The Elements of Organic Substance by Rudolf Steiner with Journaling Prompts

One of the most important questions in agriculture is that of the significance of nitrogen—its influence on all farm production.

Nitrogen as it works in nature has four sisters, in a manner of speaking, whose working we must learn to know at the same time if we want to understand the functions and significance of nitrogen itself in nature’s so-called household.  The four sisters of nitrogen are those that are united with it in plant and animal protein in a way that is not yet clear to the external science of today.  I mean carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur.

 

“This excerpt is presented in its original form to preserve the depth and nuance of Rudolf Steiner’s language.  While some phrasing may differ from modern conventions, its meaning and essence remain intact.”

 

In order to know the full significance of protein, it is not sufficient to enumerate as its main ingredients hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon.  We must include another substance of the profoundest importance for protein, and that is sulphur.  Sulphur in protein is the very element which acts as a mediator between the spiritual that is spread throughout the universe—the formative power of the spiritual—and the physical.

We can indeed say that anyone who wants to trace the tracks which the spiritual marks out in the material world must follow the activity of sulphur.  Though this activity appears less obvious than that of other substances, it is nevertheless of great importance; for it is along the paths of sulphur that the spiritual affects the physical domain of nature.  Sulphur is actually the carrier of the spiritual.

Let us begin with carbon.

What is known about carbon nowadays is very little when you consider its infinite significance in the universe.  The time is not so very long ago—only a few centuries—when this black fellow, carbon, was so highly esteemed as to be called by a very noble name.  They called it the stone of the wise—the Philosopher’s Stone.

The amorphous, formless substance which we see as coal or carbon proves to be only the last excrescence, the corpse of that which coal or carbon truly is in nature’s household.

Carbon, in effect, is the bearer of all the creatively formative processes in nature.  Whatever in nature is formed and shaped—be it the form of the plant persisting for a comparatively short time or the eternally changing configuration of the animal body—carbon is everywhere the great sculptor.  Wherever we find it in full action and inner mobility, it bears within it the creative and formative cosmic pictures, the sublime cosmic imaginations, out of which all that is formed in nature must ultimately proceed.

There is a hidden sculptor in carbon, and this sculptor—building the manifold forms that are created in nature—makes use of sulphur in the process.  To see carbon as it works in nature, we must see the spirit activity of the wide universe, making itself moist so-to-speak with sulphur, and working as a sculptor—building with the help of carbon the firmer and more well-defined form of the plant, or again, building the form in the human being which disappears again the very moment it comes into being.

For it is in this way that the human being does not turn into a plant but is a human being.  He has the faculty time and again to destroy the form as soon as it arises; for he excretes the carbon, bound to oxygen, as carbon dioxide.  Carbon in the human body would form us too stiffly and firmly—it would stiffen our form like a palm.  Carbon is constantly about to make us stiff and firm in this way, and for this precise reason our breathing must constantly dismantle what carbon builds.  Our breathing tears the carbon out of its rigidity, unites it with the oxygen and carries it outwards.  So we are formed in the mobility which we as humans need.  In plants, the carbon is present in a very different way.  To a certain degree it is fastened—even in annual plants—in a firm configuration.

It is on the paths of this carbon—moistened with sulphur—that the ego of the human being moves through the blood.  So in a manner of speaking the ego of the universe lives via the sulphur in the carbon as it forms itself and ever again dissolves such form.

To a certain extent, the carbon in the human being and animal masks its native power of configuration.  It finds a pillar of support  in the configurative forces of limestone and silicon.  Limestone gives it the earthly,  silicon the cosmic formative power.  Carbon, therefore, in the human being—and in the animal—does not declare itself exclusively responsible, but seeks support in the formative activities of limestone and silicon. 

Carbon is a true creator of form in all plants; it is carbon that forms the structure or scaffolding.  But in the course of Earth evolution this has been made difficult for carbon.  It can form the plants if water is beneath it.  Then it is equal to the task.  But when limestone is there below, the limestone disturbs it.  Therefore it allies itself to silica.  Silica and carbon together—in union with clay, once again—create the forms.  They do so in alliance because the resistance of the limestone must be overcome.

Now whether it be the human being or any other living thing, a living being must always be penetrated by an etheric element—for the etheric is the true bearer of life, as we have often emphasized.  Therefore the carbon structure of a living entity must, in turn, be permeated by an etheric element.  The latter will either stay still—holding fast to the structure—or it will be involved in a greater or lesser fluctuating movement.  In either case, the etheric element must be spread out wherever the structure is.  Now this etheric element, if it remained alone, could certainly not exist as such within our physical earth world.  It would always slide through into the void.  It could not hold what it must take hold of in the physical earth world if it had not a physical carrier.  This, after all, is the specific character of what we have here on earth, that the spiritual must always have a physical carrier.

What then is the physical carrier of that spiritual element which works in the etheric?  The physical element which with the help of sulphur carries the influences of the universal etheric into the physical is none other than  oxygen. Only now does the breathing process reveal its meaning.  In breathing we absorb oxygen in which the lowest of the super sensory elements, the etheric, lives.

Inside us, the oxygen is not the same as it is where it surrounds us externally.  Within us, it is living oxygen and in like manner it becomes living oxygen the moment it passes from the atmosphere we breathe into the soil of the earth.  Although it does not live there so intensively as it does in us and in the animals, nevertheless, there too it becomes living oxygen.  Oxygen under the earth is not the same as oxygen above the earth.

But we must now go farther.  I have placed two things side by side; on the one hand there is the carbon structure which manifests the workings of the highest spiritual essence that is accessible to us on the earth—the human ego, or the cosmic spiritual being which is at work in the plants.  Observe the human process.  We have breathing—living oxygen as it occurs inside the human being, living oxygen carrying the etheric.  And in the background we have the carbon structure, which in the human being is in perpetual movement.  These two must come together.  The oxygen must somehow find its way along the paths mapped out by the structure.

The mediator is none other than nitrogen.  Nitrogen guides life into the form or configuration that is embodied in the carbon.  Wherever nitrogen occurs, its task is to mediate between life and the spiritual essence which to begin with is in carbon.  Everywhere—in the animal kingdom, in the plants and even in the earth—the bridge between carbon and oxygen is built by nitrogen.  And the spirituality which—once again with the help of sulphur—is working thus in nitrogen is what we describe as the astral.  It is the astral spirituality in the human astral body. It is the astral spirituality in the earth’s environment.  For as you know, there too the astral is working—in the life of plants and animals, and so on.

Thus, spiritual speaking, we have the astral placed between oxygen and carbon, and this astral impresses itself upon the physical by making use of nitrogen.  Nitrogen enables it to work physically. The astral extends to wherever nitrogen is.  The etheric principle of life would flow away everywhere like a cloud, it would take no account of the carbon structure were it not for nitrogen.  Nitrogen has an immense power of attraction for the carbon structure. Wherever the lines are traced and the paths mapped out in carbon, there nitrogen carries the oxygen, there the astral in the nitrogen drags the etheric. 

Nitrogen is for ever dragging the living to the spiritual principle.  That is why nitrogen is so essential to the life of the soul in the human being.  For the soul itself is the mediator between the spirit and the mere principle of life. 

Now you can see into the human breathing process.  Through it the human being receives into himself oxygen-that is, the etheric life.  Then comes the internal nitrogen and carries the oxygen everywhere where there is carbon, wherever there is something formed and figured, albeit in perpetual change and movement.  That is where the nitrogen carries the oxygen, so that it can fetch the carbon and get rid of it.  Nitrogen is the real mediator for the oxygen which is to be turned into carbon dioxide and breathed out.

At this point I think you will have the true idea of the necessity of nitrogen for the life of plants. The plant as it stands before us in the soil has only a physical and an etheric body; unlike the animal, it does not have an astral body within it.  Nevertheless, outside it the astral must be there everywhere.  The plant would never blossom if the astral did not touch it from the outside.  Though it does not absorb it (as the human being and the animals do), the plant must nevertheless be touched by the astral from outside.  The astral is everywhere, and nitrogen itself—the bearer of the astral—is everywhere, moving about as a corpse in the air.  But the moment it enters the earth, it is alive again.  Just as with oxygen, so too nitrogen becomes alive; indeed, in the earth it grows in sentience and sensitiveness.  Strange as it may sound, nitrogen not only becomes alive but sensitive inside the earth; and this is of the greatest importance for agriculture.  Nitrogen becomes the bearer of that mysterious sensitiveness that flows over the whole of the earth.

You have seen how there is living interaction.  On the one hand there is what works out of the spirit in the carbon principle, taking on forms as of a scaffolding or structure.  This is in constant interplay with what works out of the astral in the nitrogen principle, permeating the structure with inner life, making it sentient.  And in all this, life itself is working through the oxygen principle.  But these things can only work together in the earthly realm inasmuch as it is permeated by yet another principle, which our physical world establishes the connection with the wide spaces of the cosmos.

There must be constant interchange of substance between the earth—with all its creatures—and the entire universe.  All that is living in physical forms upon the earth must eventually be led back again into the great universe.  It must be able to be purified and cleansed in the wide reaches of the cosmos.

All that is thus developed in the living creature, structurally as in a fine and delicate design, must eventually be able to vanish again.  It is not the spirit that vanishes, but that which the spirit has built into carbon, drawing life to itself out of the oxygen as it does so.  This must be able once more to disappear, not only in the sense that is vanishes on earth—it must be able to vanish into the cosmos.

We may describe the process thus.  In all these structures, the spiritual has become physical.  It lives in the body astrally, it lives in the image as the spirit or the ego—living in a physical way as spirit transmuted into the physical.  After a time, however, it no longer feels comfortable there.  It wants to dissolve again.  And now once more—moistening itself with sulphur— it needs a substance in which it can abandon all structure and definition and find its way outwards into the undefined chaos or indistinguishable realms of the cosmos, where there is no organization of any kind.

This is achieved by a substance which is nearly like the physical and yet again as nearly alike to the spiritual.  The substance which is so near to the spiritual on the one hand and to the substantial on the other is hydrogen.  Hydrogen carries out into the far spaces of the universe all that is formed and alive and astral.  Hydrogen carries it upwards and outwards till it becomes such in nature that it can be received in the universe once more. It is hydrogen which dissolves everything away.

 

~ Excerpt from ‘Bringing the Chemical Elements to Life,' Chapter 5 of Agriculture: An Introductory Reader by Rudolf Steiner. Original texts compiled, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Thornton Smith.

Note: This excerpt is from Rudolf Steiner's original text and does not include commentary or notes from the editor.

Spirit Nourished Earth created the image in this post in collaboration with DALL·E 3

 

Journaling Prompts for Self-Reflection

Form and Fluidity

Steiner speaks of carbon as shaping our physical form while oxygen and nitrogen bring fluidity and life. Where in your own life do you feel too “fixed” or too “fluid”?

Breath and Being

Oxygen is said to carry the etheric, the life force. When you breathe with awareness, what do you notice beyond the physical act of inhaling and exhaling?

Holding and Letting Go

Carbon builds form; hydrogen dissolves it. In what areas of life are you building structure, and where are you being called to release or dissolve?

Bridging the Realms

Nitrogen acts as a bridge between the spiritual and physical. What helps you feel connected to both the practical and the spiritual aspects of your being?

 

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