Aristotelian and Mendeleevian “Elements” in the Context of Alchemy and Biodynamics
Lecture presented to students of Huxley College of the Environment
August 2nd, 2013
By Henning Sehmsdorf
Based on:
Wolf Storl, Culture and Horticulture, 1979
Keith Francis, “Alchemy and Anthroposophy. Three Lectures: The Hermetic Tradition; Greek Philosophers and Mediaeval Alchemists; Paracelsus, Newton and Goethe,” 2007
Rudolf Steiner, Landwirtschaftlicher Kurs, 1924 (English: Agriculture, 1993)
John Soper, Studying the Agriculture Course, 1976
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, Alchemy: The Secret Art, 1973
Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, 2013
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790
The “Four Elements:”
The concept of the four elements, earth, water, fire and air, goes back to pre-Socratic speculation on the nature of matter and the cosmos (beginning 7th century B.C.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) thought of primary matter as what he called “Chaos,” i.e. unformed matter that has only potential existence until it is impressed with the ordering formative forces derived from the “Cosmos.” These formative forces, which Aristotle identifies with the divine, have four manifestations in the four elements. Matter is made manifest in the interplay of fire, air, water, and earth. The elements transmute into each other, each has a principle characteristic and a linking medium, e.g. fire is warm and dry, earth is dry and cold, water is moist and cold, and air is moist and warm. The images of the elements are also used to express mental or spiritual states: solid thought is analogous to earth, sensitivity to water, the soul to air, and a hot temper and fiery thought is analogous to fire.
Contrast Aristotle’s perception of the elements to that to the modern Periodic Table of Elements (Dimitri Mendeleev, 1869), which describes matter in terms of 118 chemical elements, organized on the basis of atomic number, electron configurations, and recurring chemical properties.
So what is the use of the ancient concept of the four elements to us today? Mostly this that manifestations of the four elements are directly available to our senses.
Example H20: As solid ice it manifests the earthly elemental state
As liquid it manifests the watery elemental state
As vapor it manifests the airy elemental state
As boiling substance it manifests the elemental fiery state
Using these concepts and analogies helps observe and identify transmutations of one substance into another, e.g. water into liquid, ice, vapor, or something boiling; or, an example from farming, a compost can be diagnosed as too watery, too earthy, too airy, or too hot (or it can be transmuted into just the right balance of the four elements in the living compost organism).
Passage from Michael Pollan, Cooked (2013),
As did Aristotle, Steiner argued that matter is shaped to elemental forms by what he called “etheric” (or formative) forces. These forces are supersensible, but their effects are visible in the material world.
Students of Steiner have developed methods by which to make the etheric forces visible:
Ernst Chladni showed that vibrations from musical instruments could organize sand dust on paper,
Laura Kolisko showed through capillary dynomolysis that when plant saps are added to a silver nitrate solution they express distinct patterns,
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer showed through sensitive crystallization that the underlying forms in plant, animal and human tissue can be made visible (crystallized) in copper chloride,
Theodor Schwenk showed through photographs of streams and drops of water the formative forces of the water element.
To the four elements of classical philosophy Steiner adds a fifth element (Quinta essentia), by which he means the consciousness of human ordering the four elements, e.g. in a garden or on a farm.
Processes: Salt, Mercury, Sulphur
In alchemical thought and practice, there are three processes (not chemical substances) labelled salt, mercury and sulphur which describe universal movements, functions, or states of being in the transmutation of one element into another. The salt process (sal) brings about precipitation and crystallization, the sulphur process dissipation, dissolution, sublimation. Mercury, the third process, mediates between opposite poles, the contracting, centripetal salt process, and the centrifugal sulphur process.
We can see these process in the changing seasons, freezing winter crystallizing, drawing all things together (salt process); rainy spring and early summer with lush vegetation (mercury process); late summer and fall heat with myriad color, fragrance and seed formation (sulphur process).
Alchemists looked for these processes not just on the physical, material plane, but also as processes of mind and spirit, distinguishing crystallizing thought (salt), feeling and sensing (mercury), and the will (sulphur).
In the good gardener (Quinta essentia), these processes are in their proper balance, perhaps the key to the proverbial “green thumb” or the “good vibes” that turns an urban wasteland into gardens of Eden.
Microcosm—Macrocosm:
Biodynamics share with ancient philosophy and alchemy the idea of a direct and intimate correspondence between macrocosm (nature) and microcosm (human being). Both worlds contain an inner and an outer aspect. Man can understand the inner side of the cosmos through his thoughts, feelings, instincts, intuition, dreams and imagination. Nature is man exteriorized; Man is nature internalized. Each of the seven planets has a signature that works through the formative forces into manifestations of nature and man.
For example, the planet Venus has a macrocosmic signature in the color green, in the metal copper, in sexual attraction and reproduction, in plants such as birches. Venus is present in the microcosm as sensual or aesthetic love, negatively in the green of jalousy, in the physical body as kidneys and their function. And so on for all the planets. Alchemists maintained that it was difficult to perceives these signatures and correspondences in nature correctly. It takes a clear mind, not clouded by wishful thinking, lust or bad will, to perceive the supersensible qualities of the object under study. To alchemists the mind does not primarily think, but is a mirror that reflects what exists in the universe into the conscious part of the soul.
Alchemists were concerned with changing physical, etheric and spiritual substances into other substances. By analogy, the biodynamic farmer observes changes in substances in natural processes: the patterns of plant metamorphosis (seed to sprout to developing plant and back to seed), the composting processing turning various dead materials into living humus, blood into milk in the lactating cow; water and carbon dioxide into sugars, water and oxygen in the process of photosynthesis in plants; milk into cheese in the process of fermentation, and much, much more. The underlying perception held by alchemists was that everything in nature is conserved but forever transmuted.
In the 18th century, French scientist, Antoine Lavoisier (1743-94) formulated the Law of Conservation of Matter (“Nothing is created, nothing destroyed, everything is transformed”). However, by this time, following in the footsteps of Bacon, Descartes (1596-1650) and Newton (1642-1727), the notion of the transmutability of matter no longer involved any consideration of etheric or spiritual substances or forces, at least among mainstream scientists. The Mendeleevian periodic table (1861) concerns itself strictly with material elements. Matter is seen as composed of atoms which combine into molecules, has mass and weight, occupies space and is subject to gravity, inertia and the law of entropy (2nd Law of Thermodynamics). The cosmos is seen as a mechanism winding down until all energy is spent. Life and spirit are regarded as epiphenomena arising from matter.
The concept of nature as spiritual, however, never left philosophical discourse entirely, nor from folk traditions and practices, at least until folk culture was displaced by the Industrial Revolution (18th century in England and continental Europe, a century later in the Scandinavian North). The great Enlightenment philosopher, Spinoza (1632-1677), for example, while he shared with Descartes an intensely mathematical appreciation of the universe, unlike Descartes held that body and mind are of the same substance, which he called alternately God and Nature. The universe is a single substance, known through “physical extension,” but also known spiritually and through thought. God is Nature in its fullness. Furthermore, while Cartesian science can only study nature as it is any any given moment in time and space (natura naturata), Spinoza wants to understand Nature in the process of becoming (natura naturans). During his lifetime, Spinoza, as a Jew was accused of heretical pantheism, and therefore most of his writings were not published until after his early death, but in the next century they greatly influenced the thinking of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) who layed the foundations of what today is called phenomenological science. It is on Goethe’s science Steiner’s philosophy and the practice of biodynamics are based. Goethe’s study of color theory in which he corrected Newton’s analysis of light, and his monumental Metamorphosis of Plants (1790-1823) are milestones in reclaiming a concept of nature where matter is shaped by supersensible forces. In this work, Goethe essentially discovered the (serially) homologous nature of leaf organs in plants, from cotyledons, to photosynthetic leaves, to the petals of a flower, and he showed that the transformation the plant undergoes during its life cycle is directed the supersensible archetype he calls the Urpflanze (primordial plant).
Goethean Science:
Goethean Science
Goethe’s approach to the study of nature, upon which Rudolf Steiner’s concept of agriculture is based, can be characterized as phenomenological, in contrast to the reductionist approaches exemplified by the work of Descartes (1536-1650) Newton (1642-1727), Linneaus (1707-1780), and their followers.
In Descartes’ view, the physical world is separated from spirit (God, mind), and the universe a mechanical system governed by natural laws that can be described in mathematical terms. In following Descartes, Newton demonstrated the scientific method of reducing complex phenomena by quantitative measurement and mathematical formulas involving the substitution of instruments for the human observer, and relying on controlled experiments to verify hypotheses. Linnaeus, the founder of the binomial system of nomenclature based his system of plant classification mostly on the number of stamens and pistils in the flower. Modern science and technology are the direct result of the reductionist method, most strikingly illustrated by the new platform tool referred to as nanotechnology which measures and manipulates matter at the scale of 1 billionth of a meter.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was a natural philosopher and scientist as well as a poet, argued that the life history or development (ontogenesis) of organisms is not reducible to mechanistic explanation; life processes must be understood in teleological rather than causal terms, and the teleology (end goal or indwelling purpose of life force) of an organism is best understood in terms of its holistic “form” or “type.” Holistic science must factor in the human observer and therefore is necessarily qualitative rather than reducible to quantitative measurement and mathematical abstraction. Goethe’s scientific method involved sustained observation of phenomena in nature through all of the five senses, but also through intuition and the imagination. Observation intensified through experimental variation would provide the observer with multiple perspectives and gradually lead him to intuit a unifying concept, the “form” or “type” of the organism under study. Ideally the observer becomes intuitively one with the phenomenon studied instead of objectifying it through mathematical abstraction. Macro-level understanding of the living form rather than micro-level (molecular or submolecular) construction is the goal of Goethe’s science, the diametric opposite of the goals and methodology of nanotechnology.
Goethe demonstrated his methodology in important applied studies to develop a theory of color that corrected and amplified Newton’s theory of light; he developed a theory of plant metamorphosis that laid the foundation for the study of morphology in contrast to Linneaus’s reductionist model; and he discovered the intermaximillary bone through holistic analysis of human anatomy. Long ignored by natural scientists because of his rejection of mathematical abstraction as an adequate tool to understand natural phenomena, Goethe is today recognized as a founder of the science of ecological systems.
On the biodynamic farm, Goethean science becomes the model for understanding soil quality, the life of plants and animals, and the countless symbiotic relationships that make up the whole farm organism. If nothing else, Goethe teaches the farmer how to see, hear, smell, feel, taste, and intuit the organic and inorganic life forms upon which the success or failure of the farm system depend.
Steiner’s Agricultural Lectures (1924):
The lectures Steiner gave in 1924 were in direct response to farmers who turned to him for answers to remedy the drastic reduction in soil and animal fertility due to chemical farming. Following the Cartesian paradigm, chemist Justus von Liebig in 1840 had identified the soil macronutrients responsible for plant growth (all of which we recognize as elements in the Mendeleevian Table: C, O, H, N, P, S, K, Ca, and Mg)., and once chemist, Fritz Haber (1868-1934), invented the process by which to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia (for which he earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918), chemical fertilization rapidly became established in agriculture. But the scientists, Steiner would say, had little to say about the role of humus and living organisms in the soil. Chemical farming, while no doubt profitable, had reduced soil life, and farmers had lost the traditional understanding of what life is.
In his agricultural lectures, Steiner reminded his listeners of the ancient truth that cosmic and tellurian (earthly) factors are at work in all natural phenomena. The earth and the planets constitute one and the same system. Plants and animals are permeated by cosmic rhythms (cp., for instance, the lunar ovulation cycle of the cow with the solar of the sheep). Humans are in the process of emancipating themselves from cosmic rhythms: their bodies function rhythmically, but they are not tied to cosmic rhythms in the same way plants and animals are who are totally dependent on them.
Steiner asserts that in agricultural production, there are two aspects, quantity and quality, and synthetic fertilizer supports only the first, while quality results from the influence of distant planets working through silica in the earth’s crust, while quantity is influenced through calcium in the soil.
Steiner views the earth as part of a larger organism to which the sun, moon and the planets belong. Earth absorbs cosmic forces (from the outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) through silica in the soil and reflects them back on plants, while calcium pulls atmospheric forces (the region of the inner planets, i.e. those planets travelling between the sun and earth: Mercury, Venus, Moon) into the ground. The soil acts as a thin, living diaphragm placed between the earth and the cosmos.
The air element is seen as “dead’ above the soil, but “alive” below when it is fixed by a plant in the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. The water element is seen as “alive” above ground when fixed by a plant, but “dead” when released by the plant minto the soil. Cosmic, crystallizing forces stream into the earth and water during the dead period of winter when no plants are growing. In spring when seeds germinate (a state of “chaos” during which the unity of the seed is disrupted), the instreaming cosmic forces imprint their form on the plants.
In imitation of the wholeness of the cosmic organism, the healthy farm must achieve balanced wholeness integrating plant and animal life and producing the right amount of humus to aid the organic life in the soil. The properly balanced farm is an ecosystem in which plant, animal, mineral, insect and bird worlds belong together in subtle exchanges of forces. The farmer/gardener must sensitize him/herself to observe and respond to such interactions (I call it cultivating “response-ability”). The farmer must in a way become clairsentient, responding to shades of warmth and odors. The loss of one species on the farm can unbalance the whole, thus the importance of surrounding forest, hedges, mushroom-bearing meadows, and so on.
Of the (Mendeleevian) elements working in and through nature, Steiner foregrounds carbon, calcium, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, and silicon, and needless to say in his cosmology the elements take on a rather different significance. Carbon (which constitutes only 0.032% of the earth’s crust, but it very widely distributed and forms a vast numbr of compounds) is the element that receives the formative forces to provide the structural framework of the earth. In man and animals, the structural framework is fashioned from Calcium, while CO2 is expelled to avoid carbon-based fixity. Carbon is permeated by Oxygen which is the universal carrier of life (the etheric life force). Nitrogen which is the element of universal sensitivity, acts as a bridge between life forces and spiritual archetypes. Nitrogen anchors astrality in animal and the human being, working inside their bodies. In plants, astrality works from the outside. Nitrogen is “dead” while in the air, but comes “alive” when fixed in the earth and in living organisms. Sulphur (from sol+fere) carries spiritual forces into the physical medium. Hydrogen dissolves the forms (at the end of the life cycle), and carries substances back into the spiritual Non-Manifest.Calcium pulls oxygen and etheric forces into the earth, while Silicon rays cosmic forces onto earth.