Steiner's name for the single formative power that shapes quartz in the earth, wax cells in the hive, and dissolved silica in the human body.
What is the Hexagonal Force?
The Hexagonal Force in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for one formative power that appears in three kingdoms at once, described in a lecture given to the workmen at the Goetheanum in Dornach on 1 December 1923 and published in GA 351 as Nine Lectures on Bees. In the mineral kingdom the earth drives this power outward and lets it finish: quartz grows from the rock as a six-sided crystal tapering to a point. In the animal kingdom the bee externalises the same power as wax, building the six-sided brood cell in which the larva is shaped. In the human being the power streams perpetually from the head down through the limbs as silicic acid, held in the highest possible state of solution and always on the point of crystallising, yet never permitted to finish. Steiner treats that arrest as a condition of life itself, and treats honey and silica as its dietary support.
The Hexagonal Force is what Steiner called the will in silica to take the six-sided form. He asked his workmen why quartz, honeycomb, and the human body should agree on one geometry, and answered that they do not copy each other: earth, bee, and man are each worked on by a single power, arrested at a different stage in each.
In Steiner's Own Words
I imagine that you are not all of you good geometricians. Geometry is not exactly familiar to you all; you could perhaps not straight away, draw a quartz crystal, or model one in clay. But your body is a very good geometrician, and wants always to be forming such crystals. We are prevented from doing this. All life consists in the holding back of death, and when we can no longer hold death back, we die. Now let us look at the bees. The bee flies out and gathers nectar. This it works upon in its own body, and in so doing provides its own life-forces. Further the bee prepares the wax. What does it do with the wax? It makes hexagonal cells. You see, the earth makes hexagonal silicic-acid crystals. The bee makes hexagonal cells, and this is extremely interesting.
What it Means Today
Six months after that Dornach lecture, Steiner gave the Agriculture Course at Count Carl von Keyserlingk's estate at Koberwitz in Silesia, now Kobierzyce in Poland, over eight lectures between 7 and 16 June 1924. The farmers who heard it left with a preparation numbered 501: quartz ground to a fine powder, packed into a cow horn, buried through the summer, then stirred for an hour in water and sprayed as a fine mist over the standing crop at sunrise. Nothing measurable survives that dilution, which is precisely the point Steiner had made in Dornach about the human body, where the value of silica lies not in its substantiality but in the will within it. The Experimental Circle of Anthroposophical Farmers formed that same year to test the preparations in the field, and since 1928 the Demeter mark has required both 500, the horn manure worked into the soil, and 501, the horn silica sprayed toward the light. Conventional agronomy reads quartz as inert sand. Biodynamic practice reads it as the earth's unfinished gesture toward the hexagon, applied at the point where leaf meets sun.
Thalira synthesis: the honeycomb and the sprayed vineyard are one act read at two scales, a creature and a farmer each borrowing a geometry that the earth is never allowed to finish inside the human being.
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