Bhawisha and Shachindra Joshi: “Quick Book of Minerals and Animals”

As the introduction of this booklet says it is “a concise summary” of the work of the Joshis’ last few years.

Basically it gives tables with short explanations around the structure, the sensations, issues and miasms of the periodic table and the animal remedies.

The “Quick Book” is meant as a summary and guide through the huge amount of material that the Joshis have elaborated on and taught in their seminars, written down in several books and will still write in another book to come soon. This is important to keep in mind when dealing with such a book. It can be a help to those who have heard the full story and wish for a quick orientation and reference. It is not meant as a “short-cut” for the beginner.

So the major part of the book consists of tables of the rows and columns of the periodic table and of many animal groups differentiating clearly and often, in fresh and juicy expressions, the issues, themes and aspects of that group of remedies. Some of these tables add to and extend on similar ones given by Sankaran or Scholten, some give new insights such as comparisons between lanthanides, noble gases and imponderables or between nosodes, bacteria, sarcodes and fungi.

The latest and new development of the Joshisʼ is the setting up of analogies between the periodic table and animals groups, which fills a third of the book. Following the evolutionary pattern within the animal phyla and classes, they arranged them according to the themes and issues already familiar from the mineral groups shown before. The idea is similar to the ones Jan Scholten or Michal Yakir are following with their recent works on the plant tables.

Seeing all those animal groups so finely differentiated raises the question: How come they have so many cases of extremely rare animals that even, for example, aardwolves and other hyaena, can be assorted into different rows, or numbats, anteaters, pangolins and others that we have to google to find out what they are, all sorted to rows and columns? The answer lies in an understanding of the basic pattern of human disease that is totally new and different and gives the animal remedies a dominant role.

Homeopaths who are used to working with the sensation method will notice that the Joshisʼ use terms in a different way and have a different underlying theory than other prominent teachers of the Bombay school, e. g., the common idea of the levels is that a patient experiences different levels of awareness, while the homeopath has to watch carefully from which level the information is coming. Each level is expressing the unique pattern of the disease and the remedy in a different way, as emotion (called level three), as image (called level four) or as vital sensation (called level five). The deeper you go within the levels, the clearer the remedy becomes, but all remedies, all patterns express themselves fully within all levels. So the point is not that you get a different remedy from each level, but that you prescribe with more confidence and clarity if the information coming from different levels fits.

The Joshisʼ on the other hand use the term “level” for the depth of understanding of the patient, with the idea that on a deeper level you will “in most cases find the animal pattern” (p. 2), while it is only superficially looking like a mineral or plant. So the theory is that in most patients the “deepest” remedy is an animal, whereas a more superficial or initial understanding of the case often brings up plants or minerals.

Another new theory, which has less impact on the practice, though, is that the pattern to be healed (called “prototype” here) is something we are born with like our DNA. Maybe this idea will have to be elaborated on more clearly in the book to come as it is easy to be misunderstood in this summary.

Certainly these new theoretical approaches will give nourishment to a lot of interesting debates in the homeopathic community. Behind those there lies broad practical experience in cases, the structure of which is given here like a skeleton. I am sure this book and its tables will prove to be helpful to a large readership and it makes us look forward to the extended volume on that subject.