Nature and the working of the Spirit throughout Nature must be recognised on a large scale, in an all-embracing sphere. Materialistic science has tended more and more to the investigation of minute, restricted spheres. True, this is not quite so bad in Agriculture; here they do not always go on at once to the very minute—the microscopically small, with which they are wont to deal in other sciences. Nevertheless, here too they deal with narrow spheres of activity, or rather, with conclusions which they feel able to draw from the investigation of narrow and restricted spheres. But the world in which man and the other earthly creatures live cannot possibly be judged from such restricted aspects.
Here again we must first establish a genuine science—a science that looks to the great cosmic relationships.
The very way the words are often put by scientists when they come to the manuring question, shows how little idea they really have of what manuring signifies in the economy of Nature. How often do we hear the phrase: “Manure contains the necessary foodstuffs for the plants.” I spoke these introductory sentences just now—referring to the nourishment of man—not without reason. I wanted to show you how science has had to correct itself in this instance, notably in the most recent period. Why has it to correct itself? Because it takes its start from an altogether false idea of nutrition—whether of man or of any other living creature.
Do not be angry with me for saying these things so openly and clearly. The idea used to be that the essential thing in human nutrition is what a man daily consumes. Undoubtedly, our daily food is important. But the greater part of what we daily eat is not there to be received as substance into the body—to be deposited in the body substantially. By far the greater part is there to give the body the forces which it contains, and so to call forth in the body inner mobility, activity. The greater part of what man thus receives into himself is cast out again.
Therefore the important question in the metabolic process is not the proportion of weights, but it is this: Are the foodstuffs providing us with the proper living quality of forces? We need these living forces, for example, when we walk or when we work—nay, when we only move our arms about. What the body needs, on the other hand, so as to deposit substances in itself—to provide itself with substances (which are expelled again every seven or eight years as the substance of the body is renewed)—this, for the most part, is received through the sense-organs, the skin and the breathing. Whatever the body has to receive and deposit in itself as actual substance—this it is constantly receiving in exceedingly minute doses, in a highly diluted state. It is only in the body that it becomes condensed. The body receives it from the air and thereupon hardens and condenses it, till in the nails and pair for instance it has to be cut off.
It is completely wrong to set up the formula: “Food received—Passage through the body—Wearing-away of nails and skin, and the like.” The true formula is thus: “Breathing, or reception of substances in an even finer state through the sense-organs (even the eyes)—Passage through the organism—Excretion in the widest sense.” On the other hand, what we receive through our stomach is important by virtue of its inherent life and mobility—as of a fuel. It is important inasmuch as it introduces the necessary forces for the will which is at work in the body. This is the truth—the simple result of spiritual research.
For all the different spheres of farming life we must gain insight into the working of the substances and forces, and of the Spiritual too. Such insight is necessary, so as to treat things in the right way. After all, a baby—so long as it does not know what a comb is for will merely bite into it, treating it in an impossible and style-less fashion. We too shall treat things in an impossible and style-less fashion, so long as we do not know what their true essence is ...
Consider a tree for example. A tree is different from an ordinary annual, which remains at the merely herbaccous stage. A tree surrounds itself with rind and bark, etc. What is the essence of the tree, by contrast to the annual? Let us compare such a tree with a little mound of earth which has been cast up, and which—we will assume—is very rich in humus, containing an unusual amount of vegetable matter more or less in process of decomposition, and perhaps of animal decomposition-products too.(Diagram 7).
Let us assume: this is the hillock of earth, rich in humus. And I will now make a hollow in it, like a crater. And let this (in the second drawing) be the tree: outside, the more or less solid parts, while inside is growing what leads eventually to the formation of the tree as a whole. It may seem strange to you that I put these two things side by side. But they are more nearly related than you would think.
In effect, earthly matter—permeated, as I have now described it, by humus-substances in process of decomposition—such earthly matter contains etherically living substance. Now this is the important point: Earthly matter, which by its special constitution reveals the presence in it of etherically living substance, is always on the way to become plant-integument. It only does not go far enough in the process to become such plant-integument as is drawn up, for instance, into the rind or bark of a tree.
You may conceive it thus (although in Nature it does not go so far): Imagine this hillock of earth being formed, with a hollow in the middle—a mound of earth, with humus entering into it, working in the earthly soil with the characteristic properties which proceed from the ethereal and living element. It does not happen so in Nature, but instead of it, the “mound of earth”—transmuted into a higher form of evolution—is gathered up around the plant so as to enclose it.
In effect, whenever in any given locality you have a general level or niveau, separating what is above the earth from the interior, all that is raised above this normal level of the district will show a special tendency to life—a tendency to permeate itself with ethereal vitality. Hence you will find it easier to permeate ordinary inorganic mineral earth with fruitful humus-substance, or with any waste product in process of decomposition—you will find it easier to do this efficiently if you erect mounds of earth, and permeate these with the said substance. For then the earthly material itself will tend to become inwardly alive—akin to the plant-nature. Now the same process takes place in the forming of the tree. The earth itself is “hollowed upward” to surround the plant with its ethereal and living properties. Why so?
I am telling you all this to awaken in you an idea of the really intimate kinship between that which is contained within the contours of the plant and that which constitutes the soil around it. It is simply untrue that the life ceases with the contours—with the outer periphery of the plant. The actual life is continued, especially from the roots of the plant, into the surrounding soil. For many plants there is absolutely no hard and fast line between the life within the plant and the life of the surrounding soil in which it is living.
To manure the earth is to make it alive, so that the plant may not be brought into a dead earth and find it difficult, out of its own vitality, to achieve all that is necessary up to the fruiting process. The plant will more easily achieve what is necessary for the fruiting process, if it is immersed from the outset in an element of life. Fundamentally, all plant-growth has this slightly parasitic quality. It grows like a parasite out of the living earth. And it must be so.
We must know how to gain a kind of personal relationship to all things that concern our farming work, and above all—though it may be a hard saying—a personal relationship to the manure, especially to the task of working with the manure. It may seem an unpleasant task, but without this personal relation it is impossible. Why so? You will see it at once if you can go into the question: What is the essence of any living thing? A living thing always has an outer and an inner side. The “inner” is inside some kind of skin, the “outer” is outside the skin.
Consider now the inner side. It not only has streams of forces going outward in the direction of these arrows (Diagram 8); the inner life of an organic entity also includes currents of forces going inward from the skin—currents of forces that are pressed back. Moreover, outside it the organic entity is surrounded by manifold streams of forces.
Now there is something that expresses quite exactly—yet in a kind of personal way—how the organic entity establishes the right relationship between its inner and its outer side. All that goes on by way of forces and activities within it, stimulating and maintaining life within the organism—all that is inside the contours of the skin—all this (I beg you once more to forgive the hard saying) must smell inwardly, nay we might even say it must inwardly stink.
So we might say: an organic body is the healthier, the more it smells inwardly and the less outwardly. Towards the outer world, the organism—notably the plant-organism—is predestined not to give off smell, but on the contrary to absorb it.
Perceive the helpful effect of a fragrant aromatic meadow, full of plants with aromatic scent! Then you become aware of the marvelous mutual aid prevailing in all life. The aromatic property which here expands and which is different from the mere aroma of life—it spreads its scent abroad for reasons which we may yet be able to describe, and it is this which works from without upon the plants.
Manuring and everything of the kind consists essentially in this, that a certain degree of livingness must be communicated to the soil, and yet not only livingness. For the possibility must also be given to bring about in the soil what I indicated yesterday, namely to enable the nitrogen to spread out in the soil in such a way that with its help the life is carried along certain fines of forces, as I showed you. That is to say: in manuring we must bring to the earth-kingdom enough nitrogen to carry the living property to those structures in the earth-kingdom to which it must be carried—under the plant, where the plant-soil has to be. This is our task, and we must fulfil it in a scientific way.
If you use mineral, purely mineral substances as manure, you will never get at the real earthy element; you will penetrate at most to the watery element of the earth. With mineral manures you can influence the watery content of the earth, but you do not penetrate sufficiently to bring to life the earth-element itself. Plants, therefore, which stand under the influence of mineral manures will have a kind of growth which betrays the fact that it is supported only by a quickened watery substance, not by a quickened earthy substance.
We can best approach these matters by turning, to begin with, to the most unassuming kind of manure. I mean the compost, which is sometimes even despised. In compost we have a means of kindling the life within the earth itself. We include in compost any kind of refuse to which little value is attached; refuse of farm and garden, from grass that we have let decay, to that which comes from fallen leaves or the like, nay, even from dead animals ... These things should not by any means be despised, for they preserve something not only of the ethereal but even of the astral. And that is most important. From all that has been added to it, the compost heap really contains ethereal and living elements and also astral. Living ethereal and astral elements are contained in it—though not so intensely as in manure or in liquid manure, yet in a more stable form. The ethereal and astral settle down more firmly in the compost; especially the astral.
For instance, if we just leave the pile of compost as I described it hitherto, it may easily come about that it will scatter its astral content on all sides. The point will be for us to develop the necessary personal relationship to these things. We must try to bring the compost-heap into such a condition that it smells as little as possible. This we can easily attain, to begin with, by piling it up in thin layers, covering it layer by layer with something else, for instance granulated peat, and then another layer and so on. That which would otherwise evaporate and scatter its scent abroad, is thereby held together. The nitrogen, in fast, is that which strongly tends to seek the wide expanse—in manifold forms and compounds. Now it is held together.
What I chiefly wish to indicate is that we must treat the whole agricultural life with the conviction that we need to pour vitality, nay even astrality, in all directions, so as to make it work as a totality.
Taking our start from this, another thing will result. Have you ever thought why cows have horns, or why certain animals have antlers? It is a most important question, and what ordinary science tells us of it, is as a rule one-sided and superficial. Let us then try to answer the question, why do cows have horns? I said just now that an organic or living entity need not only have streams of forces pouring outward: it can also have streams of forces pouring inward. Now imagine such an organic entity—of a lumpy and massive shape. It would have streams of forces going outward and streams of forces going inward. It would be very irregular; a lumpy organism—an ungainly creature. We should have strange-looking cows if this were all. They would be lumpy, with tiny appendages for feet, as indeed they are in the early embryonic stages. They would remain so; they would look quite grotesque.
But the cow is not like that. The cow has proper horns and hoofs. What happens at the places where the horns grow and the hoofs? A locality is formed which sends the currents inward with more than usual intensity. In this locality the outer is strongly shut off; there is no communication through a permeable skin or hair. The openings which otherwise allow the currents to pass outward are completely closed. For this reason the horn-formation is connected with the entire shaping of the animal. The forming of horns and hoofs is connected with the whole shape and form of the creature.
With the forming of antlers it is altogether different. Here the point is, not that the streams are carried back into the organism, but on the contrary, that certain streams are carried a certain way outward. There are valves, so to speak, whereby certain streams and currents are discharged outwardly. Such streams need not always be liquid or aeriform; they may also be currents of forces, localised in the antlers. The stag is beautiful because it has an intense communication with the surrounding world, inasmuch as it sends certain of its currents outward, and lives with its environment, thereby receiving all that works organically in the nerves and senses. So it becomes a quick and nervous animal. In a certain respect, all animals possessing antlers are filled with a gentle nervousness and quickness. We see it in their eyes.
The cow has horns in order to send into itself the astral-ethereal formative powers, which, pressing inward, are meant to penetrate right into the digestive organism. Precisely through the radiation that proceeds from horns and hoofs, much work arises in the digestive organism itself. Anyone who wishes to understand foot-and-mouth disease—that is, the reaction of the periphery on the digestive tract—must clearly perceive this relationship. Our remedy for foot-and-mouth disease is founded on this perception.
Thus in the horn you have something well adapted by its inherent nature, to ray back the living and astral properties into the inner life. In the horn you have something radiating life—nay, even radiating astrality. It is so indeed: if you could crawl about inside the living body of a cow—if you were there inside the belly of the cow you—would smell how the astral life and the living vitality pours inward from the horns. And so it is also with the hoofs.What is farm-yard-manure? It is what entered as outer food into the animal, and was received and assimilated by the organism up to a certain point. It gave occasion for the development of dynamic forces and influences in the organism, but it was not primarily used to enrich the organism with material substance. On the contrary, it was excreted. Nevertheless, it has been inside the organism and has thus been permeated with an astral and ethereal content. In the astral it has been permeated with the nitrogen-carrying forces, and in the ethereal with oxygen-carrying forces. The mass that emerges as dung is permeated with all this.
Imagine now: we take this mass and give it over to the earth, in one form or another (we shall go into the details presently). What we are actually doing is to give the earth something ethereal and astral which has its existence by rights, inside the belly of the animal and there engenders forces of a plant-like nature. For the forces we engender in our digestive tract are of a plant-like nature. We ought to be very thankful that the dung remains over at all; for it carries astral and ethereal contents from the interior of the organs, out into the open. The astral and ethereal adheres to it. We only have to preserve it and use it in the proper way.
In the dung, therefore, we have before us something ethereal and astral. For this reason it has a life-giving and also astralising influence upon the soil, and, what is more, in the earth-element itself; not only in the watery; but notably in the earthy element. It has the force to overcome what is inorganic in the earthy element.
What we thus give over to the earth must of course have lost its original form, i.e., the form it had before it was consumed as food. For it has passed through an organic process in the animal's digestive, metabolic system. In some sense it will be in process of dissolution and disintegration. But it is best of all if it is just at the point of dissolution by virtue of its own inherent ethereal and astral forces. Then come the little parasites—the minutest of living creatures—and find in it a good nutritive soil. These parasitic creatures are therefore generally supposed to have something to do with the goodness of the manure. In reality they are only indicators of the fact that the manure itself is in such and such a condition. As indicators of this they may well be of great importance; but we are under an illusion if we suppose that the manure can be fundamentally improved by inoculation with bacteria or the like. It may be so to outer appearance, but it is not so in reality. (I shall go into the matter at a later stage. Meanwhile, let us proceed).
We take manure, such as we have available. We stuff it into the horn of a cow, and bury the horn a certain depth into the earth—say about 18 in. to 2 ft. 6 in., provided the soil below is not too clayey or too sandy. (We can choose a good soil for the purpose. It should not be too sandy). You see, by burying the horn with its filling of manure, we preserve in the horn the forces it was accustomed to exert within the cow itself, namely the property of raying back whatever is life-giving and astral. Through the fact that it is outwardly surrounded by the earth, all the radiations that tend to etherealise and astralise are poured into the inner hollow of the horn. And the manure inside the horn is inwardly quickened with these forces, which thus gather up and attract from the surrounding earth all that is ethereal and life-giving.
And so, throughout the winter—in the season when the Earth is most alive—the entire content of the horn becomes inwardly alive. For the Earth is most inwardly alive in winter-time. All that is living is stored up in this manure. Thus in the content of the horn we get a highly concentrated, life-giving manuring force. Thereafter we can dig out the horn. We take out the manure it contains.
During our recent tests (in Dornach), as our friends discovered for themselves, when we took out the manure it no longer smelt at all. This was a very striking fast. It had no longer any smell, though naturally it began to smell a little when treated once more with water. This shows that all the odoriferous principles are concentrated and assimilated in it. Indeed it contains an immense ethereal and astral force; and of this you can now make use. When it has spent the winter in the earth, you take the stuff out of the horn and dilute it with ordinary water—only the water should perhaps be slightly warmed.
To give an impression of the quantitative aspect: I always found, having first looked at the area to be manured, that a surface, say, about as big as the patch from the third window here to the first foot-path, about 1,200 square metres (between a quarter- and third-acre) is adequately provided for if we use one hornful of this manure, diluted with about half a pailful of water. You must, however, thoroughly combine the entire content of the horn with the water. That is to say, you must set to work and stir. Stir quickly, at the very edge of the pail, so that a crater is formed reaching very nearly to the bottom of the pail, and the entire contents are rapidly rotating. Then quickly reverse the direction, so that it now seethes round in the opposite direction.
Do this for an hour and you will get a thorough penetration. Think, how little work it involves. The burden of work will really not be very great. Moreover, I can well image that—at any rate in the early stages—the otherwise idle members of a farming household will take pleasure in stirring the manure in this way. Get the sons and daughters of the house to do it and it will no doubt be wonderfully done.
It is a very pleasant feeling to discover how there arises after all, from what was altogether scentless to begin with, a rather delicately sustained aroma. This personal relationship to the matter (and you can well develop it) is extraordinarily beneficial—at any rate for one who likes to see Nature as a whole and not only as in the Baedeker guide-books.
Our next task will be to spray it over the tilled land so as to unite it with the earthly realm. For small surfaces you can do it with an ordinary syringe; it goes without saying, for larger surfaces you will have to devise special machines. But if you once resolve to combine your ordinary manuring with this kind of “spiritual manure,” if I may call it so, you will soon see how great a fertility can result from such measures. Above all, you will see how well they lend themselves to further development. For the method I have just described can be followed up at once by another, namely the following.
Once more you take the horns of cows. This time, however, you fill them not with manure but with quartz or silica or even orthorclase or feldspar, ground to a fine mealy powder, of which you make a mush, say of the consistency of a very thin dough. With this you fill the horn. And now, instead of letting it “hibernate,” you let the horn spend the summer in the earth and in the late autumn dig it out and keep its contents till the following spring.
So you dig out what has been exposed to the summery life within the earth, and now you treat it in a similar way. Only in this case you need far smaller quantities. You can take a fragment the size of a pea, or maybe only the size of a pin's head, and distribute it by stirring it up well in a bucket of water. Here again, you will have to stir it for an hour, and you can now use it to sprinkle the plants externally. It will prove most beneficial with vegetables and the like.
I do not mean that you should water them with it in a crude way; you spray the plants with it, and you will presently see how well this supplements the influence which is coming from the other side, out of the earth itself, by virtue of the cow-horn manure. And now, suppose you extend this treatment to the fields on a large scale. After all, there is no great difficulty in doing so. Why should it not be possible to make machines, able to extend over whole fields the slight sprinkling that is required? If you do this, you will soon see how the dung from the cow-horn drives from below upward, while the other draws from above—neither too feebly, nor too intensely. It will have a wonderful effect, notably in the case of cereals.
These things are derived from a larger sphere—not from what you do just at the moment with the single Thing in hand, as though you would build up the entire human being theoretically from a single finger. No doubt, by such methods too, something is attained, which I by no means wish to under-estimate. Yet with all their investigations nowadays, people are trying to discover, as they put it, what is likely to be most productive for the farmer, and in the last resort it only amounts to this: they try to find how the production may be made financially most profitable. It really amounts to little more than that. The farmer may not always think of it; but unconsciously this is the underlying thought. He is astonished when by some measure he gets great results for the moment—say he gets big potatoes; or anything else that swells and has a comely size. But he does not pursue the investigation far enough beyond this point.
In effect, this is not at all the most important point. The important thing is, when these products get to man, that they should be beneficial for his life. You may cultivate some fruit of field or orchard in its appearance absolutely splendid, and yet, when it comes to man it may only fill his stomach without organically furthering his inner life. But the science of to-day is incapable of following the matter up to the point of finding how man shall get the best kind of nourishment for his own organism. It simply does not find the way to this.
How different it is in all that is here said out of Spiritual Science Underlying it, as you have seen, is the entire household of Nature. It is always conceived out of the whole. Therefore each individual measure is truly applicable to the whole, and so it should be. If you pursue agriculture in this way, the result can be no other than to provide the very best for man and beast. Nay more, as everywhere in Spiritual Science, here too we take our start above all from man himself. Man is the foundation of all these researches, and the practical hints we give will all result from this. The end in view is the best possible sustenance of human nature. This form of study and research is very different from what is customary nowadays.
