Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4: Man, Nature and the Garden, Part 1
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Contents of this Segment:
Limnaya Muralis, a plant that purifies poluted air. Areas of discontinuity. Sedge as a plant that thrives on salt sand dunes. It leads the way for more complex land plants to move in. Iodine produced in the spume of seawater and air. Natural soil formation leading to fertility. The gravitational attraction of the moon on terrestrial water. (11:08)
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New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 4, Man, Nature, and the Garden, Part 1
In the Baronial days when there were castles and those castles had moats, and there were gates all around them, they were entirely shut in from what you might call the whole of nature. You went across the drawbridge, you pulled the drawbridge up, and that was considered that you were shut off from all interference and possibility of being gotten at. And that the brother of the baron, who probably had the opposite view when he was caught, was, of course, put in the dungeon, so that nobody should have to worry about it and that the perishing should take place on its own, as a result of no air. And if indeed, if these dungeons, which were below the moat as you know, the air became utterly congested the moment somebody was in there, and gradually there was nothing to purify the air, and that person duly perished. And many of them on top of them.
The plant world, as with everything in the plant world, supplied the need. It introduced, the moment the that somebody was there, and this deformity was taking place in the air, a plant grew upon the wall of the dungeon called Limnaya muralis (“muralis,” wall) Limnaya muralis. Thereby, as that person gradually broke down, so the Limnaya grew out of that and breathed. And breathed in the deformity, and breathed out fresh air. And in time the prisoner did not perish, and great was the surprise when he had either some way of escape or was released by history. Incredible providence.
Now the whole subject today about Man, Nature, and the Garden is this connection between these three. We have been speaking particularly connected in the cosmic about totemism, that everything equals-out and spreads as fast as possible, in fact, instant. And yet at the same time there is the areas of discontinuity. There is that line at which the sea ceases, and the salt water ends, and the sweet water begins. The whole variation between what we in verbosity again… Begin to release it every time when you can, won’t you? Land and water, sweet land and salt water. There is a line, and that line is an area of discontinuity concerning the garden’s edge.
I suppose most of you know Long Island. If you don’t, you know the equivalent. Long Island was formed by a glacier, the Hudson Glacier, running out and leaving Long Island as a deposit, and as a result. You have salt sea, and then you have what is known as sedge, growing in those enormous sand dunes that are thrown up by the gales and the great seas, and salt sand on great banks, with sedge growing in it. Now, because that salt sand is a participant of the sea, it does not... It does, actually blossom, but that blossom does not purvey anything to the rest of man’s nature, neither does it purvey anything to sea nature. In the same way as the very content of the sea, which is known as iodine, which all the oysters in the sea bed live upon so much utilise and, what we stupidly call, eat.
Nobody, no scientist has endeavored… has succeeded in getting iodine out of the sea. Why not? It’s the forms of metamorphosis. Iodine only forms in the area of discontinuity connected with the sea. When the sea is uproarious, and the airs are uproarious above the seas, you produce a word called spume, and that spume is an area of discontinuity between the sea and the air, and only at that time in that spume, is iodine formed, metamorphosed.
LIkewise then, this mullen-grass, or sedge, grows, and produces nothing that anything can eat, or no honey from, neither does it produce anything for animal, bird, human, that is what we call edible. However, as it grows, which it does and makes it’s roots, it does of course go into the whole period of life into death into life. The metamorphosis. Thereby, it produces a compost, a compost of dead matter upon which in due course it cannot, it is not permitted by divine law, to thrive. It has produced something pre-dominant to itself, and cannot live upon it, and does not eat its own compost. Having produced such a compost, the wind blows the seeds from the land into that compost. And plants generate, and grow, and produce little flowers that produce honey, that produce leaves upon the plants. Whereby a bee will come to get the nectar, and a hare or a rabbit or some animal will come to chew the leaf. It has now gone into a stage of fertility, beatification.
And that immediately those animals and birds and insects also bring something with them. We are inclined to overlook this and think that it is nothing. The droppings of a bee, the droppings of a bird are so infinitesimal that because we only think today in quantitive, we cannot comprehend the great secrets of qualities. The huge importance of a bird dropping to such a thing as that compost. It daily increases its beatific, and more beatific plants, and more fertility arise. And the very pruning of the plants also after that, by the eating of them, assists this matter. And so you have that area of discontinuity slowly turning into sweet land, or, of course, the opposite. It may go back into the oceanic, by the oceanic doing its encroaching from its side of the area of discontinuity.
Now you’ve got a little picture there of the beginning of the focus of the word, which we shall deal with next week: fertility. Let us take another one, considerably more [ ]. Think you that we spoke about the revolutionibus, and entertain conjecture that we spoke about all the springs beginning at the very tops of the hills and the mountains, and the downlands. There are dew ponds, there are the little risings of springs of water which are quite invisible. And they merely run out in little drips and drivulets, and eventually some of it drops over a rock and splashes on another, and there’s a tiny pool. And all of that is participant to these risings that make north, south, east, and west, these facades, which you must imagine in your mind that you comprehend. You must realize the enormity of that we don’t comprehend at all.
That heat ascends, and cold descends, is almost incomprehensible in that you have four facets of total difference. It’s like spring, summer, autumn and winter. And that these mountains that we’re talking of, of course, are groups of families. You’ve got them here in California. You’ve got one up in California, which is growing four feet a year. And you’ve got others which of course are very, very old, and are getting smaller. There can’t be any question when you look at them, that there’s some family procedure here, concerning life and death. And that you can’t help recognizing father and mother and the group of children. In some way you must entertain that, because otherwise you couldn’t entertain thought about mountains at all.
Now therefore, do you see, those great heads of those mountains, sticking right up above the clouds. All the clouds that sweep by, and their heads are right above them, and their heads are completely free. They’re not dressed. They stand up there like great monuments as it were...
[Text transcription 2015 by M. Crawford and G. Haynes]