When the plant absorbs through its leaves carbonic acid from the air and condenses it into the multiple grains of starch with their peculiar structure characteristic for each plant species, we have a biological event which corresponds to the formation of snow in the meteorological realm. Here we see carbon at work in a manner functionally akin to that of phosphorus. Sugar, on the other hand, has its place in the saps of the plants which rise through the stems and carry up with them the mineral substances of the earth. Here we find carbon acting in a way akin to the function of sulphur.
This twofold nature of carbon makes itself noticeable down to the very mineral sphere of the earth. There we find it in the fact that carbon occurs both in the form of the diamond, the hardest of all mineral substances, and also in the form of the softest, graphite. Here also, in the diamond's brilliant transparency, and in the dense blackness of graphite, carbon reveals its twofold relation to light.
In Fig. 6 an attempt has been made to represent diagrammatically the function of Carbon in a way corresponding to the previous representation of the functions of Sulphur and Phosphorus.
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By adding carbon to our observations on the polarity of sulphur and phosphorus we have been led to a triad of functions each of which expresses a specific interplay of levity and gravity. That we encounter three such functions is not accidental or arbitrary. Rather is it based on the fact that the interaction of forces emanating from a polarity of the first order, produces a polarity of the second order, whose poles establish between them a sphere of balance.
Through our study of levity and gravity in the matter-processes of the earth, a perspective thus opens up into a structural principle of nature which is actually not new to us. We encountered it at the very beginning of this book when we discussed the threefold psycho-physical order of man's being.
In the days of an older intuitive nature-wisdom man knew of a basic triad of functions as well as he knew of the four elementary qualities. We hear a last echo of this in the Middle Ages, when people striving for a deeper understanding of nature spoke of the trinity of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur. What the true alchemists, as these seekers of knowledge called themselves, meant by this was precisely the same as the conception we have here reached through our own way of studying matter ('Salt' standing for 'functional phosphorus', 'Mercury' for 'functional carbon'). Only the alchemist's way was a different one.
This is not the place to enter into a full examination of the meaning and value of alchemy in its original legitimate sense (which must not be confused with activities that later on paraded under the same name). Only this we will say - that genuine alchemy owes its origin to an impulse which, at a time when the onlooker-consciousness first arose, led to the foundation of a school for the development of an intuitive relationship of the soul with the world of the senses. This was to enable man to resist the effects of the division which evolution was about to set up in his soul-life - the division which was to give him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within and outside the human organism.
Thus the alchemist who used these concepts thought of them first as referring to his own soul, and to the inner organic processes corresponding to the various activities of his soul. When speaking of Salt he meant the regulated formative activity of his thinking, based on the salt-forming process in his nervous system. When he spoke of Mercury he meant the quickly changing emotional life of the soul and the corresponding activities of the rhythmic processes of the body. Lastly, Sulphur meant the will activities of his soul and the corresponding metabolic processes of the body. Only through studying these functions within himself, and through re-establishing the harmony between them which had been theirs in the beginning, and from which, he felt, man had deviated in the course of time, did the alchemist hope to come to an understanding of their counterparts in the external cosmos.
Older alchemical writings, therefore, can be understood only if prescriptions which seem to signify certain chemical manipulations are read as instructions for certain exercises of the soul, or as advices for the redirection of corresponding processes in the body. For instance, if an alchemist gave directions for a certain treatment of Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, with the assertion that by carrying out these directions properly, one would obtain Aurum (gold), he really spoke of a method to direct the thinking, feeling and willing activities of the soul in such a way as to gain true Wisdom.1