Unforgetting Natural Wisdom

“They want medicine from overseas, though better medicine grows in the garden right in front of their homes.” — Paracelsus¹

“I have always considered what the peasants and farmers thought about their things far wiser than what the scientists were thinking.” — Rudolf Steiner²

Over the last centuries, European culture and indigenous culture have suffered acute alienation from their direct traditions with nature: one culture assaulted from within and the other from without. Biodynamics itself only finally emerged in the early twentieth century as a new post-industrial mode of farming that re-engages the forgotten wisdom common to all indigenous traditions in a new way. What biodynamics still offers today is a living example of a creative reintegration with Mother Earth. To embody this kind of “dynamic” agriculture fully, it is imperative that we extend our understanding to the marginalized streams of living indigenous wisdom. We can no longer afford to neglect our common spiritual heritage nor the vital properties of indigenous medicinal plants.

The Greek philosopher Plato tells a story about the reincarnating unborn souls and their deliberate passage across the plain of lethe (“forgetfulness”) where they must drink from a river to forget their decision. This great river separates the world of the living from the wanderings of the dead. Pilgrims who drink too much lose their wisdom and are plunged into a life where they are estranged from their purpose and do not remember to focus on what is good, beautiful, and true:

“All the souls had now chosen their lives…. they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things.”³

Where the Greek word lethe itself can be translated as “forgetfulness” or “concealment,” the word for “truth” in Greek is aletheia, which might be translated as a kind of “un-forgetting.” This impulse towards truth as a mode of unconcealing what has been forgotten grows at the heart of The Spiritual Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture. Steiner sought to renew what had been lost, but not in a reactionary way. Anytime we try to “return” to a gilded “golden age,” we find fascism rearing its sinister head. Rudolf Steiner helped birth a new way of engaging a lost kind of nature wisdom, which came to be known as biodynamics.

The theme of recovering peasant wisdom had long been of interest to the man. In fact, one of Steiner’s greatest regrets is that he did not compile the peasant wisdom of indigenous natural practices when he had the opportunity in his youth. When he finally turned his attention to the subject again later in his life, that wisdom stream in Europe had run dry. Regretfully, he conceded, “it is no longer possible to write a peasant’s philosophy. These things have been almost entirely lost.”⁴ If this wisdom was gone nearly one hundred years ago, how much more has been lost in the interim?

Despite countless peoples across the world that have suffered cultural oppression, erasure, and displacement, living traditions still persist. We cannot even remember the unnamed peoples who suffered total annihilation. There is no one to tell their vanished stories at all. Their relationship with Mother Earth and their knowledge of her medicinal plants are lost. Now we are modern. Now we are “enlightened.” The general standard of living is supposedly increasing, but Mother Earth is dying. Capitalism is praised for helping improve conditions of even the poorest, but what will that matter if our common home is destroyed? It’s like we are celebrating new furniture and upholstery while the house is on fire. Many people like to say that the planet would be better off without human beings. I would counter with this: Mother Earth has not lost control, and we are part of her solution. Yes, we have been uniquely destructive, but even “conservation tillage” was only invented after we created the Dust Bowl. We can learn from our mistakes—we need to. Soils with less than 2% organic matter tend to turn into deserts when abandoned. If humanity were simply to “release” their stewardship of the soil, much on Earth would perish. Simply abandoning her now by retreating to urban centers grossly underestimates the positive effect free creative humanity can have—and underestimates the danger of the mystic temptation to refuse to participate as part of Nature. We are not separate from Nature, even as we injure her. Her wounds are our own wounds.

In many places, when the white man arrived with his technologies and culture, his effect pierced the very consciousness of shamans: some even began reporting the loss of meaningful dreams with the arrival of this new discordant culture. Indigenous peoples experienced catastrophically what European culture had already inflicted incrementally on themselves. By the time of colonization, European culture had become so atomized and materialistic that each person had become his own sovereign nation without elders or community. Even Rudolf Steiner’s own emphasis on “individualism” grows out of this time. But he issued a warning that there is a limit: “our epoch will come to an end . . . . through a mighty increase of egoism in human nature, and, on account of this, through the war of all against all.”⁵ Some might suggest that we have already reached this point in terms of militarism and global war, but also more covertly as the constant feud of each against every other on social media—likes versus likes. The most vicious disagreements don’t tend to arise between movements but within them; one is reminded of what Freud called the “narcissism of petty differences.” When Steiner initiated the Koberwitz impulse, the industrial technocrats of that time were calling for “agricultural armies” and their coal-induced delusions to bulldoze the world have not let up since then.⁶ And while it takes a people estranged from Mother Earth to oppress systematically their own brothers and sisters, if we can reconnect with Mother Earth, we can also reconnect with each other. European estrangement from nature grew as a gradual process of individuation; participating directly in severing humanity from its spiritual roots in nature, submerging culture in the waters of forgetfulness. According to Steiner, “Alcohol only arose . . . . to help men to become individualized. It closes man off from his higher capacities and encloses him in himself. But now all civilized people have reached that stage so that alcohol is an unnecessary evil today. Through its use, one loses the ability to get along with others and to understand them.”⁷ Where alcohol was newly introduced to any indigenous people formerly free from its influence, that precipitated an even more violent attack on their cultures. A rift emerged between those who still remembered the old ways and others who already had been colonized by forgetfulness.

You can see cultural callousness in microcosm when you drink alcohol:
you quickly become more reactive, emotive, and your “higher” functions of being able to see the context of the whole are quickly jettisoned. Alcohol literally “hardens the heart” spiritually and physically contributes directly to arteriosclerosis.⁸ Matter is never in any case without spirit. Esoteric interpretations of phenomena must always conform to our shared reality or they have no claim to truth. Whether or not we want to admit it, alcohol played a key role in disintegrating Europe’s spiritual culture and propelling its subsequent violence towards indigenous traditions. As Steiner puts it, “the first effect of alcohol is directed against man’s reason — indeed, on his whole life of soul.”⁹ This claim is hardly controversial these days if we adjust the lens through which we read it, specifically, if we remember that the first effects of alcohol include weakening inhibition, whilst strengthening reactivity. Alcohol’s sustained habitual and non-sacramental use is an assault against the life of spirit itself and decimates cultural traditions by isolating individuals from their feeling for their brothers and sisters. It is no surprise that this heartlessness increases with the degree of our estrangement from Mother Earth: “By harming the offspring, all the descendants are thus harmed.”¹⁰ While the physiological harm borne by children is clear enough even to materialistic science, the spiritual effects are more subtle. Alcohol’s corruption of culture is neither isolated nor merely individual—it is diffuse and generational. Even if we feel something is a “victimless” crime, we are, in fact, inflicting damage upon our descendants, to the third and fourth generations. Just as wisdom can be imparted from generation to generation, so too can its opposite—folly—transmit suffering from one to the next.

Most indigenous traditions believe in reincarnation in some form or another. But advocating such an idea was forbidden by the Church, which suppressed every idea hinting at existence before birth. Steiner himself points out that modern materialists who think they are very clever for neither believing in existence before nor after death are really just perpetuating what the Church planted in them: the idea that there was no life before conception. The experience of reincarnation itself can be deduced merely from close observation of nature. One spring day you pass by a meadow of wildflowers and your breath is stolen by its fresh color and romantic scent. By summer, the flowers have vanished and you might forget about it altogether. But when spring arrives once more, the meadow surprises you again with her blossoms and you recognize her even though not a single flower—perhaps not even a single plant—is the same. This pattern extends far beyond your little meadow and includes you and me.

The way our culture has forgotten reincarnation is a lot like an individual getting drunk, doing a lot of reckless things, and then passing out. After getting drunk one night, you wake up the next morning remembering nothing of the prior evening. Some of your friends may be angry at you. But regardless of whether you remember what you did the previous day, you still have to live with the consequences of your actions. Karma is no more radical than waking up from sleep—itself a little death— and facing the consequences of yesterday regardless of whether you remember what you did before you went to sleep. “The knowledge of reincarnation, therefore, was to be lost for two thousand years and wine was the means to this end.”¹¹ Combined with more obvious oppressions, the foreign introduction of alcohol to indigenous peoples—and later even worse drugs deliberately targeting thriving communities of color — helped precipitate the cataclysmic collapse of healthy spiritual traditions.

Instinctual clairvoyance, which Steiner refers to as “atavistic” when it lingers in our modern era, is an ancient mode of perceiving the world directly, but most of that stream has dried up under the omnipresent influence of technology reshaping our consciousness. By this point in human development, virtually every single one of us — indigenous or not — is suffering to some degree from what can only be called the Great Forgetting. As E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, says, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”¹² It may feel like we are in an abundant “information age” but we are polluted by constant irrelevant noise that has no relationship to what is good, beautiful, or true. The “information age” is really what I personally would call a digital dark age where even quality books and films aren’t making the shift, where entire libraries and cultures are being forgotten, and people fall into the whirlpool of perpetual agitation disguised as “social media.”

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

— T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock

Where are our inherited rites of passage? Where are our community rituals? Where is inherited living nature wisdom? When all we have now is scientific data, spirituality must grow out of that: and thus “spiritual science” arises from the ashes of the old mode of clairvoyant observation and seeks hidden patterns in lifeforms through ongoing disciplined research.

Steiner himself seems to have exhibited strong symptoms of this very “instinctual” clairvoyance which in his opinion belonged to another era. It even seems that he undertook methods to “cure” himself of it so he could focus on ushering in a new kind of clairvoyance suited to the scientific prejudices of the modern era:

“Steiner himself as a child brought with him into the world a vestigial relic of the old clairvoyance, the old ‘original’ participation. Biographies and his own autobiography bear witness to it. And it is credibly reported of him that he took deliberate steps to eliminate it, not even rejecting the help of alcohol, in order to clear the decks for the new clairvoyance it was his destiny both to predict and to develop.”¹³

When Europeans forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands, they found that their old songs did not work the same ways anymore because they were rituals and relationships with specific beings in unique locations. As scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Immigrants came to these shores bearing a legacy of languages, all to be cherished. But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.”¹⁴ If I myself am transplanted, I cannot easily strike up a conversation with a stranger as if we are old friends. A new personal relationship would have to be cultivated and created.

The old ways were the fruit of direct perception of the forces at work in nature. This was not exactly a “scientific” kind of seeing but was centered on a kind of direct phenomenology: unbiased observation of plant forms. This old mode of seeing was “naive” but not in a negative sense; rather it was innocent of scientific obsessions trying to systematize a world much more complex than we can even imagine. Instinctual clairvoyance dealt directly with phenomena and named them as they appeared. Because this could all be perceived directly, there was almost no reason to write down the old ways.

The old ways were passed down as oral traditions, being to being, and always as a personal relationship. When I write a letter to someone, it is precisely because there is distance between us. Plato himself wrote that when a conversation is written down, it undergoes a kind of death. There is no need to write a dissertation on plant medicine when you live in a personal relationship with the plants themselves. A shaman would show his apprentice the plants themselves, like introducing an old friend. You wouldn’t introduce your mother to someone by giving them a book to read on motherhood!

What makes biodynamics unique is not that it works conscientiously with life forces and deliberately cultivates a sacred space for spirit to manifest in nature. No, this has been done countless times before biodynamics. The greatest difference between earlier nature wisdom and the Koberwitz impulse is that biodynamics arose as a fruit of the Great Forgetting. In this sense, biodynamics itself is the product of erasure, alienation, and a deliberate creative individual impulse to reconnect with Mother Earth. Biodynamics holds the door open to all displaced indigenous cultures. If we cannot “return” to forgotten old ways, we can still create new ways and incorporate whatever threads of ancient wisdom we have retained so that they are reborn as part of a new living tapestry.

The favorite herbs of indigenous peoples are not just herbs for healing human beings. The conditions that I might suffer from in another climate are the same conditions the soil will experience. People talk about wine expressing the distinct character of a place (terroir). Medicinal herbs express terroir probably even more than wine, and more importantly because they don’t just get us intoxicated: these plants heal us. Traditional indigenous medicines growing in their own habitat are a unique expression of forces that can be used to overcome life-negative processes that result in sickness. In my consulting work, whether in person or over Skype, I remind my clients that since disease is just a displaced natural process, curing disease is about counterbalancing a process with an opposite process.¹⁵ If it is too dry in the garden, you must irrigate to counteract premature withering of your young plants. But the conditions we are working to balance will differ from region to region. This point cannot be overemphasized because the natural processes that result in illness differ from climate to climate and from place to place. Healing itself is a simple principle, but the infinite processes of nature to be counterbalanced are complex. In subtropical coastal Virginia, I personally need to use herbs that help dry my plants out because it is often excessively humid. It would be irrational to think the same plants would be ideal for both desert conditions and for subtropical conditions. Plants grow where they do for a very good reason and it is hubris to ignore local conditions. A poignant reminder for us to maintain humility is crystallized in this sentiment from American plant pathologist Frank E. Egler, who assisted Rachel Carson in writing Silent Spring: “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, ecosystems are more complex than we can think.”¹⁶ This principle applies not only to Mother Earth as a whole but also to each living farm organism.

The medicinal herbs used in biodynamics are native to every inhabited continent, which gives them a unique range of influence. Steiner could have selected herbs unique to Europe, but instead selected plants that are available to every continent. But where the plants themselves refuse to grow, it shows a kind of colorblindness when we insist farmers use medicines from afar. As Paracelsus says: “They want medicine from overseas, though better medicine grows in the garden right in front of their homes.”¹⁷ Steiner gave us the ABCs of how to read the book of nature, not a sacred scroll of recipes. When we claim that the “alphabet” Steiner delivered can only ever possibly be arranged in one specific order, it only reveals our illiteracy of the Book of Nature.

Nature always has exceptions. Therefore, if biodynamics is a living practice, it too will always have exceptions. It is imperative that we learn from indigenous wisdom so that we can make the most of working with infinitely varied conditions. An inability to recognize superior indigenous plant medicines isn’t just arrogance, it is ignorance. Steiner himself drew from known native plant medicines. He even goes so far as to say that only stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) had no existing replacement to his knowledge at the time: “Only in one case a substitute cannot be found, for it is so characteristic that the effect is not likely to be found in the same way in any other plant.”¹⁸ There are an infinite number of plant species and possible plants to be used as good medicine.

As we are all children of the Great Forgetting, biodynamics represents not the best or the only way to work conscientiously with life forces and spirit in matter. And not even the first. The claim to fame for biodynamics should be that it is a pioneer of a creative new wave of nature wisdom after our great cultural losses.¹⁹ Because Steiner himself is a child of the Great Forgetting, biodynamics stands out as an encouragement to all peoples suffering cultural destruction, erasure, and displacement because we can all initiate new living traditions in the midst of spiritual chaos. Our new relationships will not look identical to the old ways, because we are not the same people as our ancestors. Our own relationship with Mother Earth will be as unique as each individual. Biodynamics as an impulse encompasses every new nature wisdom tradition that works creatively with life forces in nature as fully conscious and creative individuals.

Our practical successes have unfolded because of the desecration and forgetting of sacred ways. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer shows how far we have come and how much we have forgotten: “Take, for instance, three elements in present-day agriculture: the plough, the draught animal and milk. All these were first used in religious ceremonies alone, and only later converted to utilitarian uses.”²⁰ Originally milk itself was a sacramental food, and cattle had sacred laws protecting them, and the plough was implemented for ritual use alone. We have forgotten the sacred meaning of the old ways and are left only with their profane uses.

Willa Cather praises the indigenous nature wisdom as one of balance: “They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.”²¹ Though I feel like I understand what she intends in this passage, it is clear that indigenous peoples were always gently improving their world, though it was never in the violent technocratic kind of “improvement” that desecrated Mother Earth. Though the grand fruitful forests of the Americas are the product of co-creative human involvement, indigenous wisdom never forgot that Mother Earth is far wiser than individual human beings and she does not need to be “upgraded.”

Thanks to the destruction of the last centuries, Mother Earth is in crisis. We have sought to “improve” the world so much that we have depleted her reserves. Is global warming Gaia undergoing a benevolent fever?

The great irony now is that we must intervene more than ever with new nature wisdom if we are ever to restore balance and justice. For this opportunity, we will need every imaginable plant and every conceivable ally.

The German physician Valentin Schindler reminds us in the sixteenth century that the greatest wisdom is not found in bastions of academic scholarship, but out in the world where people work directly with the forces of nature: “It is not so that a doctor learns everything he knows at the universities; he must, from time to time, turn to the old women, the gypsies, the practitioners of the black arts, vagrants, and to all kinds of peasants and learn from them — because they have more knowledge of such things than all the universities do.”²² It is precisely these marginalized groups who preserve nature’s innermost secrets.

Biodynamics as a living impulse is inconceivably more diverse than what we might package and label BIODYNAMICS™. It is time to recognize every indigenous medicinal plant as a potential way to guide life forces conscientiously and help heal the earth. Our ignorance of the varied properties of indigenous plants does not make them bad medicines. It only exposes how little we know about our Mother Earth. We have drunk deeply of the river of Forgetfulness and now need to rise from our lethargy and live actively in unforgetting our collective truth.

1. Sergius Golowin. Paracelsus. Munich: Goldmann, 1993, p. 125.
2. Rudolf Steiner. Agriculture Course: The Birth of the Biodynamic Method. Trans. George Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, p. 64.
3. Plato. Republic, Book X. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html
4. Steiner. Agriculture Course. op. cit., p. 84.
5. Rudolf Steiner. Universe, Earth, and Man: In their relationship to Egyptian myths and modern civilization. London: H. Collison, 1931, p. 259.
6. At the time the “Left” was dominated by technocrats who favored factory farming whereas “environmental” concerns were expressed almost largely by the “Right.”
7. Rudolf Steiner. Esoteric Lessons 1904–1909: Lectures, Notes, Meditations, and Exercises by Rudolf Steiner; Notes of Esoteric Lessons from Memory by the Participants. Trans. James Hindes. Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 2007, p. 350.
8. It’s worth noting that Owen Bar eld considered the modern Eucharist to do the opposite, using a virtually homeopathic dose of alcohol to open the heart. Modern research confirms that someone who has a mild dose of alcohol once a week is less at risk for heart disease than either an alcoholic or a teetotaler. A drink like kombucha might hypothetically serve such a role as well. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed/9596232
9. Rudolf Steiner. From Comets to Cocaine . . . Answers to Questions.London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2000, p. 180.
10. Rudolf Steiner. Nutrition and Stimulants. Eds. Katherine Castelliz and Barbara Saunders-Davies. Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association, 1991, p. 35.
11. Rudolf Steiner. An Esoteric Cosmology. Blauvelt, NY: Garber, 1987, p. 49.
12. Edward O. Wilson. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998, p. 294.
13. Owen Barfield. “Introducing Rudolf Steiner,” Towards, 2, no. 4, Fall-Winter, 1983, pp. 42–44.
14. Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013, p. 58.
15. See: Rudolf Steiner, The Healing Process; also Rudolf Steiner, Physiology and Healing.
16. Frank E. Egler. The Nature of Vegetation: Its Management and Mismanagement. Norfolk, VA: Aton Forest, 1977, p. 17.
17. Golowin. p. 125.
18. Steiner. Agriculture Course. op. cit., p. 91.
19. Owen Bareld sheds this light on anthroposophy (and therefore its offshoot, biodynamics) in his introduction to The Case for Anthroposophy: “What differentiates anthroposophy from its ‘traditional’ predecessors, both methodologically and in its content, is precisely its ‘post-revolutionary’ status. It is, if you are that way minded, the perennial philosophy; but, if so, it is that philosophy risen again, and in a form determined by its having risen again, from the psychological and spiritual eclipse of the scientific revolution.” https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA021/English/RSP1970/GA021_intro.html
20. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The Earth’s Face and Human Destiny. Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 1947, p. 127.
21. Willa Cather. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf, 1927, p. 237.
22. As quoted by Johannes Janssen, in History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. XII, p. 289.