Steiner's name for beeswax as a middle product between blood, muscle, and bone: a stage the human body passes through inwardly, kept fluid by warmth.
Wax as the Human Intermediate Substance in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of beeswax as a middle product standing between blood on one side and muscle and bone on the other, together with the matching wax stage that every human body passes through inwardly. He gave it to the workmen building the Goetheanum at Dornach in the lecture of 26 November 1923, printed in English as Nine Lectures on Bees (GA 351). The bee carries the process outwardly, secreting wax and building the comb from it. The human being reaches the same stage in the blood but never lets it set: the substance stays fluid until it is carried over into blood, into muscle, or into the cells of the bone. Steiner therefore said we hold wax within us as forces rather than as substance, and he traced the ancient veneration of the bee, and of the beeswax candle, to that recognition.
Wax as the Human Intermediate Substance is the reason Steiner gave for the old veneration of the bee: the colony works outwardly at a process the human organism works at inwardly. A piece of comb held in the hand is a middle state made visible, one that in us is never permitted to harden. Warmth holds that difference, and the whole of Steiner's bee teaching turns on it.
In Steiner's Own Words
You see bee-keeping has at all times been highly valued; in olden times especially, the bee was held to be a sacred animal. Why? It was so considered because in their whole activity, processes reveal themselves which also take place in man himself. If you take a piece of bees-wax in your hand you are in reality holding something between blood, muscle and bone, which in man's inner organisation passes through the stage of being wax. The wax does not however become solid, but remains fluidic till it is transformed into blood, or muscles, or into the cells of the bones. In the wax we have before us what we bear within us as forces, not as substance.
What it Means Today
The chemist Rudolf Hauschka (1891 to 1969) took this line of thought into a laboratory. Trained in analytical chemistry in Vienna, he put his questions about the living processes to Steiner directly in the early 1920s, and in 1935 he founded WALA, the anthroposophic pharmaceutical house now at Eckwälden near Bad Boll in Württemberg, where remedies are still made by rhythmic processing rather than by heat extraction alone. His Substanzlehre, translated into English as The Nature of Substance, reads the material world by the states a substance moves through rather than by its formula, and it places the fats and waxes in the group that lives at the border between the fluid and the solid, held to one side or the other by warmth. That is Steiner's remark about the hive, restated as pharmacy.
Ordinary chemistry supports the picture from its own side. Beeswax melts at roughly 62 to 65 degrees Celsius, far above the 37 degrees of the human interior, so the substance a colony is able to stiffen into comb could never stiffen inside us. The bee finishes the process; we are required to leave it open.
Thalira synthesis: the bee is not a symbol of human industry but a specimen of arrested human physiology, a creature that stopped at the stage our blood must keep passing through, which is why the wax on the altar and the wax in the comb were once read as one substance in two conditions.
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