Wondering Wednesday #31
What Did Rudolf Steiner say about the Honey Bees? Part 4
This is a fourth installment of some time spent trying to unpack and interpret the lectures of Rudolf Steiner that he gave to a group of beekeepers in 1923. By the time I finish with these, it may be exactly 100 years since he gave those lectures in November and December of that year!
Through our studies so far, we’ve seen Steiner offering anti-materialistic imaginations as an alternative to thinking that everything about the behavior of honeybees (or anything in nature) can be traced solely to the “stuff” the bees are made of. Lecture 4 is another fascinating collection of topics, but here we see Steiner really pushing his listeners to stretch their anti-materialistic muscles. One has to start letting go of the side of the pool and really start swimming to keep up with him.
Steiner begins this lecture focusing a good amount of time on a doctor’s article describing honey cures she used on children in an orphanage. She speaks quite favorably about the benefits of good milk and honey, and mixtures of the two, for bolstering the health of unhealthy children and adults. This becomes a springboard for Steiner to talk about the difference between the substances that make up something like milk and honey, and the vital forces that make milk and honey so special. Wait, you may say, there is no difference! All the nutrition and benefit that comes through milk or honey has to be traced to some substance within, right? Ah, there is an example of the difference between materialism and anti-materialism.
Steiner references a Professor who did experiments on mice at the University of Basel. I think he means this person, Nikolai Lunin. Observing that mice did quite well and were healthy when they were fed milk (I assume cow’s milk), Lunin then did the following, in Steiner’s words:
So now he made the experiment in another way. He said: — milk consists of casein — i.e. cheese-substance, fat, sugar and salts. He said to himself: — the mice throve splendidly on milk; milk consists of casein, fat, sugar and salts; consequently, I shall give some mice casein, fat, sugar and salts. This is exactly what is contained in milk. And behold! when he gave the mice casein, fat, sugar and salts, they died within a few days! They got the same things, but they all died.
You see, gentlemen, the composition of the substance is not the whole matter. Those gentlemen ought to have said to themselves: something else must be in question here. But what did they say? They said: “substance is everything: substance must be everywhere where anything happens.”
Well, yes, but the substances that are there in casein, fat, sugar and salts — well, they do not make milk. So the gentlemen said, evidently there must be a new substance here, in such minute quantities that it cannot be found by chemical analysis. This substance is what people now call — vitamin. Vita means life; min is connected with “make”; therefore, vitamin “makes life.”
Wow. Reading this should give one pause. It certainly does me. Have you ever wondered what, exactly, vitamins are and where the name came from? I certainly have. Reading up a bit on the “discovery” of vitamins, what I am struck by is that all of the research was completely tied to large-scale ill health phenomena in populations eating modern food (Some of the original research was into things like scurvy and beriberi disease, coming from lack of access to normal diets while being at sea, or new food processing methods.)
Wait a minute, though. Is Steiner really saying that all the vitamin business is bunk, and that there are forces at work in whole foods such as milk and honey that can’t be quantified or identified? Well, not exactly to the first, but yes to the second. The subtle point that I think Steiner is making is this: the development of the idea of vitamins came from people working from the assumption that every observable quality of a substance like milk or honey, can be traced to a separable component of that substance. So, if you can separate milk into its constituent components, then those components are what milk is, period. Can you see the bias in this thought? It’s hard to see for materialists like us, almost lost in the background of our thinking. The sum of the parts is not, in fact, the whole.
What are we to do with this, we modern people? By now there is widespread acceptance of the need to take vitamin supplements for good health. Many governments, including our own, mandate that vitamins be added to common food items like breakfast cereals to keep people from being unhealthy. But, is this really a modern science discovery, or a band-aid for the fact that so much of the food we eat today is highly processed and leaves our bodies deficient, in need of propping up? I guess most of the world would say the former, as a number of Nobel Prizes have been given out for the isolation of the chemical structure of the base vitamins. But, here is an interesting excerpt from the Wikipedia article on vitamins (I’ve put one section in bold).
Robert W. Yoder is credited with first using the term vitamania, in 1942, to describe the appeal of relying on nutritional supplements rather than on obtaining vitamins from a varied diet of foods. The continuing preoccupation with a healthy lifestyle led to an obsessive consumption of vitamins and multi-vitamins, the beneficial effects of which are questionable. As one example, in the 1950s, the Wonder Bread company sponsored the Howdy Doody television show, with host Buffalo Bob Smith telling the audience, "Wonder Bread builds strong bodies 8 ways", referring to the number of added nutrients.
Let’s not quibble about whether vitamins are really needed, though, shall we? In fact, Steiner doesn’t. He heads into another of those entertaining digressions intended to make this very point. Steiner begins by talking about a number of practical examples in which we think we are explaining things by giving them a new name (like “vitamin”), but we haven’t explained anything at all. He concludes this way:
This is just as though one should say in economics: — where does money come from? Money comes from the money-making force. Nothing is explained in this way. Well — in economics one would at once remark that anyone saying that money comes from the money-making-force was a queer fellow! But in science people do not notice it when someone asks: — where does the life-giving property of milk come from? and then answers: — from the vitamin! That is the same as saying that poverty comes from being poor! But it is not noticed. People think they have said something wonderful, but in truth nothing at all has been said.
With the stage set to leave behind vitamin-thinking, Steiner now takes up what it is about honey that makes it so health-giving for humans. And here he begins to build a picture of quartz and silicic acid. We’ve probably all heard of and had some experience with quartz, this very plentiful hard mineral that is found all over the earth. It can take many forms, but it is crystalline (in fact, the ancient descriptions of quartz by Pliny the Elder is where we get the word “crystal” in the first place). Without getting into the depths of chemistry, silicic acid can be thought of in a simple way as “quartz dissolved in water” (The chemical name for quartz is silicon dioxide). Some searching on silicic acid on the internet shows me that this is recognized well by the big ag industry as a growth stimulating substance that you can spray on plants to get bigger stems and leaves. Very interesting. . . .sometimes I think Steiner’s ideas have been making it out into the mainstream, but no one realizes it because it’s so buried in terminological gobbledegook, and patents. Yet Steiner, for all our difficulty understanding him today, speaks quite directly:
As I have so often explained to you, the forces that are within the earth and in the universe, are also in man. The earth in her turn receives this force from the universe; man has it from the earth. Man has the same force within him which, in the earth, drives out the crystal. How is it then within him? Truly, gentlemen, the human body is full of quartz.
It’s time now for Steiner to give us another anti-materialistic imagination to counter the assumptions that “qualities of materials only come from constituent substances within those materials”. He offers this idea: that we humans have within us a substance that “wants to become quartz crystals”, but never makes it, as long as we are living:
Our whole life rests on this — that we are perpetually on the point of forming hexagonal crystals from the head downwards, but we do not permit it actually to come about. These hexagonal crystals always wish to take form in us, but in reality they do not do so. They are interrupted, arrested, and then we have, so to speak, the quartz fluid in the highest possible state of solution within us.
If we had not this quartz-fluid within us, we could for example, eat ever so much sugar and we should never have a sweet taste in our mouth. This tasting of the sugar is brought about by the quartz we have within us, not by its substantiality, but by what is the will within it to become hexagonal like a crystal. That is what causes it; that is the essential.
Before moving on, or dismissing it, maybe allow this imagination to settle in you for awhile. . . this is what Steiner intends us to do, if we are interested to transcend “vitamin thinking” that always just points to some substance as the cause of everything. Steiner is talking about the will, an entirely insubstantial reality, the will to crystallize, in the case of quartz to crystallize into a hexagonal form, as an important force in nature, and therefore also within the human body, even up to and including our ability to taste something sweet!
Perhaps you can already anticipate the connection to the honeybee. That hexagonal form is essential, and we all know that the honeybee hive organism is the master of the hexagonal shape.
The bee is shaped by the same force that is within the earth and forms the quartz. Here the finely dissolved silicic acid is at work. A force is at work there, though this cannot be physically proved. The nectar works in the body of the bee so that it can shape the wax in a form which man really needs, for man must have those six-cornered spaces within him. Man needs the same thing. Inasmuch as the bee is the creature best able to give form to this hexagonal force, the bee is the creature that everywhere collects that particular food which can best be transformed in the body into this hexagonal force.
So, we need to understand the hexagonal form as key to the importance of the honeybee, and to the health-giving effects of honey. This leads me to an observation I’ve had for several years that I can’t explain: as long as honey stays in the hexagonal cells (for example if I cut honeycomb and take it out intact, even if it’s left out in freezing cold temperatures, it almost never crystallizes. But, if I extract it and bottle it, it crystallizes quite readily when it gets cold. . . I’ve done nothing chemically to the honey, just extracted it, filtered it and bottled it. Why should this change occur?
We need to loosen our hold on “vitamins” or other imagined little substances that folks have given names to as the keys to everything. If you want to to go much further down that rabbit hole, go check out the Weston Price Foundation, the best source I know of for information that offers a way to eat good, whole foods, and skip the vitamins. Steiner is advocating that we embrace the idea that good honey, honey that has come from the bees through their natural foraging and is harvested raw and unprocessed, has something, some force or will, that can not be chemically identified, and yet makes it exactly what a person needs for good health. Can we be open to this, even to the idea that the hexagonal form itself has power? Lots of ancient cultures before us were very open to this idea. The modern science of crystallography seems to be another one of those places where this is actually recognized, even if it is saturated with materialistic notions of matter. Perhaps it’s time we gave will-processes, and form in space, and other non-material realities, greater consideration when we imagine what makes life operate so beautifully and healthfully.
So interesting!