Quartz

What is quartz in biodynamics?

Quartz is the mineral starting material of horn silica (preparation 501). Chemically, quartz is silicon dioxide (SiO₂), the most common chemical compound in the Earth's crust. In its pure form quartz lets light pass through unhindered, is hard and does not dissolve in water. Rock crystal is the clear, well-crystallised, transparent form of quartz. In biodynamic practice, quartz is ground as fine as flour, stirred with rainwater into a paste, filled into a cow horn and buried in the soil over the summer.

In biodynamics, silica stands for the element of light: the opposite pole to soil-bound lime and to earth-bound horn manure 500. Fine grinding creates a very large surface that interacts with light; in the biodynamic understanding, this is what quartz's role as the carrier of light and ripening processes rests on.

Silica in nature, plants and living beings

Although quartz is hard and insoluble, silica is found wherever light processes play a part. In the plant world it shows in the high silica content of grasses and especially of horsetail, and in the silica-containing parachutes of dandelion seeds. In animal and human bodies it occurs in skin, eyes and nerves, precisely in the sense organs that face the light. In the soil, silica is found as a structural substance (grains of sand), in clay as aluminium silicate, and in colloidal form, in which plants can take it up; it is even present, finely dispersed, in the atmosphere.

Steiner linked silica with the ability to take up and pass on light; as a component of the sense organs, he said, it points to its relationship with light. This observation is the thinking behind making the "light preparation" horn silica from quartz: stirred in water for an hour and sprayed onto the plant, it is meant to pass on the light effects transformed by the summer processes in the soil, and to support and order the plant's metabolism.

Preparing it for the preparation

For horn silica, starting material that is over 98 percent silica is used: rock crystal, quartzite, agate, flint or potassium feldspar (orthoclase). The material is broken up roughly, ground in a mortar and worked over a sieve and a glass plate until it is as fine as flour; the finer it is, the larger the effective surface. In the Agriculture Course, Steiner spoke of "quartz or silica, or orthoclase, feldspar, ground to a flour". Shortly after Easter, the flour is stirred with rainwater into a paste that is just still runny, filled into the cow horn, buried between Easter and Whitsun and exposed to the forces of the sun over the summer; it is dug up again between the end of September and the beginning of October. Details are in the entry horn silica 501.

Context

For a serious account, one point matters: popular texts sometimes describe quartz as a "store of information", "vibrations" or "energies". This is borrowed from esotericism, and it confuses the preparation with the technical quartz crystals in clocks, optical instruments and information technology, where quartz crystals really are used for precise oscillations. This "information store" idea does not apply to the biodynamic preparation and is expressly not claimed here. The biodynamic interpretation is limited to silica as the carrier of the element of light; that is a concept of Steiner's, not a physical mechanism. What is factually correct and undisputed is only that quartz is transparent, hard, chemically very stable and one of the most common minerals in the Earth's crust.