Man, Nature and the Cosmos

GA 91 — 10 August 1905, Haubinda

13. The Philosopher's Stone

In the Middle Ages we often hear of the art of making gold and of the philosopher's stone. Such things, though connected with quite deep questions of life, are often misunderstood by people who know nothing of higher things. By "philosopher's stone" one understood in former times the production of some mineral, which was able to prolong the life by medicinal ingestion. Gold, as it is found on earth today, has in fact not always existed in the same form, but first had completely different forms and then gradually changed into gold. It is more difficult with gold to bring it into a liquid state than with lead, for example, but there is also liquid gold, which runs like water at high temperature. You can liquefy it still further, then gold clouds develop, which cover the planet, and if you volatilize it more and more, from gold - sunlight develops. So that we have in gold a substance which was formed inside the earth by the solidification of sunlight in the same way as ice was formed by the solidification of water.

When the earth was still sun, the gold was sunlight. It was only by splitting off the sun that the earth became so cold that the rays of light remaining in it solidified into gold. The miner still knows this, and he treats the gold in this way. On the moon the gold became a little more rigid than it was on the sun; it ran in streams on the surface of the moon. On the earth it became veins of gold and crossed the earth as the veins of blood cross the man. When the earth time was there, it happened in such a way that man himself could take up all that which had previously solidified into gold. The light gained this meaning for man. When man sucked fire in and out, it glowed through him and permeated him with the substance contained in the sunlight. The sucking in and out of the fire is a process which was externally connected with luminous and light phenomena; man was then a shining and glittering man. Remnants of it are in the beings that cause the sea luminescence and also in the firefly. Man has lost this luminosity by sucking the warmth into himself. In the post-Lemurian time we already have the warm man, and now the way back begins. When man develops physically, he will not only develop the warmth in himself, but will radiate it again and illuminate his surroundings like a sun. Then he will radiate the light like the sun used to do, and the earth can evolve. On the earth, which later becomes Jupiter, he radiates the luminous gold power, so that man will be the creator of gold. Thus, through his own development, man becomes the chemical laboratory that creates gold. Man becomes the planetary spirit and then brings forth what the planet has brought forth. A material transformation is really going on with him, and so he becomes the source of gold. Through meditation and concentration we generate the forces that lead to this. So that today for the mankind these spiritual operations are the natural forces, by which he prepares later material transformations. Today, even a Christ could not materially produce gold directly in our physical earth, because you cannot produce anything that the environment does not absorb.

The art of making gold was conceived quite materially in the Middle Ages. One did not wait, did not extend spirituality to many incarnations, but merely to one, and thereby materialized.

[Let us now come to the] philosopher's stone. To anyone who has not practiced occultism, the writings about it seem as if written by a madman. In the eighteenth century one described it in the "Imperial Gazetteer" and said, "He who knows it only once finds it everywhere; you have it in your room, find it in the street, hold it in your hand. - So he describes him as something that you just don't know what it is. It is erwas, which, if man will be able to generate it through himself, will make him truly immortal.

We know that man is placed in the whole nature, that he is dependent on the plant world. He inhales oxygen, exhales carbonic acid; the plant, on the other hand, assimilates carbonic acid and exhales oxygen. Thus man and plant complement each other. What the human being expels, the plant builds up its body from. It goes without saying that there must be light before the plant can build up its body; but when that is there, it builds it up from the carbonic acid. Such a plant is a strange chemical laboratory. The main substance is carbonic acid; what salts it takes up are secondary. Carbonic acid consists of carbon and oxygen. The plant retains the carbon and releases the oxygen. Man combines the oxygen with his carbon and pushes it away from him. We can see this when we dig plants out of the ground after millions of years; what do we find? We find coal. The plant has in fact incarnated into the coal, and the coal is its corpse, its lunar body. If we were to follow what the plant world would do if left to its own devices, we would see that the earth would be transformed into a coal planet.

Now we have seen that man is transforming the mineral kingdom, that he is plowing the earth with the same forces with which the mineral kingdom works. When the earth steps out of its present round, man has completely transformed it, then the fifth round begins with the plant kingdom [as the lowest kingdom]. Then man will do to the plant kingdom what he is now doing to the mineral kingdom: he will work through it and incarnate in it. And thus the laboratory powers of the vegetable kingdom will pass into him, and he will, out of his own powers, transform the planet into coal. Thus we have reached the point where the human kingdom becomes immortal. No longer will man move in and out of a body, as is the case with his mineral incarnations, but as a spirit being he will assimilate the substance and move out again, thus forming the planet out of his own substance. Of course, the coal will then be present in the fine form of the present diamond; man forms his diamond planet, which he permeates with the gold veins, as formerly the sun permeated his earth planet with gold veins. Man becomes planetary spirit. Thus we must understand Kortum when he says that we hold the philosopher's stone perpetually in our hand: It is coal.