Nothing grows in a place where there is no life capable of feeling, growth, or thought. Feathers grow on birds and change every year; hair grows on an animal and changes every year […]; grass grows on the meadows and the leaves on the trees, and every year they are largely renewed. So we could say that the soul of the earth is its capacity to grow: its flesh is the earth kingdom, its bones are the successive connections of its rocks, out of which the mountain ranges are composed, its cartilage is the tufa, its blood the water veins; the lake of blood around the heart is the world’s sea, whose tides are the waxing and waning of the blood in the arteries, which, for the earth, is the ebb and flow of the sea; and the warmth in the soul of the world is fire that has been poured into the earth, while the soul, the ability to grow, lives in the fires that erupt from the earth as baths and sulphur mines and volcanoes, as at Etna in Sicily, and in many other places.8
Leonardo da Vinci
Since early antiquity, and through into the nineteenth century, people have regarded the human being as a combination of everything that surrounds us as nature and the universe. In the smallest space, in our body and soul, are not all the forces bundled up that are visibly spread out in the expanses of nature, in the macrocosm, and have come to expression in the various minerals, plants and animals, in the elements and the stars? In the age of the microchip, with its immense functions in the smallest space, this is not such a strange idea. How many big and small products has the development of technology had to discard in the last hundred years, even reject, to arrive at the present form of electronic ‘intelligence’ on a minute scale? Likewise how many attempts, sketches and ‘drafts’ has Creation had to produce in order to arrive, for its part, at its highest goal, the human being? In the Finnish language, the human being is called ‘ihminen’, which literally means ‘little miracle’.
There is actually great scope in the unusual idea that out there, in nature and the cosmos, I see what has been ‘shed’ from my own human development, and now see in, say, the liverwort, spleenwort, etc., opal, malachite, in ants and bees, even if these express one-sided connections with my organs and soul capacities, but through such connections, can, among other things, be made into remedies in human medicine.
Although I have a strong suspicion that I am right in thinking these thoughts, I still have not even opened the key in the first door into the secrets of that world which can make the connections explicable to my reasoning powers. So, consequently, I must first of all look into the world that I do have access to in order to fully understand my own inner being, my organs. Not until I find this connection shall I have real access to my inner being and the necessary feeling of coherence as a dweller in that world.
Not very long ago a North American journalist did this on a political level when, living in the USA he decided that, in order to understand anything about the USA one couldn’t stay in one’s own country, because one only gets illusory caricatures. One has to travel abroad, to find out how present-day America and the American people are reflected in the souls of other nationalities. So he set about his quest for self-knowledge by asking other people about his country and its politics. He went home with an abundance of knowledge, some of it quite shattering.9
Don’t we also get caricatures when we only consider ourselves, our inner life and our organs? Don’t we perhaps find much more insight into our inner being when we learn to study detailed aspects of outer nature? It may of course appear a little absurd at first, to have to look outwards into the so-called ‘objective realm’ to experience something objective about my subjective personal self. To be consistent, shouldn’t I do the opposite, and look into my subjective inner being first, to find out about the so-called objective world outside?
A caricature of this is the idea people used to have of taking certain drugs to embark on a journey through their inner universe in order to discover something about the outer cosmos. In this connection, however, we can also quote Schiller, from whom there comes this pertinent saying:
If you seek what is loftiest, grandest, the plant can teach it to you: what in the plant is without will, undertake with your will — that’s it!
A study of a growing plant with its lawful development, its leaf metamorphosis and its connection with warmth, light and soil consistency, and its polarity between root and blossom, can indeed tell us something significant about our own soul and bodily development. If on the other hand I could really see into the world of my inner organs I would, as a microcosmic being, acquire knowledge of the greater world and its hidden blueprint. Just as it was customary in ancient Egypt, I could then connect the individual organs with spiritual beings, that is, gods, and know what the liver and the lungs have to do with the myth of Prometheus, the heart with the sun, the intestines with snakes and toads; or how the ant heap, if I truly understand it, offers me a true picture of my immune system. The ant heap, after all, reacts when a foreign body enters it, with its various guards, messengers, killers and clearers, and its other manifold functions, behaving just as ‘intelligently’ as the immune system in the blood does. This is why we talk about ‘immune memory’. By developing such insights we start to explore how and why remedies from the kingdoms of nature can work. There must be a differentiated reciprocal relationship between the various members of the natural world and human beings that can be recognized and made into medicines capable of remedying organic deficits in an illness and bringing about healing—as in naturopathy, homeopathy, the Bach flower remedies, Chinese and anthroposophic medicine.
Many traditional fairytales describe in a humorous and yet profound way how the higher spiritual development of human beings led them to becoming organically ‘defective’. There is a Bulgarian fairytale in which the creation of man is described as follows: God lovingly formed many structures out of clay, but none of them corresponded to the original divine intention, so that he had to reject them time and again. As the day drew to a close, he at last succeeded, and after many attempts to make a ‘medium race’ that satisfied him, he placed his creation in the sun to dry. But he was so absorbed in his work, however, that he did not notice the devil, who came by secretly, and gazed at the work with envy and jealousy. He wanted to spoil God’s work, and secretly bored lots of holes in the human body with his stick, which now, to the great surprise of its creator, was disfigured. To save at least the outer form of his creation, God began laboriously to stuff grasses and herbs into all the holes that had been made, smoothed them down with clay, and made his human model intact again. ‘But these very grasses, with which God once filled up and mended holes in the body, can be used to cure many an illness. Since that time these medicinal herbs and grasses have existed.’10
Thus it was that the devil, the ‘devil incarnate’ — to whom, according to the creation story of Moses, we owe the knowledge and therewith the freedom of the divine world of the creator — also incorporated into us our capacity for illness.
In Greek mythology we find a similar motif: Prometheus brings fire from heaven to people who, until then, had been dully dreaming and dependent on other beings: an image of enlightenment and the possibility of transforming earthly matter and thus becoming independent of divine leadership. But the revenge of the immortals is inevitable. They send Pandora, the ‘richly gifted one’, into the world, with a box full of evil and illnesses, that is opened by Epimetheus, the ‘retrospective’ thinker, as opposed to his brother Prometheus, the ‘fore-thinker’. Spiritual possibilities of development have an inner connection with organic weaknesses — the one is not conceivable without the other, for the spirit is the flame that devours growth. Without the possibility of being ill there is no freedom, and conversely freedom brings the possibility to make mistakes and to create illnesses, as we can experience today on a grand scale. Civilization and tooth decay are reciprocal factors, but surplus vitality would also cause problems for us, since it would hinder the acquisition of consciousness. We often find in this respect the remarkable phenomenon that an organically ill person is far healthier in his soul than someone who is always full of vitality — or the other way round.
What kind of relationship is there between the soul and body if, as the saying goes, I am ‘liverish’, or someone is a ‘person of my kidney’, or my heart ‘breaks’? What do we mean by a ‘mental illness’? Can the spirit fall ill at all, or is it just that the soul no longer sounds harmonious — like a piano with a broken hammer? We have to pursue these questions as far as possible in this context because they have many further ramifications for us.
So we shall try to explain the specific nature of various organs and identify their place within the whole organism of soul and body. On the purely anatomical level they lie unrelated as pebbles beside one another. But on the functional level they are connected in ways that Chinese medicine describes as ‘organ families’, in which particular ‘siblings’ have a closer connection to each another than to others, and in which there must of course be ‘governance’ by ‘father and mother’ — in this case brain and heart. Western medicine sometimes even speaks of a ‘concert’ of hormone-secreting glands, or of ‘closed loop systems’, or of the stomach’s ‘community overlap’.
As far as the relationship of the soul to specific organs is concerned, neither this, nor equally the influence of our organs on soul life, is easy to fathom. But we have been asking these questions for more than 2,600 years. About 600 BC, a pupil of Socrates was suffering from a headache and asked for a remedy to take away the pain and cure him forever, even though he himself was not prepared to change anything in his life — for instance to combat his stubbornness and rashness. But a Greek philosopher is not as easy-going in this respect as modern medical practice! The pupil had to learn from his master that there should not be specialists either for the body or the soul, because they both belong inseparably together; that for instance one could neither understand nor treat a single organ like an eye if one didn’t understand anything about the whole, for the eye is part of the head and the head again belongs to the rest of the body, and this, as long as one lives, is gifted with a soul. If the head already produces such problems we can ask if it is perhaps only mirroring something organically and psychologically out of order, rather than itself being the cause.
In fact Leonardo da Vinci also says:
Anyone who wants to see how the soul lives in the body should also see how this body uses its everyday dwelling; that is, if disorder and confusion reign there, then the body is being looked after by its soul in a disorderly and confusing manner.11
But what then are suitable remedies, and if these don’t have a good effect, what other, more effective methods could there be?
In an era when we idolize youth, beauty, extending life, and freedom from pain, it is absolutely essential to think about the profounder significance, the meaning, as it were, of suffering, pain, illness and dying. Suffering and pain can, namely, deepen and extend our knowledge of the world, because they awaken a heightened consciousness and by doing so become real ‘helpers in our development’. According to Nietzsche,
the human being, the bravest and longest-suffering animal, doesn’t reject suffering as such, but actually wants it, goes in search of it, provided one gives him the reason for it, tells him what it is for. The senselessness of pain, not pain itself, was the curse that has hitherto plagued humanity.12
Therefore let us bravely endeavour to find the first of the many mysterious keys to understanding human nature better, and in doing so let us not forget the bright light of reason and our hopefully still sound human understanding. Let us turn away from the smoking lamp of largely habitual prejudices, and continually analyse our own experiences. Let us not unquestioningly believe the self-appointed ‘popes’ and ‘cardinals’ of modern science, for ‘whoever cites an authority in a dispute is not using his mind but more likely his memory’.13 Let us avoid that at all costs.