Biodynamics: Another Trojan Horse

Many “alternative” medical treatments and related systems of belief are trojan horses. What I mean by this is that many people use/follow these systems because they are not aware of what the system is actually saying but instead have a popular misconception that makes the belief seem much more mild.

Two examples quickly come to mind. A lot of people think homeopathy is something like herbal medicine, where products are extracted from plants and other “natural” sources. I certainly assumed this many years ago. They don’t realise that it’s water that is thought to retain the “memory” of the ingredients it diluted. Similarly, I used to think chiropractors perform physical manipulation of the spine for physical relief just like a physio might. While this is true for many (or even most?) chiropractors, people don’t realise that at the extreme this is a medical system that aims to cure pretty much all disease through spinal manipulation and vitalism.

Of course it doesn’t necessarily mean that the proponents of these treatments have deliberately misled the public about the principles behind the treatment. This may be true in some instances but it can also be the result of the public simply not realising. It even makes sense for ridiculous claims like the law of infinitisemals — most people when faced with a treatment wouldn’t even think that it could possibly be based on something so ludicrous so they assume it must be something more plausible like herbal medicine.

Biodynamics is a third candidate for this. I used to think biodynamic food was something similar to organic food: something about “natural” growing conditions, eschewing chemicals and so on. Unfortunately it’s pure pseudoscience and vitalism. Biodynamics was invented by Rudolf Steiner, the guy behind Steiner Education which I’ll post about next week. To start with, let’s look at the home page of Biodynamics.net.au:

Biodynamics is a regenerative agriculture, holistic in approach and practice, through which the farmer and gardener bring the substances and forces of nature into a quality and sustainable production.

Biodynamics – Tools for making organics easier:

• Let increased soil biology work for you
• Strengthens plants and animals against stress
• Optimise growth cycles using lunar and cosmic rhythms

Yes, part of biodynamics includes useful ideas like crop rotation, soil replenishment and the like. (Of course I don’t know if the specific flavour of, say, crop rotation promoted in biodynamics is any good either.) But talk of cosmic rhythms does raise my alarms to full capacity. Digging deeper, it’s not much different to homeopathy for the soil. A key principle of biodynamics is eight fertiliser assistants used to strengthen the “life-force” of the farm. Here are three of them from the horse’s mouth, rescued by Wayback Machine:

500: (horn-manure) a humus mixture prepared by stuffing cow manure into the horn of a cow and buried into the ground (40-60 cm below the surface) in the autumn and left to decompose during the winter.
502: Yarrow blossoms (Achillea millefolium) are stuffed into urinary bladders from Cervus elaphus, Red Deers, placed in the sun during summer, buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring.
503: Chamomile blossoms (Chamomilla officinalis) are stuffed into small intestines from cattle buried in humus-rich earth in the autumn and retrieved in the spring.

A biodynamic farm is run according to moon cycles, astrological charts and so on. It is unfortunately quite popular in the wine industry. The graphic at the top of this post is an astrological chart for biodynamic agriculture.

Because you see, it’s just so typical of Western reductionism to only be concerned with the physical aspect of agriculture! But that only misses the most important part, that the fruits of our labour be endowed with spiritual energy. If we just consume dead matter without the spiritual content we’ll lose sight of Who We Really Are. It’s because we’ve hubristically allowed ourselves to lose track of our place in the Cosmos that the calamities of the modern age are upon us. All right, I think that enough for one day, before I make myself nauseous let alone you, dear reader!

More details on biodynamics can be found on Respectful Insolence and Skeptoid.