The inner deposit of mineral substance in the human head that runs parallel to intellectual cognition, mirrored with reversed sign in the plant root and the earth.
The Mineralisation of the Head in Anthroposophy is the inner process by which purely mineral substance settles into the living organism of the human head, forming the physical vehicle of intellectual cognition. Rudolf Steiner described it on 6 April 1921 at the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the lecture course published as The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences (GA 76). Because the head is, for Steiner, the oldest formation of the human body, a metamorphosis already regressing in evolution, its functions now run down into mineral deposit: every act of intellectual knowledge is carried by this settling of the mineral within the organic of the nerve-sense apparatus. The same process appears with reversed sign in the root of the plant and in the mineral earth itself. Anthroposophic physicians read this correspondence as the rational bridge from pathology to therapy, notably through root remedies for the nerve-sense system.
When Steiner traces intellectual thinking to its bodily ground, he finds the Mineralisation of the Head: a fine, continuous settling of mineral substance within the living head organism. The sharper the intellect becomes, the further this deposit proceeds. What looks like decline is the price of clear concepts, and its outer mirror lies below us, in the root of the plant and the mineral crust of the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
We learn to recognize how the functions of the human head, by undergoing evolution in the way I have described here, are already in the process of regressing today, how they have become the human head from other states, but how a mineralization process is taking place in the human head today through external influences. And this mineralization process is the parallel phenomenon to our intellectual knowledge, which also only knows how to grasp the mineral physical, because it is bound to a mineralization process in the human nerve-sense apparatus. One becomes familiar with how what one accomplishes in intellectual cognition is paralleled by a mineralization process that builds itself into the organic of the human being as its physical vehicle, a settling of the purely mineral within the organic.
What it Means Today
Steiner ends the lecture by telling the physicians in the room that the road from pathology to rational therapy runs through this correspondence, and the invitation was taken up almost at once. Within months of the April 1921 course, Ita Wegman opened the Klinisch-Therapeutisches Institut in Arlesheim, today the Klinik Arlesheim, and the laboratories that grew into Weleda began preparing medicines on this exact logic. The book Steiner and Wegman wrote together, Fundamentals of Therapy (1925), works the principle out: the nerve-sense pole of the threefold human being concentrates in the head, and the plant stands as its inverted image, root answering head, leaf answering the rhythmic system, flower and fruit answering metabolism.
A century later this remains the working grammar of anthroposophic pharmacy. When a preparation is directed at the nerve-sense organisation, the root of the plant is the part the pharmacist reaches for, precisely because root formation and head formation are the same mineralising gesture carried out with reversed sign. Thalira synthesis: the head purchases the clarity of its concepts with a slow turning toward stone, and Steiner's therapeutics begins by finding that same gesture, healthy and outwardly directed, in the root below the soil.
Where to Read More
- The Stimulating Effect of Anthroposophy on the Individual Sciences, GA 76
- Find GA 76 at SteinerBooks
- Find Fundamentals of Therapy at SteinerBooks
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