With Hugo Erbe I came to know a completely different way of working with the
plants and the elements. He used the power of his singing voice. Once when I
visited him he showed me how he was able to shatter a glass with his voice.
Another time, when it was very cold outside, he made us breathe on the
window pane in a warm room. Ice flowers formed, but in different forms for
each of us. Erbe wiped the pane clear and we breathed on it once more. Again
each of us had his own kind of ice flowers. We realised that apart form its
waves, moisture content and the like, our breath, and also our speech and
singing, held quite different powers.
Erbe connected with the group souls in his singing, but he also found other
ways of influencing plants, for instance with his special preparations. I'd
like to give just one example here - a preparation made from red grape juice
and home-baked bread. He would stir it and use it to spray plants and also
dress seeds with it. Basing himself on the preparations Rudolf Steiner had
spoken of at the Koberwitz course he developed a whole series of 'food and
drink' for the elemental spirit work force', as he called it.
Erbe would meditate, sing and pray, and after many experiments produced a
variety of Triticum caninum similar to spelt in the shape of the ear. A
number of different wheats came from this in the years that followed,
including his 'golden corn'.
This was on his small farm on Roggenbeuren on Lake Constance. Later, I saw a
large bed in his Thalhamer farm in Bavaria where he had sown many different
grain plants, some of them given to him by friends, others he had obtained
in his own experiments. He would take different plants from the bed every
year and work on them. Before sunrise every day he would spray the bed with
one of his preparations. Erbe's first successful transformation - he did not
ever want to hear the work 'breeding' mentioned - was achieved long before
the war.
During one of my many visits to his farm he buried twelve hermetically
sealed alabaster vessels in the ground in the shape of a cross; they
contained different seeds in the white of hens' eggs. He asked his son, who
was 12 at the time, and other people to think of it at the time when it was
buried. I cannot say anything about the results of this experiment but
mention it here in order to show the rich variety that may arise when
thinking comes alive and meditate work is done.
Hugo Erbe did not want to give lectures. He only liked to talk to
individuals - serious, intimate talks between just two people, where words
were often found to be inadequate in conveying ones meaning. I always felt I
received many gifts on those visits and marvelled at this extraordinary
friend and person would seem rather like a magician to his friends.
Developing Biodynamic Agriculture - ISBN1-902636-13-9