The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture Three

[ 1 ] One of the deepest principles of occultism is based on the great law of analogies, according to which nature reveals to us what is going on within ourselves.

[ 2 ] To give a striking and typical example of this law, which is completely unknown to official science, we cite that of the philosopher's stone. It was known to the Rosicrucians. A German journal from the end of the 18th century mentions this philosopher's stone. It speaks of it as a real object, saying: Everyone touches it often without knowing it. — That is literally true.

[ 3 ] To understand this, it is only necessary to penetrate deeper into the workshop of nature than modern science does.

[ 4 ] Everyone knows that humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. This has both a physical and a spiritual meaning in yoga training. Humans cannot breathe in carbon dioxide to sustain themselves. They would die from it, while plants need carbon dioxide to live. Plants provide humans with the oxygen they need to live. Plants renew the air and make it suitable for humans to breathe. And humans and animals in turn provide plants with the carbon dioxide they need for their own survival. What does the plant do with the carbon dioxide it inhales? It uses it to build its own body. We now know that coal is the corpse of the plant. Coal is therefore crystallized carbon dioxide.

[ 5 ] The red blood that has absorbed the carbon dioxide turns into “blue” blood, but the blue blood must be constantly renewed by oxygen. This is because the blood cannot use carbon dioxide to build up the body.

[ 6 ] Yoga exercises are a special training that enables people to turn red blood into a building block for their bodies. In this way, the yogi builds up his body by means of the blood, just as the plant builds up its body by means of carbon dioxide.

[ 7 ] We can see, then, that the capacity for transformation that exists in nature is represented by coal, which is a crystallized plant. And the philosopher's stone, in the broadest sense of the word, refers to this capacity for transformation.

[ 8 ] The law of retransformation applies to all beings, as does the law of ascension. Minerals are degenerate plants, plants are the ancestors of animals. Animals and humans have a common ancestor. Humans have ascended, animals have descended. As far as the spiritual part of humans is concerned, it comes from the gods. In this respect, humans are fallen gods, and Lamartine's saying is literally true: “Humans are fallen gods who remember the heavenly worlds.”

[ 9 ] There was an era when all life on Earth was half plant, half animal. The Earth itself was alive and represented a kind of giant animal. The ground was like an enormous mass of peat on which giant forests grew, which later turned into coal. This era corresponds to the time when the Earth and Moon were still one entity. The Moon represents the female element of the Earth.

[ 10 ] There are beings that have remained at a lower stage of development. Mistletoe, for example, is a witness to this world age, a remnant of the parasitic plants that lived on Earth as if on a plant. This is where its special occult properties come from. They were known to the Druids, who regarded it as a sacred plant. The parasitic mistletoe is a remnant from the lunar era of the Earth. It is a parasite because it has not learned how to live directly on mineral soil like other plants.

[ 11 ] The situation is similar with illness. It is a relapse caused by parasitic elements in the organism. The Druids and the Skalds knew about the relationship between mistletoe and humans. An echo of this can be found in the legend of Baldur. The god Baldur is killed by mistletoe because mistletoe is a hostile element from the previous epoch that is no longer appropriate for the human body. The other plants, which were adapted to the age, had sworn friendship to humans.

[ 12 ] As the plant-based earth became mineral, it acquired a new property through the metals: the ability to reflect light. A celestial body only becomes visible in the sky once it has become mineral. There are therefore many other worlds in the universe that our physical eyes cannot perceive and that can only be perceived by clairvoyants.

[ 13 ] The earth has become as mineral as the physical body of man. But it is characteristic of human beings that there is a movement in two directions within them. For when the physical human being has descended, the spiritual human being has ascended. Paul expressed this truth. He explains that there is one law for the body and another for the spirit. Consequently, the human being appears as both an end and a beginning.

[ 14 ] The turning point in human development is the time of the separation of the sexes. There was a time when the two sexes were united in the human being. Even Darwin recognized the possibility of such a state. With the separation of the sexes, this new, powerful element entered the world: love. The power of attraction of love is so powerful and mysterious that, for example, tropical butterflies of different sexes, which were brought from the tropics to Europe and were two hundred miles apart, flew towards each other immediately after they were released and met halfway.

[ 15 ] Something similar happens between the human world and the divine world as between the human kingdom and the plant kingdom. Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Just as the plant kingdom breathes out oxygen, so the human world breathes out love—since the separation of the sexes—and the gods live on these emanations of love.

[ 16 ] Why do animals and humans exhale love? The occultist sees modern humans as beings in the midst of evolution. Humans are fallen gods and gods in the making, all in one.

[ 17 ] The realms of heaven feed on the outpouring of human love. The Greeks expressed this fact in the myth of nectar and ambrosia. However, the gods are so far above humans that, according to their own nature, they would actually crush them. But there is something between humans and the gods, a kind of intermediate stage, just as mistletoe is an intermediate stage between plant and animal: this is Lucifer and the Luciferic being in general.

[ 18 ] The gods are only interested in humans' capacity for love. While Lucifer, in the form of a serpent, wants to tempt humans to seek knowledge and insight, Jehovah opposes him. But Lucifer is a fallen god who can only ascend through humans by instilling in them the desire for personal insight. He therefore opposes the will of God, who created humans in his image.

[ 19 ] Rosicrucianism explains Lucifer's role in the world. We will return to this later. Here, we will only mention the following maxim from Rosicrucian wisdom: “O man, consider that an upward and downward current flows through you.”