Lecture by Alan Chadwick in New Market, Virginia, 1979
Lecture 6, Fertilization, Part 6
An Introduction to Alan Chadwick's Lectures and a Glossary of Terms
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An experiment with cats fed upon canned cat food. How the vitality of the manures of the cats reflected the vitality of the food that they were fed upon. Wild bird guano far superior to domesticated animals. Legumes as a source of fertility. Compost of seeds. Questions and Answers. Nature as the great giver. The oaks of Dodona. Gratitude and sacrament. (16:36)
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New Market, Virginia, September 11, 1979
Lecture 6, Fertilizations, Part 6
There is one of them en evidence. And I refer you to another one which has taken place very recently and has been exposed in the Soil Association, which I brought to your notice an article about three cats being kept on different foods. Now this is connected with cats and tinned cat food, you understand, in the first place. But it ends by referring to horticulture, interestingly enough. Now those three cats, quantities of cats, they were not just single cats, they were quantities of cats were kept in three distinct pens and houses separately. And they fed them on tinned food because of the huge industry and money making made out of keeping cats on tinned food, and the argument against certain old ladies who were thinking of leaving their fortunes to cat homes, and were beginning to argue about leaving a single penny to such a cat’s home that fed the cats on filthy tinned food, when they were leaving them with enough money to be fed on the rest of the cats. So they took three variations on cat’s foods and, in a sense, they took the most argumentative, those with preservatives and everything else to the last degree, and those that were entirely tinned to make money. (The things were probably used in cat [ ], heaven knows.)
The middle one was the middle version of that, and the other one was almost a removal out of that into the beginnings of the attitude toward vital food. And so they were kept on that for a long period and the cats observed, duly noted with a whole log kept of the performance. And, of course, as you could imagine, the result of the cat’s fur, the result of the cat’s breeding, and the result of the cat’s lives when in three enormous grades that were totally obvious. Do you comprehend? We needn’t dissect that here because we’re not here to discuss cats, thank goodness.
Now came the fact that during that period the cats had big pens as well as houses and that they went to their toilet in the pens. So after the cats were removed, the industry, the commerce [ ] was thinking of how to get on with the tinning, and satisfy getting the money from the old spinsters who were going to leave their money.
Meantime the weeds, the angelic force, had blown in and germinated in these three pens. And the four cycles had performed their duties of bringing them to life. And suddenly, you saw three totally different performances of weeds. And this was so obvious that the horticulturists, such as Organic Garden might have done, or any such, or we would have done, entered the scene and said, “Gosh, here’s a fascinating example which has been put on our doorstep for us."
And so you had voluptuous weeds, you had rather sickly looking weeds prone to all sorts of problems, and you had weeds that literally wouldn’t grow. The moment they came up went yellow, and went nyeeeghhhh.
Now they took a step further. They placed these on the compost heaps—all three of them. And they took tests out of that performance, with [ ]. And indeed, they got out of that a likewise performance of fertility, reaction, reflection which in those three grades were:
- Futile to want to live, nyaaaaah!
- Well, if something could possibly help we might manage
- Come on, kids, let’s try.
So none of them were what you call beatific, you understand, but I’m alluding to it again, in a degree, but that the Humbolt is a much clearer version of the whole thing because its utterly positive. And that’s the one to go to.
I have one more remark, that beyond the bacterials that we have spoken of, they include certain plants, all the Vicias, clovers, the lupine, perennial and the annual, but principally the annual, and the Phaseolus [bean family], with a particular on the greatest of all of them, Phaseolus Vicia Faba [fava bean], produces the most of all and the most nitrogen in the plant. They are above ground and below ground utter enormous fertilizers. And one further remark beyond all of that: that the great secret of seeds as a great secret compost, a fortune chest. It is completely unrealized. It is out of composting various seeds, affected by the planets, that is the greatest secret of all fertilizations focused right down.
If you will cogitate that matter, you will realize the quantity, as well as the quality, of the seeds given by the whole of the archangels to the fertilization of the soil. How many seeds germinate, out of this incredible spring. You know Darwin said that two plants―and one of them was the Orchis maculata, a charming little wild Orchis, grows so high. He said it produces seeds to such a degree that if it were given the freedom of the world by the planets in its performance, it could overrun the whole soil of the world as a carpet in two years. You realize that Papaver produces millions and lasts for a hundred years as being fertile. Do you realize that you can turn soil over and that seeds have been buried―for the moment that they are out of touch with the planets, they are not in communication with birth―and that therefore they are acting as fertilizers. And in some cases, of course, they go into this immediately. You must realize the enormity that is in the soil each year as a new life force that comes out of seeds.
Now you’re all getting terribly tired and I’ve worn you out, and God knows if I haven’t done the same to myself. Do you want to discuss it?
Question: Alan, is there a preference for the type of grass used to make turf loam?
Answer: Yes, of course. Does it not imply… Have you not got there child? All grasses have the variation from one pole to the other. Did we not talk about sedge as [ ]? Do you want to plant Mullein grass for the purpose of turf loam? No. So, there are definite grasses. We cannot touch that in this subject today, unless you’re prepared to stay until dinner time. Do you comprehend? Does that answer you?
Question: When we go into the forest to take the leaf mold, or when we go to take the turf loam, what do we give back to the forest in return when we take these things that are making their own soil?
Answer: Well, what do you give back? You answer it. Why do you put it on my shoulders? Very well. Survey it, since you ask the question; survey it as you might have done. Have we not said that the plant world, which includes trees, is an incredible angelic force of giving and forgiving and that the giving is unlimited? Have we not just discussed the propagation of this orchis, in its giving? That in sowing one grain of wheat you get a whole ear? Perceive. When you plant a tree young, it has to be given from the Nature around it. It’s one year old. It has to be given all sorts of matters that it needs. It’s a child in the soil. And the plants help it, and the other trees help it, and the atmosphere helps it. And, presumably, you help it.
At a certain period it crosses the equator line of taking into giving. And you will notice a fascinating matter: that it has become a conservatoire. And that that tree now has a perimeter, and here you get the origin energy, and the periphery. And that right under the tree, until you begin to come within the circle of its branches outside, is a whole shade area in which plants become less and less, ferns will become more and more, and only limited plants can grow. As you go outside that line of perimeter, shall we call it a Capricorn, you come into the full play of the elements. And the tree has very little inference except the giving of atmosphere, in the air, and the giving of a certain amount of nutriments in the form of leaf mold and so on. But it now becomes limited. You would find that your wild strawberries, just as they are coming into fruit, would be dried up, burned. But in the periphery, under the boughs, you will find your wild strawberries; you will find your exquisite little flowers; you will find your violets in bloom, your cowslips. You are in an area of conservatoire.
Now in all cases you will discover that those trees—for we discussed this very clearly—are making vastly more quantities of leaf mold than they would use. Nature takes the whole of that issue, as it takes the lightning, as it takes the marriage of the Sun in the atmosphere and spreads it over everything equally. Are you going to turn around to the Sun and say, “How dare you! What are you doing, taking this and spreading it all over the place? You put it here, for the moment.” Do you follow? And that this give-ness produces an acquirement of give-ness. A law begins to operate in secret. And you must understand that when you plant a copse of trees, as Ptolemy or Solomon said, you are not planting a copse of trees.
And that is why all of the Greek children had to plant trees. Every one of them had to plant trees. It was a law and a duty within them. And that when you have planted that grove of trees, and it is growing and becomes grown, within it is all the atmosphere of sylvan, the secrets of atmosphere. You have created moistures; you even changed climatics; you have changed rainfall; you have changed sunshine; and what is more, you have introduced a play of the four elements that you have now, in the introduction of sylvan, produced sylphs.
Whether you choose to believe in them, of course, is a matter of whether you belong to Findhorn apparently, or the London government. But that they interweave in their duties. In other words you have performed a mystery that is out of all sense of mathematical performance. You can’t tell from it whether you have produced one of the secret copses of the world. The oaks of Dodona are the grove of oaks in the Aegean where the Druids performed their oracles and where they took the mistletoe with the golden knife. And then they waited, and they attended, as you know, upon the oracle. And that that oracle frequently came to them in the way in which it rustled the leaves of the boughs of those oak trees, in the grove of Dodona. I won’t endeavor to expedite [expand] on that. We must leave those secrets with their own symbolic boundaries. Do I answer you a little?
Question: Well, I can see…
Answer: Oh somebody please help me! Explain that when a plant grows, that when we do the French intensive system, we have gone into the word fertility, which we are going to deal with the day after tomorrow, and we are going to show that the beneficence that Theophrastus von Hoenheim, PARACELCUS, (I must just finish this) said that the destiny and the duty of the gardener in living, to produce his food, to produce his family, produce his life, is to place his hand in Paradise and to bring it, through seed, into the visibility of this world, whereby you have turned a bitter Lactuca into a lettuce. And that out of that lettuce you take seed and supply, as you would say, food for the millions. Now do I answer you? Thank you very much. Well, you were going to say something?
Question: Today I went to get leaf mold, and I wanted to talk to him. I said, “Thank you.” And I felt that’s what I was giving. He said we were taking and not giving back, so I gave my gratitude.
Answer: I am so glad that you said this, you see, because it reiterates what we said last week. Once you have been able to produce a certain type of a pair of wings, and you are out of the necessities of utility, out of the necessities of utility, you are into the sacramental. And you can no longer look at any of it the same. For to cut the head off of a lettuce when it wants to bloom is identically the same as collecting a bunch of leaf mold from the forest. But what has happened through the destiny of your exquisite mind? Is something born in a seed there in the atmosphere? Do you comprehend me? Good. Anything further?
Thank you Alan.