Steiner's GA 312 image of instinctive natural pharmacy: a blackbird poisoned by a garden spider flies straight to black henbane and heals itself.
The Blackbird and the Henbane in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's illustration of instinctive natural pharmacy, given in Spiritual Science and Medicine (GA 312), the course for physicians he delivered in Dornach in the spring of 1920. A blackbird that devours a garden spider takes in a creature woven through with extra-telluric planetary forces. Those forces begin to stir inside the bird, which in its inner tendencies becomes a replica of extra-telluric life; without help it dies in violent convulsions. The bird therefore flies straight to black henbane, Hyoscyamus niger, a plant doubly terrestrial because it grows upward from the soil and stores an unworked substance as poison. The henbane's poison rouses the bird's defensive instinct and restores its earthly balance. Steiner uses the case to argue that healing knowledge once lived as protective instinct throughout nature, and that medicine must consciously regain what the blackbird still knows.
The Blackbird and the Henbane is the most vivid parable in Steiner's 1920 medical course: a bird that has poisoned itself with a garden spider finds its own antidote in a poisonous plant. For Steiner, the episode proves that remedy-finding intelligence is not confined to the human skull. It hovers in nature itself, and the earliest medicine, down to the Hippocratic school, drew on the same protective instinct.
In Steiner's Own Words
When the bird swallows the spider, the internal planetary forces begin to stir. These planetary forces which still have the urge towards assuming shape tend to permeate the body of the bird which has to struggle against them. For from the moment of devouring the spider, the blackbird in its inner tendencies becomes a replica of extra-telluric life. Therefore the bird has recourse to the appropriate medicinal plant, which has become similar to the terrestrial sphere, as contrasted with the planetary in two respects; both by its growing upwards from the soil and by its retention of a substance which it cannot wholly work up under the planetary influence but stores up as a poison. The bird seeks help from the henbane.
What it Means Today
Steiner offered the blackbird as evidence that remedy-finding intelligence works through the whole of nature, and modern biology has since built a discipline on exactly such cases. In 1987 the primatologist Michael Huffman observed a parasite-ridden chimpanzee named Chausiku, in Tanzania's Mahale Mountains, seek out the bitter shrub Vernonia amygdalina, chew its pith, and recover within a day; WaTongwe healers used the same plant for the same complaints. In the early 1990s Eloy Rodriguez of Cornell and Richard Wrangham of Harvard named this field zoopharmacognosy, the study of animal self-medication, and its case files now range from parrots eating clay at Peruvian riverbank licks to city finches lining nests with mite-repelling fibres.
Zoopharmacognosy records the behaviour; Steiner read its inner mechanics. The sick creature does not calculate. It is steered by a protective instinct in which, he says in the same lecture, intelligence and reason hover everywhere and are not seated in the skull alone. Thalira synthesis: the blackbird is Steiner's counter-image to the medical diploma, the reminder that the Hippocratic inheritance began as participation in nature's own reason, so that a healing science regains by conscious method what the bird still owns by instinct. A practitioner who takes the case seriously starts reading remedy relationships, creature, poison, and plant, as polarities of planetary and earthly forces rather than as isolated chemical accidents.
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