The Form Gestures of Animals

by Dave Robison

We live at a time when we have available more facts and details of living things than ever before. Yet busy within their fields of specialization, scientists no longer ask the fundamental question: What is life? This essay is an extension of the gestures of plants discussed in biodynamics; it is exploration of the life-gesture observed in the forms of animals and covering three chapters.

The Threefold Form

Introduction
Carnivores
Rodents
Ungulates
Additional Mammals

The Sheaths of the Preparations

Horned Animals
Antlered Animals
Making the Preparations
The Stag's Bladder
The Cow Intestine and Mesentery
The Skull
Preparations without a Sheath

The Soul Life of Animals

Reproduction
Emotional Life of Animals
Influence from the Environment
Domestic Animals
Human Threefoldness

Acknowledgements
The inspiration and primary source is Wolfgang Shad, Man and Mammals, Toward a Biology of Form, 1977, ISBN 0-914614-10-X. He follows Steiner's approach based on Goethe's nature observations, a training into not only careful observations and clear concepts but an interweaving of both. We have a new tool not available to Shad - that of DNA analysis, Biologists have revised some ideas about evolution. Recent findings regarding the ancestry of animals are found at Tree of Life, http://tolweb.org/tree/phylogeny.html. Important insight into the animal sheaths is contained in Dr. Karl König, "On the Sheath of the Preparation", in Earth and Man, 1982, ISBN 0-938250-1813,

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