For Steiner, real alchemy was the last living conversation with the Nature Spirits, a Mystery knowledge of nature that died as the Cosmic Intelligences withdrew.
Mediaeval alchemy, as Rudolf Steiner reads it, was not a clumsy first draft of chemistry but the last inheritance of Mystery knowledge of nature. In the Rosicrucian laboratory the genuine alchemist read each process as a picture of the divine, hearing the Nature Spirits speak in the warm-airy and the cold-watery. He worked in piety, not theory, and felt nature as a living script of God in man and world.
Mediaeval Alchemy in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the last inheritance of the ancient Mysteries' knowledge of nature, practised in the Rosicrucian laboratory between roughly the eighth and fifteenth centuries. In Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres (GA 232, 1923), Steiner describes the genuine alchemist as one who could still converse with the Nature Spirits in the warm-airy and the cold-watery processes, reading each experiment as a picture of the divine working in man and in the great world of nature. He prepared himself as for a sacred rite, since inner purity counted as part of the research. Steiner called quicksilver the Lucifer among the metals, the one substance that stayed behind at an earlier stage of formation. The alchemist's tragedy was that he kept the Nature Spirits but had lost the Cosmic Intelligences, so a complete knowledge of man slipped beyond his reach.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, you see, the other metals, let's say lead, copper, tin, iron, they have gone beyond the drop shape. When the whole earth was still under the influence of the spherical cosmos, all metals were Mercury. They have gone beyond the mercurial form; today they crystallize in other forms. Only the actual, in the modern sense, actual mercury remained at that level. What did the ancients say, and what do medieval alchemists still say about today's mercury? They say: copper, tin, iron, lead are the good metals that have progressed with providence; mercury is the Lucifer among metals, for it has remained at an earlier stage of formation.
What it Means Today
The most serious modern reckoning with mediaeval alchemy belongs to Carl Gustav Jung, whose Psychology and Alchemy appeared in German in 1944 (volume 12 of the Collected Works). Working from his Eranos lectures at Ascona and a private library of alchemical treatises, Jung argued that the alchemists were not bungling proto-chemists but men projecting an inner drama onto their retorts. The blackening, whitening, and reddening of matter mapped, for him, the stages of what he named individuation, the slow integration of the unconscious. The Lucifer-quicksilver that fascinated Steiner became, in Jung's reading, Mercurius, the trickster spirit of the work, both poison and cure.
Steiner and Jung look at the same Rosicrucian laboratory and see two different losses. Jung locates the alchemist's gold inside the psyche, a symbol of the integrated self. Steiner insists the alchemist was really conversing with beings, the Nature Spirits of earth and water, and that his sorrow came from a withdrawal of the Cosmic Intelligences, not from a repressed complex. Thalira synthesis: where Jung saw alchemy as the soul painting its own portrait in matter, Steiner saw it as the soul straining to hear a cosmos that had begun, lecture by lecture, to fall silent. The figure both men reach for is the same, Goethe's Faust, the scholar who has all his lore and stands no wiser than before.
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