Salt, Mercury, Sulphur in the Alchemical Language of Rudolf Steiner

Salt, Mercury, Sulphur in the Alchemical Language of Rudolf Steiner

Lecture presented to students of Huxley College of the Environment

August 3rd, 2013

By Henning Sehmsdorf

Based on R. Steiner’s lecture given at Dornach, Switzerland, January 13th, 1923

By the turn of the 16-17th century the ancient knowledge of what it means to be human in relation to the cosmos, was being lost, as witnessed in the writings of Giordano Bruno, Lord Bacon of Verulam, and Jakob Boehme.

Bruno (1548-1600), Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, fled to escape charge of hersey, later tried for same by the Inquisition and burned to death. Works: De la causa, principio et uno, 1584; De l’infinito, universo et mondi, 1584. Also wrote satire and poetry. Rejected all dogmatism, believed that our perception of the world is relative to the position in space and time of the viewer; wherefore there is no absolute truth, no limit to the progress of knowledge. He pictured the world as composed of individual elements of beings, called monads, based on an infinite principle, or cause, or Deity, manifest in us and all the world. Profoundly influenced the philosophies of Spinoza and Leibniz.

Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Most important work: Novum Organum, 1620. Introduced the inductive method of modern science, i.e. the kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates general propositions that are derived from specific examples. Inductive reasoning contrasts with deductive reasoning, in which specific examples are derived from general propositions.

Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), German religious mystic, a cobbler by trade, a student of the Bible, influenced by Paracelsus. Works: De signatura rerum, 1622, and many other works, most of them circulated in hand writing (his full works first published in 1730). B. describes God as the abyss, the nothing and the all from which the creative Will struggles to find self-manifestation and self-consciousness. He also called the natural world the cloak of Divinity filled with spiritual forces. B. exerted profound influence on philosophies of Baader, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and in England on William Blake. Followers of Boehme in England, eventually joined ranks with the Quakers.

Bruno, Bacon and Boehme all tried to understand the relationship of the human to the cosmos, the micro- to the macrocosm, but all three failed. Boehme, however, preserved some of the ancient wisdom by referring to three principles in human beings—salt, mercury, sulphur, which principles have an entirely different significance in his language from the significance attached to them in modern chemistry. The knowledge of these three principles Boehme gleaned from Paracelsus (1493-1541), who was a major figure among medieval practitioners of alchemy (more of that later).

By the salt process Boehme, as did the ancients, refers to the assimilation of the outer world of matter in the human body through dissolution and crystallization. As man ingests food, cosmic thoughts which have formed the plants and animals from which human draw their nutrition are expressed in internal human perception: “Jakob Boehme connected the thinking – the process by which the world presents itself to man in pictures – with the salt process, that is to say, with the dissolving and re-forming process undergone by substance within the material organism of man,” what Steiner calls his “etheric body.”

By the sulphur process Boehme refers to the human experience of taking in the “life-giving air which man takes in and which then spreads through his whole organism.” While the salt process is experienced in the material body, the sulphur process refers to an experience of the human soul, what Steiner refers to as man’s “astral body.” In the sulphur process etheric (material) thoughts are broken up and metamorphosed into a force, human will, which is connected to human growth and development. So the sulphur process encompasses what is experienced in the soul as will.

As man’s “etheric” and “astral” bodies are in tension and opposition, a third process is required to bring about an adjustment between the two, and this process Boehme calls the mercury process which Steiner describes as “that which is fluid and yet has form, which swings to and fro frrom the etheric nature to the astral nature, from the fluid to the airy-form.”

The ancients never spoke of thought or will, and of the mediation between thought and will through feeling, in the abstract, but of internally perceived processes which they referred to as the processes of salt, sulphur and mercury. In contrast, by the time of Bruno, Bacon and Boehme, this kind of direct, inner knowledge was being replaced by abstract thinking and willing. As Steiner puts it, “Ideas had become abstract; man was obliged to look, not into his own being but out into nature…Man lost the spontaneous, inner activity which gives birth to knowledge. In the interval which has elapsed since the fifteenth century, man has lost the capacity to discover anything when he merely looks into his inner being. He therefore looks into outer nature and evolves his abstract concepts.”

Steiners posits, however, that this direct, inner experience of the macrocosm is available to human beings; it has to be rediscovered, and that it is critical for humanity to do so. He argues (elsewhere) that the quest for this inner knowledge was the real purpose and meaning of alchemical practice. For the alchemists, the search for gold through transformation from lower, or base, metals amounted to, and was dependent on, the inner transformation of the practioner. Steiner also describes the transformative role of agriculture in alchemical terms. The most important product is not what the farmer sells at the gate. More than a production system, biodynamic agriculture is a practice of living and relating to nature in a way that focuses on the health of the bioregion, landscape, soil, and animal, plant and human life to promote the inner development of the practitioner.

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