Steiner's therapeutic principle that illness is an excess at one pole, luciferic softening or ahrimanic hardening, healed by remedies deliberately prepared toward the opposite pole.
Ahrimanising and Luciferising Remedies in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's therapeutic principle that every illness is an excess at one of two poles, and that healing means preparing a substance toward the opposite pole. In a workers' lecture of 7 May 1923 at Dornach, published in The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity (GA 349), Steiner taught that pleurisy and feverish inflammation express too much luciferic softening in the human organism, and are met with a deliberately ahrimanised remedy: birch wood charred into charcoal, its spring growth forces killed and mineralised, then powdered. Apoplexy, paralysis and calcification express too much ahrimanic hardening, and call for a luciferised remedy drawn from the fragrant flower pole of the plant. The balancing middle between the two poles is the Christ-principle. Anthroposophic physicians, from Ita Wegman's Arlesheim clinic of 1921 onward, still work with this polarity.
Ahrimanising and Luciferising Remedies name the practical side of Steiner's teaching on the two adversary forces. Because the luciferic pole softens and the ahrimanic pole hardens, the physician reads each illness as a tipped scale and prepares a substance from the opposite pole to restore it. Steiner's example is birch: char its rejuvenating wood and the powdered charcoal carries the mineralising counterweight a feverish body needs.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us assume, then, that I am saying to myself quite correctly: this person has pleurisy; how can I help him? I take, say, a piece of birch wood. Birch wood grows strongly in spring. Birch wood in particular is very good, especially when it is towards the bark; there are very good growth forces in the bark. I kill them, that is, I char the birch wood. Then I have birch charcoal. What have I made out of the fresh, ever-rejuvenating birch wood? I have made birch charcoal out of it; I have made Ahrimanic out of it. And now I make a powder out of this birch charcoal and give it to the person who has too much of the Luciferic in his pleurisy. Then I have added the Ahrimanic to what he has too much of the Luciferic.
What it Means Today
Two years after this lecture, Steiner and the Dutch physician Ita Wegman fixed the principle into a medical text, Fundamentals of Therapy (1925), written jointly during his final illness. There the two adversary poles become the clinical polarity that anthroposophic doctors still work with: inflammation at one end, sclerosis at the other, each remedy chosen to lend the organism the counter-gesture it cannot summon itself. Wegman's Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut in Arlesheim, opened in 1921 and continuing today as Klinik Arlesheim, became the proving ground for this remedy-logic, and Weleda, founded that same year in Arlesheim, took over the pharmacy: charred, mineralised preparations such as Carbo Betulae, Steiner's own birch charcoal, remain listed in the anthroposophic pharmacopoeia.
What separates this from folk herbalism is the direction of the question. The herbalist asks what a plant contains; the anthroposophic physician asks which pole a preparation has been moved toward, by charring, by mineralising, by drawing from root or from fragrant flower. The Thalira synthesis: an ahrimanised remedy is not a weapon against Lucifer but a loan of form, the physician lending the body enough hardness that its own Christ-balance, the living middle between the poles, can resume the healing.
Where to Read More
- The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity, GA 349
- Find From Limestone to Lucifer (GA 349) at SteinerBooks
- Find Fundamentals of Therapy (Steiner and Wegman) at SteinerBooks
- Earthing and Grounding: Walking Barefoot for Health and Spirit
- Pineal Gland and the Third Eye: Science and Tradition
- Thoughtforms and Egregores: How to Create and Work With Them