Jul 11, 2024
Equisetum and Fungus: Good and Bad
In a prehistoric epoch, the earth was too hot for water to condense into rivers, lakes, or oceans. Instead, other compounds like silicon were fluid. We might say molten but the entire earth did not yet have a solid crust. The earth was once too hot for water to condense into rivers, lakes, or oceans. As Steiner says, “As long as the earth was soft, such forces were still in it." When the earth hardened, those activities — relatively speaking — became locked up. With certain preparations, such as the horn silica, we liberate these and make them available to live again, but in general, these forces are not nearly as active as they once were.
Under different conditions, chemistry behaves in radically different ways. One can almost imagine molten glass raining down in winter. The earth experienced a sort of summer and winter, with variations in temperature enough to solidify quartz and melt it again. In such a world, H2O could not exist except perhaps as isolated molecules in a gaseous state.
For anyone who’s performed the childhood experiment of warming water, dissolving sugar, and then cooling the solution, you see spontaneous sugar crystals arise. Most of the earth’s crust is silica – quartz. But when the earth was much hotter, that quartz would have been molten. Only by cooling enough did it crystalize out of solution. Artist Larry Young suggests, “The crystal is a resurrected creative deed from the far distant past.”
As the earth cooled over eons, these silicate crystals remained in a more permanent solid state. Eventually, water as we know it became the fluid element condensing in pools and rivers and between the crystalline crust of the Earth. We have a picture of silicon dioxide having been molten and crystallizing. In this image, Rudolf Steiner tells us we see something of a foreshadowing of the possibility of plant growth. It is as if crystals are an earlier incarnation of the archetypal plant, the Urpflanze appearing in the only way that it could because carbon-based growth forms were impossible. In this prehistoric epoch, silicon was the carrier of living forces, before carbon would have its golden age.
While the earth was still molten, the living (dynamic) potential at work there was still unfolding. Soil as we know it is far less active than the primitive earth in its mobile molten state. Steiner says, “When you go out to the mountains to-day and find granite there, or gneiss — which differs from granite in being more rich in mica — they are the remains of this ancient giant plant… And thus to-day you have the mountain ranges. For our hardest mountains originated from the plant nature, when the whole earth was a kind of plant.”
What crystallized out of the primordial earth was quartz, and this image is maintained (in microcosm) by plants: “If you observe a plant to-day and enlarge it, you find even now that it resembles the mountain formations outside. For the universe only acts on the plant as a whole; its minutest parts are already stone.”
If we take a step back, anything that unfolds into physical form did so by using energy and that energy “dying” into manifest form. Steiner reminds us that all plant growth is a process of devitalization — the crystallization of growth is the discharge of potential energy into condensed form, a dying of life potential into actuality. Steiner says: “We find the strongest life force in the root nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalization from below upward.”
This is how quartz belongs to a transitional stage between primordial chaos and living form. As John Ruskin writes in Proserpina, “A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the mineral.” When the world was a fluid primordial soup of minerality — and Steiner emphasizes that “water, too, is mineral”— out of this fertile chaos would birth crystals as the spiritual forerunner of the kind of emergence that would later express as flowers. In this sense, quartz silica is another flower process, albeit one of the realm of minerals. Quartz “died” out of a dynamic living fluidic state and became a form transparent to light, something that flowers would later do out of the sap of plants.
One can imagine that the world of quartz had hardened, and these floral crystals were covered in dew as water condensed from the atmosphere. On these moistened silica florets emerged a new form of life as a transition between the crystal world and the plants we know today: giant equisetum towered.
