Steiner identified the Philosopher's Stone with carbon, the substance a future humanity will hold back from its own breath and build a body from.
What is the Philosopher's Stone as Carbon?
The Philosopher's Stone As Carbon in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's identification of the alchemists' Stone of the Wise with the chemical element carbon, given in the thirteenth lecture of At the Gates of Spiritual Science (GA 95), delivered in Stuttgart on 3 September 1906. Steiner placed the teaching inside his account of Pranayama, the yogic discipline of the breath. Human beings inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, a poison, so ordinary breathing slowly kills the surrounding world; only the plant, which holds its carbon back and builds a body from it, keeps the air fit to breathe. Occult training, Steiner said, anticipates a far future in which the human being carries out that plant process inwardly, retaining the carbon of his own breath and building a soft, transparent body of it, which is to say a body of diamond. Historians of chemistry now read such claims as statements about matter rather than allegory.
The Philosopher's Stone as carbon is the most concrete of Steiner's alchemical statements. He does not treat the Stone as a metaphor for inner purification. He names an element, carbon, and a bodily process, breathing, and points to a future in which the human being keeps his carbon and builds a diamond body from it.
In Steiner's Own Words
At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century a good deal of information about occult development leaked out. The Stone of the Wise was often mentioned in published writings, but one can see that the author understood little of it, even though it all came from the right sources. In 1797 a local Thuringian newspaper printed an article about the Stone of the Wise which included, inter alia, the following: “The Stone of the Wise is something one has only to recognise, for every man has seen it. It is something which everyone holds in his hand for part of almost every day, but without knowing that it is the Philosopher's Stone.” This is an enigmatic way of indicating that the Philosopher's Stone can be found everywhere. Yet this strange expression is literally true.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, historians of science read the Philosopher's Stone as fraud or as private psychological allegory. That reading has collapsed. Lawrence Principe, a chemist and historian at Johns Hopkins University, argued in The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) that the alchemists meant what they wrote about matter, and he tested it at the bench, reconstructing seventeenth-century procedures from the notebooks of George Starkey, the Harvard-educated chymist who supplied Robert Boyle with recipes in London. Principe and William Newman had already shown, in Alchemy Tried in the Fire (2002), that Starkey's coded language resolves into repeatable laboratory work. On that reading the Stone was a claim about a real substance.
Steiner made that same move in 1906, and then he named the substance: carbon. His Stone is not gold-making but body-making, and the vessel is the lung rather than the crucible.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner's is the only version of the Stone in which the alchemist's own breathing is the furnace, which is why he files the teaching under Pranayama and not under laboratory practice.
The practical line runs on through anthroposophic pharmacy: Rudolf Hauschka, who founded WALA in 1935 and wrote The Nature of Substance, took carbon as the form-giving element of the earthly world and read the plant's carbon-building as the pattern for preparing medicines. Rhythmic breathing exercises in anthroposophic therapy work the near end of that same idea.
Where to Read More
- At the Gates of Spiritual Science, GA 95
- Find At the Gates of Spiritual Science at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]