Rudolf Steiner’s Nature Stories

Description

After 40 years of delving into Dr Steiner’s (RS) Agriculture and Medical lectures, working out what his story is, I got to wondering what it was he actually said about how a plant grows. So, I entered ‘Plant’ into the search function of the Rudolf Steiner archive, and up came a range of references, of which around 20 provided some direct story of his view of how plants grow. Some of his stories I knew but a couple I had not come across before.

All the lectures and paragraphs I found relevant are collected together, as a summary in ’The Layers of the Story’ essay, while the original study text is available at http://garudabd.org/dr-steiners-plant-story/ (if you have more references please let me know).

In the first chapter I have attempted to condense all the various bits into a cohesive story through the seasons. As is RS’s way, each reference tells a slightly different part of the story, from all the others. Our challenge is to layer these stories over each other, using the obviously common denominators, as the ‘structural’ pieces, and
merge them together to find his overall message, for how we can use nature forces to grow healthy plants, animals and humans.

The theme running through it all can be summed up in this from “The Spirit in the Realm of Plants” given in Berlin, December 8, 1910 –

“Thus we cannot picture the earth only as a physical structure, for the
physical structure is for us something like our own physical body,
which can be seen with the outer eyes and touched with the hands,
and which is observed by outer science. This is the earth body that
present-day astronomy or geology studies. Then we have to direct our
attention to what in the human being we have come to know as the
etheric body or life body. The earth also has such an etheric body, and
it also has an astral body. This is what awakens every spring as the
thoughts and feelings of the earth, which recede when winter
approaches so that the earth rests in its own ego, closed off within
itself, retaining only what it needs in order, through memory, to carry
over the preceding into the following, retaining in the plant’s seed forces
what it has conquered for itself. Just as the human being, when he falls
asleep, does not lose his thoughts and sensations but finds them again
the next morning, so the earth, awakening again from sleep in the
spring, finds the seed forces of the plants in order to permit what has
been conquered in an earlier time to emerge again from the living
memory of the seed forces.”