C4-Homeopathy

The C4- trituration is a special way of triturating substances as the first stages of homeopathic potentisation.

The most wide-spread way of preparing homeopathic remedies is to triturate the crude substance up to the C3 and from there on to potentise in liquid form by succussion, which is also what the pharmacies are obliged to do.

The following text was written by Wiet van Helmond

Concept

In order for us to understand the concept of C4 Homeopathy we need to go back to Hahnemann (1755-1843) who in the beginning of his career discovered the effect of the homeopathic principle (like cures like) but was still figuring out how these remedies came to their effect.

With his experiments with the China officinalis plant he discovered that diluting the substance made it more potent. But how do you dilute gold or sand?

Hahnemann’s experiments

It was probably Hahnemann’s contemporary physician Franz Anton Mesmer who experimented with iron and magnets that gave him the idea of trituration. If rubbing a magnet over a piece of iron for a long time made it magnetic than perhaps rubbing two other substances against each other also transferred some of the characteristics of these substances. In an ideal situation one of these two substances would be completely inert before the experiment. That way the transference would be a one way street. This led to his first quest: to find an inert substance that was able to absorb the energy of any other substance. After some time he found lactose (milk sugar) to be the ideal material. It had very little characteristics of its own (as a carbohydrate it gave some energy but otherwise it presented the user with very little to no symptoms) so it seemed like a blanc paper ready to project other energies on.

His first experiment was with gold. This was a substance that had been connected to mankind for a very long time so it must have some healing properties as well. So how do you transfer these to lactose? What’s the best procedure to rub these together to have the characteristics of gold into milk sugar? Being a perfectionist physician he wrote down every detail. How long he triturated, how long he scraped (during trituration the lactose tends to stick to the sides of the mortar so he frequently took time to scrape this off) and how often he diluted by adding more milk sugar to the mortar. And as you develop symptoms during this process (see further on) you also get a hint of when the remedy has unfolded itself. So after three rounds of triturating Hahnemann finished his experiment and had thus created the remedy Aurum metallicum and also found that all remedies should be triturated for three rounds which he wrote in his Organon paragraph 270.

However the experiment didn’t stop here. In his materia medica of Aurum Metallicum he wrote that he triturated for another cycle and that “By further trituration and dilution the power of gold is still more developed and spiritualized, so that I now employ for all curative purposes only a very small portion of a grain of the quadrillion-fold dilution for a dose.”

Modern development

Withold Ehrler and Jürgen Becker

Strangely this piece of information went unnoticed until in the late nineties when Withold Ehrler, a German pharmacist, was inspired during a trituration by a very strong contact with the substance at hand, so that he gave a voice to the remedy’s substance and wrote down what it told him. He and the renowned homeopath Jürgen Becker then wanted to do more such trituration provings and were retracing the steps Hahnemann had made. They discovered that while creating a new remedy (triturating) you are actually peeling of layers of symptoms that are connected to the substance. These layers are named after the cycle of trituration. With Jürgen Becker bringing Ehrler’s concept into the public during a seminar, this could be seen as the birth of the C4-homeopathy.

Trituration cycles and their symbolic meaning

While triturating from crude substance to C1 (the first cycle) most symptoms will be on the physical sphere: pain, hunger, thirst, itching, discomfort, physical sensations, etc.

The in the following C2 cycle most symptoms will be on an emotional level (happiness, giddiness, irritation, sadness, anger, etc).

Which leads us to the C3 where the key aspects of the mental sphere of the remedy will come out to express themselves. So it wasn’t strange that Hahnemann decided that C3 should be the basis for all remedies! But in the next cycle (C4) we will come across the more spiritual side of the remedy. Here lies not only the absolute essence of the remedy, this is also our deepest and most profound individual level of functioning. Within this layer lie our life purpose, our goal and pathway. Whenever we meet a patient who asks “Why is this always happening to me?” the remedy should come from at least the fourth trituration. Anyone struggling with these kind of spiritual questions should have a remedy coming from at least the C4 sphere. But! There is more. What if we went even higher? Well there are, according to Withold, 8 layers. But it is also possible that during a trituration a C4 essence comes up at an earlier phase or that the C4 essence will not reveal itself until even later (for instance diamond took several hours extra to reach the C4 essence information). But what are these other 4 layers?

Well C5 is our miasmatic, family and archetypical layer. When we identify ourselves too much to a miasmatic pattern or archetype we need remedies from this layer. It’s field of reach is beyond our physical body and is no longer individual. We behave from a pattern without an individual basis. For instance when someone has over identified himself with the Christ archetype or is behaving purely from a miasmatic pattern.

In the C6 level the archetypical connection becomes bigger. This is where the collective archetypes are expressed and lived out. For instance living in a famine surrounded by epidemical disease. So C6 is the larger collective, the epidemic, the cultural level. These are the problems we face as a society. In this level we find information on why these things are happening to us. But the influence is coming from outside ourselves. It’s in the larger collective.

Also we can look at the C0 to C8 as a journey where C0 is just pre-birth, still not fully physically, emotionally and mentally present. It is what, on a chemical level, feeds us or makes us sick. And from there you go in through layers C1, C2 and C3 to the very core of our human existence: the C4 level. This is where the core of our being lies. Why we are here in this incarnation, in this location, in this family, in this body, etc.

C8 is the reverse level. From a religious point of view you could say that C8 is where the body has died and the soul is in a higher sphere, beyond our reach, about to start its new incarnation from level C0.