That Lucky ‘Ol Sun
solstice
c.1250, from O.Fr. solstice, from L. solstitium “point at which the sun seems to stand still,” from sol “sun” (see sol) + pp. stem of sistere “to come to a stop, make stand still.”
The days just before and just after the Summer Solstice are referred to as Midsummer in England - drowsy, still days where imagination runs riot, where the beautiful Titania, Queen of the Faeries, falls madly in love with the ass-headed Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where time seems to stand as still as the sun.
Solstice, equinox, declination, the sun traversing the sky and every time I hear these words (once I get past my Shakespeare fix) I think of Rudolph Steiner, the progenitor of Bio-Dynamic Agriculture. Steiner was an Austrian thinker, Goethe scholar, philosopher and occultist who was hated by the Nazi’s for his ideas on human freedom.
In 1924 Steiner gave a series of lectures in Silesia in response to concerns from farmers about soil degradation and the decline in the health of their crops and livestock. Steiner’s great understanding was to treat the farm holistically, as a single organism, and to abjure from any chemical treatments at all. It is the root of all organic farming practices.
Wine makers have been devotees of Steiner’s thinking for years, and the health of their vineyards is proof of the efficacy of these ideas. But here is where I land right back in the upside down world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the love potions that disrupt the lives of Shakespeare’s lovers. Beyond Steiner’s stout and steady advice to work in harmony with the land he also advises planting, sowing and harvesting by lunar cycles. He imagines preparations to be sprayed on the plants to enlist the help of non-physical beings in the growth of that plant. He calls out to the spiritual world for help in this world with a series of concoctions, potions & preparations all loosely based on rotting animal parts.
These preparations include filling a cow’s horn with cow manure, burying it in the autumn and recovering it in spring, then mixing it with water to spray over the fields. Another preparation takes crushed quartz and stuffs it into a cow’s horn, then buries it in spring to be used in the autumn. Steiner calls for yarrow blossoms to be stuffed into the urinary bladders of Red Deer, then left out in the summer sun and buried in the winter. He does the same with Chamomile stuffed into a cow’s small intestine, and on and on.
For pests and weeds you have to burn the skin of the pest, or the seed of the weed and scatter the ashes to make them infertile and prevent any return.
Brilliant.
Most wine makers don’t buy into the geomancy of all this, but they follow it to the letter just in case he’s right. I admire the vision that buries cow horns filled with manure to elicit a harmonic response from the spirit world to grow grapes. Steiner may have been a kook, but he was also passionate about improving the world around him and all of his work pointed in that direction. That was why Hitler, the old paper hanger himself, railed against Steiner, and the dangers his ideas posed for Germany.
It would be easy to scoff and make fun of Steiner and his odd agricultural preparations, the cow horns his talismans, but I’ll pass. His work was Protean and we eat and drink better because of it. So, when the solstice rolls around raise a glass of wine to Herr Steiner, and raise another to Puck, Titania & Bottom - wine being the best love potion of all.
Does anyone know where I can get a used cow horn cheap?