Steiner House

It feels like yesterday, but it was two years ago in June 2022 that I first went to Steiner House in London. It is situated just west of Regent’s Park.

The visit reminded me of my drop-in to Cecil Sharp House way back in 2007. That, on the north side of Regent’s Park, is another building-as-ideological-portal. However, in that case the agenda was English Folk Arts, and in this it is the Anthroposophical ideas of Rudolf Steiner.

I chose that Saturday because there was going to be a market stall open selling biodynamic produce from a variety of growers. This is where I bought this delicious apple juice.

On the ground floor there is a bookshop. It stocks many of Steiner’s own titles, largely lectures he gave which were dutifully transcribed and published, but also books by a wide range of authors on subjects, many not directly relating to Steiner thought. It’s a very interesting shop and has a more diverse offering than for instance than that at Swedenborg House.

The exterior of the building, as you can see from the opening photo, has this wonderfully eccentric art-deco styling. And this is carried on into the building’s interior.

In the stairwell cavity, there is what looks like a glass flowform. These are Steiner’s ritualistic sculptures, which are designed to energise water. It would be great one day to visit the Goetheanum in Switzerland and see more of this quirky architecture.

On the ground floor, the café and bookshop are open to the public. On the first floor, one is able to access the library. Here you can discover the full complement of Steiner’s hundreds of publications.

This shelf of art books caught my eye. I do like it that Anthroposophy covers the full range of human experience in the cosmos; from the most “spiritual” and etheric to the most “grounded” and integrated.

These boxes contain back issues of The Golden Blade, the Anthroposophical journal.

 

Steiner 101.

  

Steiner 102.

As I was making my way out, I asked the librarian which of Steiner’s own books that he would recommend for a neophyte. He selected the following for me How To Know Higher Worlds, Theosophy, and Occult Sceince. I’ve subsequently read these three, and they are certainly interesting, the first being the most indispensable.

In fact, my own recommendation to a beginner would be Steiner’s Autobiography The Story of my Life, which I think gives one a better idea of where he was coming from. The librarian also recommended the two books on the right as good supplementary reading. I haven’t read them…yet. If you get the opportunity, it’s definitely worth visiting Steiner House.

 [Update: I had the great fortune to present a talk with Charles Dowding in the Steiner building theatre in 2025.]

The Koliskos

In the course of my research for my book “The Garden” time and again, I came across the work of the husband and wife Eugen Kolisko (21 March 1893 – 29 November 1939) and Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889 – November 20, 1976).

They shared with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer the role of putting the flesh on Rudolf Steiner’s biological theories. It is my understanding that, while Pfeiffer was tied up on other Anthroposophical business during Steiner’s “Agriculture Course” lectures, the Koliskos were present at Breslau for them. This was the birth of the Biodynamic movement, which this year is celebrating its centenary.

Eugen Kolisko had a perhaps broader range of interest than his wife. This above is my copy of “Zoology for Everybody” (1944) that I discovered in the bargain bin in the bookshop at Emerson College. But his other works include writings on nutrition, natural history, geology, chemistry, medicine, even fiction.

Lili Kolisko, on the other hand, was dedicated to the scientific method. Early on, pursuant to Steiner’s esoteric ideas about the function of the spleen, through her microscope she discovered a new type of speckled platelet, which she and Steiner termed “regulator cells”. This reminds me somewhat of Wilhelm Reich’s microscopic investigations.

As much as Steiner himself celebrated her work, she was met with a cold shoulder by the medics and scientists of the Anthroposophical Society. These internal disagreements between the couple and other senior figures in the movement effectively drove them from Germany to resettle in England in the thirties. Eugen Kolisko died relatively shortly afterwards in 1939 leaving Lili in penury and eking out a living sewing purses.

10 Euros on eBay.

In 1936 Lili Kolisko published “Moon and Plant Growth” in which she showed, by means of statistics and these beautiful photographs, how the influence of the waxing and waning moon could be used to optimise sowing. The Biodynamic idea is, in short, that you should plant root vegetables on a full moon, and leafy ones on the waxing moon.

Agriculture of Tomorrow in the library at Steiner House.

The couple’s book, Agriculture of Tomorrow (1939) is probably their masterpiece. Although Eugen had compiled the research with his wife, just as they were about to start writing it, he died, leaving the task to her. In it, they set out a series of experiments exploring the influence of the moon and planets and the role of chemical elements on plant growth, and upon the subject of nutrition. They also perform a scientific breakdown of Steiner’s suggestions for the renewal of agriculture.

In a sentence that could be penned today, in the book’s introduction Lili writes, “I want to write therefore about the regeneration of agriculture, which is the basis of the physical existence of men. Without proper food mediating life-forces to the human organism, human beings cannot grow strong and healthy, nor become able to develop the clear minds and moral strength we so urgently need.”

Among the photographs in the book (see below) you can glimpse the Kolisko’s house, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud in Gloucestershire. Lili Kolisko died there in 1976, and it’s interesting for me to reflect that at that very moment I was living only 3 miles away in Lypiatt, Stroud.

Because I am in Gloucestershire often, with two uncles and aunts living just outside Stroud, and on this occasion travelling back from Wales, I thought I would drive past their old house and have a look.

[Big shout out to Jason Warland]

 

Soil like Dirt

 Thanks to Sukhdev for sharing this documentary with me about New York City Garden Activists. Quite a lot of the film’s focus is upon things which happen in gardens, rather than growing. This is a typical media bias. It’s impossibly rare to come across any commentary which connects the dots between farming and culture.

However, the featured Adam Purple is definitely an interesting figure. I’d be including him and “The Garden of Life” in the book in greater depth were I, (a) not already discussing an arguably more interesting guerilla gardener, (b) as Sukhdev points out, Purple was, regrettably, an unsavoury character.

Purple’s “Garden of Eden”, built by him single-handedly over five years starting in 1975, was a well-known open, community garden on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The garden began when the city and the neighborhood were blighted with urban decay. A building was razed in 1973 on Eldridge Street behind Purple’s apartment, and he decided to plant something with his companion, Eve.

The process of clearing the lot took some time since the couple would only use hand tools. Modern machinery was considered “counter-revolutionary.” He would haul manure from the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park and created a highly fertile topsoil. The garden was ready to be planted in the spring of 1975. The garden was designed around concentric circles with a yin-yang symbol in the center. As buildings were torn down on either side, Purple would add new rings to the garden, allowing it to grow. By the end, it was 15,000 square feet featuring a wide range of produce, including corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. He regularly bicycled to Central Park to collect horse manure to use as fertilizer.

Wikipedia entry

In the film, Purple is shown with an enlargement of a photograph from the September 1984 edition of National Geographic. My curiosity got the better of me, and I tracked down a copy of the issue on eBay for a few bob. It’s a truly glorious photograph.

 

Adam Purple looking down upon “The Garden of Life”

The article which it is a part of, “Do we treat our soil like dirt?” By Boyd Gibbons, with photographs by Steven C. Wilson, is excellent. I thought I would go ahead and share it here. I love the illustrated soil cutaway especially.