On Old Moon, nitrogen did what carbon does on Earth. Its earthly leftovers, the cyanic compounds, are poisons stranded outside their own epoch.
Nitrogen as the Moon Substance in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that nitrogen occupied on Old Moon, the planetary incarnation preceding Earth, the place carbon occupies on Earth now. Lecturing in Berlin on 6 November 1903, in the cycle printed as Theosophy and Occultism (GA 90c), Steiner described the old lunar atmosphere as nitrogen-bearing and said that the growing predominance of nitrogen marked the beginning of that world's pralaya, the darkening that closes one planetary incarnation before the next opens. What stayed behind when Earth condensed are the nitrogen compounds and the cyanic compounds, and cyanide, carbon joined to nitrogen, ranks among the severest poisons because it is a lunar norm surviving into an epoch that no longer runs on it. A week later Steiner drew the dietary consequence: nitrogen-rich foods such as legumes cloud the etheric body, and mushrooms carry an inhibiting lunar force.
Nitrogen as the Moon Substance names the point where Steiner's cosmology touches chemistry. Earth breathes carbon; Old Moon, he taught, breathed nitrogen. The passage from one planetary incarnation to the next left residues inside the periodic table itself, so that something as ordinary as prussic acid registers, in his reading, as a fragment of an older world still loose in this one.
In Steiner's Own Words
What remained is what reminds us of the last processes on the moon; on Earth, these are the nitrogen compounds, the cyanic compounds. That is why these compounds are so destructive on Earth. They are remnants and therefore dangerous because they were the norm only on the moon. One of the most severe poisons is cyan, the combination of carbon with nitrogen. On the moon, this meant approximately the same as what the combination of carbon with oxygen means on Earth today. Everything that was there in one epoch must be utilized in a subsequent epoch.
What it Means Today
Steiner came back to nitrogen twenty-one years later at Koberwitz in Silesia, now Kobierzyce in Poland, in the eight agriculture lectures of June 1924 published as GA 327. There he named nitrogen the bearer of astrality in the plant world, the substance through which sensitivity enters what would otherwise be carbon architecture. The 1903 Old Moon lecture supplies the reason that claim is not arbitrary. If nitrogen once governed a world whose beings lived in dream consciousness, then its earthly office is to carry feeling into matter, which is also why it turns so violent when it hardens into cyanide.
Biodynamic growers have worked this practically since Koberwitz. Preparation 504, made from stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) and buried for a full year, is the nitrogen preparation of the set, and Steiner said it makes the soil reasonable, able to regulate itself rather than merely be fed. The claim has been put under measurement. The DOK trial at Therwil in Switzerland, running since 1978 under the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL) with Agroscope, grows biodynamic, organic, and conventional plots on one field. The twenty-one-year results that Paul Mäder and colleagues published in Science in May 2002 recorded nutrient inputs far below the conventional plots, yields holding near four fifths of them, and higher soil biological activity.
Thalira synthesis: set the two lectures side by side and nitrogen stops being a fertiliser question and becomes a question of tact, since the substance that once made a whole world dreamlike is the one we now spread by the tonne.
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