In Steiner's Rosicrucian path, the Philosopher's Stone is not gold making but the fourth-degree discipline of conscious breathing that builds a chaste, plant-like body.
The Philosopher's Stone in Anthroposophy is the fourth degree of Rosicrucian training, in which the pupil learns to regulate the breathing process consciously, retain carbon rather than exhale it, and build his own body out of that carbon as a plant builds its stem and leaf. Rudolf Steiner set the degree out in Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy (GA 111), in the lecture given at The Hague on 5 March 1908, and earlier at Hannover in October 1907. He strips the phrase of every gold-making association: no sorcery, no deception, nothing but a natural process. The stone is the human body itself once desire has been chastened out of the blood, which is why Steiner repeats the old saying that every person has held the Philosopher's Stone in his hands without knowing it. Carbon, the commonest of substances and the substance of the diamond, is the mineral in question. German: Stein der Weisen.
Alchemy's most famous object is, for Rudolf Steiner, an ordinary one. The Philosopher's Stone names a stage of inner work, not a substance to be manufactured, and its material is carbon: the element the plant takes from the air and turns into stem, leaf, and wood. What the Rosicrucian pupil practises is a breathing discipline that lets the body approach the plant's chastity.
In Steiner's Own Words
But of this it can be said: When man consciously learns to direct the breathing process towards a goal, then he learns with his consciousness to carry out the process that the plant performs: the direct building of forms from carbon. This is a completely true fact, even if it may sound strange: Man can learn to transform the carbon within himself, the transformation of matter. The conquest of consciously transforming carbon into living substance is called the “philosopher's stone”. This is the path of the Rosicrucian: to use and master this greatest of all minerals. We now also understand what the man meant who said that we have all held the “philosopher's stone” in our hands without knowing it.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim about the plant, that it performs the direct building of forms from carbon, was in 1908 a description without a mechanism. Chemists had known since Jan Ingenhousz published Experiments upon Vegetables in 1779 that green leaves restore air in sunlight, and since Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure's work of 1804 that the carbon of the plant comes from the air itself. What nobody could say was what the carbon did once it entered the leaf. The answer came out of Melvin Calvin's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Working with Andrew Benson and James Bassham through the late 1940s and the 1950s, Calvin fed algae carbon-14, stopped the reaction at intervals of seconds, and read the labelled compounds off paper chromatograms. The result was the carbon-fixation cycle that carries his name, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961. The plant does build its substance out of atmospheric carbon, step by traceable step.
None of that vindicates the fourth degree as physiology. Human beings exhale their carbon, no laboratory has found a person building tissue from the breath, and Steiner himself said the underlying rhythm could not be discussed in public and placed the material result far ahead of the present. What survives the translation is the polarity. Thalira synthesis: the Philosopher's Stone is Steiner's name for an ethical direction rather than a chemical result, the direction in which the human body becomes as unpossessive about its own substance as the plant already is. Read that way, the fourth degree is a training of attention on the breath, and the diamond it promises is the ordinary carbon a person exhales every minute without noticing.
Where to Read More
- Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy, GA 111
- Find Rosicrucian Esotericism at SteinerBooks
- Philosopher's stone (Q182053) on Wikidata [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]