When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 2 - Waldorf Research Institute

hand air or “smoke,” some of its spiritual power is transmitted to both
spheres. Spiritual beings must associate with the smoke. And similarly an
enchantment of spiritual beings is associated with every materialisation.
Everything that is material is “smoke.” Rudolf Steiner then poses the
question: Can we do anything for these enchanted elementals? Elementals
enter into us when we observe nature. But if we observe nature in such a
way that we try to penetrate to her very being, or, more concretely expressed,
to the beings that work in her, then we release the elementals and then they
find, when we die, the way back to their origin. By his inward warmth man
forms fire again from the smoke. Before the inner eye the image of the old
customs of sacrifice can loom up. In the smoke of the sacrifice the priest
sends his prayers and thereby leads the spirit linked to the smoke back to
the spiritual world.
But the elementals were not only banished in space at the beginning of
the world, but also in time. The rhythm of the day, month and year became
possible because elementals made the sacrifice of allowing themselves to be
banished to the darkness of the night, the new moon and the dark winter.
Rudolf Steiner also provides inner activities of man for the release of these
elementals (see second lecture of Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the
Physical World, GA 110.).
Preparation of remedies
In one of the conversations Rudolf Steiner had on his sick bed with
Ita Wegman, he made the suggestion that a spinnable fibre be made from
peat. This would release the elementals banished to this mummified plantsubstance.
They would thereafter protect man from harmful influences that
in the future will increasingly threaten him from the earth’s atmosphere
as a result of technical developments. One could make clothing from the
spinnable fiber. From this background Rudolf Hauschka developed the
prepara tion Solum Uliginosum.
This story is an archetypal image for the preparation of remedies and
the operation of elementals as “healing spirits” (heilende Geister).
We know that the essential aspect of anthroposophical remedies is their
preparation. Natural substances are not of themselves strongly efficacious
remedies. They become so by undergoing preparation. A substance becomes
curative when it is brought along the road to the spirit. One can also say:
only when it is conducted into the realm of the etheric, when it acquires a
relationship with the etheric body. Roughly speaking there are two possible
ways of bringing this about.
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