[Old] Chapter 6: Hauschka, Herzeele and Baumgartner [New Ch.9 V0.4]

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For this chapter I have a lot of homework to do… I need to (re-)read Rudolf Hauschka’s The Nature of Substance (Substanzlehre). Meanwhile an outline of what I recall…

Hauschka discovered Herzeele’s work possibly in the early 1930’s. Was this after hearing or reading Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture lecture in 1924? In his Substanzlehre he wrote about the ‘biological transmutation’ experiments which he had conducted, inspired by Herzeele’s research. However, Hauschka’s research differed significantly from that of Herzeele. He investigated the increase in weight of a closed culture of micro-organisms and in particular, the variations in weight with the phases of moon. My understanding was that he investigated the new forming of matter, not the transmutation of one chemical element into another. Had Herzeele believed he was studying the new forming of chemical elements – a transmutation of spirit (non-material cosmic forces) into matter? I didn’t think so, but I need to find out; Herzeele wrote: it is not the soil that produces the plant, but the plant that produces the soil.

Some time in the 1930s Wim Holleman worked with Hauschka, conducting Herzeele inspired experiments.

In the 1980s(?) Stefan Baumgartner attempted a repeat of Haushka’s experiments, but these were unsuccessful [Stephan Baumgartner: Hauschkas Wägeversuche (Weight variations of germinating plants in a closed system), Verlag am Goetheanum (Mathematisch-Astronomische Sektion), Dornach, 1992].

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