Nutrition from Earth and Cosmos

Nutrition from Earth and Cosmos

Food quality is an important issue for our modern world. There is an increasing awareness that empty calories and mass-produced food don’t offer the quality nutrition that people need, and that smaller amounts of better-quality food could help combat the epidemic of obesity sweeping the Western world.

Karl König recognized the significance of human nutrition nearly one hundred years ago. In the 1920s, he began lecturing on the subject as part of a program of social help in deprived city areas, and in 1936 he gave a course for physicians and educators.

This book contains two essays and sixteen lectures, ranging from the significance of nutrition in early childhood and during illness and descriptions of the digestive process and the inner organs from a spiritual point of view to his ideas on the future development of nourishment. König’s work is introduced by three contemporary researchers into nutritional practice, and finishes with König’s appreciation of the only mealtime grace given by Rudolf Steiner.

C O N T E N T S:

A Note about this Volume by Richard Steel

Nutrition and Healing by Erdmut Schädel
Anthroposophical Research into Nutrition by Petra Kühne
Nutrition from Cosmos and Earth: a Contemporary Question by Anita Pedersen

Cosmic and Earthly Nutrition
1. Nutrition in General
2. Vegetarian Food or Meat
3. Childhood and Infant Nutrition
4. Special Diets

The Cultural Impulse of Agriculture
1. Milk and Blood
2. Feces and the Brain
3. The Rain of Cosmic Nutrition

Earthly and Cosmic Nutritional Streams in Human Beings and Plants
1. The Contrast between the Senses and Digestion
2. Nutrition in Digestion and the Senses
3. Silica and Calcium
4. The Endocrine Glands

The Meteorological Organs
1. Introduction
2. The Lung
3. The Speres surrounding the Earth
4. The Liver
5. The Kidney
6. The Heart

Two Essays
The Relation of the Intestine and Brain
The Plant-seeds are Quickened

About the Author

Karl König (1902–1966) was born in Vienna, in Austria-Hungary, the only son of a Jewish shoemaker. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1927, with a special interest in embryology. After graduating, he was invited by Ita Wegman to work in her Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut, a clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland for people with special needs. He married Mathilde Maasberg in 1929. Dr. König was appointed paediatrician at the Rudolf Steiner-inspired Schloß Pilgrimshain institute in Strzegom, where he worked until 1936, when he returned to Vienna and established a successful medical practice. Owing to Hitler’s invasion of Austria, he was forced to flee Vienna to Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1938. Dr. König was interned briefly at the beginning of World War II, but on his release in 1940 he set up the first Camphill Community for Children in Need of Special Care at Camphill on the outskirts of Aberdeen. From the mid-1950s, König began more communities, including one in North Yorkshire, the first to care for those beyond school age with special needs. In 1964, König moved to Brachenreuthe near Überlingen on Lake Constance, Germany, where he set up another community, where he died in 1966.