Klett: 100 years, and a new name for BD?
Posted: 20 Dec 2023, 11:37
100 Years of the biodynamic Movement
Historic Background and the Symptoms of its Genesis
Manfred Klett
A Review
The moment of birth of the biodynamic movement, “The Agriculture Course of Rudolf Steiner, the spiritual-scientific foundations for the thriving of agriculture”, held at Whitsuntide 1924, happened at a time that could not have been more dramatic in Central Europe. It was preceded by the First World War (1914–1918) and with it, above all, in Central and Eastern Europe the collapse of the old-world order. This ending of the feudal-hierarchical social fabric caused devastating chaos on all levels in the aftermath, which shattered the foundations of human co-existence. Thus, the Agriculture Course took place at the time of hyperinflation, in the years of the devaluation of all values. However, at the same time amid all the turbulence of diverging streams in the scientific, artistic and social fields an experimental joy to dare to do something new was stirred up in people.
An outward Path
If we look at the time of the First World War and its aftermath, two basic positions in human society confront each other: the one is marked by power-seeking to enforce personal advantage through and by the destruction through war of what was existing; the other was marked by spiritual impulses to transform what had come about for the future through peace-making. Immediately before the First World War the ultimate means of destruction were created, the ammonia or nitrogen synthesis from the air. This allowed people to produce unlimited quantities of nitrogen salts, using an enormous amount of energy. Nitrogen, by its physical nature, is gaseous in form, part of the air; it avoids the solid state. With our breathing we take it in, it fills the whole human being. In the air nitrogen is to a certain extent content with itself; it is bonded with itself (N2), it is inert and would like to remain in a gaseous state. Only through the living activity of breathing, through being absorbed into an ensouled organism, does it unfold its actual being; it becomes the bearer of every stirring of the soul that is connected to the body in a good sense and in a bad sense. The soul aspect of humans and animals requires the nitrogen so that it can realise itself in physical existence. The nitrogen breathed in assimilates to the soul aspect, it becomes its bearer. This amazing phenomenon occurs in the plant realm too with the species-rich family of the legumes. They too breathe in the nitrogen in the air through their shoots above the earth, absorb it into their living being, produce the picture of a kind of inwardness, morphologically and physiologically, e.g. in the rich formation of protein, luxuriant growth, a dark-green colouring of the leaves, the blossoms turned down into the foliage, and colonies of bacteria in the roots area: the fruit-like nodules. Apart from lightening discharges, this is the way via the living activity of organisms through which nitrogen becomes the bearer of soul activity in the earth realm.
This mysterious happening, which also takes place in the human sub-conscious, was disrupted by the inventive spirit of humans. The ammonia synthesis and the conversion of the highly active ammonia gas to solid, crystalline salts created a nitrogen compound, which, when the time factor is excluded, has the property of exploding, thereby unleashing forces, which are not the malleable bearers of soul activity evolving in the course of time, but turn into the bearers, so to speak, of explosive soul violence. The three expressions of the soul that are bound to the body, desires, passions and drives, become the instrument of exercising human egoism with the help of the nitrogen salts, that is, to exploit any lust for power effectively for personal advantage in the world. One example is the rifle, by means of which one aims at a distant target out of desire, in feverish passion waits for the moment in which one follows the urge to pull the trigger so as to then view the destruction wreaked with satisfaction. The nitrogen of the air, transformed by force into an explosive substance, is the “fodder”, the sustenance for war. The greater the desire to wreak destruction in the world, the more nitrogen salts make the grenades, bombs, rockets solid and heavy, the greater is the satisfaction over the extent of the destruction.
The First World War could not have been fought with its power of destruction and cruelty, going far beyond all previous wars, without the discovery of the ammoniac synthesis from out of the air, immediately preceding it. The subsequent wars up to the present day have continued the abstractly inhuman use of the explosive power of the nitrogen salts with polished technology.
An inward Path
This basic attitude, inclined towards the evil of destruction, which celebrated its triumphs in the First World War, began with the experimental, preparatory steps of the Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis at the same time as the other, the above-mentioned basic attitude of the peace-making power, for which anthroposophical spiritual science stands. It is the same time after the end of the Kali-Yuga (1899), the age of darkness, in which Rudolf Steiner opens up the “age of light” with his spiritual science. It enables the striving person, on the basis of the development of soul-spiritual organs of knowledge, to research the spirit world in a body-free state as well as to understand the spiritual, which has become set in the manifest forms of the world phenomena. Spiritual research reveals the being and the evolution of the human being and, against this background, that of the animal realm, the plant realm and mineral nature. From the beginning of the 20th century right into the time of the First World War, through spiritual research a mighty panorama of spiritual knowledge, ideas formed for the thinking spirit of humankind, unfolds; this leads them to knowledge of themselves as originating in the spirit and to knowledge of the being of the cosmos and the earth. In this period up to the First World War a broad field of knowledge is prepared for human beings to take up the battle for a higher level of humanity with themselves, to school themselves in peace-making, to see the wounds all over which need to be healed. In retrospect one can say this infinitely creative time of anthroposophy finding its way into modern civilisation up until the First World War is a time of preparation for a mission of peace in a world that is preparing itself to unleash storms of destruction.
The Path from inner to outer
The First World War opened the gates, across the threshold of which, in full opposition, it comes to an encounter of the beings of vicious warlike forces, contemptuous of human beings, with the healing forces of the peace mission of anthroposophy. This encounter sets off a metamorphosis in the peace-making working of anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner, the spiritual researcher, in his deepest, most painful sadness, experiences the flow of inspirations which point the way for the above-mentioned inner path to a change of direction to the outer path. The conditions of war brought to light, to full exposure, the long-standing, deplorable, fermenting social conditions of the work life of the proletariat. At the same time the feudal order collapsed and the bourgeois order sank into chaos. These symptoms had an influence on Rudolf Steiner in his directing his “appeal to the world of culture” and the appeal to understand and take hold of the idea of the “three-fold social order” as the true peace mission in the shaping of social life. Rudolf Steiner involved himself in this budding, community-building initiative, not only as a researcher or teacher but also as a dynamic organiser. Only a little later (1919), also as a fruit of this, he founded a further peace-making initiative, Waldorf education, based on the spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being. It is at work today as a blessing in nearly all countries of the world with its core educational interest in awakening the peace-making conscious awareness for personal self-determination in the up and coming generation. Once again, in the aftermath of the First World War Rudolf Steiner gives spiritual-scientific indications to an enquiring group of doctors on the medical-therapeutic art of healing.
This too has been radiating out to almost all the countries of the world for over 100 years. As the last initiative, timed in close connection with curative education, Rudolf Steiner inaugurated a peace mission to heal the emerging deplorable state of affairs, a mission that completely took hold of people’s wills and inspired them with ideas. This too is a consequence of the destruction of the war just past. It is the agriculture of renewal, out of the wellspring of the deepest spiritual impulses. Since 1929 it has borne the name “biological-dynamic method of agriculture”, further shortened to “biodynamics” or with a mythological reference “Demeter farming”. The term “anthroposophically oriented cultivation” would get closest to the spiritual intention, but because this would face a lack of understanding as in the early days, it would perhaps be worth the effort to reflect in the coming century on a new name to challenge contemporary ideas.
The Peace Mission of the Agriculture Course
It expressed itself in an esoterically beneficial and exoterically hindering sense:
The esoteric aspect
The participants in the Course were so fired up right through to the depths of their wills by the presentation of esotericism with its practical application to life that after the course they charged out, so to speak, filled with courage and enthusiasm to their farms and market gardens and to other countries in order to put what they had heard into practice. The Course took place at Whitsuntide and for the listeners, who were engaged in practical farm and gardening work, it was like a Whitsun experience. And this experience is renewed in places all over the world, where people come together , who practise the biodynamic measures and who share the experiences gained with one another. The practical working on the farms becomes a source of learning, study and knowledge. People feel their activity as a service to nature , and learn to see their surroundings, the cosmos and the earth with new eyes. Work, which in the times of technology has become a burden, becomes a joy again; people have the experience that they can love what they do. They live with the feeling they are playing into the hands of the future development of human beings and the earth. Directly in the simple practical carrying out of the measures given in the Agriculture Course people enter into the experience of how the spiritual background of ideas flows into the work, can be experienced in the work and proves to be well-founded. You can become aware how, on the one hand, working with nature constantly meets you as a necessity and, therefore, triggers the feeling “you must! You should! Being unfree” and how, on the other hand, in contrast, the work to which are encouraged by the spiritual research of the Agriculture Course, can be experienced as so creative for the future, because the impulse of freedom is immanent in it. This applies to the extent to which you progress in the knowledge of the spiritual background. For instance, there is with regard to the making of the biodynamic preparations no outer reason for their necessity to be found in nature. The only thing that is decisive is the one that you give yourself through insight into the esoteric indication from the spiritual research of the Agriculture Course itself.
This esoteric trait is inherent in all Rudolf Steiner’s indications in the Agriculture Course. If one seeks to penetrate this with one’s understanding through thorough study and at the same time enable oneself to experience it in practice through engaging one’s will, this effort will deepen to spiritual assurance, to a feeling of truth. The enthusiasm, the firing of the will, the love of the cause, will grow and grow. Following an inkling one will come closer to the knowledge that ideas formed by anthroposophical spiritual science of the eternal nature of being, which, as a creative agent, is the basis of all sense phenomena, become accessible to the thinking mind. If we only draw upon two statements among the wealth of Rudolf Steiner’s indications in the Agriculture Course, such as this one perhaps, “the human being is made the basis”, with regard to the measures for shaping a farm into a closed loop system, as much as possible, and the other, “the fertiliser is such a profound mystery that only the spiritual researcher can fathom it”, then one’s gaze is directed, on the one hand, to the most extensive connections of the physical constitution of the human being and, on the other hand, to the hidden being of the world of matter.
Thus, Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course is not a teaching that is limited to a particular time, but rather it is a guiding principle interwoven in ideas from out of the spiritual depths for the working of the biodynamic movement in the coming centuries.
The exoteric Aspect
From the early days after the First World War until today this aspect is interwoven with the biodynamic movement in the most varied manner, in a tremendously restricting way, determining destiny, above all in Central Europe and it turned into a harsh trial for it. The cause was the collapse of the war industry after the end of First World War and the search for new markets. The production of masses of nitrogen salts which had filled the bellies of grenades and bombs, lay suddenly fallow. Quickly friend and foe decided to found the European Nitrogen Syndicate. People knew about agriculture’s need for nitrogen fertiliser and on behalf of the industry undertook a large-scale, extensive campaign, unparalleled for the times, backed up by superficial, closely-knitted scientific arguments and pounced upon the unsuspecting farmers with them. Farmers’ experimental circles were founded. There was one based in Koberwitz, the place where the Agriculture Course took place, looked after by an academically schooled representative of BASF, the business, where the Haber-Bosch-Procedure was invented and made ready for use. This representative’s wish to participate in the Agriculture Course was turned down by Rudolf Steiner. Nevertheless, despite the entering of his name with a number on the receipt, he succeeded in acquiring a first edition of the Agriculture Course. Thus, with the founding of the Agriculture Course the opposition was brought into the arena. A kind of nitrate war broke out with provocations and slandering against the biodynamic movement, which accompanied it throughout the 20th century and forced it continually to back up its arguments. In a materialistic sense this could not be delivered to their opponents’ satisfaction. Only the long-term fertiliser trials after the Second World War in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany made the opponents quieten down a bit.
In the above-mentioned experimental circles, whose work the nitrate industry financed, there was a massive thrust to convince people. The increased yield spoke for itself; for the vast majority of farmers the future had begun. Henceforth, the nitrate industry manufactured for a secret war against life with the same means that had brought about death and ruin. Fertilising with nitrates alongside the accompanying fertilisers (phosphorus, potassium, etc.) became a sort of materialistic ideology, a substitute religion. A battle against people who thought differently came about, which finally led to the banning of biodynamic cultivation in the time of National-Socialism in Germany. Only a few farmers and gardeners had withstood this maelstrom soon after the First World War. With increasingly urgent questions they turned to Rudolf Steiner with the request for indications out of spiritual research for a renewal of agriculture, for such a renewal that, by evolving, creates out of its own resources.
The slander onslaught from industry, politics and wide circles of the Agrarian Sciences against biodynamic agriculture was sustained well beyond the Second World War and ebbed away in the 1960s and 1970s, on the one hand, because of the high-quality research in the field of biodynamics, on the other hand, the increasing nitrate pollution of ground and drinking water as well as of the rivers and lakes made the public prick up their ears. To the great credit of biodynamic research in the 1960s, using a variety of methods, they managed to demonstrate the reduced physiological quality of nutrition caused by fertilising with nitrate salts.
A forward Look
The peace mission of the anthroposophical biodynamic movement radiated out soon after the Agriculture Course across several countries in Europe right over to America, then gradually after the Second World War and in the 21st century across the world. Wherever it takes hold, general human interest lights up, independent of religion, education, national borders and social status. Beyond language barriers, traditional blood bonds etc. you meet a way of thinking, in which people find themselves with common goals from out of the future, as it were. People no longer meet one another in the arbitrary mix of opinions, but in the determined striving to put one’s own self selflessly at the service of a task for humanity. You experience everywhere how at certain points from biodynamic farms an energy is released that brings people together, how on all sides new communities are forming and also joy in experimenting in the social realm. In all this a spirituality is living which has a peace-making effect.
This links up to the question whether this striving towards something in the future is connected with the process of creating anew with the biodynamic preparations. With regard to the yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle preparations he explains that through these through the transformation of calcium and other substances in the organic processes nitrogen arises. What soul-spiritual qualities do we need to attribute to the thus newly created nitrogen as their bearer?
In view of the world-wide waning of the soul capacities of thinking, feeling and willing and their mutual estrangement the biodynamic movement is facing the challenge of being in a position to tip the scales, so to speak, (and increasingly so) and to enable people’s consciousness which is wandering off into the digital AI virtual world to be grounded and to open up to the spiritual cosmos. Standing in this polarity it is its task to turn the thought of evolution into actions, the thought, which has completely manifested itself in the everyday world of all beings and only continues to be creatively at work in human beings in their ego-awakening. It is the spiritual task, in connection with the human soul development, to imprint this idea of evolution on nature, in the course of working with it. In this I see the being and significance of the biodynamic movement going into the far future. It is a high ideal. We must carry it within ourselves as an inkling so as to do the groundwork for it in selfless caring for the earth.
For 100 years the biodynamic movement has been progressing on the path marked out for itself, guided by deep trust in the Agriculture Course. For a hundred years it has produced a rich treasure trove of practical experience, practice-oriented experimental research as well as spiritual insights. These strivings will continue to be pioneering. However, in view of the mighty challenges to be expected in the coming 100 years they will need to be evaluated more effectively. Above all this concerns the common study of spiritual science on the farms, practising looking at all the phenomena of mineral, plant and animal existence, of the phenomena in the heavens in the rhythm of the course of the year; all of which make up the whole organism of the farm, in the sense world and the world beyond. Moreover, the biodynamic movement is called upon to build a bridge of co-operation to the related healing and pedagogical fields of medicine and education. These efforts have been moving closer to the biodynamic farms for a longer time in questions of nutrition and practical education and the latter opens the doors to practical farm experience, which opens a new field to experience observation of living nature and will activity with the involvement in shaping the course of the farming year. The farms are becoming organs of the free spiritual life beyond their boundaries.
Such a development, directed inwardly, towards the spiritual deepening of the biodynamic work is now and in the future only possible through a new ordering of social conditions throughout the whole of society. In lots of places the start has already been made, through new legal forms regarding ownership of land and capital through trustees, through endeavours to separate work and income etc. as well as in the economic area through working together associatively.
All these tentative efforts show that biodynamic agriculture has grown more and more into a new impulse giver for the forming of the three-fold social organism. Each biodynamic farm – a point in the surrounding social landscape – bears within it the potential to structure the social conditions from the concrete reality of farm life in the following sense: thus, 1, a community of people work on the spiritual goal of shaping a piece of land to form a more or less closed loop system that renews itself by and large. Out of the will to put this goal into effect there arises, 2, trust in being able to do this together. In the trust from person to person a feeling of justice is developed and out of this a living legal set-up, within which with regard to the administration of the land and capital in trusteeship the enterprise radiates out into the general life of law. Finally, 3, the farm produces value in its own right, goods for which each person has a daily need. Thereby, the farm stands at the starting point of all economic activity. It can only afford to do so, if it receives the prices at the market for its produce that enable it to again manage the same productive capacity in the following year. The form, in which such economic activity regarding the satisfaction of people’s needs and price-setting becomes manageable, is the associative joining together of the economic partners around the farm.
With regard to the coming centenary the biodynamic movement faces the task of being and becoming the catalyst in order that in a renewed attempt the three-fold social organism can be given a flexible form that is capable of transformation for the social fabric of modern civilisation, which is in danger of collapse. If that becomes the general objective equally necessary alongside the work on nature, I can see a way in which agriculture, in which nowadays the burden of work rests excessively on a few shoulders, can be carried by many and the common spiritual work on the farms can stimulate people to renewed enthusiasm and the firing up of their wills. In this synthesis, evolutionary in the context of nature and working in social life through mutual support, I can see the progressive carrying out of the peace-making mission of the biodynamic movement.
Historic Background and the Symptoms of its Genesis
Manfred Klett
A Review
The moment of birth of the biodynamic movement, “The Agriculture Course of Rudolf Steiner, the spiritual-scientific foundations for the thriving of agriculture”, held at Whitsuntide 1924, happened at a time that could not have been more dramatic in Central Europe. It was preceded by the First World War (1914–1918) and with it, above all, in Central and Eastern Europe the collapse of the old-world order. This ending of the feudal-hierarchical social fabric caused devastating chaos on all levels in the aftermath, which shattered the foundations of human co-existence. Thus, the Agriculture Course took place at the time of hyperinflation, in the years of the devaluation of all values. However, at the same time amid all the turbulence of diverging streams in the scientific, artistic and social fields an experimental joy to dare to do something new was stirred up in people.
An outward Path
If we look at the time of the First World War and its aftermath, two basic positions in human society confront each other: the one is marked by power-seeking to enforce personal advantage through and by the destruction through war of what was existing; the other was marked by spiritual impulses to transform what had come about for the future through peace-making. Immediately before the First World War the ultimate means of destruction were created, the ammonia or nitrogen synthesis from the air. This allowed people to produce unlimited quantities of nitrogen salts, using an enormous amount of energy. Nitrogen, by its physical nature, is gaseous in form, part of the air; it avoids the solid state. With our breathing we take it in, it fills the whole human being. In the air nitrogen is to a certain extent content with itself; it is bonded with itself (N2), it is inert and would like to remain in a gaseous state. Only through the living activity of breathing, through being absorbed into an ensouled organism, does it unfold its actual being; it becomes the bearer of every stirring of the soul that is connected to the body in a good sense and in a bad sense. The soul aspect of humans and animals requires the nitrogen so that it can realise itself in physical existence. The nitrogen breathed in assimilates to the soul aspect, it becomes its bearer. This amazing phenomenon occurs in the plant realm too with the species-rich family of the legumes. They too breathe in the nitrogen in the air through their shoots above the earth, absorb it into their living being, produce the picture of a kind of inwardness, morphologically and physiologically, e.g. in the rich formation of protein, luxuriant growth, a dark-green colouring of the leaves, the blossoms turned down into the foliage, and colonies of bacteria in the roots area: the fruit-like nodules. Apart from lightening discharges, this is the way via the living activity of organisms through which nitrogen becomes the bearer of soul activity in the earth realm.
This mysterious happening, which also takes place in the human sub-conscious, was disrupted by the inventive spirit of humans. The ammonia synthesis and the conversion of the highly active ammonia gas to solid, crystalline salts created a nitrogen compound, which, when the time factor is excluded, has the property of exploding, thereby unleashing forces, which are not the malleable bearers of soul activity evolving in the course of time, but turn into the bearers, so to speak, of explosive soul violence. The three expressions of the soul that are bound to the body, desires, passions and drives, become the instrument of exercising human egoism with the help of the nitrogen salts, that is, to exploit any lust for power effectively for personal advantage in the world. One example is the rifle, by means of which one aims at a distant target out of desire, in feverish passion waits for the moment in which one follows the urge to pull the trigger so as to then view the destruction wreaked with satisfaction. The nitrogen of the air, transformed by force into an explosive substance, is the “fodder”, the sustenance for war. The greater the desire to wreak destruction in the world, the more nitrogen salts make the grenades, bombs, rockets solid and heavy, the greater is the satisfaction over the extent of the destruction.
The First World War could not have been fought with its power of destruction and cruelty, going far beyond all previous wars, without the discovery of the ammoniac synthesis from out of the air, immediately preceding it. The subsequent wars up to the present day have continued the abstractly inhuman use of the explosive power of the nitrogen salts with polished technology.
An inward Path
This basic attitude, inclined towards the evil of destruction, which celebrated its triumphs in the First World War, began with the experimental, preparatory steps of the Haber-Bosch process of ammonia synthesis at the same time as the other, the above-mentioned basic attitude of the peace-making power, for which anthroposophical spiritual science stands. It is the same time after the end of the Kali-Yuga (1899), the age of darkness, in which Rudolf Steiner opens up the “age of light” with his spiritual science. It enables the striving person, on the basis of the development of soul-spiritual organs of knowledge, to research the spirit world in a body-free state as well as to understand the spiritual, which has become set in the manifest forms of the world phenomena. Spiritual research reveals the being and the evolution of the human being and, against this background, that of the animal realm, the plant realm and mineral nature. From the beginning of the 20th century right into the time of the First World War, through spiritual research a mighty panorama of spiritual knowledge, ideas formed for the thinking spirit of humankind, unfolds; this leads them to knowledge of themselves as originating in the spirit and to knowledge of the being of the cosmos and the earth. In this period up to the First World War a broad field of knowledge is prepared for human beings to take up the battle for a higher level of humanity with themselves, to school themselves in peace-making, to see the wounds all over which need to be healed. In retrospect one can say this infinitely creative time of anthroposophy finding its way into modern civilisation up until the First World War is a time of preparation for a mission of peace in a world that is preparing itself to unleash storms of destruction.
The Path from inner to outer
The First World War opened the gates, across the threshold of which, in full opposition, it comes to an encounter of the beings of vicious warlike forces, contemptuous of human beings, with the healing forces of the peace mission of anthroposophy. This encounter sets off a metamorphosis in the peace-making working of anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner, the spiritual researcher, in his deepest, most painful sadness, experiences the flow of inspirations which point the way for the above-mentioned inner path to a change of direction to the outer path. The conditions of war brought to light, to full exposure, the long-standing, deplorable, fermenting social conditions of the work life of the proletariat. At the same time the feudal order collapsed and the bourgeois order sank into chaos. These symptoms had an influence on Rudolf Steiner in his directing his “appeal to the world of culture” and the appeal to understand and take hold of the idea of the “three-fold social order” as the true peace mission in the shaping of social life. Rudolf Steiner involved himself in this budding, community-building initiative, not only as a researcher or teacher but also as a dynamic organiser. Only a little later (1919), also as a fruit of this, he founded a further peace-making initiative, Waldorf education, based on the spiritual-scientific understanding of the human being. It is at work today as a blessing in nearly all countries of the world with its core educational interest in awakening the peace-making conscious awareness for personal self-determination in the up and coming generation. Once again, in the aftermath of the First World War Rudolf Steiner gives spiritual-scientific indications to an enquiring group of doctors on the medical-therapeutic art of healing.
This too has been radiating out to almost all the countries of the world for over 100 years. As the last initiative, timed in close connection with curative education, Rudolf Steiner inaugurated a peace mission to heal the emerging deplorable state of affairs, a mission that completely took hold of people’s wills and inspired them with ideas. This too is a consequence of the destruction of the war just past. It is the agriculture of renewal, out of the wellspring of the deepest spiritual impulses. Since 1929 it has borne the name “biological-dynamic method of agriculture”, further shortened to “biodynamics” or with a mythological reference “Demeter farming”. The term “anthroposophically oriented cultivation” would get closest to the spiritual intention, but because this would face a lack of understanding as in the early days, it would perhaps be worth the effort to reflect in the coming century on a new name to challenge contemporary ideas.
The Peace Mission of the Agriculture Course
It expressed itself in an esoterically beneficial and exoterically hindering sense:
The esoteric aspect
The participants in the Course were so fired up right through to the depths of their wills by the presentation of esotericism with its practical application to life that after the course they charged out, so to speak, filled with courage and enthusiasm to their farms and market gardens and to other countries in order to put what they had heard into practice. The Course took place at Whitsuntide and for the listeners, who were engaged in practical farm and gardening work, it was like a Whitsun experience. And this experience is renewed in places all over the world, where people come together , who practise the biodynamic measures and who share the experiences gained with one another. The practical working on the farms becomes a source of learning, study and knowledge. People feel their activity as a service to nature , and learn to see their surroundings, the cosmos and the earth with new eyes. Work, which in the times of technology has become a burden, becomes a joy again; people have the experience that they can love what they do. They live with the feeling they are playing into the hands of the future development of human beings and the earth. Directly in the simple practical carrying out of the measures given in the Agriculture Course people enter into the experience of how the spiritual background of ideas flows into the work, can be experienced in the work and proves to be well-founded. You can become aware how, on the one hand, working with nature constantly meets you as a necessity and, therefore, triggers the feeling “you must! You should! Being unfree” and how, on the other hand, in contrast, the work to which are encouraged by the spiritual research of the Agriculture Course, can be experienced as so creative for the future, because the impulse of freedom is immanent in it. This applies to the extent to which you progress in the knowledge of the spiritual background. For instance, there is with regard to the making of the biodynamic preparations no outer reason for their necessity to be found in nature. The only thing that is decisive is the one that you give yourself through insight into the esoteric indication from the spiritual research of the Agriculture Course itself.
This esoteric trait is inherent in all Rudolf Steiner’s indications in the Agriculture Course. If one seeks to penetrate this with one’s understanding through thorough study and at the same time enable oneself to experience it in practice through engaging one’s will, this effort will deepen to spiritual assurance, to a feeling of truth. The enthusiasm, the firing of the will, the love of the cause, will grow and grow. Following an inkling one will come closer to the knowledge that ideas formed by anthroposophical spiritual science of the eternal nature of being, which, as a creative agent, is the basis of all sense phenomena, become accessible to the thinking mind. If we only draw upon two statements among the wealth of Rudolf Steiner’s indications in the Agriculture Course, such as this one perhaps, “the human being is made the basis”, with regard to the measures for shaping a farm into a closed loop system, as much as possible, and the other, “the fertiliser is such a profound mystery that only the spiritual researcher can fathom it”, then one’s gaze is directed, on the one hand, to the most extensive connections of the physical constitution of the human being and, on the other hand, to the hidden being of the world of matter.
Thus, Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course is not a teaching that is limited to a particular time, but rather it is a guiding principle interwoven in ideas from out of the spiritual depths for the working of the biodynamic movement in the coming centuries.
The exoteric Aspect
From the early days after the First World War until today this aspect is interwoven with the biodynamic movement in the most varied manner, in a tremendously restricting way, determining destiny, above all in Central Europe and it turned into a harsh trial for it. The cause was the collapse of the war industry after the end of First World War and the search for new markets. The production of masses of nitrogen salts which had filled the bellies of grenades and bombs, lay suddenly fallow. Quickly friend and foe decided to found the European Nitrogen Syndicate. People knew about agriculture’s need for nitrogen fertiliser and on behalf of the industry undertook a large-scale, extensive campaign, unparalleled for the times, backed up by superficial, closely-knitted scientific arguments and pounced upon the unsuspecting farmers with them. Farmers’ experimental circles were founded. There was one based in Koberwitz, the place where the Agriculture Course took place, looked after by an academically schooled representative of BASF, the business, where the Haber-Bosch-Procedure was invented and made ready for use. This representative’s wish to participate in the Agriculture Course was turned down by Rudolf Steiner. Nevertheless, despite the entering of his name with a number on the receipt, he succeeded in acquiring a first edition of the Agriculture Course. Thus, with the founding of the Agriculture Course the opposition was brought into the arena. A kind of nitrate war broke out with provocations and slandering against the biodynamic movement, which accompanied it throughout the 20th century and forced it continually to back up its arguments. In a materialistic sense this could not be delivered to their opponents’ satisfaction. Only the long-term fertiliser trials after the Second World War in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany made the opponents quieten down a bit.
In the above-mentioned experimental circles, whose work the nitrate industry financed, there was a massive thrust to convince people. The increased yield spoke for itself; for the vast majority of farmers the future had begun. Henceforth, the nitrate industry manufactured for a secret war against life with the same means that had brought about death and ruin. Fertilising with nitrates alongside the accompanying fertilisers (phosphorus, potassium, etc.) became a sort of materialistic ideology, a substitute religion. A battle against people who thought differently came about, which finally led to the banning of biodynamic cultivation in the time of National-Socialism in Germany. Only a few farmers and gardeners had withstood this maelstrom soon after the First World War. With increasingly urgent questions they turned to Rudolf Steiner with the request for indications out of spiritual research for a renewal of agriculture, for such a renewal that, by evolving, creates out of its own resources.
The slander onslaught from industry, politics and wide circles of the Agrarian Sciences against biodynamic agriculture was sustained well beyond the Second World War and ebbed away in the 1960s and 1970s, on the one hand, because of the high-quality research in the field of biodynamics, on the other hand, the increasing nitrate pollution of ground and drinking water as well as of the rivers and lakes made the public prick up their ears. To the great credit of biodynamic research in the 1960s, using a variety of methods, they managed to demonstrate the reduced physiological quality of nutrition caused by fertilising with nitrate salts.
A forward Look
The peace mission of the anthroposophical biodynamic movement radiated out soon after the Agriculture Course across several countries in Europe right over to America, then gradually after the Second World War and in the 21st century across the world. Wherever it takes hold, general human interest lights up, independent of religion, education, national borders and social status. Beyond language barriers, traditional blood bonds etc. you meet a way of thinking, in which people find themselves with common goals from out of the future, as it were. People no longer meet one another in the arbitrary mix of opinions, but in the determined striving to put one’s own self selflessly at the service of a task for humanity. You experience everywhere how at certain points from biodynamic farms an energy is released that brings people together, how on all sides new communities are forming and also joy in experimenting in the social realm. In all this a spirituality is living which has a peace-making effect.
This links up to the question whether this striving towards something in the future is connected with the process of creating anew with the biodynamic preparations. With regard to the yarrow, chamomile and stinging nettle preparations he explains that through these through the transformation of calcium and other substances in the organic processes nitrogen arises. What soul-spiritual qualities do we need to attribute to the thus newly created nitrogen as their bearer?
In view of the world-wide waning of the soul capacities of thinking, feeling and willing and their mutual estrangement the biodynamic movement is facing the challenge of being in a position to tip the scales, so to speak, (and increasingly so) and to enable people’s consciousness which is wandering off into the digital AI virtual world to be grounded and to open up to the spiritual cosmos. Standing in this polarity it is its task to turn the thought of evolution into actions, the thought, which has completely manifested itself in the everyday world of all beings and only continues to be creatively at work in human beings in their ego-awakening. It is the spiritual task, in connection with the human soul development, to imprint this idea of evolution on nature, in the course of working with it. In this I see the being and significance of the biodynamic movement going into the far future. It is a high ideal. We must carry it within ourselves as an inkling so as to do the groundwork for it in selfless caring for the earth.
For 100 years the biodynamic movement has been progressing on the path marked out for itself, guided by deep trust in the Agriculture Course. For a hundred years it has produced a rich treasure trove of practical experience, practice-oriented experimental research as well as spiritual insights. These strivings will continue to be pioneering. However, in view of the mighty challenges to be expected in the coming 100 years they will need to be evaluated more effectively. Above all this concerns the common study of spiritual science on the farms, practising looking at all the phenomena of mineral, plant and animal existence, of the phenomena in the heavens in the rhythm of the course of the year; all of which make up the whole organism of the farm, in the sense world and the world beyond. Moreover, the biodynamic movement is called upon to build a bridge of co-operation to the related healing and pedagogical fields of medicine and education. These efforts have been moving closer to the biodynamic farms for a longer time in questions of nutrition and practical education and the latter opens the doors to practical farm experience, which opens a new field to experience observation of living nature and will activity with the involvement in shaping the course of the farming year. The farms are becoming organs of the free spiritual life beyond their boundaries.
Such a development, directed inwardly, towards the spiritual deepening of the biodynamic work is now and in the future only possible through a new ordering of social conditions throughout the whole of society. In lots of places the start has already been made, through new legal forms regarding ownership of land and capital through trustees, through endeavours to separate work and income etc. as well as in the economic area through working together associatively.
All these tentative efforts show that biodynamic agriculture has grown more and more into a new impulse giver for the forming of the three-fold social organism. Each biodynamic farm – a point in the surrounding social landscape – bears within it the potential to structure the social conditions from the concrete reality of farm life in the following sense: thus, 1, a community of people work on the spiritual goal of shaping a piece of land to form a more or less closed loop system that renews itself by and large. Out of the will to put this goal into effect there arises, 2, trust in being able to do this together. In the trust from person to person a feeling of justice is developed and out of this a living legal set-up, within which with regard to the administration of the land and capital in trusteeship the enterprise radiates out into the general life of law. Finally, 3, the farm produces value in its own right, goods for which each person has a daily need. Thereby, the farm stands at the starting point of all economic activity. It can only afford to do so, if it receives the prices at the market for its produce that enable it to again manage the same productive capacity in the following year. The form, in which such economic activity regarding the satisfaction of people’s needs and price-setting becomes manageable, is the associative joining together of the economic partners around the farm.
With regard to the coming centenary the biodynamic movement faces the task of being and becoming the catalyst in order that in a renewed attempt the three-fold social organism can be given a flexible form that is capable of transformation for the social fabric of modern civilisation, which is in danger of collapse. If that becomes the general objective equally necessary alongside the work on nature, I can see a way in which agriculture, in which nowadays the burden of work rests excessively on a few shoulders, can be carried by many and the common spiritual work on the farms can stimulate people to renewed enthusiasm and the firing up of their wills. In this synthesis, evolutionary in the context of nature and working in social life through mutual support, I can see the progressive carrying out of the peace-making mission of the biodynamic movement.