Anthroposophy

What is anthroposophy?

Anthroposophy is a worldview founded by Rudolf Steiner around the turn of the 20th century, which Steiner himself called "spiritual science". Its basic idea: the spiritual and the material world belong together, and through trained inner perception people can gain knowledge of the spiritual side of reality. Several practical movements grew out of this worldview: Waldorf education, anthroposophic medicine, certain forms of art and architecture, and biodynamic agriculture.

For biodynamics, anthroposophy is the intellectual background against which the terms of the method make sense in the first place.

Anthroposophy and biodynamics

The Agriculture Course of 1924 applies anthroposophical ideas to agriculture. This explains why the biodynamic method contains elements that go beyond what natural science can explain. Terms such as "cosmic forces", "formative forces", the "etheric" and the "astral", or the particular role of certain organs and substances in the preparations, come from this framework. When Steiner describes the cow horn as an organ that "radiates back" forces, or manure as the bearer of an "ego disposition", these are anthroposophical concepts, not chemical or biological statements.

In this picture, the preparations as a whole are "material carriers of spiritual forces": substances through which ordering, living forces are meant to act in soil and plant. This is the inner logic that sets the biodynamic method apart from a purely material approach to farming.

Context

One distinction matters, and many practitioners make it themselves: you can farm biodynamically and value the method for its results (soil fertility, the farm cycle, product quality) without adopting anthroposophy as a whole.