without, must now be grasped as a spiritual-soul impulse from within. The image of the erstwhile village community must now be inwardly elaborated as an idea-filled form-configuration. At stake is the knowledge of the essential being of the soil, of the rhythmic middle between the heights and the depths, and the manner of its cultivating tillage through the course of the year; it is the knowledge of the essential being
of the cultivated plants, of their organ-functions within the framework of the crop rotation, as well as of their sowing and after-cultivation; it is the deeper insight into the continued life of the «organism of agriculture», in the articulation of the field-land into hedgerows, field margins, scrubland, woodlands, solitary trees, water-meadows and waterways. Furthermore at stake is the knowledge of the essential being of domestic animal-nature and its representatives, above all of the cattle as well as of the wild fauna, and here above all the knowledge of those animal groups connected with the four elements: the worms in the earth, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air and the insects in the warmth. And finally it concerns the knowledge of the organ-functions which, in their reciprocal interaction of giving and receiving, constitute the totality of the inner «economy» of the farm as a whole. This repetition in the reorientation of a farm is, now in full wakefulness, the third step of the metamorphosis in the development of the organism principle. The first step lay within the naturally given «organism in natural growth», the second was the cultural achievement of the herdsmen and farmers in the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations. It underwent metamorphosis and, after the turning-point of time, was taken up into the farming-Christian village communities. After their cultural death — at the latest by the middle of the twentieth century — we stand at the threshold to the aforementioned third step of a metamorphosis. Everything that has ever been accomplished as agricultural cultural creation must be repeated in individual I-experience.
As one example among many, let us make an excursus into crop rotations in arable farming, and here in particular to the question of soil cultivation:
Arable farming rests on three pillars: manuring, crop rotation and soil cultivation. From the earliest times of arable farming, soil cultivation was carried out with the scratch plough and the pointed hoe. In the second step of the metamorphosis the single- to double-share turning plough and the harrow came into use;
the hoe took various forms according to the work to be done. In the course of the industrial age the more deeply working plough, the skim plough, the heavy harrow, the cultivator and the weeder harrow, as well as implements driven by power take-off shafts, were added. The domestic animals — horse, cow, ox, donkey — were at first the draught animals. With this equipment in the second step of the metamorphosis, the agricultural organism developed toward a nearly complete autarky. The sustainability of soil fertility was assured through manuring from the farm's own livestock and the crop rotation of the three-field system.
In the course of the ascending industrial methods of production, monoculture arose in arable farming, and socially the migration away from the native soil took place. The traction machines grew ever more powerful in horsepower, the implements broader and more technically refined, the ploughs worked ever more deeply and were fitted per share with ever wider furrow slices; chemical weed control caused the weeder harrow and the hoe to disappear. The sustainability of soil fertility and a soil cultivation harmonised therewith are, on account of annual mineral-salt manuring, no longer called for. The second stage of organism formation grown out of Christianity has died, and is being carried altogether to its grave by electronic control technology.
The answer to the cultural death of the second metamorphosis of the organism principle was given by Rudolf Steiner one hundred years ago, in 1924, with the Agriculture Course. This inaugurated, as mentioned, a third metamorphosis. Only later, in the second half of the twentieth century, did a general ecological consciousness grow — independently of this inauguration. With a certain exclusivity — and this holds true for biodynamic farming as well — attention has been directed one-sidedly toward humus as the bearer of soil fertility, not simultaneously toward the processes of the crystalline clay minerals.
Humus Cultivation
Humus is subject to decomposing processes from spring through toward summer; a loss of humus occurs. In late summer through autumn, by contrast, humus-building processes come to the fore, compensating for the loss. Over winter, a processual rest prevails.
In spring, plough-working and cultivator work should rest — unless what is called for is the breaking up of a winter cover crop (Landsberg mixture, vetch-rye) for the sowing of fast-growing successor crops (transplanted turnips, field vegetables). For spring, the cultivating skin tillage applies: the harrowing of winter crops and spring-sown crops, as well as seedbed preparation for the summer fruits with harrow and crumbler. The sowing is preceded in time by a second harrow-pass to combat germinating weeds. After the crop has emerged, a crust breaking with mesh or spring-tine weeder harrow is required after every shower of rain — and where needed, a mechanical hoe right through to stem elongation of the grain. This serves soil aeration and weed destruction.
In summer, skin tillage is continued on root crops until the rows close. In grain growing, immediately after harvest and the clearing of the straw, stubble breaking follows — a mulching cultivation reaching to crumb-tilth depth (approximately 8 cm), mixing the surface. With this, and with a green manure sowing, the turn from humus decomposition to humus building is accomplished, and therewith the opening of the living soil to the working of the earth's depth-forces in autumn and winter.
In late summer and autumn comes the time for spreading ripened deep-litter manure and composts by shallow ploughing-in. The mixing effect of the cultivator is too slight. The cultivator is helpful after early-harvested root crops (potatoes) and loosely crumbling, dry soil. With late-harvested root crops and heavily-trafficked, over-moist soil, only an autumn-winter furrow can come into consideration for late
sowing of winter crops or for the spring sowing of spring-sown crops. A root-rich post-harvest green manure promotes the humus-building worm-life in the soil. From late summer through to late autumn, the humus ripens into the clay-humus complex.
Clay Working
In winter, or late autumn, the winter furrow — a turning deep-cultivation to approximately 20 cm — may be carried out with full confidence. By this time the entire soil life has already passed over into the winter condition of rest, as has the «universal seed» humus into the form of stable humus. Within this, over winter, the preceding course of the year is worked through in retrospect and the future one prepared. The cultivating hand of the human being rests. The distant fixed-star cosmos of the macrocosm, in conjunction with sustained frost, now works the soil — the middle of the heights and the depths. «When January draws to its close, the mineral substances of the earth have the greatest longing [...] to become crystallically pure within the household of nature.»[45]
Plough-Working
It falls to soil cultivation to steer both processes in the course of the year — the humus dynamic as well as the silica-clay dynamic — in favour of an enduring soil-born fertility. To this end the plough retains its undiminished primacy over the cultivator or any power-take-off-driven implement. The cultivator loosens well, with distributed sliding sole, but it does not mix — or does not mix sufficiently — above all not in the vertical. In wet conditions it produces compressed clods in the upper soil profile, which in the following
spring can scarcely, or only too late, reform themselves into a crumb structure. What has established itself in some quarters with the heavy cultivator fitted with ridging mouldboards is the laying-up of ridges. The green manure sown upon them, together with the weed cover, is intended to keep the humus process alive as far as possible through the winter. The ridge furrows, partly stripped of their humus covering, remain moist through capillary water-rise and compact themselves permanently with each successive tillage operation. Mechanical weed control in the ridge furrow (too moist) and along the ridge crown (rather dry, with trickle-crumbling soil) is possible only to a very limited extent with precision inter-row hoes; harrowing with the weeder is almost entirely out of the question. There is a tendency toward progressive weed increase and — especially in the soil profile — toward the formation of a seedbed interspersed with clods. The consequence is that the root-crop fields, generally regarded as cleansing crops in the rotation, now tend toward weed proliferation.
The plough stands in a relation contrary to that of exclusively cultivator-based tillage. It serves the care of humus — as does the skim plough, which shallowly undercuts the crumbling, mellow-ripe layer across the full surface during stubble breaking, and over the more steeply inclined mouldboard shears the opened furrow slice, casting it down in crumbling, turning, shaking movement while incorporating the stubble. Seen from above, from the metabolic pole, this is a first step of chaotisation, which initiates humus formation in the course of the year. A second step of chaotisation is the deeper seed furrow (approx. 17 cm), for winter crops — principally rye and barley — that tiller in the pre-winter period. The third and actual step of chaotisation is brought by the deeper winter furrow (18–20 cm). It chaotises the soil built up in living layers through the course of the year and opens it to the crystal-forming winter forces. One may also call the winter furrow the «clay ploughing». The clay particles displaced into the subsoil by heavy summer rains are, in complement to the earthworm's work,
guided back again to the surface into the metabolically active living topsoil. The spreading snow cover over the winter furrow is the perceptible image of the forces of the fixed-star cosmos raying into the depths of the earth, into the silicate subsoil.
The true significance of plough-working must be rediscovered. The plough, rightly constructed and rightly employed, is the central implement of all soil cultivation. Like no other implement, it is the forming sculptor of the diaphragm organ soil, under the forces of the heights and the depths. The chief problem in plough-working is the field-efficiency demanded of it. This necessitates high drawbar performance, a wide tyre-contact area and a correspondingly high dead-weight of the tractor. High field-efficiency is energy-intensive. Combined with the simultaneously sought considerably greater ploughing depth, it requires an over-wide cut of the furrow slice, multiple-share arrangements, and drawn-out, large-dimensioned mouldboards. The need to bring plough-working back to a soil-appropriate measure is something that a few more recent plough designs attempt to meet.
These allow an adjustable ploughing depth of 12 to 18 cm, a narrower, adjustable cutting width, and are equipped — with a view to a well-mixing cast — with a relatively short, steeply set mouldboard.
Plough-working creates a uniform depth, a level-plane loosened layer, into whose macro- and micro-pores warmth, air and rainwater can penetrate evenly. At the boundary with the subsoil the capillarity is interrupted — also as a consequence of the displacement of the furrow slice. As a result, the soil warms more quickly in spring, so that the weeds germinate before the seedbed operations. The plough, with a subsoil packer running alongside it, brings the soil into the appropriate condition for the autumn sowings; the star-roller harrow as a plough-follower prepares the soil for the spring sowings. In this way, early in spring the
skin tillage (2–3 cm deep) can begin with harrow, weeder harrow and hoe. The weeder-harrow working serves — as far as possible after every shower of rain, right up to the stem elongation of the grain — crust breaking, aeration, reduction of evaporation and weed control. In the case of root crops this continues until the rows close over.
Only timely and appropriate ploughing leads over into a subsequent cultivation of the seedbed, into a stewardship that can lay claim to being an art of arable farming. The precondition for this is that one observes and moves in thought the sum of the spatio-temporal phenomena which the soil displays in the course of the year and in connection with the crops. If one pursues this path with the requisite rigour, the art of soil cultivation can never degenerate into ideology nor fall into routine. It consciously repeats on a higher level what was practice — in an artistically-instinctive manner — in Western-Christian farming.
The Organism as Body of the Farm Individuality
It encompasses the described heights and depths of the metabolic pole and the head pole, and the zone of interpenetration of both — the soil as the diaphragm organ. The cultivation and care of the soil, the middle between cosmos and earth, is the field of activity of agriculture. In and through the soil, what lives hidden within it — and within the forces of the heights and the depths — comes to appearance. What appears is, according to the site, an earth-bound creation, the existential foundation for plant, animal and human being; it is the «organism in natural growth» mentioned on several occasions. The contribution that agriculture makes is to guide and direct the conditions of past working in such a way that out of mere nature-being a nursery of culture may arise. Such a
nursery has come into existence over millennia through spirit-guided human labour, in the form of cultivated soil, cultivated plants, and culture- or domestic animals. It was the human spirit and human labour that led the nature-given creation a step beyond itself. From this arose the first great metamorphosis of nature-being, in the epochs of the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations, above all those of the Orient. The second metamorphosis took place, as mentioned, under the influence of Christianity. All elements of agriculture — arable farming, animal husbandry, pasture husbandry, horticulture, fruit growing and silviculture — were brought into measured relation with one another: the cultivated soil was thereby raised to the higher stage of enduring soil-born fertility. With Rudolf Steiner's «Agriculture Course» a third metamorphosis of the organism principle is initiated. This course builds upon the repetition of the pre-Christian and post-Christian stages of becoming in agriculture. On these foundations drawn from spiritual research, the germ is laid whose unfolding — through spirit, heart and hand of the farmer — raises the agricultural organism to become the bearer of a spiritual being-nature that works in from out of the future. The same spirituality lives in the human being as the I. It is the kernel of his being that makes his own bodily organism into a vessel of incarnation.
The spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner gives guidance toward bringing this metamorphosis into the future to realisation. To this end, however, the cultural heritage of the past must be repeated on the present developmental stage of the «consciousness soul». The steps of repetition are, once more in summary, the following.
I The repetition of the «organism in natural growth»:
a) The establishment of hedgerows, field copses, tree avenues, mixed woodlands, flowering strips, field margins, ponds
b) The preservation of wet meadows, floodplains, moors, etc.
1st Metamorphosis
II The repetition of the cultural achievements of the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations of the Orient
a) The breeding-creation of new cultivated plants from wild grasses into grain crops and from wild herbs into vegetable cultures, from wild woody plants, berries and standard fruit, as well as the further development of seed-stable, site-adapted varieties out of the old cultural heritage
b) Soil cultivation with the mattock and the scratch plough, and later the turning plough and the harrow
c) The bodily-ensouled transformation of wild-animal forms into herd animals turned toward the human being, as well as further development and racial diversity
d) Irrigation by flooding through canal and ditch systems and furrow irrigation
e) Manuring through high-flood sediments
f) The loose juxtaposition of arable farming, animal husbandry, pasture areas, horticulture, fruit growing and woodland
2nd Metamorphosis
III The repetition of the cultural heritage of the post-Christian age, in particular since the end of the Migration Period.
a) Integration of arable farming, animal husbandry, meadow and pasture husbandry, fruit growing and silviculture in measured reciprocal interaction, as well as water management
b) Village-organisms as well as feudal and hamlet farms as enclosed culture-organisms
c) The becoming-domestic-animal in stable-keeping; itinerant shepherds, common-land and forest pastures belonging to the village bounds, communal pastures on fallow ground
d) Feeding: in summer pasture, arable and woodland grazing, in winter meadow hay, straw, turnips
e) Arable farming: the threefoldness of:
Soil cultivation: skim plough, plough, harrow, and later weeder harrow; variation of hand implements
Crop rotation: Three-field husbandry: winter crop, spring-sown crop, fallow — or alternation of grassland and arable land; later the green manuring of the fallow (clover-grass)
Manuring: marl-liming, stable manure, liquid manure, composting in horticulture and soft-fruit growing
f) Plant breeding: Landscape-bound so-called landrace varieties, saved seed with occasional regional seed exchange. Finally the beginning of cross-breeding and selection
g) Water balance: Drainage of extensive woodland-marsh areas, regulation of groundwater levels
h) Regulation of watercourses through weirs (mills, dams, grassland on flood zones)
i) Irrigation: ditch systems with overflow slope irrigation, ridge-and-furrow meadows
A 3rd Metamorphosis into the future follows
These three great cultural steps of farming form the basis of a third metamorphosis. The impulse-giver of the same is the anthroposophical spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner, the aforementioned knowledge of the essential being of the human being and of the world. Through it, every gesture of daily work receives spiritual-moral weight. One no longer gropes in the dark; one sees before oneself a path of knowledge through which the above-named fields of activity are recognised as though newly grounded in spirit, and with this one sees before oneself a path of development of farming that, in the present, connects the future to the past. This transforming force underlies all the measures addressed in the 'Agriculture Course' that aim to shape the organism of the agricultural operation into the body of an 'individuality filling itself with being'.[46]
The point of departure for setting in motion this third metamorphosis of organism formation is, physically, soul-wise and spiritually, the human being. Knowledge of the spirit directs toward a work that addresses itself to the 'diaphragm organ', the soil, working down through it into the head pole and working up through it into the 'belly' of farming. The soil, in its mineral nature, is the 'work' of the past, as is equally the working of the forces of 'above and below'. The
spiritual-scientific indications of Rudolf Steiner aim, through a new kind of manuring, to enable the 'middle' itself to become self-actively creative and to make the forces of the heights and the depths its servants. With this 'fulfilling of the middle with being', the secret of manuring is revealed: it concerns 'the enlivening of the solid, the earthy itself',[47] the return and transformation of the inorganic-dead substance into the living condition.
The farming impulsed by anthroposophical spiritual science adds to the above-named fields of activity, prefigured out of the past, a new field of activity that transforms them. It is the extensive field of working with the so-called biodynamic preparations, their making and their application. This forms the kernel of anthroposophically oriented farming. This kernel can never be thought widely or deeply enough in terms of its essential being and its significance. The obtaining of the preparations takes place as far as possible within the given farm organism; their efficacy, the enlivening of the 'middle' toward self-activity, is 'filling-with-being'. What matters toward this goal is 'unconditional working'.[48] One may understand this call in such a way that the initiative-community of the farm surrenders itself, thinking, feeling and willing, to the task of leading the polar separate-existence in the kingdoms of nature up to higher syntheses. What is meant by this shall be made clear in what follows.
A Methodological Aspect Regarding the Making of the Preparations
The manner of making the preparations and of applying them aims at the enlivening of the inorganic, dead world of substance and at the opening-up of the plant toward its higher members of the human being — those members that are at home in the cosmos. The methodological
path by which this is accomplished proceeds through processes of inversion. Something outwardly sensible is inverted into an inwardly supersensible working. For example, cow-pat dung, or in another instance silica meal, is filled into the inner cavity of a cow horn. The cow horn, itself something outer, served — in its connection with the cow — an inner process, in that it dammed back the arterial blood-stream flowing from the heart toward the head, into the digestive pole. As something outer, as an organ detached from the cow, this same horn becomes once more an inner, by being buried in the winter earth (horn manure) or summer earth (horn silica) respectively. As a further example, standing in place of the compost preparations, let us consider the process of inversion in the making of the dandelion preparation. The blossoms of the dandelion — the highest, outwardly directed revelation of the essential being of the plant — are enveloped on all sides with the mesentery membrane of a cow (peritoneum). Something previously outer becomes an inner. The peritoneum itself was in the cow an active inner organ; now, inverted, it is an outer sheath-membrane. Together with its blossom-content it becomes in an ascending step once more an inner, by being buried in the earth in autumn and there, in moist earth, exposed to the cosmic winter forces. This is the instruction for action given by Rudolf Steiner in the «Agriculture Course». It has become more and more established practice — following methodologically upon the yarrow preparation and upon a remark by Rudolf Steiner in the notes that may be interpreted in this sense («hang up the intestines»[49]) — to hang up the dandelion preparation as well during the summer in air and warmth and to expose it to the cosmic workings.
In the preparation process, polar spatio-temporal processes of inversion take place. Substance-relationships and substance-transformations of a new kind arise, as the result of the mutually interpenetrating forces of forms and substances of physical, living and ensouled origin.
The Ensoulment of the Agricultural Organism, a Plastic-Artistic Activity
Just as conventional technology has the natural sciences, physics and chemistry — and therewith the laws of the physically inorganic nature — as its foundation, so the making of the biodynamic preparations proceeds from a kind of technology of anthroposophical spiritual science, from the knowledge of the essential being of physical, living and ensouled nature. Their making is bound in time to the course of the year, to the seasons around Easter and Michaelmas. Grouped around each of these — before or after — are the most varied preparatory activities and those of application.
The Seasonal Preparations
Throughout the winter, quartz and orthoclase feldspar are comminuted — a process of chaotisation — and ground through sieve-sets into the finest silica meal, which is then filled into cow horns at Eastertide. At the same time in April, the dandelion blooms on meadows and pastures: its flowers are gathered and either prepared directly and hung up through the following summer, or air-dried and, in accordance with Rudolf Steiner's instruction in the «Agriculture Course», surrendered to the winter earth only in autumn. In May, the stinging-nettle shoot, come into bloom, is cut, chopped, and immediately buried in this form at a place on the farm chosen in advance. Without any animal organ sheath, the nettle bundle remains buried in the earth for a full year. In June follows the gathering of the flowers of true chamomile; it is to be found at roadsides or in the bright headlands of the grain fields. The flowers are air-dried and kept until the autumn preparation. At the beginning of July the valerian blooms. It is found in riparian zones along watercourses,
at hillside seepage-water sites and at forest margins. Its flower-heads are harvested and immediately pressed. The fragrant juice, rich in essential oils, is bottled and kept in this form until use. In mid to late July, the white-pink radiant little flower umbels of yarrow are gathered on meadows and pastures, the individual florets cut off, dried, and kept until the further preparation in spring. In the same period, field horsetail is ready for harvest. The shoots are gathered, dried, and sprayed onto the soils in the form of a tea from autumn through to spring. In August and September comes the time to scrape the oak bark (outer bark) from older oaks with a drawknife and to comminute the bark-mass into a crumbly condition. The practice, exercised here and there, of peeling the living bark of younger oaks above the cambium (oak-tan bark), is based, in my estimation, on a misunderstanding.[50] Immediately at Michaelmas, on the 29th of September, freshly formed, shapely cow-pats, best taken from the autumn pasture, are gathered for packing into the cow horns.
Throughout the whole summer half-year one has in this way the opportunity — with the same thoroughness with which one devotes attention to the cultivation of cultivated plants and the keeping of domestic animals — to turn, with cognitive engagement, toward the essential being of the wild-herb flora that is otherwise noticed only in passing.
The choice of the animal organ sheaths proceeds, no less than the choice of the preparation plants, from no outwardly nature-given occasion. It is grounded in spiritual science. Their provision likewise demands a forward-looking consciousness of the preparation-work in the course of the year. Thus at every slaughter of a cow one must attend to the recovery of the horns, and in particular to the fact that the horns are carefully separated from the skull and bony cores without suffering damage. In this regard, personal supervision of the slaughter is to be recommended as far as possible.
In factory slaughterhouses this is no longer possible. The same holds for the provision of the other sheath-organs of the cow. With regard to the additional need for cow horns — also in order to ensure their replacement after some three years of use — it is advisable to seek collaboration with a regional abattoir. The few horns needed for the making of the horn silica preparation should preferably be taken from the farm's own herd.
With the exception of the stag's bladders from the male animal, all organ sheaths come from domestic animals, above all from the cow. The stag's bladders for the making of the yarrow preparation are provided by hunters in the hunting season. The bladders must be dried, stored, and moistened before use in spring. For the procurement of the remaining organ sheaths — small intestine and peritoneum — these should as far as possible be taken from a cow slaughtered immediately before the preparation. In farm slaughters, cow skulls too become available, which — like those of other domestic animals (horse, sheep, goat) — may be used for the preparation of the oak bark.
One can deepen one's understanding of the use of the organ sheaths of the cow from one's own herd by first attempting to form an image of the function of these organs in the living animal destined for autumn slaughter. Following on from this, one can place before the soul the polar image of what function the organ sheaths then fulfil when, for half or the whole of the year, they are exposed in the elements of the earthly to the radiating forces of the cosmos.
The Preparation: an Easter and Michaelmas Event
The seasonal nodal points of preparation-making are Easter and Michaelmas. The former is connected with the mood of the ascending, the latter with that of the beginning of the descending year. At Eastertide the preparations that have overwintered in the soil are dug up — the horn manure preparation as well as the chamomile, nettle, oak bark and dandelion preparations. These are stored in the preparation cellar in clay vessels surrounded by peat. At the same time, the cow horns filled with silica meal are buried in the summer earth, and the freshly chopped nettle preparation is buried for a whole year — that is, through the course of all four seasons.
At Michaelmas all those preparations are made ready which are to be exposed to the cosmic winter process in the soil. These are the large number of horns filled with cow dung, as well as the yarrow, chamomile, oak bark and dandelion preparations.
It is a rich programme which, in a free and open mood of soul — reflecting in thinking and feeling upon one's own activity — makes these two nodal points in spring and autumn into festival seasons that can be freshly experienced anew. Two aspects of this may be highlighted here.
The Esoteric-Supersensible Aspect of a New Agricultural Culture
Every step of the preparation work rests upon an indication for action arising from spiritual research. The world-appearances mediated through the senses are experienced as objective presences and grasped in thought. As objects, they are spatially separated one from another; they are form-configurations that have come into being, that have reached their conclusion in their respective states — whether egg, caterpillar, chrysalis or butterfly. The
work with the preparations, however, is of such a nature that through human hands forces are introduced into the nexus of nature which, working from the «interior» of nature, bring about transformation in what has come into being. This work awakens a feeling that gains ever greater certainty the more one experiences oneself as the causative agent acting out of the spirit, the more one rises to the consciousness that the creative wellspring is one's own I-being as kernel of one's being. The working of this I is, as already indicated, a twofold one: on the one hand the spirit of the human being, his I, works transformingly and ennobling upon the body-forming members of the human being throughout earthly existence; on the other hand it shapes the earth or reshapes it arbitrarily through its technically inventive spirit.
Most advanced of all is the I's working upon the soul body. This the human being shares with the animal. It renders sense-impressions conscious. Through the activity of the I — which the animals do not possess — the content of the soul becomes something enduring, something that can be remembered. The pure spirituality of the I interpenetrates the soul body. The working of the I is directed towards widening the soul toward the spirit, towards loosing it from body-boundness, towards drawing it into unity with the I. Thus is the I, in the earthly working of the human being, the great innovator and impulse-giver for the development of the human being and of the earth.
But the I does not work upon the soul body alone; it also interpenetrates the life body, which the human being shares with everything plant-like. Within this member of the human being the I creates for itself an I-organisation whose workings make themselves known from unconscious depths of the body — for example in the temperaments, in the characteristics of character, and in the capacity to form thoughts. The force of the I within the life body works upon it and reshapes it toward ever higher spiritual capacitance.
The I also interpenetrates the physical body — within which the laws of mineral-anorganic nature hold sway — with
an I-organisation. This makes itself known, for example, in the way in which the physical laws are constituted with such wisdom in the sense organs, eye, ear, and so forth. Indeed, the physical wholeness of the human organism is an image of the I of the human being that constitutes it.
The Exoteric-Historical Aspect in the Repetition of the Ancient Agricultural Cultures
Let us set aside the utilisation of the earth's resources through the technically inventive spirit of the human being. This utilisation is finite, produces consumer goods, and generates waste alien to nature. Since prehistoric times the human being has shaped the earth through his labour upon it. This labour was guided from the wisdom-centres of the ancient Mysteries. Human beings received their directions through priest-initiates. This treasure of wisdom, which contained within itself the germ of organism formation, lived on after the extinction of the Mysteries in a dream-like way, in a kind of pictorial consciousness. Only with the advance of Christianity — that is, with the I-awakening within the soul — did there arise the I-willed, I-guided labour, and with it, above all in Europe, the gradual shaping-forth of the organism principle in agriculture as an image of the I-awakening of human beings. The peasant village community developed toward an ever greater soul-warmth of sociality, with the church as the centre of communal life and, at the periphery, an agricultural surround — the village bounds. Christianity, as the great initiator of the I-awakening, stood at the starting-point of the development toward a farm organism that was largely "closed within itself." What was once the Mystery-life, and in post-Christian times the significance of the church as impulse-giver and centre, will henceforth be the I striving for its self-consciousness, will be the community pressing toward the spirit.
The Western-Christian organism principle of agriculture was the synthesis of all site-specific natural conditions and of all the cultural assets of farming inherited from pre-Christian times — arable farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, fruit growing, silviculture, as well as meadow, pasture, and water management. All these elements stood in a measured reciprocal relation to one another, site-specifically, and created the image of the cultural landscape articulated into village organisms.
This cultural-landscape work of art of Western-Christian farming repeats itself — as already indicated — in metamorphosis as the foundational farm organisation in every refounding of a farm out of the spirit of Anthroposophy. What was once created out of the force of the Christ-permeated mind soul must henceforth be re-founded out of the awakening of the I in the consciousness soul. It is this that "organic farming" seeks to accomplish, albeit abstractly and without any deeper foundation in ideas.
The measured, I-guided ordering-toward-one-another and interpenetration of the named organs of the agricultural organism forms the foundation. Upon this foundation, in idea-bearing practice, the understanding can grow that the preparation and efficacy of the biodynamic preparations rests, in a far higher sense, upon the Christian principle of interpenetration. In it the activity of the I-being of the human being finds expression.
The Principle of Interpenetration Illustrated by the Yarrow Preparation
Rudolf Steiner describes yarrow (Achillea millefolium) as «a quite particular wonder of nature»[51]. He describes it in such a way that it masters, as no other plant species does, the sulphur process (Sulphur) and, in connection with this, the potassium process (Sal). It would lead too far afield here to portray the
morphological and physiological appearance of yarrow, as it lives itself forth in every phase of growth as a cosmic-terrestrial polarity of the relation between sulphur and potassium.[52] In the root, this relation is still dominated by the potassium-salt process; in stems and in succulents, as in the finely articulated leaf blade dissolved into arrow-tip formations, this relation of substance and form comes into equilibrium. This shows itself in the potassium-induced accumulation of sap, within which the protein formation in the leaves is accomplished. In the blossom, the growth of the plant comes to an end. It cannot grow in intensification beyond itself. It blooms forth, and after a brief time already it fades away. The processual happening lifted out of the earth is absorbed once more into the purely earthly. In the blossom there reveals itself, as in an image, the being of the plant — that which, concealed since germination, has as formative force interpenetrated the vegetative and generative becoming of the plant. In the blossom the potassium-salt process has been largely divested of its physical properties; the potassium has been sulphurised or, as one may also say, etherised — that is, it has as substance taken on the properties of the living. Yarrow, and thus in modified form every species of flowering plant, interpenetrates what belongs to earthly substance and makes it its own, assimilating it to the living.
To this there attaches itself, in my estimation, the general point of departure for the preparation work with the compost preparations: How can this process of perfected substance-enlivening in the blossom — a process that endures only for a single moment — be held fast in this stadium nascendi, how can duration be conferred upon it? If one enters inwardly into this question, an answer cannot be found from the mere sensory observation of the blossoming process. One comes, however, to understand why Rudolf Steiner, for the first step of the preparation, makes a borrowing from the higher animal kingdom. In the case of yarrow, he chooses an organ — the urinary bladder — whose function within the animal organism is precisely this: to maintain living, through
the sentient force of the animal, the stream of enlivened substantiality of the kidney-bladder process all the way to its accumulation in the bladder.
For the preparation of yarrow — as fundamentally for all of the compost preparations (the oak bark preparation occupying a special position!) — the blossoms are used. In summer, as already indicated, the little flower umbels are gathered, the individual florets cut off and dried. In the first act of preparation we step across the threshold of the given lawfulness of nature. We take the urinary bladder of a male deer, stuff into it the re-moistened yarrow blossoms, and close the bladder. As already indicated in the example of the dandelion preparation, there takes place an interpenetration of plant substance and animal formative force in the sense of an inversion. What was previously outside — the blossom opening itself to the sun — now fills an inner space, and what previously fulfilled a function essentially within the interior of the animal is now outside: namely, the organ now enveloping the yarrow blossoms. This first act of interpenetration of plant substance and specifically animal formative force is followed by a second: the filled urinary bladders are hung up over the earth throughout the summer, in the period from Easter to Michaelmas, and exposed to the forces active from out of the cosmos through light and through the elements of warmth and air. These forces receive, in their passage through the bladder-organ formed in shape and substance by the being of the deer, a specific imprint. In the third act of the continuing efficacious interpenetration of the blossom substance with the forces of the cosmos and the depths of the earth, the deer-bladder spheres are taken down around Michaelmas. They are buried in the ground and there, in the element of the earthly-solid, exposed to the in-raying, crystal-forming forces of the fixed-star sphere. The cosmic winter forces too receive in their passage through the skin-organ of the deer bladder a specific imprint. In the second and third acts, bearing the imprint of both, the forces of the heights and the depths of the earth that ray in during the sum-
mer and then in winter interpenetrate the mass of yarrow blossoms. They concentrate themselves within it and «confer upon it duration» — thus may one understand the indication from spiritual research — that which of potassium salt in yarrow has been raised, through root, leaf, and stem into the blossom, into the state of life.
Whereas in the first act an interpenetration of animal substance-force and formative force with plant blossom-substance is brought about, such an interpenetration takes place in the second and third acts with that of the physical in warmth-air and water-earth. What has in the course of evolution unfolded and differentiated itself outward into the kingdoms of nature — into the kingdom of minerals, plants, and animals — is here directed toward the future and, in a different way in each of the preparations, united into a whole. What reveals itself in nature outwardly in completion and in distinctness — precisely as yarrow blossom, deer bladder, and as the elemental conditions that shape «the middle, the diaphragm» at the given site — has run its course. In the fusing of creation that has ripened to its highest perfection, through spirit and hand of the human being, a process becomes recognisable by which the I interpenetrates the members of the human being and in so doing transforms them. The same principle — the developmental principle par excellence — we carry working out into nature, in that on the path of preparation we create a new substance, a manure, that works in equal measure enlivening upon the physical, living, and ensouled nature. This holds both for the compost preparations and for the two spray or field preparations. The manuring efficacy rests not upon analysable nutrient contents. The preparation manures are substance-compositions that are the bearers of a continuing potency of forces. They are force-manures. This makes it understandable as well why they find application only in a kind of homoeopathic dosage. In the case of the compost preparations, their force-working interpenetrates the organic
wastes arising in the organism of the farm — in plant composts or, in the case of the excretions of the animals, in farmyard-manure heaps, deep-litter stalls, and liquid-manure pits. The composts or farmyard manures thus prepared, ripened half or wholly to stable humus, carry the force-workings of the preparations out into the farm bounds. They in their turn interpenetrate the soil-diaphragm organ and work in a balancing way upon the forces of the heights and the depths.
The same holds for the spray preparations, the horn manure preparation and the horn silica preparation. Both have become, on the path of preparation, new substances that are not given in nature. They are substances of the element of the Earthy and are led, on the path of preparation through to application, through the elemental conditions of water, air and warmth. Both preparations are stirred by hand for one hour in rhythmic alternation of direction. The force-radiations of the 'Earthy-Solid' of the preparations, interpenetrating the element of water, are taken up into it completely. In the spraying-out, the liquid dissolves in fine droplets into the element of air, falls like drops of spray-rain downward, and unites with the element of warmth in the soil and with that warmth which envelops the germinating, growing and ripening plant.
In working with the making and application of the biodynamic preparations, the high sense, the truth, of Rudolf Steiner's citation mentioned at the outset becomes gradually more graspable: 'The human being is made the foundation.' Equally the following citation: 'You need only consider this one thing [...], today no human being actually understands the essential being of manuring [...] except those who are able to know out of the spirit what manure actually means for the field.'[53] Manuring is therefore a deep mystery, because it concerns the question of the essential being of substance. The human being can come to know, through self-knowledge, that by virtue of his I he is a being in development. Through the findings of spiritual research, this insight can deepen to the point where one learns, interpenetrating and transforming one's own members of the human being,
to develop them upward toward a higher humanity. This is a profoundly Christian impulse of becoming. If one now seeks to trace the mystery of manuring — and this in working with the creations born from spiritual research, the canon of preparations — then their mystery can begin to unveil itself in intimation, above all in that one understands oneself, through one's own activity, as a part of the process. For the spirit within us is the initiating cause of their coming-into-being. The process of coming-into-being as such is disposed to become a free act of creation by the human being. If one seeks future paths of Christian working that reach beyond one's own self-becoming, then the I is the bearer of the developmental thought into 'the inner nature of nature'. The earth, nature and her kingdoms have become 'work'. They await their development into the future. This can come to them only through the development of the human soul. The human being is the key, and preparation work a step upon the path of this development. When this step is taken in selflessness and freedom, it is taken in love.
Preparation Work and Organism Formation, a Social Community Task
The saying of the poet Novalis: «Humanity is on a mission, we are called to the formation of the Earth»[54] already indicates that this mission cannot be fulfilled by that 2 percent of the working population still active today in agriculture — and this with the exclusion of the organism principle as well as with an extreme orientation toward agricultural technology. Were agriculture to face up to this call of Novalis, the social question would receive entirely new impulses and thereby a new direction. It would extend itself into a domain that lies socially fallow today, but which, were it to take shape from the thought of organism and indi-
viduality, could ground a wealth of approaches to action in the social realm. Here let only that aspect of the social be named which is directed toward the formation of 'the inner nature of nature' — toward what idea-guided work upon nature can mean. This has been described in outline in the preceding expositions. To do justice to the demands placed here, many hands are needed. This holds in general for all agricultural work that presents itself daily out of natural necessity — a multiplicity that will not cease! But it holds still more for the timely preparation work in the course of the year. This is the domain of free self-determination. It interpenetrates, widens, enriches and quickens the daily circle of duties. Preparation work can directly kindle the interest of people, even when they stand outside agriculture. This shows itself when one gives a festive setting to the nodal points of this work in the course of the year — at the times around Easter and Michaelmas — and invites people to participate. With an introduction to the essential being and significance of the tasks at hand: such as the digging out of the preparations that have rested in the earth through the winter, or the horn-stuffing, the filling of the preparation sheaths, the burying — partly in the summer earth, to the greater part in the winter earth — and the hanging in the air. One then goes together to the work at prepared tables, and out with spade and shovel into the field. One experiences in this unusual work a remarkable readiness for earnest participation and a joyful openness. One experiences oneself in shared, meaning-bearing activity. Not the intellect, a theoretical calculus, is addressed — but rather the mind soul, which reaches more deeply into the soul-spiritual, the sibling of the intellect. When the forces of the mind soul are kindled in this way, the feeling of meaningfulness awakens in the doing. One experiences oneself in a work that brings together people of the most varied inner dispositions, and this within an agricul-
tural context in which the acting human being stands at the centre. In this work, the true 'mystery of the manuring of the Earth' can, step by step, become an experience of the will.
The participation of people from the social environment creates a kind of social mantle around the farm, a circumference of inner disposition with regard to the 'formation of the Earth'. It comes into being through the shared gathering of the blossoms of the preparation plants and through participation in the steps of the preparation work; it widens when willing hands are found to take on the timely preparation of the compost windrows. This applies especially also to participation in the stirring of the two spray preparations as well as their application with the knapsack sprayer. Particularly instructive in this regard is the stirring itself. After adding a small dose of the horn manure or horn silica preparation to the stirring barrel filled with hand-warm rainwater, one builds up a vortex-funnel through a steadily accelerating rotary movement of the stirring brush. When this can be heightened no further, one steers briefly against it, throws the water-mass into chaos, and builds up a new vortex-funnel in the opposite direction — and so on, in alternation, for an hour. In this rhythmic building-up and breaking-down, one experiences oneself as its creator. One observes, simultaneously with one's own activity of will, how through these polarities there arise: rest and movement, form and chaos, expansion and contraction. These are processes of the 'rhythmic middle', of the pulse-beat and of breathing, carried out by human hands.
The 'stirring' too has a social element that belongs to it essentially. It succeeds best when several stir together, each one with his own barrel. Out of this there arises, in all earnestness, a mood of cheerfulness, lightness, and a joy in storytelling — in free willing.
With regard to the spraying onto the crops, the PTO-driven machine sprayer is as a rule employed, for the sake of simplicity and from a lack of helping hands. But here too the question arises for the future, whether this work as well — through the inclusion of the social environment — should not be placed
into the hands of the human being. Equipped with the knapsack sprayer, one traverses the entire bounds of the farm organism, again and again. As the sower once cast his seed in rhythmic swing, one swings the spray rod to and fro in the measured cadence of one's stride, and watches how the arc of spray of the falling droplets wanders out before one, glinting perhaps in the colours of the rainbow. The walking with the hand-sprayer — and this repeated time and again in spring, summer and autumn over the fields, meadows and pastures, over the garden and orchard grounds — heightens the attentiveness to the wholeness of the farm organism's integral structure. The experience of identity between the I and the individualising spirit-nature of the farm becomes real. Goethe gives expression to this in his poem 'Epirrhema'[55] in the words:
...
Nothing is within, nothing is without:
for what is within, that is without.
So seize then without delay
Holy, open Mystery.
...
What has been set forth above holds equally for the compost preparations. Here too the collaboration of those from outside can fertilise the being and becoming of the farm organism just as much as the earth-connected striving for knowledge. So for instance when someone is willing to take on the preparation of freshly assembled compost or farmyard manure heaps and to follow their further development with attentive observation. There are manifold activities which, for people from the social environment, carry significance for the farm's flourishing and at the same time open up for those concerned a field of research in practice. One such field is, for example, to work more deeply into the methodical conditions of the so-called weed-seed and insect-
incineration — an indication of Rudolf Steiner's for the regulation of weeds and harmful insects. A further field would be the participation in the winning and raising of fine seeds in vegetable, field-fodder and herb cultivation, the tending of a herb garden, above all with a view to dietetic supplementary fodder for the dairy herd. Beyond this there are countless tasks in the care of the world of birds and insects, of hedgerows and fruit trees (pruning, trunk painting, nesting boxes), the constant concern for a blossom-rich wild flora from spring to autumn, as well as for the beauty and harmony of the landscape image as a whole.
What is to be done in agriculture in the sense of the 'formation of the Earth' out of spiritual aims exceeds the measure of what can be achieved by the few who today manage a farm on the basis of the organism principle. The agricultural workplace is considered the most costly of all and is at the same time the one with comparatively the smallest return. But this shows that by its very nature it cannot be a workplace in the commercial-industrial sense at all. It is a culture-founding workplace which — seen from the future — the farmer tends as representative of his fellow human beings. To grasp this, social life itself must be recognised as a whole, as a social organism, which articulates itself into three autonomous spheres: a free spiritual-cultural life, a rights-life that practises equality, and an economic life oriented towards solidarity. Agriculture that works in earnest in the sense of the organism principle is an enterprise deeply anchored in spiritual-cultural life. The farmer may, on the basis of his capacity to lead a biodynamic enterprise, understand himself as one commissioned by his fellow human beings. This commission can as a rule not be fulfilled by a single family. The manifold tasks which the organism principle lays upon agriculture demand, now and in the future with compelling urgency, the collaborative working within the enterprise on equal terms,
in the form of communities of responsibility, of work, or of farm community. Their working aims must be developed together out of the spirit and directed towards the future. Out of them grows the will to selfless collaboration, to the capacity to work initiatively within the members of the farm organism out of consciousness of its wholeness.
Furthermore, the social commission is bound up with the expectation that the farm organism, with regard to the interest and collaboration of the social environment, is not a closed entity, but an altogether open one. Collaboration quickens into a mood of joyfulness when it is willed initiatively and led with competence. A key to such a working-mood is the preparation work. Many diligent hands are needed there. The farm organism, worked with wakeful consciousness, is disclosed to its last corner. As the plough in shearing, crumbling inversion of the furrow gives plastic form to the soil, the diaphragm organ, so the many idea-bearing gestures of the preparation work form — visibly, tangibly, but also invisibly — throughout the year at the spirit-reality of the farm organism. Invisible is the nature of the relationship which develops from the 'middle' outward toward the essential being of the heights and the depths. Visible become the workings of the interpenetration of the 'middle' — for instance in the development toward enduring soil-born fertility, in the archetypal type-imprinting of the fruit-bearing cultivated plants, in the turning of the domestic animals toward the human being, as well as their health and longevity.
With regard to the soil, the Christian principle of the interpenetration of beings realises itself above all through manuring. What in the biodynamic preparations, on the path of the interpenetration of the physical in the elemental working of the living in the formation and transformation of substance, and of the animal in the soul-astral formative force, has been raised up into a unity in the preparation — that fulfils the indication of Rudolf
Steiner: «Manuring means the enlivening of the solid, the earthy itself.»[56] This enlivening lays hold of the dead mineral, of that which in the course of evolution has fallen away from the living, ensouled and spiritual world-context. The understanding of the essential being and significance of the biodynamic preparations grows only in the doing. One works with compositions of substance just as with a composed piece of music. Each of these compositions of substance is in its kind a bearer of the efficacious spirit, which works from the 'middle' outward upon the heights and the depths. With the newly-created substances of the biodynamic preparations, a spiritual element becomes active in the farm organism — one which is not yet present within it, but first becomes so through the spirit and deed of the human being. The quotation of Rudolf Steiner adduced at the outset, that «an agriculture [...] fulfils its essential being when it can be understood as a kind of individuality unto itself, a truly self-enclosed individuality»,[57] says, after all, that this «essential being» is not present in nature as it has become, but must first be worked out through the 'comprehension' of the being of the individuality on the foundation of spiritual research — a comprehension which then, purposively, becomes reality in and through the work. The fruit of the knowledge of the «fulfilment of the essential being» Rudolf Steiner has anticipated in the presentation of the biodynamic preparations, and spoken it into the hearts and hands of the practising farmers. Where this fruit becomes deed-action, there grows with it a spiritual understanding of the essential being of the farm organism. Its significance may be seen in this: that it becomes the body of that being which is addressed in the quotation above as a «kind of individuality». With what has been set forth, the spiritual-cultural life flowering forth from the work on the farm is addressed, and how this, radiating outward, can awaken the interest and the collaboration of the social environment. Experience in the will strengthens and deepens the feeling. In the collaboration directed toward things and beings in agriculture, there grows a sense of right — for instance with regard to the question of the
justification of the buyability and saleability of land and soil as well as of capital. And further: how the rights within a community of collaborating human beings are not defined in a set of procedural rules, but grow in daily life, out of the sure sense of right, from person to person.
Likewise, there germinates in many places a consciousness for the particular economic concerns of agriculture. It comes to expression in the striving after versatility in production as well as in a regionalisation of markets; equally in the farm-proximate artisan further-processing, and in the attempt to unite the various trades — which connect to the primary agricultural production, through processing and trade right up to the consumers — in economic associations. In these associations the concern is to develop a reality-conforming thinking directed toward mutually reciprocal needs.
One can recognise, by means of this development pressing out from agriculture into social reality, that the handling of the organism principle opens new perspectives for the impulse-giving of the threefold articulation of the social organism.
A Closing Contemplation
What Rudolf Steiner addresses in the «Agriculture Course»[58] as the «above the earth» — the metabolic member or the «belly» of the farm individuality —, «that below the earth» as its «head», and the soil as its middle, «the diaphragm»: these together form the body of the agricultural organism. This statement from spiritual science with regard to the farm individuality was made by Rudolf Steiner 6 months after the Christmas Conference, which took place in 1923/24 on the occasion of the refounding of the «General
Anthroposophical Society». This Conference stood under the sign of the «Foundation Stone Meditation»[59], in which the human being who inwardly practises knowledge of the spirit in willing, feeling and thinking stands at the centre. The macrocosmic spirit-reality of the Heights and the Depths is addressed, and, standing in the middle, the Earth-Sun being of the Christ. Through this meditation the practising human being can be led to the point where there becomes spiritually audible to him what speaks to him from the source of essential forces of the three regions named.
In the agriculture fertilised by anthroposophical spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner turns the gaze from the inwardly practising to the outwardly practising human being. In the latter case too we stand again — proceeding from the human being — before the triad, holding sway in the hiddenness of nature, of the Heights, the Depths, and the middle that articulates itself between them: the soil-diaphragm organ. This latter, however, does not develop through the forces inherent within it, but requires for its becoming the I-guided work of the human being.
In the «Foundation Stone Meditation» there is gathered together in spiritual-scientific form what once lived, hidden, in the Mystery centres of antiquity and expressed itself outwardly in mighty mythological images. One such myth was cultivated in the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries: Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the Heights, is abducted by the god Pluto, ruler of the underworld, of the earthly depths. Out of the long contention between Demeter and Pluto that follows there comes about at last the agreement that Persephone, descending in autumn, shall spend the winter half-year in the depths with Pluto, and, ascending in spring, shall be reunited with her mother Demeter over the summer half-year.[60] Descending and ascending, Persephone penetrates each year the still wholly nature-given middle, the «organism in natural growth». Sculptural works of classical antiquity
show Demeter and Persephone holding ears and stalks of grain in their hands. One can understand this artistic-sacral representation, as an archetypal image, as the result of the rhythmic return of Persephone «from below» through the «middle» on upward «to the heights»: an image of the arising of nourishing fruit-formation in the food plants.
Does not this mythological image point toward the fact known today that the oldest cultivated plants are the primordial forms of wheat and barley? Do not the vertical suction-roots of the cereals, like the root-works of all earth-plants, grow downward into the darkness of the earth — and does not the cereal stalk, bearing its leaves with it, strive vertically toward the rays of the sun? Is not the gathering-up of the stalk's end into the ear, which shelters the nourishing fruit, an image of the transcending equilibrium (Persephone) of the polar forces of Pluto and Demeter?
The Demeter-Pluto-Persephone myth points toward the fact that the agricultural development of prehistoric times stood under the guidance of the Mysteries — that is, under the guidance of the gods. Under this guidance the first metamorphosis of the «organism in natural growth» came about through the taking-into-culture of the organ of the middle, the soil. Toward the turning-point of time, the Mystery of Golgotha, this guidance gradually faded. Christianity brought the I-awakening into humanity. A first fruit was the I-willed labour, the now human-guided interpenetration and union of what had developed separately in the pre-Christian great ancient civilizations; there came about «the marriage of arable farming and animal husbandry» (domestication), the union of the Cain and Abel streams, and with it the second step toward a cultural metamorphosis in the becoming of the agricultural organism. The inaugurator of this second step was the awakening I-will of human beings. The third step, as metamorphosis of the first and second, is in the present and the future the shaping of the organism from
within outward, out of the fully self-consciousness-awakened I of human beings. It builds on the foundation of the insights of the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner, as well as on the ruins of Western-Christian peasant farming. In these guiding directions from spiritual research, the myth of the Eleusinian Demeter Mysteries lights up anew in the thought-forms of our time. This becomes wholly apparent in the renewed application of the principle of interpenetration — now on a higher level — in the manner of preparing and applying the biodynamic preparations. Each of these steps signifies a bringing-into-relationship in the sense of a union of the Heights and the Depths out of the evolving middle. The measures that rest on such insights enliven the farm organism from within.
The Eleusinia were celebrated in ancient Greece twice a year — the lesser Eleusinia at the beginning of spring, the greater Eleusinia at the beginning of autumn. Transformed and given spiritual re-determination, they appeared again at the dawn of Christianity. Following the polar moments of the equinoxes, at movable intervals, come Easter, the festival of death and resurrection, and — fixed to the twenty-ninth of September — Michaelmas, the festival directed toward the future, of the free deed and of soul courage. Both festivals stand as nodal points of a spirit-guided work upon the earth which, bridging in itself the gulf between the human being and nature, bears a festive character and can mean for the Easter festival, and above all for the shaping of the Michaelmas celebration, an enrichment and deepening of inner earthly-cosmic experience. In the preparation work, which encompasses the entire course of the year and with it the whole of nature, both festivals enter into an intimate relationship.
The spring festival of the Eleusinia celebrated the ascending, the autumn festival the descending Persephone. Both seasons are at the same time the points of orientation for the preparation
of the manuring substances of the preparations in the course of the year: the Easter festival in regard to the inward awareness of the dead mineral, of what has died into form, and its re-enlivening; the Michaelmas festival, working outward, celebrating with soul courage the free deeds that direct themselves toward the union of the kingdoms of nature, toward their mutual interpenetration. The methodical procedure appears, viewed from without, to be the same. Yet it is striking how the spirit-grounded activity of both festival seasons, on the one hand, interpenetrates, and on the other, reverses itself. Thus the greater part consists of those preparations which are submerged into the «grave» of the earth in winter at Michaelmas and brought again from it into the light of day at Eastertide. The laying-to-rest of the materiality of the freshly prepared preparations and their awakening to a higher life-potency extend themselves over the whole course of the year. If one seeks to fathom the substance-mystery of manuring, the path toward it is already traced out through the spiritual research of Rudolf Steiner. One comes to understand how an ancient Mystery-wisdom has been transformed upward through the Christ-event of death and resurrection. One comes to recognise how, through the thought-forms of Anthroposophy and through meditation — such as that of the «Foundation Stone» — the soul faculties of thinking, feeling and willing are schooled, and how in this way a new metamorphosis leading into the future can once again be initiated. The truth vouched for by spiritual science opens itself on the path of thinking and doing, in «unconditional working».
What was once the guidance of the gods from above becomes the free self-guidance of the human being from below.
The Author
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 Salem Castle School and, after the Second World War, at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, with a year of student exchange in England. Studies at the Stuttgart Technical University came to a premature end through an accident. During a year-long working stay in north-eastern Syria he resolved to become a farmer. Following an apprenticeship came the study of agriculture at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim, with a doctorate in the field of soil science. A further four years were devoted to research at the Institute for biodynamic farming practice on the theme of «manuring and food quality». The year 1968 marked the founding of the farm community Dottenfelderhof (five families) and, shortly thereafter, that of the Landbauschule Dottenfelderhof. After twenty years of biodynamic building-up 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. Following fourteen years of activity and a further eight years as a freelance collaborator at the meanwhile refounded «Section for Agriculture», he returned to the Dottenfelderhof and resumed a teaching activity at the farming school there. Alongside this he has, for twenty-one years, been guiding the village project Juchowo in Poland — an attempt to create, in eastern Europe, a seedbed in which the «formation of the Earth» (Novalis) presents itself as a social task, and in which «the social question» finds its answer in the formation of the Earth.
Endnotes
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1960, siehe Ausführungen S. 8
- ↑ Die Lehre von den Hierarchien (siehe Fig. 1, Fig. 2 und Fig. 3 zu Mineral, Pflanze, Tier) ist seit dem Apostel Paulus Weisheitsgut des esoterischen Christentums geworden. Diese Strömung ist abseits des institutionellen Christentums durch die folgenden Zeiten wirksam geblieben. Sie geht auf Dionysius den Aeropagiten zurück, den Weisen von Athen jener Zeit und Schüler des Paulus. Er stand seinerseits noch in dem ausklingenden Weisheitsstrom der Mysterien von Eleusis. Diese Lehre weist auf eine Stufenfolge von neun Hierarchien hin, die mit der Hierarchie der Engel beginnt, gefolgt von der Erzengel und der Archai, und hinaufreicht über die zweite Hierarchie der Geister der Form (Exusiai), der Geister der Bewegung (Dynamis) und der Geister der Weisheit (Kyriotetes) zu den hierarchischen Wesenheiten der Throne der Cherubim und Seraphim. Die Wirksamkeit dieser Hierarchienfolge steht hinter dem Menschen und der Schöpfung. Sie wird umfasst und überhöht von der «Dreifaltigkeit» oder Trichotomie (vgl. auch Emil Bock, Urchristentum IV, Paulus, Stuttgart 1954).
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Geisteswissenschaftliche Grundlagen zum Gedeihen der Landwirtschaft. Landwirtschaftlicher Kurs. Dornach 1979, 2. Vortrag, S. 53 (in folgenden Fußnoten abgekürzt als LK).
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13, Stuttgart 1955.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1960, 9. Vortrag.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen. GA 102, Dornach 1984, 11. Vortrag, 1. Juni 1908.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 76.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 82.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 47.
- ↑ Georges Adams: Von dem ätherischen Raume, Stuttgart 1964.
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Maximen und Reflexionen (573). Das Tier wird durch seine Organe belehrt, der Mensch belehrt die seinigen und beherrscht sie. Goethes Werke Band XII, Hamburger Ausgabe, München 1978, S. 443.
- ↑ 12
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Weltanschauliche Gedichte, in: Goethes Werke, Band I, Hamburger Ausgabe, München 1978, S. 367.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Brücke zwischen der Weltgeistigkeit und dem Physischen der Menschen, GA 202, Dornach 1970, 10. Vortrag.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Eine okkulte Physiologie, GA 128, Dornach 1978, 7. Vortrag.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Welt, Erde und Mensch, GA 105, Dornach 1960, 3. Vortrag.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, GA 102, Dornach 1924, 11. Vortrag.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophische Leitsätze, GA 26, Dornach 1976. Eine Weihnachtsbetrachtung: Das Logos-Mysterium.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß, GA 13, Stuttgart 1995.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Hereinwirken geistiger Wesenheiten in den Menschen, GA 102, Dornach 1984, 12. Vortrag, S. 200. Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1960, 9. Vortrag, S. 162 und S. 169–170.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die geistigen Wesenheiten in den Himmelskörpern und Naturreichen, GA 136, Dornach 1960, 9. Vortrag, S. 162 und S. 169–170.
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Zweiter Band. Betrachtungen im Sinne der Wanderer, Nr. 136, S. 304. Goethes Werke Band VIII, Hamburger Ausgabe, München 1977.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 44.
- ↑ LK, 4. Vortrag, S. 103.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 42.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag S. 49/50.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Das Miterleben des Jahreslaufes in vier kosmischen Imaginationen, Dornach 1984, 2. Vortrag, S. 23.
- ↑ LK, 3. Vortrag, S. 82.
- ↑ LK, 3. Vortrag, S. 83.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß, GA 13, Dornach 1989.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 44.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 41.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 58.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 58.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1988.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Der Mensch als Zusammenklang des schaffenden, bildenden und gestaltenden Weltenwortes, GA 230, Dornach 1988.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 49.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 49.
- ↑ LK, 3. Vortrag, S. 82.
- ↑ LK, 3. Vortrag, S. 83.
- ↑ LK, Notizen, Blatt 12.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 59.
- ↑ Frank Teichmann: Der Mensch und sein Tempel: Chartres, Stuttgart 2005, S. 63.
- ↑ Der Ausdruck «Kirchspiel» bedeutet eine weilerartige Anordnung von Einzelhöfen mit einer zugehörigen einzelstehenden Kirche.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 49.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 42.
- ↑ LK, 5. Vortrag, S. 122.
- ↑ LK, 8. Vortrag, S. 234.
- ↑ LK, Notizen, Blatt 30.
- ↑ Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst. Wesenszüge des biologisch-dynamischen Landbaus. Eine Landwirtschaft der Zukunft, Dornach 2021, S. 389 ff.
- ↑ LK, 8. Vortrag, S. 126.
- ↑ Jochen Bockemühl, Kari Järvinen: Auf den Spuren der biologisch-dynamischen Präparatepflanzen. Lebensorgane bilden für die Kulturlandschaft, Dornach 2005. Erdmut-M. W. Hoerner: Die biologisch-dynamischen Präparate. Beiträge zu einem vertieften Verständnis ihres Wesens aus goetheanistischer, christologischer und geisteswissenschaftlicher Sicht, SchneiderEditionen 2018. Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst. Wesenszüge des biologisch-dynamischen Landbaus. Eine Landwirtschaft der Zukunft, Dornach 2021. Manfred Klett (Hg.): Zur Frage der Düngung im biologisch-dynamischen Landbau. Elemente zum Verständnis des Schafgarbenpräparates, Dornach 1994.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: LK, Vortrag Dornach, 20. Juni 1924, GA 327, Dornach 1957.
- ↑ Gerhard Schulz (Hg.): Novalis Werke. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Gerhard Schulz, München 1969, S. 330.
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Epirrhema, in: Gedichte und Epen, erster Band, Hamburger Ausgabe 1978, S. 358.
- ↑ LK, 5. Vortrag, S. 122.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 42.
- ↑ LK, 2. Vortrag, S. 45.
- ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Die Weihnachtstagung zur Begründung der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft 1923/1924, GA 260, Dornach 1963.
- ↑ Edith Lammerts van Bueren: Leben mit Persephone und die Zukunft der Pflanzenwelt, Dornach 2024.
