Lecture II

Think back to the times of earlier medicine. Nobody who had anything to do with medicine in those days would have thought of investigating merely the external, abstract forces and substances of nature. Men worked in their laboratories—if their workshops can be called that—in such a way that the operations of the elemental forces were clearly revealed to them. Actually, men have always asked: How does a sulphur—or some other process combine with a different substance? What effect has this behind the actual sense-phenomenon? How are the elemental beings working here? Men made their experiments in order to learn, let us say, by paying attention to the transformation undergone by a substance when it combines with another, or when it arises out of another, how—especially in the change of colour revealed by a substance in the process of transition—beings of the elemental kingdom peep out into the world of the senses. Even Paracelsus, when he described sulphur, salt and mercury was not describing these ordinary physical substances, but what peeped out at him from the elemental kingdom when these substances were undergoing transformation. Hence you can never understand Paracelsus if you take his expressions in the sense in which they are used today in chemistry, because everywhere he really means what peeps out from the elemental world in the way described. Here, however, are the healing forces, the real healing forces. In what you see when you Look at the external appearance of any plant, let us say the meadow saffron, you do not see the healing forces that are its characteristic; if you want to perceive the healing forces of the meadow saffron you must watch it when it is fading, when it is undergoing its unique, bold changes of colour; then the elemental being is escaping and this brings about the changes of colour. You know the saying that when the devil makes off, he leaves a stink behind him—and as they escape the elemental beings assert their audacity by the colouring.