Chapter 5 – Applications of the Elemental Cycle
Discussion of Example Applications
Plant Physiology
As Goethe recognized, all parts of a plant – such as the roots, leaves, flower, and seeds – are linked to each other via a process of growth whose archetype is a singular formative principle that he termed the “Urpflanze”. This ur-plant is something very much like an Idea – itself without physical manifestation – yet simultaneously instantiated in and through the existence of the entire plant kingdom in all its variability. All plants are participants in the unfolding of the idea of the ur-plant, which is hidden as an “open secret” in the form and growth cycles of actual plants around us.
It was Goethe’s sensitivity to morphology that led him to the experience of the archetypal Plant, and was the fruit of long labor and considerable training in what he called “exact sensorial imagination”, by which every stage of a plants growth and decay could be reproduced inwardly as a sequence of coherently connected moving images and feelings. In this way he was able to notice that regardless of the species of plant under observation, all its unique qualities and patters derived from a high-level pattern of growth and decay which could likewise be found – albeit transformed – in any other species.
We can use the elemental mandala as one way of approaching the nature of this ur-plant, out of which Goethe claimed he could – hypothetically, if he had the appropriate means – produce completely new and viable plant species that Nature herself would be able to produce in her own evolutionary course with sufficient conditions. The elemental cycle helps elucidate the processes by which the ur-plant – and by extension, all plants – operate.
Because we are speaking of the ur-plant, and not any single plant species, it will be important to recognize that in some sense it is life itself that is under discussion; the deepest and most pure expression of ‘living-ness’ is to be found in plants (not minerals or animals), and therefore most clearly in the plant’s highest expression, the archetypal plant. While the beginning of life on our planet is shrouded in mystery and debate, it is quite clear that a number of factors needed to be in place before life could arise, for example, the abundance of water, a source of energy, and the raw materials to create amino acids and ultimately nucleic acids (such as RNA and DNA). This is the Earth element at work: all the constituents of the physical situation had to be in place for the next phase.
The Water element alerts us to how the mere presence of these factors themselves are not enough to produce life. Individually, no single amino acid, nor any arbitrary concatenation of amino acids can be called living – something more is required, and the Water element makes clear that the next phase of the manifestation of life requires an ordering of relationships between these diverse materials. The raw materials must combine together into forms which have higher-level structuring and functioning. At this stage (some theories suggest a ‘chemical soup’), although patterns of chemical synthesis can be established, life does not appear – still something is missing, which is only provided in the Air element.
William Martin and Michael Russel, in a 2003 study, (Martin & Russel, 2003) note that with respect to all living organisms, physical compartmentation through establishment of cell membranes is one of the most highly conserved attributes. The formation of cell membranes itself occurs because of a polarity in the molecules (usually phospholipids) which interact with the surrounding water: one side of a molecule likes to be near water (hydrophilic), while the other side of the same 
molecule likes to be far from water (hydrophobic). This polarity 21 creates the tendency for the hydrophobic ends of molecules to get together in pairs, which then link to other pairs to create a sheet, which can then ‘close the gaps’ at the edges of the sheet by forming a sphere. Thus the Air polarity arising directly out of a Water relationship (between the phospholipids and the water) results in the establishment of a higher-level polarity: that between the inside and the outside of a newly formed ‘cell’, which is made up of a thin, flexible membrane.
Life requires this inner/outer polarity. The cell membrane creates an inner space, which is relatively (but not completely) isolated from the surrounding environment. This allows for a higher ordering to occur within the cell that would otherwise be impossible because of the high number of uncontrollable interactions with all the other products of the environment, many of which would destroy the delicate chemical harmonies exhibited by every living cell. The regulation thus established by the existence of the membrane works precisely because the membrane selectively limits and accepts interaction with the outer environment according to the cells own inner processes along a scale of polarities, in particular with electrolyte balance such as sodium and potassium levels and the taking in and expulsion of nutrients and waste products. As stated in NASA’s astrobiology roadmap, “boundary membranes also divide complex molecular mixtures into large numbers of individual structures that can undergo selective processes required to initiate biological evolution.” (Rothschild, 2003) Thus, the creation of the inner space of the cell provides the right situation for something even higher to occur: the actual beginning of life, where all of the processes occurring in the cell can find mutually enhancing relationships that allow not just for their replication and continuation, but their evolution. This is the Fire element at work. The cell is a whole entity, capable of complex interaction with the environment as well as internally, and it exists as an integral part of the environment while providing something unique to it. In other words, the evolutionary capacity of the single cell becomes linked to the evolution of the whole environment and all its other unique entities – other plants, animals, even the very rocks and atmosphere are all involved in a coevolutionary process of which the plant is an integral piece.
This diversion into the origin of life is important because it provides one round through the cycle which has direct analogs when we consider the patterns of the archetypal plant. To begin with, we can see how all plants have some physical form and structure, with a primal origin in the cell. This is its Earth nature. All the diverse forms of plants result from modifications and adaptations of the basic structure of the cell. The raw materials present in the plant – water, starches, cellulose, phosphorus, carbon dioxide, etc. – are all a part of its Earth nature, they its identifiable, individual parts.
But if we were to restrict our vision only to the Earth level of a plant, it would be as if, instead of listening to a live performance of a Bach symphony, we simply procured a copy of the score and counted up the number and duration of each note with the idea that this gave us all the information needed to fully ‘understand’ the music. With respect to the plant, there is more to it than the sum of its parts; life does not work by simple summation. The Water element brings to light the need for connection – not just between all the parts of the plant itself, but also between the plant and its environment. At the Water level, we notice that all of the Earth aspects of the plant are neither arbitrary nor isolated, but are all embedded in a myriad number of processes, all of which help relate the plant to its environment.
Rooting keep plants in place, stemming provides optimal usage of space by separating the leaves, which themselves drive the whole system through the process of photosynthesis, which allows for the production of a concatenated, compressed image of itself as in the form of spores or seeds. All of these processes are ways through which the archetype of the plant expresses itself in the context of an actual physical environment. The Water element keys us into the idea that the plant, with respect to its life is essentially completely contiguous with its environment. A plant can, in this way, be thought of as a direct expression of its environment, and the environment can be thought of as expressing itself in the form of the plant. Even though every plant has an obvious physical form, if we look beyond the form to the processes, we cannot find any non-arbitrary boundary between the plant processes and the processes of the wider environment – they are seamlessly meshed into one another at all levels. This is made more obvious when we consider that a plant will grow precisely in accordance with the specific ongoing situation it finds in its environment. In other words, changes in the environment are also changes in the plant – although not necessarily in a one-to-one correspondence (because of the Air and Fire elements, yet to be discussed). The Water element sensitizes us to the fact that a continual exchange and interplay between the inner nature of the plant and its required situation in an outer environment are in fact what produces the specific forms and qualities of a given plant in the first place. Indeed, the plant can be experienced as a continual streaming between the manifest physical components available to our base senses and a manifesting but non-physical component available only to our thinking – the ur-plant.
How the plant actually accomplishes this is expressive of the Air element, and we can see that the polarity between the manifest plant and the ur-plant has already been active even in the Earth level. Yet despite the continuity between the plant and its environment, there is more to the puzzle. Plants are not simply expressive of their environment – they themselves fit reciprocally into the environment through processes which are unique to each species of plant. In other words, plants give something back to the environment that was not there before. On the one hand this occurs at a purely Earth-type level, in which plants can be used in any number of ways, obviously by humans but also more generally by the entirety of nature. The growth and decay processes (another polarity) at work within a plant give rise to new expressions within the plant which are capable of actively changing the environment. The highest example of this occurs in the flowering plants, which have an amazing relationship with the insect world, where the production of flowers, pollen, nectar, and so forth, become absolutely entwined with the behavior of the next highest form of life that the plant itself cannot achieve. We also see such reciprocation over larger scales, in the fact that most plants take in carbon dioxide from the air which, through the process of photosynthesis is transformed into starches and sugars for the plant while creating the oxygen necessary for the higher forms of life on the planet – the plants are the lungs of the Earth.
We could say that each plant has a ‘gesture’ which arises out of the boundary conditions formed by the meeting of its internal life processes with its embededness in the wider environment. This ‘gesture’ is well known to those who work with plants on a daily basis, and has led to the discovery of uncountable instances of the most fascinating Air polarity exhibited by the plants: their healing capacities. The plant world is abundant with pharmaceutical compounds – indeed, essentially all active medicines are created directly from or are synthetically derived from plants. These compounds are formed when the plants own life processes are forced to respond to and reciprocate with the surrounding environmental conditions – such as the rhythms of night and day, of hot and cold, of dry and wet, and so forth. This capacity for the plant to form something within itself out of the flowing of its life processes in the context of the impulses of the environment is directly analogous to what in the human being would be the formation of an inner experience on the basis of a sensation of the outer world, such as the arising of a mental image. In each case, something from the environment is taken hold of by inner forces which transform the outer impulse into something analogous but also completely new – a medicine, a thought form.
Within these polarities, the plant is capable of moving further – to the Fire level. Here, amongst all the various pushes and pulls from the environment, as a transformation of its own life processes to a new level, the plant becomes capable of producing a concentrated bit of itself that is capable of manifesting anew as another plant. This capacity for reproduction is, of course, a hallmark of life in general, and its foundation is in the plant world. At the Fire level, all the physical aspects and elements of the plant, all its life processes, and all its reciprocating relationships are harmonized together to allow the production of a seed. The whole constellation of forces that produce the seed as a harmonic maturation of the unique plant is properly expressive of the Fire element, while the actual seed itself (in whatever form it may take) is in fact the ‘New Earth’. Each plant species is unique, and it is through the Fire element that this uniqueness is maintained. Walnuts produce walnut trees, acorns produce oak trees. But all of these are plants, and the Fire element shows us how regardless of the species, it is possible to speak of the plant as an archetype.
We can even see this in the geometry of plant growth, in which the four elements manifest quite distinctly as processes of pointing (Earth), elongating (Water), planarizing (Air), and spherizing (Fire). We begin with the New Earth of the seed, spore or pollen, a point-like structure capable of nothing but maintaining itself independently of its original plant. The seed, a protective Earth structure, has within it something Fiery – all the information needed to create an entirely new plant, but only if the conditions (Water) are right. If the environment is suitable – generally meaning water is readily available – then elongating occurs through rooting and stemming processes. But this stemming is only there so that the leafing process of the plant can occur. This planarizing process is directly expressive of Air, in that the leaf is the most prominent and important membrane between the plant and the environment. The processes of transpiration and photosynthesis are continually regulated by the leafing process, which sensitively optimizes itself according to the conditions in each species and each individual plant through modification of its planarity. The form and function of the leaf is therefore a direct manifestation of the polarity between the inner nature of the plant and its outer environment. In the most evolved plants – the flowers – we can see the 
planarizing forces taken to another level in the flower, which is itself a plane, made up of planar petals, and even the ‘flowering plane’ upon which all the individual flowers, at a specific height from the ground, produces flowers so as to form a connected plane across an entire area such as a field. But all these leafing processes are then transformed again, into the spherizing activity of fruiting. Here, a completely separate inner space is formed that provides an environment in which the next activity – the pointing of seed formation – can take place in such a way as to propagate the species, even at great expense to the original plant, which can burn up much of its resources in the fruiting process. As the highest level of plant manifestation, this capacity is not manifested overtly in many lower plant species. Indeed we can take these four activities described by their geometry of pointing, elongating, planarizing, and spherizing, vary each of them independently, and find actual plant species which correspond to our parameters 22.
Going one step further, we can imagine that in some sense the whole process also moves in reverse – that the seed is, in a way, an excuse for the ability of the plant to root and stem, which is itself an excuse for the leafing process, which is only there to create the ability of the plant, through its fruiting process, to produce new seeds. In other words, we can have the sense that simultaneous to the normal 
direction of growth of a plant from seed to roots and stem to leaves and flowers to fruit and seed, another process is occurring as if backwards, by which the seed works to create the fruit, which makes leaves to gather the required energy from the environment, but which themselves move all the way down and into the earth through stems and roots in order to ground the whole thing. Thinking imaginatively in this way is a step towards achieving for ourselves the experience of Goethe when he perceived the archetypal plant.
Footnotes:
21: Back Indeed, molecules displaying this behavior are said to be “polar”, while “non-polar” molecules do not display this imbalance.
22: Back As another layer of the elemental cycle, we can see these four activities of pointing, elongating, planarizing, and spherizing at work within each separate part of the plant as well as along the whole development of a single plant. The simultaneous presence of these activities in each part of the plant is even more pronounced when a comparative morphological approach is taken and many species are examined side by side – obviously such a study is far beyond the confines of the present work but is quite illuminative.
