Which Sources did Rudolf Steiner have for the Agriculture Course?
Ueli Hurter
Rudolf Steiner was not a farmer. Nonetheless, he gave the Agriculture Course and from the eight lectures in June 1924 a deep and broad force for the renewal of agriculture went out. How was he able to speak in such a way that it was fruitful, and still is, for the farmers and gardeners, the landscapers and plant breeders? Where did he get this knowledge from? From where did he know the specialist vocabulary? What were his sources?
We are well informed about this and this article endeavours to present the situation in a short version. My concern is to clear up any uncertainties and out of date knowledge. Thus, for example, in the weekly newsletter “Das Goetheanum” no. 33–34 of 18.8.2023 an article appeared by Wolfgang Held, in which it was written that an estimated 70% of the Agriculture Course had been adopted from other authors. From more than one side I have been asked to comment on this statement, which I am doing here. At the same time, I want to try to widen the scope of the question and ask how much of the spiritual knowledge in the Course has been adopted in the sense that it is ancient knowledge of humanity, and how much is genuinely from Steiner. What holds good, in any case, is: the Agriculture Course is from Rudolf Steiner; thus, even if facts are included from science, agronomic knowledge of the times, humanity’s wisdom from the Mysteries and other things, then, all the same, the whole Course is genuinely original. It is like with a work of art: this or that you know in a similar form from somewhere else, a lot is completely new and the composition, the whole work of art, is something totally Rudolf Steiner’s own.
Biographical Sources
Study of Specialist Literature
At the Christmas Conference 1923/24 the Agriculture Course that had been long since requested was promised by Rudolf Steiner for Whitsun 1924. Steiner did not take this lightly and took the trouble- alongside all the other things that he did after the Christmas Conference – to study text books on agriculture at night. What he read and how he went about it is well documented in his notebooks. These are printed in the new edition of the Agriculture Course GA 327 as a facsimile. In Steiner’s library there are 23 works on agriculture to be found. Hans Vereijeken was able to show in a study “Analyse der Notizzettel von Rudolf Steiner zum Landwirtschaftlichen Kurs” (Analysis of Rudolf Steiner’s Notes on the Agriculture Course) in 2009 with many places in Steiner’s notes which textbooks they refer to; this is given in facsimile. Essentially he studied four text books.1
On the question of vocabulary let us add another example. Steiner speaks in the Course of the ‘agricultural organism’ and also of the ‘agricultural individuality’ in order to refer to the farm as a whole. The term ‘organism’ as a description of the farm as a whole is not from Steiner, but was usual at the time. We know that Richard Krzymowski was lecturing on farm business studies at the University of Breslau (Wroclaw) from 1922 to 1936, and referred to the farm as an organism. The young participants of the Course were studying or had studied under him. When, in lecture eight, Rudolf Steiner says, “Such a farm is really an organism”, he is picking up his listeners at a point where they were able to follow him with their knowledge; and then continues with, “now you see that thereby the farm is a kind of individuality”. The term agricultural individuality definitely derives from Steiner. And he means more than an organism in the sense of the working together of different branches of the farm, he is giving the farm a dimension extending into the spiritual and cosmic.
Spiritual-scientific Sources
In particular, Rudolf Steiner’s lifelong spiritual research has also flowed into the Agriculture Course. We can find places in many lectures that can appear to us like a source for what we ourselves have understood as characteristic in the Agriculture Course. It is also true that it is very characteristic of the Agriculture Course, but more in the way that it appears as a practical introduction, expressed in these ‘practical conceptual images’, rather than in terms of the deeper content. This is often found elsewhere in Steiner’s work. A striking example of this is a series of lecture cycles from the autumn and early winter of 1923.These lectures lead up to the Christmas Conference at which, a year after the burning of the first Goetheanum, the anthroposophical society was to be re-founded in such a way that it would form the social basis for the building of a second Goetheanum and for establishing the university with its Sections. Six months later, at Whitsun 1924, under the auspices of the re-founded anthroposophical society, the Agriculture Course was then organised by Keyserlingks and given by Rudolf Steiner. At the same time, a large anthroposophical conference was held in the nearby town of Breslau in the evenings, with nine karma lectures amongst others. Many of the participants at the Agriculture Course went to the karma lectures in Breslau in the evenings, and the energy that the biodynamic impulse had from these beginnings, may also be seen in the overall experience – ‘The destiny of earth, man and cosmos’.
From 5th-13th October in autumn 1923, Rudolf Steiner gave the lectures “The four Seasons and the Archangels”, GA 229. He described in powerful images how substances and forces such as nature beings and archangels cooperate in different constellations in each season. In spring, lime becomes full of life, desire; in summer the sun’s gold is created, that in winter has an enlivening effect in the depths of the earth. Iron subdues the sulphurous dragon at Michaelmas and the earth becomes an independent drop in the cosmos in order to give birth to the new at Christmas time and through the winter. We can sense how the indications in the Agriculture Course on the very specific qualities of particular times of the year, for example, the period from 15th January to 15th February – as the time of the greatest crystallisation force in the earth – are like crystals embedded from out of this world of the Imaginations of the seasons. In the fifth lecture on the Imaginations of the seasons, Steiner then describes how the four archangels, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel and Michael, act together through the seasons and how the four-step processes in nature of germination, growth, flowering and ripening correspond in the human being to the stages of nourishing, healing, thinking and willing. This is followed from 19th October to 11th November by what biodynamic farmers sometimes call the ‘cow cycle’. The real title is “Man as symphony of the creative word”, GA 230. Here Steiner describes the bull, lion and eagle as representing the metabolism animal, chest animal and head animal. The human being is the combination of this trinity and has to balance out their one-sided natures. The concepts of spiritual and earthly substance, which reappear in the 8th lecture of the Agriculture Course, are introduced here. The insects and birds, that we find again in the 7th lecture of the Agriculture Course, are described from the angle of their evolutionary genesis. He then talks in detail about the effects of the elemental spirits in the processes of nature. Everything about the elementals that is not contained in the Agriculture Course is described in detail here. And finally, attention is given to the connection of nature with the human being via food. The lectures on bees, GA 351, took place from 26th No-ember to 22nd December. These were lectures for the workers at the Goetheanum in response to a question from the workforce that Steiner gave spontaneously during working hours after the morning coffee break. These lectures form the basis for the work of bee-keepers inspired by anthroposophy. It is really amazing how much detailed knowledge Steiner possessed about the biology of the bees and the bee-keepers’ work so that these lectures turned into a top-class professional course. The high spiritual being of the bees is seemingly effortlessly woven into the detailed account. Since bees have been dying, this apparent side-branch of agriculture has gradually shifted into the centre in phases. For instance, the 2014Agriculture Conference was on the topic of “The bees, creators of relationships”.
From 23 November to 22 December, Rudolf Steiner held fourteen lectures that are collected under the title of “Mystery Centres”, GA 232. Steiner described how the pupils were taught by the teachers in these centres in earlier times. Some of these schools were open to many people for elementary education as part of seasonal festivities, for example in Eleusis, where the goddess Demeter was worshipped. However, for higher levels of training these mystery centres were secret and only accessible to chosen people. The training involved a step by step initiation. Steiner described the initiation schooling at Ephesus, Hibernia, Eleusis and Samothrace, and also the situation in the Middle Ages up to and including the Rosicrucians. While these places and what was taught there varied, there were also common elements. The philosophical riddle everywhere was: what is the relationship between nature and mankind? How are macrocosmic processes and substances related to microcosmic processes and sub-stances in human beings? How are humans and the world related in evolutionary terms? Where are the bridges of understanding of humans to the world and of the world to humans? Steiner then described what was taught and how. This lecture cycle thus became a large-scale cosmic study of nature and man. And many of these tremendous cosmic Imaginations appear again in the Agriculture Course in the form of practical tips, of apparently unimportant guidelines – in a simple, modest form.
Ephesus
The lecture from 2nd December 1923 describes the mysteries of Ephesus. At this place on the coast of Asia Minor (nowadays Turkey) was the Artemision, a very large temple to the goddess Artemis. The temple was one of the seven wonders of the world. The initiation that was carried out there took place via speech: How does the world word live in the human word? The school lasted for several hundred years, until the temple was destroyed by arson in 356 BC. During the night of the fire, Alexander the Great was born. He later carried much of the mystery wisdom that was passed on to him by his teacher Aristotle in a philosophical form into the wide world while on his campaigns. Much later, around 100 AD, John the Evangelist was also in Ephesus as an old man. The beginning of St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God”, is like a resumption of the ancient teachings of the word, speech or logos in the Artemision. Steiner states in the lecture, “…These world-happenings, in what form do they reveal themselves? They reveal themselves as the Word of the cosmos, as the Logos. The Logos sounds forth, the macrocosmic Word in this rising and falling of the lime.”(Mystery Centres GA 232, lecture 6). This lime substance brought moulded forms from the cosmos into the protein atmosphere on the earth: the animal forms arose. The calcareous skeletons enable the diversity of the animal kingdom. If we study the forms of the skeletons, we can develop our observation of how, from the front, the formative force of the sun works and from behind, that of the moon. Exactly the same statement is repeated in the Agriculture Course with the remark that, through a form study like this, we can find out how many of each kind of animal is needed on a farm.
The lecture also talks about the plants that find their way onto the earth through the siliceous substance. “… The Word was first of all sound. The Word was something which struggled, as it were, to be solved like a riddle; in the arising of the animal creation something was revealed which struggled for a solution. Like a question the animal-kingdom arose within the lime soil. Humans looked into the silicic acid, and the plant-creation answered with that which it had taken up as the sense nature of the earth, and solved the riddles which the animal creation presented. These beings themselves mutually answered each other’s questions. The whole world becomes speech.” Is it not this reciprocal solving of riddles in the macrocosmic development of the earth that we find again in the Agriculture Course, where it is stressed that the animals belong to an agricultural organism? Is the digestive process in the cow with the resulting dung formation, which then becomes manure for the plants, not just this kind of reciprocal unravelling of a riddle of plant and animal? And is this inmost conversation between animal and plant not mentioned in many places in the Agriculture Course? I believe that through this example and many others we can see how the Agriculture Course is an expression of the knowledge about the link between the evolution of the world and the evolution of man, as was taught in ancient times in Ephesus and other mystery centres.
New insights
In the Agriculture Course, however, there are also genuinely new things; something which applies especially to the preparations. I believe they are really new inventions by Rudolf Steiner. It is not that they would stand out markedly as “the new element” in the flow of the Course.T hey appear much more as a logical deepening of what is said before and after. They are embedded in the course of the lectures, in the fourth and fifth lectures. They are part of the Course and they are understood and used as part of biodynamics as well. However, until now I have seen neither forerunners nor related examples in the known studies of agriculture of various cultures or in the content of the mystery wisdom as described by Steiner. Of course, this hypothesis needs to be discussed further. The horn manure preparation was produced the first time at the Research Institute at the Goetheanum with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and Guenther Wachsmuth even before the Course. The horns with manure were buried in the winter 1923/24and in spring 1924 they were stirred for the first time. With regard to this preparation there are forerunners at most from the Old Indian culture. The horn silica preparation with the finely ground quartz is very much in line with Steiner’s approach in the sense of the use of minerals, even in medicines. The compost preparations, which, before the Course, appear in all modesty on one single note2, are in composition and in the effect described so absolutely innovative that they appear as seeds for the future, worked into modern agriculture and opening themselves to the future.
What becomes concretely graspable with the preparations is a characteristic style that is present in the Course. This new agriculture has a dimension, in which we, as the active participants become co-creators, involved in the future development of nature, of the earth, the cosmos, for which we also share the responsibility. Biodynamic agriculture is co-creative agriculture.
The modern university
At the Christmas Conference the university was re-founded as ‘the soul’ of the Anthroposophical Society. Rudolf Steiner’s intention with the university, divided into classes and specialist Sections, was to link in a certain way to the ancient spiritual knowledge of the mystery schools. In keeping with the times, a scientific form of knowledge in the form of spiritual science is required. There should also be discourse with today’s scientific community. And above all, its ambition is to produce results that can be applied in practical life. The Agriculture Course is an excellent example of this. The way in which knowledge is passed on is quite different from earlier times. Individuals are not summoned, but themselves register for membership. This path of schooling is no longer tied to a ‘holy place’ and does not follow a strictly defined code, but can be adapted to life depending on the situation. This applies particularly to the path via the Sections, where training is closely linked to practice in the various fields of activity. Our conferences are Section conferences. Besides many other things, they should foster and enable a ‘step for-ward’ on the inner path for many participants and contributors. And I believe that this is widely the case. The learning community which we are and as which we plan the agriculture conferences, also contains the dimension of spiritual learning. And when we now celebrate the centenary and enter into the deep Imagination images of the Agriculture Course, knowing ourselves to be in a stream of knowledge that flows through the age can give us the right mood and attitude. In the plenary events, in the working groups and in the many individual meetings there are always opportunities to let the deep sources of inspiration hidden in the Course, out of the past and out of the future, light up.
1 - 1 For the preparation for the Koberwitz Course the four following works were used particularly: Gustav Boehme: Landwirtschaftliche
Sueden, Fehler im Betriebe, Berlin 1923; Johann Adam Schlipf: Schlipfs praktisches Handbuch der Landwirtschaft, Berlin 1922; Albert Studler: Schweizerisches Landwirtschaftliches Lexikon, Zurich 1919; Theodor Woelfer: Grundsaetz und Ziele der neuzeitlichen Landwirtschaft, Berlin 1921. Both the book by Boehme and the book by Schlipf were published anew by Woelfer at the time.
2 - 2 Note NZ 3623, Agriculture Course, GA 327, 9th Edition, Basle 2022, S.323.