Agriculture is under pressure due to climate change, monocultures and soil erosion. Fields are devastated by wars and the earth is poisoned by weapons. Fertile soil is being lost and deserts are spreading. Many farms are struggling to survive. With its action plan for 2025 to 2027, the Goetheanum‘s Section for Agriculture wishes to encourage a sustainable approach to farming.
On 8 May, the publishing company Philosophisch-Anthroposophische Verlage was entered in the Swiss commercial register. The publishers Rudolf Steiner Verlag and Verlag am Goetheanum have merged under this name.
Rudolf Steiner was the originator of pioneering achievements such as Waldorf Education, biodynamic farming and Anthroposophic Medicine. His scientific approach is not as well known. In his book ‘Rudolf Steiner und die Anthroposophie’, Peter Selg describes a man with a social impulse that includes the effectiveness of spiritual forces.
After six years of development and testing, the Section for Agriculture at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, has handed over study modules on biodynamic farming to Heliopolis University in Cairo, Egypt, as part of a degree programme in organic agricultural science.
Waldorf schools and kindergartens, biodynamic farming and Anthroposophical Medicine are rooted in the anthroposophical approach developed by Rudolf Steiner. But the effectiveness of his work was not to be taken for granted, as events organized at and around the Goetheanum for the 100th anniversary of his death on 30 March will illustrate.
The staging of Richard Wagner’s opera ‘Parsifal’ at the Goetheanum under director Jasmin Solfaghari has made history by including eurythmy. It also brought together art and science. The book on ‘Parsifal’ at the Goetheanum offers multiple glimpses, personal and professional, into this complex undertaking, a cooperation of Schott Music and Pamy Media Productions.
The smallholder farmers of indigenous cultures seek to live in harmony with the earth. Biodynamic farming is for them a way of bringing together tradition and innovation to achieve a unity of earth, humans and cosmos.
What remains when all the knowledge from guidelines and textbooks does not suit the individual patients one meets as a physician or therapist? Erik Baars pursues this question in conversation with Julia Demming from the Medical Section at the Goetheanum. Erik Baars is professor of Anthroposophic Medicine at the University of Applied Sciences in Leiden (NL).
We need laughter, we need self-distance in order to develop. Since if we think we are doing everything right, there will be no development. And nothing to laugh about. Or even more so?
Anthroposophic physicians largely resisted Nazi ideology, particularly in terms of content, but some individuals accepted the system in the hope of gaining advantages for Anthroposophic Medicine. These are the findings of the study ‘Anthroposophy and National Socialism. The Anthroposophical Physicians’ by Peter Selg, Susanne H. Gross and Matthias Mochner.
Biodynamic projects give small farmers and their families access to food through self-sufficiency, promoting self-reliance and sustainable food systems along the way.
For 100 years the Sections of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum have been working with an understanding of life under cosmic, earthly and human developmental conditions in order to take on civilizational tasks. At the Campus Fete on 8 September 2024, Goetheanum co-workers will make the work of the School tangible to visitors.