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Materia Medica

Planting by the Stars






Homoeopathic agriculture pioneers

Rudolf Steiner: biodynamics
Lily and Eugen Kolisko
May E Bruce
Hugo Erbe
Glen Atkinson
Enzo Nastati
Konrad Wurthle
GSR Murthy
Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj
Iftikhar Waris
Others ...


In the Autumn of 1986 Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj was visiting a friend's house in Switzerland. They had some problems with their fruit trees, and since the family had fared well with homoeopathic treatments, the mother argued, why not the fruit trees? Around the back, pear and apple trees were growing along trellis. The leaves had dark red rings erupting which had spread through the trees very quickly. The trees were demanding of water. In a human these would be close to the symptoms of the remedy Belladonna so that was given to the trees. The trees recovered, the fruit lost the bitter taste of previous years, and there has been no sign of rust ever since.

Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj has been trying remedies of the homoeopathic pharmacopoeia, sometimes using this anthropomorphic projection onto plants as a first guess, sometimes using the companion plants in potency, occasionally using the pests as a nosode whilst at other times the predator has been applied. The gleanings of this first tentative step into a new field is now recorded in Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj's materia medica and the first attempts at a structure of a repertory. This was published in the book 'Homoeopathy for Farm and Garden' in 2006, and Considera has been granted permission to take this seed and grow it on the web!

Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj, a Dutch homoeopath, has based his approach and recommendations firmly on the shoulders of Hahnemann and Kent and the classical school of homoeopathy: the minimum dose, the similimum, the totality of the symptoms, a single dose of a simple remedy. These pillars of Hahnemannian homoeopathy remain in this agricultural homoeopathy.

An issue that was clarified for me when reading the materia medica is that when one is using a pesticide one is focusing upon the pest; when using a poison one is focusing upon the organism which is supposed to be the 'cause' of the disease. But pests are ubiquitous as are pathogenic organisms. A question is why some plants thrive in their presence and others fall ill. The therapeutic approach depends on the answer to this. If the opportunistic pathogen gets the plant because of the randomness of nature - if it is just the plant's turn - then it is reasonable to deal directly with the pathogen. However, if one answers that the health of the plant is reflected in its susceptibility to those pathogens, then one will focus on the plant and its health. Seen from the second perspective the poisonous herbicides and pesticides are just another burden to an ailing plant and, not only are they unhelpful to the health of the plant, they add insult to injury.

The majority of the first homeopathic preparations that went in the materia medica have been suggested by Kaviraj in his "Homeopathy for Farm and Garden", and the one everyone in the UK asks about is Helix Tosta for slugs.

It is a great loss to our small commmunity that Kavi died in 2013. I wrote a small memory for hpathy.


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