The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. The Philosopher's Stone

[ 1 ] In the Middle Ages, we often hear about the art of making gold and the Philosopher’s Stone. Although such things are connected to very profound questions of life, they are often misunderstood by people who know nothing of higher matters. In the past, the “Philosopher’s Stone” was understood to be the creation of a certain mineral that, when taken as a medicine, was believed to prolong life. Gold, as it is found on Earth today, has in fact not always existed in the same form; rather, it initially took on entirely different forms and then gradually transformed into gold. It is more difficult to bring gold into a liquid state than, for example, lead, but there is also liquid gold that flows like water at high temperatures. It can be liquefied even further, creating clouds of gold that cover the planet, and if you continue to vaporize it, sunlight is produced from gold. Thus, in gold we have a substance that was formed inside the Earth through the solidification of sunlight, just as ice is formed through the solidification of water.

[ 2 ] When the Earth was still the Sun, gold was sunlight. It was only when the Sun split apart that the Earth became so cold that the rays of light remaining within it solidified into gold. The miner still knows this, and that is how he treats the gold. On the Moon, the gold became somewhat stiffer than it had been on the Sun; it flowed in streams across the Moon’s surface. On Earth, it became veins of gold and crisscrossed the Earth, just as blood vessels crisscross the human body. When the Earth’s time came, it so happened that human beings themselves were able to absorb all that which had previously solidified into gold. Light has acquired this significance for humanity. As humanity breathed fire in and out, it burned through them and permeated them with the substance contained in sunlight. The inhaling and exhaling of fire is a process that was outwardly linked to luminous and light phenomena; humanity was then a luminous and glittering being. Remnants of this can be found in the creatures that cause the sea to glow, and also in the firefly. Humanity lost this luminous power by drawing the warmth into itself. In the post-Lemurian era, we already have the warm human being, and now the return journey begins. As human beings develop physically, they will not only develop warmth within themselves but will radiate it outward again, illuminating their surroundings like a sun. Then they will radiate light as the sun once did, and the Earth can continue to develop. On the Earth that will later become Jupiter, he radiates the luminous golden power, so that humanity will become the creator of gold. Thus, through its own development, humanity becomes the chemical laboratory that produces gold. Humanity becomes the planetary spirit and then brings forth what the planet has brought forth. A material transformation truly takes place within it, and thus it becomes the source of gold. Through meditation and concentration, we generate the forces that lead to this. So that today, for humanity, these spiritual activities are the forces of nature through which he prepares for later material transformations. Today, not even a Christ could immediately produce gold in a material sense on our physical Earth, for one cannot produce anything that the environment does not absorb.

[ 3 ] In the Middle Ages, the art of making gold was understood in purely material terms. People did not wait, nor did they extend the spiritual realm across many incarnations, but limited it to just one, thereby reducing it to the material.

[ 4 ] [Let us now turn to] the Philosopher’s Stone. To anyone who has not practiced the occult, the writings on this subject seem as though they were written by a madman. In the eighteenth century, someone described it in the *Reichsanzeiger* and said: “Whoever knows it even once will find it everywhere; you have it in your room, find it on the street, hold it in your hand.” — He thus describes it as something of which one simply does not know what it is. It is something that, if a person can produce it through their own efforts, will truly make them immortal.

[ 5 ] We know that human beings are part of the whole of nature, that they are dependent on the plant world. They breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide; plants, on the other hand, assimilate carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Thus, humans and plants complement each other. Plants build their bodies from what humans exhale. It goes without saying that light must be present before a plant can build its body; but once that is there, it builds it from carbon dioxide. Such a plant is a remarkable chemical laboratory. The main substance is carbon dioxide; the salts it absorbs are secondary. Carbon dioxide consists of carbon and oxygen. The plant retains the carbon and releases the oxygen. Humans combine the oxygen with their carbon and expel it. We can see this when we dig plants out of the earth after millions of years; what do we find then? We find coal. The plant has, in fact, incarnated itself in coal, and coal is its corpse, its lunar body. If we were to observe what the plant world would do if left to its own devices, we would see that the Earth would be transformed into a carbon planet.

[ 6 ] We have now seen that human beings transform the mineral kingdom, that they till the earth with the very same forces that also work within the mineral kingdom. When the earth moves out of its present cycle, human beings will have completely transformed it, and the fifth cycle will begin with the plant kingdom [as the lowest kingdom]. Then humanity will do with the plant kingdom what it is now doing with the mineral kingdom: it will work through it and incarnate within it. And with that, the laboratory forces of the plant world will pass into humanity, and humanity will transform the planet into coal through its own powers. With this, we have reached the point where the human kingdom becomes immortal. Humanity will no longer, as is the case with its mineral incarnations, enter and leave a body, but as a spiritual being will assimilate and then release matter, thereby forming the planet from its own substance. Of course, coal will then exist in the refined form of today’s diamond; humanity forms its diamond planet, which it permeates with veins of gold, just as the Sun once permeated its Earth planet with veins of gold. Humanity becomes the planetary spirit. This is how we must understand Kortum when he says that we constantly hold the Philosopher’s Stone in our hands: it is coal.