High summer's inner warmth-process, when the human being burns gently with sulphur-fire and the soul shines out into the cosmos.
The sulphurising of summer is Rudolf Steiner's name for the warmth-process that rises within living things as the year reaches its height. Around St. John's-tide the sulphur a person carries as a quiet bodily substance flares into a mild inner combustion, and the etheric being begins to shine outward, given up to the surrounding cosmos rather than held within the skin.
In Steiner's Own Words
The inner process which occurs during high summer is a permeation of the organism by that which is represented crudely in the material world as sulphur. When a man lives with the summer sun and its effects, he experiences a sulphurising process in his physical-etheric being. The sulphur that he carries within him as a useful substance has a special importance for him in high summer, quite different from its importance at other seasons. It becomes a kind of combustion process. It is natural for man that the sulphur within him should thus rise at midsummer to a specially enhanced condition.
What it Means Today
Steiner asks us to take "sulphur" not as a yellow powder on a chemist's shelf but as a process, a direction of warmth. In high summer that warmth turns outward. The plant pours itself up into blossom and scent, the human soul loosens its grip on the body, and Steiner pictures the inner being shining into space like the glow-worms (Johannis Käferchen) that light the meadows at St. John's time. This is the year's gesture of self-surrender, the moment the earth gives itself away to the stars before autumn calls it home.
The lineage that still works with this reading is biodynamic agriculture, the method Steiner founded in his June 1924 lectures at Koberwitz. Biodynamic growers speak of sulphur, mercury, and salt as three living processes rather than three elements on the periodic table, and they treat the summer sulphur-process as the warmth that carries a plant up into flower and aroma. The horn-silica preparation (501), stirred and sprayed as the morning sun climbs, is the practical answer to this gesture: it works with the upward, light-and-warmth pole of the growing season, the very pole Steiner traced from the human blood out to the cosmos. Where a soil chemist counts parts per million of elemental sulphur, the biodynamic grower watches for ripeness, scent, and the quality of light a fruit seems to hold, reading summer's burning as something the whole farm passes through together. The sulphurising of summer names that shared inner fire, and its counter-image is the iron that streams down in the August meteors to gather, by autumn, into the indrawing strength of Michael.
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