In GA 312 Steiner names oxygen and nitrogen as the only substances working uncombined inside the human body, mirroring the loose atmospheric mixture that governs sleep.
Oxygen and Nitrogen in Man in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching, given in Spiritual Science and Medicine (GA 312, Dornach, 1920), that oxygen and nitrogen are the only two substances present in the human organism in a pure, uncombined state, while every other substance appears there as a compound or a solution. Their loose mingling in the atmosphere mirrors the human constitution: the looser link binding the upper pair, astral body and ego, to the lower pair, etheric body and physical body, is a true mirror-image of the loose admixture of the two gases in the outer air. Any shift in the normal atmospheric ratio of oxygen to nitrogen disturbs human sleep, the nightly separation of those two pairs. Steiner gave this observation in the lecture of 1 April 1920, during his first medical course for physicians, and anthroposophic doctors still apply it to breathing, air quality, and sleep.
Oxygen and Nitrogen in Man names a single startling observation from Steiner's first course for doctors: of all the substances chemistry finds in the human body, only these two gases work within us pure and uncombined. Because the same two gases mingle loosely in the air we breathe, Steiner read the atmosphere and the human being as answering images, joined most intimately at the threshold of sleep.
In Steiner's Own Words
Pass in review all the substances at present known to us, and active in the human organism; and you will find that (with two exceptions) all these are found in combination with other substances within the human organism: as a rule we find compounds and solutions. Two only appear in their pure state within us; these are oxygen and nitrogen. So these main components of the atmosphere play also particular parts within our human bodies. Their interactions form as it were the very core of the substances in us. Oxygen and nitrogen are linked with the functions of the human organism; and they act as the only elements operating in their pure state, and not modified or deflected by other substances combined with them in the human organic sphere.
What it Means Today
For a century, physiology treated the nitrogen we inhale as inert filler, the four-fifths of every breath that does nothing. Diving medicine broke that assumption. In 1935 the American naval physician Albert R. Behnke, with R. M. Thomson and E. P. Motley, published a study of men breathing compressed air at four atmospheres of pressure and identified nitrogen, the supposedly indifferent gas, as the agent of the intoxication divers had long reported: slowed thinking, euphoria, clouded judgment. The condition is now called nitrogen narcosis, Jacques Cousteau later named it the rapture of the deep, and it is the reason compressed-air diving carries strict depth limits. The finding matters here because it demonstrates, in fully conventional terms, that the proportion and pressure of nitrogen against oxygen acts directly on human consciousness, not only on tissue chemistry. Steiner told the physicians of his 1920 course something structurally similar fifteen years earlier: alter the normal relation of these two gases and the human being's states of consciousness, above all sleep, shift with them. The proposed mechanisms could hardly differ more, partial pressures and lipid solubility on one side, the loosening of astral body and ego from etheric and physical bodies on the other. Thalira synthesis: nitrogen narcosis is the crude, pressurized demonstration of the finer law Steiner stated, that the oxygen-nitrogen relation does not stop at the skin but continues into us, and consciousness registers every change in its terms. The gentler application needs no dive: for Steiner's medical students, attention to the air where a patient sleeps was already a therapeutic instrument.
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