The reasoning and explantions behind the construction of the book
By Michal Yakir
Why - or the quest for order
Reading old homeopathic manuscripts, we find that less than one-hundred years ago a huge variety of plant remedies was in common use, whereas nowadays, homeopaths tend to use only a small portion of available plant remedies, and an even smaller selection of all existing plants. The old knowledge has been largely forgotten - maybe along the general decline in the use of herbal medicine in the world - to be replaced with more intensive use of minerals and new materials.
Contemporary homeopathy uses the arrangement of the minerals, their location and relationship in the Periodic Table in order to understand the nature of remedies made from those substances, assuming that an primary or advanced location in the table has homeopathic implications. In other words, the order of the Periodic Table, ergo in nature, carries homeopathic significance. A lesser-known fact is that the plant kingdom has its own systematic botanical order, based on evolutionary related groups of plants and ordered according to an evolving sequence. Wouldn’t it be most serviceable to have a method by which to approach the plant homeopathic remedies in a systematic fashion, based on a comprehensive understanding of the natural order within the plant kingdom, and by that approach, group individual plants according to common homeopathic attributes?
Already Farrington had noted, early in the 20th century, themes common to related botanical families. More recently, contemporary homeopaths including Scholten, Vermeulen, Mangialavori, Kreisberg, Sankaran and his group and Rupal Desay began arranging remedies according to botanical groups (families or orders) and typifying their common characteristics, themes, Miasms and so on. All in all, so far, the homeopathic themes of many plant families have been defined. But what about an all-encompassing order of plant families, one that corresponds to that of the minerals? There is a clear absence of a global overview of the processes that dictate the nature of every family or group of plants. Once those principles that govern the plant kingdom are grasped, once the general order, prevalence in nature is established, an understanding of the lawfulness behind the symptomatology common to botanically related homeopathic remedies will emerge in its wondrous order.
How did the Table of Plants come into being?
As a former botanist I was intrigued by the idea of the developmental order found in nature, and the possibility of homeopathic implications of this found dynamics in the plant kingdom. Investigating the question for many years, my understanding evolved gradually: like pieces of a puzzle, bits of information coalesced into a full-size picture: Clinical observation, late-night studies of Materia Medica and Provings, reading new homeopathic ideas*, conversing with colleagues about their own understanding of individual botanical groups - were all incorporated with botanical, psychological, and Kabbalistic understanding.
The integration of all of this data led to the development of a general scheme that consolidated into a comprehensive representation in a two-dimensional tabular structure: a table that exposes the astonishing order which underlies the association between plant remedies and their evolutionary developmental stages - to human health, development and disease processes.
How was the table formatted?
The first step was formatting a botanical ground. The simplest fact is that the very nature of plants are development: in the personal level – most of the plants continue to grow and develop all their life. From a general point of view – plants display a clear developing evolutionary process along the history of earth. Just observing the order that is to be found in the plant kingdom, with its obvious development aspect, confirms that there is an order in the universe.
From a purely botanical perspective, plant kingdom taxonomy is structured and arranged as a tree of evolutionary development, where the location of every plant family in this "tree” is a consequence of successive or independent courses of evolution. The main paths of development are representable on a separate axis, which in principle is amenable to conversion into a two-dimensional table[1]: To configure one axis in the table, each botanical Subclass (the main division inside each plant Class) was represented as a column, sequenced according to evolutionary order.
Once this botanical axis was set, it was possible to regard all the homeopathic remedies within every column (Subclass) "as if one remedy” and learn of their shared attributes. Following this line of thinking, I assembled and analyzed all the common or recurrent themes of each Subclass. Once the common attributes of each column emerged, a clear correspondence with human development was revealed, as best described by C.Jung: namely to the process of development of the Ego, separation, and individuation. This was topped with an understanding of the nature of human development into conscious creative beings, in human general course and in every person`s privet course of life.
Upon gaining a general understanding of the horizontal structure of the table – that is, seeing that a botanical evolutionary order could be superimposed on known human processes of development – further accuracy was required. This was achieved by subdividing the developmental process of the Ego, (as represented by the columns) according to a finer botanical partition, thus creating a two-dimensional developmental process: Within every column (Subclass), the secondary partition was introduced by considering the botanical subdivisions of each Subclass: That botanical level that falls under Subclass is called "Order", where every Order is a a higher hierarchy above Families. Thus in every Order, all the remedies, big and small, were again studied "as if one remedy”, once more extracting their common attributes. The themes of the Orders, arranged in evolutionary sequence, revealed a correspondence with another aspect of human development, namely the stages of development from birth to old age. This sequence was observed repeatedly in every column.
Together, both botanic axes comprise a comprehensive table of plant remedies that corresponds with two axes of human developmental stages.
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[1] I used Cronquist botanic systematics for basis, as this more traditional method of classification seems most congruent system to explain homeopathic data, to my understanding, and seemed most fit to describe development stages. It dose not negate the importance or validity of the APG system.