Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1290/en

The Horn Manure Preparation

In the ascending and descending arc of the summer half-year — the time of the earth's out-breathing — the growing plant becomes an image of the forces active in the periphery of light, air and warmth. This growth provides nourishment for human being and animal. Above all it is the ruminant, the cow, that takes in the growth from meadows, pastures and fodder fields. This fodder is, in the act of rumination and rumen digestion, raised to the level of soul-experience. In the physical dissolving of the plant substance, the cow tastes the cosmically constituting forces of that substance. She carries out a "cosmic-qualitative analysis" (cf. ch. "The Cow," p. 146 ff.). In this tasting, analysing sense activity in the processing of the fodder, the cow experiences the character of the environment from which the fodder comes — the particularity, for instance, of the site-specific conditions of the soil and the climate. Ruminating, she perceives all this as mighty force-formations. In this state — inwardly wakefully concentrated, outwardly dreamlike — her soul or astral body unites wholly with the etheric body, and this mirrors back to it the physical-chemical digestive processes. With infinite contentment, the soul of the cow takes part in what is happening in the body: "That is a whole world which the cow sees." She cannot hold fast this living-ensouled-force-filled quality and claim it for herself, for she has no being of her own, no I. She must excrete this force-filled quality, which she has permeated with her soul-nature. That is what lends cow dung its unique fertilising force — the highest and most harmonious that nature is capable of producing.