Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 6, Fertilization, Part 3
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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Cumbustion within the compost pile. Weeds and herbs as of the highest importance in the garden. Relationship and disrelationship. Planetary influences working through combinations of plants in compost. Synthetic fertilizers and reasons to avoid them. Life in to Death into Life. The need for the entire spectrum of positive and negetive opposition to create authenticity in nature. Findhorn garden in Scotland. Organic garden as a healing force against the forces of destruction in the culture. Positive influence of Organic Gardening Magazine. Turf loam. (13:37)
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New Market, Virginia, September 11, 1979
Lecture 6, Fertilizations, Part 3
...into acid, you take all of that green matter and the dead matter and you compost that into decomposition, setting up a performance of decay—I can’t get the word, of rot, of combustion. Remember that word, because it is very important. It is what begins in the compost heap. Combustion: it is a volcanic matter. Temperatures rise, but all that’s verbosity, do you understand? You put your hand in the grass cuttings three days later and what have you got? Goodness, it is quite hot. And then frequently you see the haystack on fire. Well that’s easily explained from the planetary.
If you review the matter that on a day, shall we say, when the temperature reached sixty-eight, and you took a cucumber from the glass house and you put that same thermometer in the cucumber and left it there long enough, it would read about forty-eight. And if you took that same thermometer out of the cucumber, on that same day when the temperature outside was sixty-eight, and you put it amongst the roots of say, the wild arum lilies that were middle aged in growth, three years, it would read one hundred and twelve. And if you put it amongst arum lilies that were much older than that, it would read up to a hundred and twenty. Do we know what we’re talking about? Is there any knowing what we’re talking about or are we journeying?
Likewise with that cucumber, in order to explain the planetary, which I am trying to invect at the moment for the importance of the herbs, for now we are coming to the most important matter of the garden: weeds and herbs. And today we treat them as the least important in the whole of agriculture and horticulture, and endeavor even to dispose of them without seeing. They are the most incredible angelic force.
That if you take that cucumber and you place water to the right of it, supposing it’s going up, the cucumber will bend to the right. And if you place water to the left, the cucumber will bend to the left. And if you place water above it, it will go straight up. And if you place water below it, it will turn down. On the contrary, if you place oil in a bowl to the right, it will go to the left, and likewise left it will go right, and above and below in the opposites. Do you see what we are alluding to? Relationship and dis-relationship: the whole aspect and the whole world governed, the plant world governed by the planetary influences, contain every form of opposite, of relationship and dis-relationship.
“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, and vice sometimes, by action dignified. Within the infant rind of this sweet flower, poison hath residence and medicine power.”
There it is in a nutshell, from one end to the other. Comprehend the enormity then that we are going to touch when we look into the whole of our composting, and realize that within the formation of those compost heaps, either by relationships of weeds, herbs, the great angelic gifts, either by their roots, their stems, their leaves, their flowers, their seeds, for those are the influences of the planets and the stars, applying into them those matters, which are from them themselves, as the Sun does in this marriage each day in the atmosphere, make love, and we call it, ooh, heat. We dare to pretend that the sun is hot.
And so… oh forgive me I get so lost… Can you tell me where I was? Yes, thank you.. You’ve given it to me, wonderful. You see, it’s time for you to pick this up and go on with it yourselves.
Do you see… that by the relationship and dis-relationship of placing certain participants of plants—it may be the stalk of one and the leaves of another—you finally go into most artistic depths of this marriage of relationships and dis-relationships. Meantime, it is the plants in toto that you put together that make a marriage between Mars and Saturn, or between Jupiter and Venus, or just Jupiter at a certain period. And that you bring those elements and those minerals that have come from that planet, into the gift of that plant that are in its juices, in its performance, and you now place them in a compost heap, which is going to produce the metamorphosis of the new soil that the plants are going to grow in.
And here is the whole view of what the agriculturalist thought he would do by placing synthetics in the ground, by placing ammonia sulfate, sulfates of ammonia, by placing nitrate and potassium, all made out of synthetics. But those synthetics can never replace the uplift, the aromas, the performances of the planets, because they come out of the darkness of the Earth, the Ahrimanic. We are talking about the Luciferics already married with the Ahrimanics. And that your performance is the performance of the four seasons, of the law of the four Archangels, the cycles.
I won’t try to go too far into this because of time and because of its enormous depths. But you must suddenly perceive that in all the herbs and in all the weeds are veritable secrets. This is not the roseum of a rose, and it is not the roseum of another carnation. This is not the mauve, although this is the shadow of that. This is not the color that is any other color or any dye that you could ever wear of anything. You can only reflect it. And you will get this tomorrow in propagation, when we deal with the magic and miracle of seed. That color is not color alone, any more than sound is sound alone. When you sing a note, you are really singing two notes, one either side. Laaaaaaaaa. You will say, “Well that’s a note.” Not if you were really discriminatory. It is this: Laaaaaaaaa [with vibrato]. You see you have got a note either side. It is the same with color. There is no “a color.” You can only have a color because of the color on either side. You have got the whole rainbow, the spectrum. You’re not going to cheat. You can’t get out of it.
Oh dear, where am I getting to?
So we deal with this matter then of turning, in that compost, the metamorphosis through combustion: life into life into death into life into death into life; sweet into acid into sweet into acid. That by putting that semi-acid back into the ground, this incredible angelic plant will hunt in it and will find all the noxious and the obnoxious and will go through it and say, “Blahh!” And if it can’t go blahh, and you only give it nitrate and sulfate of ammonia, it’s got nothing to go blahh over and it is not real. Oh no, it is not. It does not run to the two poles, to Cancer and Capricorn. You have separated the whole issue from life. You have protected yourself. You have removed everything that is important to you: opposition.
The ant in the formicary has, under its leg, nearly all of it, a little louse. And that little louse lives on the ant and sucks its blood and lives in the formicary and breeds. And when the ant has to move from the formicary because of a fire or a flood or an invasion, the very first thing all the ants do is they collect the embryo of the louse and they take it to the new formicary. They know the importance of opposition.
We, today, have set out to wear clothes that can’t be dirty. Do you comprehend? Our whole approach is “anti” the four cycles, which are handing the Grail from winter to summer into the opposites. And you cannot have live animals and live birds with you if you think, out of the thinking of your mind, you know what it should eat. It’s got to find the obnoxious and the noxious. And if it cannot find the noxious and the obnoxious, it is not any more an animal or a bird: it’s a lunacy out of the mind. And that is what they all are, poor dears. You must look at exactly the same thing in the soil. You are not fertilizing the plants! You are fertilizing the atmosphere and the soil and the whole area. You are not putting fertilization as food for a hydrangea, hydrangea food. It’s a monstrous, wicked, this performance… It should be taken to the president and have its head chopped off! And then the president’s, of course.
Well, I better stop that there. Let us proceed with the fertilizations. You realize that we are going to pick up composting. We’re going to go through a whole labyrinth of caves, of magics connected with this.
And that if you think that the great magazines of the garden, which have been invaluable…God how invaluable has—not merely because they are here do I say this, Organic Gardening—been to the whole institution of America and reversed its thinking just like the thing in Scotland: Findhorn. Findhorn has reinstituted the performance of the four elements, you understand, as nymphs, undines, fairies.
Good gracious, I am off again.
So such things as this Organic Gardening has indeed completely managed to revert the perverted attitude of mis-performance, of synthetic, back towards a vision of the four Archangels. And this must be looked at, for it’s an enormity. Almost nobody, nobody in commerce, nobody in the financial world, and certainly nobody in the governmental world—unless they are having a struggle for their life to death—is performing this. They are going with the tide of destruction.
So, the next item of huge importance in the fertilization is a magic: turf loam. Now a great American poet talked about leaves of grass. And frequently we can’t think of grass as trees or plants or vegetables. And you talk about lawn. But the whole performance of grass is unique. Think what it does in its deep composting method.