Tycho de Brahe Verlag

SUMMARIES 2005

MANFRID GÄDEKE – Traces of Chronos in the root region

THOMAS GÖBEL – On the behaviour of the leaf base of leaves in the vicinity to the blossoms of the genera Ranunculus and Adonis

WOLFGANG SCHAD – Krkonose – the central region of the Giant Mountains in the Czech Republic: impressions after the political change

RUBEN STELZNER – The golden section and the mystery of beauty

U. EDLUND – The threefoldness of the skin

THOMAS GÖBEL – Sound – language – rhythm and rhyme

MANFRID GÄDEKE

Traces of Chronos in the root region

Close investigation of rhythmic geniculation in root systems reveals cyclic processes of generation. Distinct roots repeatedly cease and are succeeded by lateral ones. At a longer or shorter time before such a growth interruption takes place, the direction of growth changes more or less suddenly downwards. The causes of such phenomena were investigated by means of observations both in the natural habitat and during experimental, mainly hydroponic cultivation. Investigations of plants with shoots on roots – aptly termed »suckers« – were especially informative. Such shoots, and the »secondary« lateral roots belonging to them, initially grow »parasitically«. They mature when the resources in the mother root that enabled their formation are declining. In doing so, they first make greater contact with the other plant organs and provide them with water and nutrients, i. e. with assimilates. This is expressed in the change to vertical growth of the roots. The ratio of «parasitic« to integrated growth varies between different roots and shoots. As the plant gains vigour its capacity increases to supply the new organs for longer thus enabling their extensive growth. But as they become denser and less able to reach new resources in the environment, the maturation processes increase. Thus, in a single vegetative period, the growth of the whole plant comes to a standstill brought about by its own development. This leads to a »selection« of the few meristems that can continue the growth of the plant on a higher level. In this way the proper plant form arises together with its adaptation to the particular outer conditions. This paper shows that connecting links exist between »normal« continued growth of extant shoots and the generation of root suckers. Thus the processes that are described for the latter can also to some extent explain the cyclic growth of other plants without root suckers.
Of special importance for all fields of botanical research is the recognition that plants, in their polarisation into root and shoot in proper temporal and spatial order, create the same conditions of deficiency or excess for the growth of their parts that are also produced in a more accidental way by outer circumstances. This enables recognition of a joint type (in Goethe´s sense) in all externally caused modifications (including the species differences determined by ancestry).

THOMAS GÖBEL

On the behaviour of the leaf base of leaves in the vicinity to the blossoms of the genera Ranunculus and Adonis

In the family Ranunculaceae we sometimes find transitional forms between the usually distinct leaf organs. The last leaves before the inflorescences in the leaf successions of Ranunculus acris (meadow buttercup), Ranunculus auricomus (goldilocks buttercup) and Adonis (pheasant´s eye) show morphological formations which have not been described mhitherto: they comprise small pinnules originating from the veins at the leaf base before the vessels merge into a ring in the petiole. We think that these pinnules form the transition to the sepals from the leaves adjacent to the inflorescence.

WOLFGANG SCHAD

Krkonose – the central region of the Giant Mountains in the Czech Republic: impressions after the political change

In addition to short excursions from 1994 to 2003, motives, experiences and results of a one-week excursion at Whitsun 2004 to the Krkonose mountains (»Giant Mountains«) in the Czech Republic are presented. Its landscape-geographical aspects are differentiated into three components: sensorial-objective, mind-mood and subconscious lifesphere. The common task of the working group was to find a way of expressing the aspects of the living (etheric) quality of the individual landscape.

RUBEN STELZNER

The golden section and the mystery of beauty

What is beauty? It is not difficult for us to name things which we perceive as beautiful, harmonic or pleasant. But at the same time this property seems to evade all objective and scientific descriptions. A general law has not yet been found behind the mystery of beauty.
On the path towards understanding beauty, modern natural sciences have reencountered and again focused interest on the golden section, a special mathematical ratio whose proportions were first recognised thousands of years ago. Many striking examples show that the golden section is not only related to beauty and good proportions in very different cultures but also – as recent research in natural sciences shows – plays a key role in the development of life. It seems strange that the special role of the golden section – recently acknowledged by biologists, mathematicians and cultural scientists – had already been described several centuries ago in the proportio divina, the holy ratio. Religious descriptions of this sort take on a completely new level of significance through recognition by modern science.
The facts and parallels presented by modern research on the golden section are impressive but not satisfying. For it seems that hiding behind all phenomena there is a universal pattern which is more than only a ratio of numbers. What then is the golden section´s principle that is preferred by nature during evolution and which we as human beings experience as beautiful or divine? Knowledge of the golden section reveals a character that forms the basis of beauty and the evolution of life: the manifestation of the indissoluble relationship between the whole and its intrinsic contrasts.

U. EDLUND

The threefoldness of the skin

If the three layers of the human skin are analysed according to a functional view, a picture of the effective formative forces in the skin is produced.
The primary formative force of the outermost layer (epidermis) produces the horny substance which isolates the physical organism from its environment. The production of the horny substance takes place by a death process of the horn-producing cells involved. This is called terminal differentiation. This process of terminal differentiation leads the substance to solidification and rigidity from which it cannot be reintegrated into the living organism but is expelled. Physiologically and biochemically the epidermis shows the characteristics of organs with ectodermal origin: the brain and the nerve system.
The internal layer of the skin, the fatty tissue, presents a functional character that is polar to the epidermis. The subcutaneous fatty tissue is part of the metabolic system of the organism. As a store for fats it is situated between uptake of nutritional fats and their release according to the needs of the organism. Moreover, the fatty tissue is an endocrine organ whose hormones affect various metabolic processes. In its ack of rigid, solid structures and the resistance to apoptosis (programmed cell death) of the fat cells it represents a polarity to the epidermis.
The dermis as the middle layer reveals properties of both formative principles. The histological picture of the dermis is determined by the intercellular substance which consists of a structured part, the fibres, and a structureless part, the amorphous matrix. As a tissue the dermis is rich in blood and lymph vessels, and also the intercellular substance is functionally part of the organism´s circulation processes. In the dermis the functions of the rhythmic system predominate.
Thus the skin with its three layers represents all three parts of the whole human organism: nerve-sense system, rhythmic system and digestive system.

THOMAS GÖBEL

Sound – language – rhythm and rhyme

The basis of all language is sound comprising vowels and consonants. Vowels are expressions of the human mind: A – amazement at the wonders of the world and one´s own soul; E – a sobering encounter with one´s own self; I – an expression of one´s own human being in relation to the world; O – loving attention to the world; U – slight fear of something unfathomable; EI – stroking, comforting, and AU – reverence for everything sublime. Consonants, however, are noises adapted from nature which man integrates transformed into his soul, relating them to the state of his mind.
Human speech organisation and the speech itself are threefold:
1. the force and dynamics of speech are intentionally created by the muscles of the chest and trunk and represent willing in speech; 2. sonation is created by the larynx and is the expression of feeling; 3. the mouth and nose as speech organs create the different consonants thereby bringing thoughts into speech. The overall development of the German language is likewise threefold. Ancient High German was a
language of willing with almost magical forces (magic spells of Merseburg). Middle High German was a language that especially expressed state of mind or feeling (medieval German love poems). And it was not until Martin Luther that New High German became the language of thinking. Rudolf Steiner further developed German to enable it to express spiritual concepts.
In ancient Greece, artistic, rhythmic speech had already existed, albeit without rhyme. Greek hexameter corresponds to the heart-lung rhythm of the sleeping human being. Rhyming poetry developed in the Middle Ages (Edda, medieval German love poems). Development of rhyme is demonstrated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his Faust (part II, act 3, inner courtyard of a castle), where Faust teaches rhyming to Helena. By union of the »male« with the »female«, i. e. the content of thought (Faust) with the rhyme structure formed by the etheric body (Helena), poetry comes into existence and is then born as Euphorion.
In his autobiographical work Dichtung und Wahrheit (book XVI) Goethe gives an imaginative picture of how he experiences the development of poetry in himself as a »night« process of his inner being for which he feels a deep respect, almost like a mother hen surrounded by her brood of hatched and chirping chicks. Goethe wrote poems and cycles of poems especially when he abstained from physical relationships with the women he loved. But also in other circumstances he could appeal to his rhyming etheric body, for instance when contemplating Schiller´s skull on the occasion he was asked to identify it in the vault where Schiller was buried.