Plant between Animal and Mineral Natures – Blossom and Root
The plant not only stands between the polarity of gravity and light, but due to the delicate astral atmosphere hovering around the blossom, a tendency toward animalisation and expansive dispersive Sulphur processes at the flowering pole, and contractive mineralising Salt processes at the root pole, with rhythmical mediating Mercury processes in the middle realm of the leaf. Lecture seven of the Agriculture Course mentions the tree’s tendency to release the etheric at the root pole, that is to become less living and more mineral, and to condense astrality at the flower pole.
In lectures given in 1923, Rudolf Steiner described how the druids experienced the forces at work outwardly in the destructive processes of fire and ice as the same forces working beneficially within the gentle combustion processes of the blossom and the form crystallising forces of the root of the plant. By applying the outer nature forces to the appropriate plant substances healing remedies could be made. Perhaps now with this picture of the plant between animal and mineral natures, we can begin to see what a complex process of creating balanced healing medicines the biodynamic preparations are.
With 500 we place the volatile, florid, fertile, expansive manure, as the astralised product of an animal metabolic process (Sulp) into the cold, condensing, crystallising, forming winter earth (Sal), while with 501, the formed solid mineral substance of silica (Sal) is pulverised, “scattered”, de-formed and placed into the inwardly active warmth of the metabolic summer earth (Sulp). The condensed fertile metabolic product of an animal is sprayed onto the soil and sense-root pole of the plant, while the dematerialised “warmed” mineral silica substance, originally related to the senses, is sprayed into the air, warmth and on the metabolic-blossom pole of the plant. This is a complex balancing of condensing Salt and dispersing Sulpur principles.