The Homœopathic Proving of

Kauri

Agathis Australis

Introduction

Kauri Introduction

Kauri Materia Medica

Kauri Repertory

Kauri Cases

Introductory Paragraphs and Poem
by Misha Norland.

Introduction
by Alastair Gray

This Proving

Kauri - An Introduction

Kauri - The Signature

The Remedy

Rubrics

The Methodology

The Provers

Introductory Paragraphs and Poem
by Misha Norland.

The impulse to prove Kauri was based upon a variety of impressions which included the staggering age, size and splendour of the mature trees and the mythology about the trees which abound in New Zealand. The deciding factor, however, was the signature: this comprises of the crime of the wholesale destruction of native New Zealand forests within which the Kauri is the giant, and the signature of the unhealing wound: the resinous gum which oozes (in the case of old wounds, for hundreds, even thousands of years) from damaged branches forming stalactites aloft and corresponding stalagmites upon the tree's mighty roots and the forest floor below. Indeed this gum, which in the Victorian era had commercial value as a furniture polish, was 'bled' from the trees in the manner of maple syrup, while solidified deposits were dug up from logged forest sites. Lumps of aged resin used to be a common find, washed up on Northland beaches.

Agathis Australis first appeared about 130 million years ago. Botanically it is a primitive form, as are its relatives, the Norfolk Pine and the Monkey-puzzle tree, yet of the genus it is the giant. A mature Kauri may be upward of 2000 years old and has more wood in it than any other tree in existence. The Waipoua forest in New Zealand's Northlands is the only remaining stronghold of these forest lords, and impressed me with a lasting reverence for that which is ancient, sacred and strong. The site of the tree used in the proving is known as Cathedral Grove and, at the time of collection of the specimen, was reached after a considerable trek upon a tortuous woodland path. It was in the company of Elisha Norrie that I first made the acquaintance of the ancient tree named by the Maori people of the region: Yakas. All ancient trees have individual names, being held in reverence by the Maori. There is a story telling that the two giants of ocean and land, whale and Kauri exchanged 'skins' in an act of mutual admiration. Kauri is also accounted for in the Maori genesis myth. Alistair Gray writes of this in his extensive introduction which follows on. Giant Kauri were used in the construction of ceremonial and war ships, yet prior to logging in the 19th and 20th century, the trees were regarded as sacred forest lords.

Misha and Sam Norland in front of a Kauri Tree giving some idea of its size.

Having no alcohol or jar into which to place a specimen of Yakas' sap and gum on the occasion of our visit to the Waipoua forest, we agreed that Elisha would do the deed as soon as she was again in the region.

I had returned to England from my visit to New Zealand in 1992 when Elisha wrote to me, informing that she had obtained a vial of sap and gum from Yakas, "As we had agreed, I bored a small hole through the bark of Yakas, but not before sitting in the stillness of the bush and meditating upon the task, asking that the spirit of trees and forest offer this up willingly, so that the homoeopathic remedy could be made. I was overcome with longing and loneliness as I began to collect the sap, so that I had to take care not to accidentally let a tear fall into the vial." The sap issuing from a small wound inflicted by knife actually flows as fast as tears, the internal sap pressure being so high. This then was the first proving effect of Kauri. Subsequently this specimen (sap and scrapings of gum in absolute alcohol) was run up to 30c and 200c potencies by Selene Homoeopathics in New Zealand from which medicating tinctures were posted to me. From these the homoeopathic provings were carried out. These potencies are also lodged with Helios Homoeopathic Pharmacy in UK.

While in New Zealand, I wrote this poem:

Images out of time

It is simple to know that the grandeur of oceans
as they crash upon reefs and beaches are creations of a God in eternal bliss
who also casts upon the shifting sands of time skeletons innumerable,
bones of whales, Kauri gum and sea-shell dust. The agony before death,
chaos of body, like tremors under earth, when the solidity of rock
is changed into water's wave, challenges precepts of certainty. Let them go,
all impermanent ideas, for the place from which we begin our journey
is a no man's land of imponderability
where we may wish to dream into being all forests and rivers,
fishes and Fauns, dragonflies' wings and the myriad things, for
each is a variant upon the theme of the blueprint of the Mistress of forms.

We may wish to slumber beside Her, in the aura of Her warmth,
in range of the drumming of Her heart beat, and walk Her path upon life's sands,
our smaller steps falling in place within the marks of Her grander feet.

Apprenticed to Gods we may be, inventing the details of our lives, prescribing
the remedies for our diseases, finding the panorama, such as nature unfolds,
that enlivens our spirit and mirrors an inner view of soul which pleases.

Intention and pattern correspond as in the veining of a leaf,
as in the spirals of shells; to know the one is to be drawn
into the perfumed garden of the heart where lovers spin their spells.

Thus apprenticed to Gods yet being of human kind, we may well
steer into the wind of wisdom, and ultimately find that this world
of pleasures and pains, does reflect the heavenly realm.

I am indebted to the sterling work of Alastair Gray without which the provings of Kauri would be incomplete. Not only did he conduct further and detailed provings, he also extracted, collated, repertorized and presented the material in its present form and organization.

It is possible that Kauri, that ancient remnant from the distant past, will prove to be as important a polychrest as our other famous tree remedy: Thuja. Its range is different and appropriate for an age yet to come into full expression: the age of the realization of the wound which we are inflicting upon ourselves, our inner and outer nature, through the wholesale destruction of the natural world.

On a positive note, New Zealand set aside is regenerating and Kauri is reappearing. Its juvenile form (rickers) thrust upwards in forests with great vigour reaching a magnificent height in a mere hundred years, then thickening up and loosing all trace of lateral branches. The provers felt a great affinity with childhood and the natural world. We note that in direct proportion to destructive processes and the 'un-grounding' of ourselves we are witnessing a growing interest in activities informed by spiritual values and in previously occult magical and shamanic practices. The awakening of the higher chakras, clairvoyant visioning and focus upon the brow centre in particular, is evident and is seen in the Kauri proving. One of the New Zealand provers imaged a red spider upon the third eye centre, while one of Alastair's provers felt the energy as if the forehead was pulled forward, another as if wearing a medieval jouster's helmet with a forward peak.

Alastair gives the key themes in the latter part of his introduction.

Introduction by Alastair Gray

This Proving

Reading a proving document can be at best, an opportunity to glimpse the medical mysteries hidden latent within a substance, or about as enthralling as watching paint dry. It depends on how you look at it. My own initiation into the encyclopedias of Allen and Hering left me with the uncomfortable feeling of being submerged in an entanglement of unrelated and incomprehensible information and very lost. But my experiences over the last few years taking part in the provings of AIDS, Plutonium, Mica, Molybdenum, and the supervision of this proving of Agathis Australis, plus regularly prescribing new remedies in my practise such as Salmon, Scorpion, Hydrogen and Chocolate, has altered that perception greatly.

While so much in Homoeopathy is intangible, unable to be seen, unable to be measured, unable to be repeated, especially to the gaze of medical orthodoxy from outside the profession, it is only the provings that seem to speak a similar language. To the outsider glancing in, the idea of a proving is understandable.

But to those within Homoeopathy the provings have even greater value because it is in the words and experience of the patient or prover that the true centre of a remedy lies. Essences come and go as the fickle winds of fashion direct, but the provings are solid. As long as there is a sound method employed, then the provings remain the most profound testament of the remedy. We must remember that when learning and understanding materia medica, the remedy speaks loudest through the language of the prover, not the presentation of the lecturer. So upon the shoulders of the supervisor and collator of a proving falls the mission of creating a sound document to be used by practitioners of their own and future generations.

This proving is offered with these thoughts in mind; the desire to present something useful, and immediately understandable to my collegues, and to produce a proving of quality. I feel that to be of value to homoeopaths around the world, the new remedy need not have been proved to the exact degree and precision of the remedies recently produced by the Dynamis School, but nevertheless the standard of the provings of Chocolate, Hydrogen, Diamond, Scorpion and the others set the standard, and this is something that this proving of Agathis Australis has aspired to.

Thanks to the provers, Misha for the opportunity, and Jeremy for the inspiration.

Any clinical information please send to Alastair Gray, 105 Glebe Point Road Glebe Sydney NSW 2037 Australia.

Kauri: An Introduction

No-one is quite sure of its age. Some say 1500 years, others 2300 years depending on the author, but nevertheless we can speculate that when Alexander the Great was chasing Darius through Persia and carving an empire for himself from Macedonia to India, the tree from which this remedy was made, called Yakas, was a robust youth. Its comrades in Cathedral Grove, of which two still stand, were already in their second centuries. And later, when Harold and William of Normandy were slogging it out in the mud at Hastings, Yakas was already a thousand years old. Yakas has been alive to witness two thousand years of human history; Galen, Hippocrates, Paracelcus, Hahnemman, Kent. Even if it turns out that Yakas is younger, and we will only know this when it topples, the point remains that it is incredibly old. All this history; Yakas has been alive for it all.

Yakas is a Kauri tree found in the Waipoua forest in the north of the North Island of New Zealand. Kauri is otherwise known as Agathis Australis.

Kauri is the monarch of the New Zealand forest and is a tree of most venerable ancestry - older than history, immemorially older than humans. The kauri forests of New Zealand have stood for thousands of years. And for virtually all of that time they have been limited to northern New Zealand, to a small strip of land only 250 miles in length and forty wide. When the Polynesian voyagers discovered and colonized New Zealand, they gave the forest giants the name it now bears. Millions of acres of kauri were standing when the first Europeans arrived at the end of the eighteenth century; an apparent inexhaustible supply of timber. The story of the kauri since 1800 has been one of gargantuan plunder without regard to economy or conservation.

No two kauri forests are alike. The trees stand and group in infinite variety. There is rich intermingling with other species that is the special nature of the New Zealand bush. But where they do exist in the forest they absolutely dominate it. When mature they are the largest, among the tallest, and in their towering crowns as well as their huge clean trunks (boles), the broadest trees. It has been written that even in their youth they have a clean upward thrust of trunk that distinguishes them 'as a master race'. They really are the Lords of the Forest.

It is not going too far to say there is little in nature that excels that of a vigorous grove of kauri in the prime of life, 600 to 1000 years old. The great untapering columns are like those of the Acropolis or Chartres. And they draw the eye upwards to the enormous spreading heads of the crown.

Two Towering Columns

The giants that remain are true wonders of the world and are now protected as such. But it must be remembered however the giants represent only the full growth of the kauri not necessarily its strength and vigor, and certainly not its future. The Kauri giants are not everlasting, however eternal they may seem. Two of the largest have crashed to the ground in recent years. Kopi which was known to be hollow in spite of its solid appearance, and Toronui, the biggest of them all, which was thought to be solid and yet proved to be hollow have both fallen.

The two most striking aspects of kauri are its immense size and age. Kauri is certainly the most famous of the New Zealand native trees and one of the largest trees found anywhere in the world. Those remaining today average 30m high with a columnar trunk up to 3m in diameter. It is free of branches for up to 18m above the ground. The Californian redwood is higher and wider at the base, but because of its cylindrical trunk the Kauri has more wood. It is much richer in mass. The timber content of the largest measured redwood was less than half that of the kauri giant Kairaru.

The Mercury Bay kauri - the Father of the Forest - and the largest ever recorded was measured in 1850 at 75 feet in circumference, 25 feet through with 80 feet to the branches. It was killed by lightening. Kairaru was 66 feet in circumference, and about 100 to the branches.

Compared to some of the Pinus Aristata of California that have been dated at 4000 to 5000 years old, the Kauri also has its veterans. Counting kauri growth rings, trees have been dated at over 2000 years old. The massive kauri felled at Mercury Bay in 1850 could have been 4000 years old.

It is a monoecious tree. In other words both male and female cones are borne on the same tree, and a tree twenty-five to thirty years old may begin to bear fertile seeds. Cones of various ages also occur on the same tree. Male and female cones are produced about the same time, usually annually. Female cones are quite round, and the male finger-like. The female cones open up their scales to receive the winged seeds which are borne away by the wind, or carried off by birds. The kaka especially is a useful carrier. The wind blown pollen from the male cones come from elsewhere on the tree or from neighbouring trees. Seeds remain viable for only a short period, and usually germinate when they settle in an open situation where light can penetrate readily.

Kauri's thick leathery leaves with parallel veins, are sessile and arise on the branches either alternately or opposing one another. Leaves of the young trees are lanceolate, 5-10cm long and 5-12cm wide; adult leaves are blunter and only 2-3.5cm long.

The spreading crown of the kauri is of course relative to the trunk and is immense. It is open as the tree ages and it is supported on huge branches that simply swell out of the upper trunk. Once out of the forest cover the kauri adopts its final form shedding all its side branches and breaking out its wide spreading head.

The bark of the young kauri is very different to that of a mature tree, it is reddish and persists for 40-80 years. The healthy bark of a mature kauri shows thick flakes before peeling, and yellow gum exudes in thin trickles. The bark keeps the tree free of epiphytes by continuously shedding flakes. The bark is relatively thin and smooth, and scaling off in large flakes helps to keep the trunk free of parasitic growth. This flaking leaves spectacular bark patterns, the bark of the kauri is an art form of mottled tracery. It is coloured from ash-grey to brown. It is therefore a beautiful clean trunk with no parasites (the exception may be the forks of branches).

Kauri is very slow growing over it's life span. Under good conditions kauri grows at 30cm per year at a young stage. But after reaching a height of about 5 metres slows down considerably and takes hundreds of years to produce its fully developed spreading crown. Life begins as a spindly, twiggy seedling. There is a high mortality of seedlings during their first years due to dessication and fungal infection. In adolescence it develops a typical conifer shape. Young trees have a very different appearance to their elders. Young specimens of sixty to a hundred years have sharp pointed conical crowns. The trunk runs perfectly straight from the root to the topmost end of the crown. The juvenile tree is pyramidal in shape, with a slender trunk extending from the ground to the apex of the tree, and it persists in this form for fifty years or more before shedding its lower branches and expanding its trunk and crown. Young trees are called 'rickers'. This name derives from an old Anglo-Saxon word applied to a pole used in making hayricks or to the spar of a boat. They persist in this juvenile form for many years and can attain a considerable height with their tall thin trunks and narrow pyramid shaped crowns. Eventually rickers shed their lower branches, and as their slender trunks and narrow crowns expand they assume the shape of the mature tree. After about forty years they are able to produce viable seed. As it approaches maturity, normally when it breaks the forest cover, it breaks out a huge head, sheds the last of its lateral branches, swells and stretches its columnar trunk, which remains symmetrical like a majestic pillar, and grows on to become one of the longest living and largest things in nature.

Kauri timber is light and very durable, of a yellow-brown colour, straight grained, amazingly free of knots and other defects, and easily worked. Quite simply it is superlative timber. It contains a high proportion of heart wood. It is very stable and durable, does not taint or stain, is resistant to corrosive liquids and stands up to combined heat and moisture without splitting.

The other striking aspect of the tree is the bark which exudes gum, which also flows copiously from any wound to the tree as well as cones and even, at times from branchlets and the bases of leaves. Kauri gum is formed by the hardening of resin exuding from injuries to the bark, broken branches, cones and bruised leaves. It has an unhealing wound.

The gum of the kauri was greatly prized as an ingredient for the manufacture of high quality paints, linoleum and varnishes. The first shipment was sent to London in 1830, in an attempt to raise interest in the trade. One report has it that a shipment of twenty tons was pronounced worthless by London experts and thrown overboard into the Thames. It was only later in the century that its value in varnish was recognized. Somewhere in the slime at the bottom of the Thames is an absolute fortune.

The history and mythology, and the relationship between the Kauri and Maori, and the passing of the Kauri forests are also relevant for our purposes in understanding the Homoeopathic action of the remedy Agathis Australis and understanding its signature. These will be fully dealt with in upcoming articles rather than in this brief introduction.

Kauri - The Signature

From a homoeopathic perspective, if we look at its most striking aspects of Kauri we see that it is huge, of great mass, volume, with such incredible density and girth. The appearance of kauri is extraordinary, straight from the forest floor to up to its first branches, thirty metres above the ground; totally free of branches. It is old, ancient. Next, while vigourous in youth it is incredibly slow growing. It is clean and free of any parasite. It has a chaotic bursting huge crown which towers out of the canopy of the forest. It is bursting and swelling with blood, or gum. When the gum is extracted it bleeds and it does not heal. It has an unhealing wound.

The gum bleeding from a Kauri Tree.

It was the lord of the forest, the king, the biggest and the oldest. For the Maori it was considered a sentient being with soul. When it was needed it was cut with ceremony. In both Maori and Pakeha tradition it is considered male. The language associated with the tree is all about father, monarch, lord, autocrat. Moreover the look of the tree adds to this. It is phallic; the swelling of the trunk; the expanse of crown. Both the Maori and European refer to kauri as 'he', and nowadays the media certainly do.

For the European, the kauri was desired for the heart wood, the timber, and the gum.

So what we see is that the uses of the tree were similar. It was needed for water transport, canoes and ships. Yet there was a blatant disregard for the spirituality that surrounded the tree by the visitors. The Maori used elaborate ceremony, the European waded in and chopped. In exploiting the tree it was felled by the axe and the saw by men without ceremony. It was transported mainly by water, but also by log shutes, bullocks and trains. Thirty per cent of these logs were destroyed and wasted in the process. Over half of the rest was burned.

Vast amounts of the timber went into the building of dams, settlements and furniture.

The collection of gum from the land involved destruction by fire. In collecting the gum the trees were bled to death, and the graves of their ancestors pillaged with spears and spades.

A phenomenon which took thousands of years to develop was destroyed in a hundred. A tree which has experienced a vast amount of human history was plundered in a fraction of that time.

The kauri is impressive because of its size - but its size turns out to be an aspect of its age and exhaustion. These trees are often hollow, and come crashing to the ground, toppled by wind, cyclone, or earth movement. In fact the youth and vitality of the kauri, when it is in this most vigorous stage - we don't see or notice these trees at all. They are there, but we overlook them for their older fathers.

These then are the most striking aspects of kauri. In other words this is its signature that evolves out of an examination of the anatomy, physiology, history, mythology and botany of the tree as a genus and the Yakas tree in particular. Virtually all of these striking aspects have a direct and equally striking parallel in the proving symptoms of the remedy Agathis Australis.

The Remedy

Unsurprisingly from the nature of the tree, the focus of the remedy is very much in the Mind, Head, Back and Dreams.

One of the most striking features of the proving was the strange, rare and peculiar symptom; the sensation of the head being pulled to a point. The point was out in front of the eyes and nose, with concomitant frowning, pressure, fuzzy, muzzy and foggy sensations. It took the form of either a pain or a sensation, as if she was wearing a visor or a metal jouster's mask. The head was pulled to a peak. There was pain in the third eye, a tightness in the third eye, a scrunchy feeling in the third eye, and in one prover a delusion that there was a ruby spider on the third eye. There was also a collapsed sensation in the head that went down to her nose.

But equally striking in the proving is the champagne quality of the remedy. Virtually all the provers experienced the exhilaration, euphoria, giggling and hysterics, the laughing, bubbling, effervescing, light, floaty drunkenness of kauri. And of course came its antithesis - the secondary reaction of sadness, subduedness, lifelessness and lassitude. Provers felt woozy, muzzy, fuzzy, and a heavy drunkenness. The up was champagne, the down was woozy. It seems that the great age of the trees manifested in exhaustion, lassitude and lifelessness of the provers. Provers complained of their body being heavy, of a tremendous lack of energy, lassitude, washed out, fuzzy, groggy, flat, exhausted feelings. But the vitality and strength and vigor of the young trees was matched by the champagne exuberance and euphoria of the provers. (This is highlighted strongly by a glance at the rubrics; see the Rubrics section of the proving, especially the Mind section).

Furthermore there was tremendous forsakenness. In more than one prover their long lasting feelings of deep rejection and anger were completely cured. One of the provers said of her forsakenness that she realized that her life had changed after her parents began doing battle. She was never going to be completely healed until her parents reconciled. So there is strong forsakenness, but the quality of it was a yearning, and loss, and longing. It was a longing for what has gone. A sense of being cheated, a feeling of darkness and sadness. A yearning for the innocence of childhood, the innocence of dancing, the simplicity of everything. It was a longing for that which was last innocently expressed. It is usually as a child that we have our last expression of pure uninhibited vitality, pristine and lush and unadulterated. And it was this last experience of the pure joy of vitality was expressed over and over in the provings.

It was described as a grasping for, and yearning for something which has slipped away. For example one prover manifested this with a monomaniac obsession to dance. She danced obsessively all the time, felt happy, euphoric, just as she had as a child before she was made to give it all up. It was this vitality and euphoria that was behind the champagne quality of the provers. But the reverse of this phenomenon was also seen. The reverting to memories deeply painful, the betrayals, the old hurts. Either way it was those events and memories of the last time of youthful pure unbounded energy that the provers were taken to. The remedy seems to be about the reconnection to the past, especially to what is gone, wasted, destroyed - the betrayals, the old teachers - and the feelings that arise from that, yearning, longing. There was homesickness and longing, lostness and childhood.

There is a lot of guilt in the remedy. In one dream a dead body is to be disposed of. They throw it in a playground. Then they try and dispose of it in water. There is a lack of concern, a lack of feeling. There was something about self responsibility and the abdication of responsibility. There is a terrible disaster, and everyone is pretending that nothing has happened, there is a murder yet there is no guilt, there is no accountability. One prover said that the usual social constraints were all washed away. During the proving she had no tact, was stroppy, had or wanted to use no diplomacy, and looked after herself badly especially with regard to food. There was the loss of all social skills. There was a tendency to blurt out or explode, not caring what people thought or said. In this abdication of responsibility it is as if there is painlessness where there should be pain.

Kauri revealed a strong aspect of self love with both its faces, love of self and self hatred. It revealed or healed a lack of self love, especially around the issue of food. One woman with an eating disorder was absolutely cured of the insidious need to stuff herself with food, and more importantly the underlying current of self hatred. She fell in love with herself, felt sexual, and ate only when she was hungry. "I feel like I'm seeing the world with different eyes now, older wiser, calmer." The desire for sweet food was cured. It took away her compulsion to eat. Another woman began to eat terribly, she just didn't care what or when she ate. In both cases the despair of recovery was completely cured while on the remedy.

In a direct parallel to the nature of the tree with regard to its appearance, girth and height, there is a lot of reference to great height in the proving. There were dreams of chimneys, of climbing, of being a long way up. Moreover, there were dreams of smoke and fire; of cliffs overlooking the sea; of up and down; of giants stepping off boats and across the sea.

Virtually all of the dreams are about outside things and water, cliffs sea, shingle beaches, cliff faces, sunlit lawns, monasteries, climbing, streams, water.

There is an incredible amount of water in the remedy. There are dreams of walking on water, of people being in boats, of swimming pools being iced over, of clipper ships, of swimming, beaches, of wasps drowning, dreams of waterfalls, sensations of her uterus being grasped, of trickling sensations running down the legs, of incredible thirst, the smell of water, of everlasting urination, the longest urination people had ever had, of running noses. This is a direct parallel to the nature of the remedy. The tree was used for canoes and war, the masts and spars by both Maori and European, the logs were transported by water.

Other striking things that emerged from the remedy were an idea of helplessness, a feeling of being at the mercy of the remedy. There was the sensation of being a wolf, the nose elongated, the sense of smell altered. There were dreams of being chased by mythical creatures. Furthermore there were dreams of numbness or painlessness where usually there would be pain. An example was being attacked without any fear. Another was a drowning but everyone pretends that nothing is wrong. There were dreams of trees burning - paralleled by the burning of the forests.

There are lots of mistakes in the mind of the provers, wrong words, things said backwards, etc.. There was fuzzyness and lack of clarity; loss of memory and great lassitude. So many provers became very focused, just like the head symptoms of coming to a point while others lost all focus. Kauri contained this quality of things slipping away; memory, dreams; grasping for something and it slipping away.

Quite striking is that different provers dreamt of balloons, square ones, or in cucumber shapes, or ones with billowing sides, and Alladin on his carpet.

As the shape of the tree indicates there were a plethora of Head and Back symptoms. Generally there were sensations of shooting, of waves of pins and needles, prickling, and twitching. In the Head there was the sensation as if drunk, woozy, marshmallowy, muzzy, foggy. There were head pains that were seething, throbbing, pulsating; pressure headaches especially on the crown.

In the Eyes the vision was sharp but the body and the head was woozy like two eyes in a marshmallow.

The Back was characterized by aching and twitching. Characteristic was the symptom in the back of being poked, there was a strong pain in the scapular, a boring, pushing pain. This is very close to the actual digging for gum, and the bleeding of the trees. One of the provers, had the very strong image of being scratched by a rose and being covered in insects. There were explosive discharges, anger, sneezes. Always of interest in a proving in addition to what is there, is what isn't there. There are no Stool, Male, Expectoration, Chill, or Fever symptoms, and amazingly, virtually no Skin symptoms.

Rubrics

In this proving there are 192 Mind rubrics. I have made the addition of 10 new single remedy Mind rubrics as well as further new rubrics in the other sections where indicated. There are 56 Generalities, 145 Head, and 183 Back rubrics.

The Methodology

The methodology adopted for this homoeopathic proving of Agathis Australis was as follows. During 1993 twenty-three students at the School of Homoeopathy were administered Kauri 30c by Misha in a single dose. For the purposes of this proving document they are called the English Dream Provers. They reported their findings over the next two days and then three weeks later. In addition, during 1994-5 four other provers were administered the remedy in the 200th potency and supervised very closely by Alastair over a period of six to ten weeks. The instructions these provers were given were to take up to six doses until there was an action. Furthermore, there was another prover who was supervised by Misha during 1993-94 in the 30th potency. And in the summer of 1995 Misha conducted a further seminar proving in New Zealand to expand the understanding of the remedy using the 200th potency; the New Zealand Dream Provers.

The methodology for the extraction and the conversion into a schema along Kentian lines is in keeping with that of the Dynamis School. The conversion to rubrics was done using the Combined Repertory from the CARA programme (Kent plus additions, and the Synthetic) and the Synthesis Repertory. In addition a few rubrics have been adopted from Phatak and Murphy. Perhaps a valuable forth year thesis for a student could be to convert the proving to the Complete Repertory and Murphy.

The time reference for the provers 2-10 was that adopted for the Hydrogen proving.

I have deliberately left a number of the provers symptoms in chronological order, as they appeared. This is to give an idea of the development of different symptoms (for example prover 10's dreams).

I decided that for the purposes of this proving document to present the Dreams and Generalities section after the Mind to provide some continuity in looking at the major themes of the remedy. It reads with much more movement. Had I put the Dreams section under Sleep after Extremities, and the Generalities at the end, I feel the flow of the proving would have been lost. However readers will note that the conventional Kentian schema has been adopted for the rubric schema.

The Provers

Kauri Introduction	Kauri Materia Medica	Kauri Repertory	Kauri Cases