Astral Body: What It Is in Anthroposophy

The astral body is the third member of the fourfold human being: the bearer of sensation, feeling, desire, pain, and pleasure, the whole inner life that the plant does not have and the animal does. Where the etheric body gives life, the astral body gives consciousness of life: not merely growing, but feeling oneself grow; not merely being wounded, but hurting. Steiner sets it out in Theosophy and in An Outline of Occult Science. The name is old and he keeps it deliberately: the astral body is related to the world of the stars, and its forces come to the human being from the planetary spheres, which is why anthroposophy carries an astrology of its own alongside its picture of the human being.

What it does

Every sensation, every feeling of sympathy and antipathy, every impulse of desire lives in the astral body. It is the body of the inner world as the physical body is the body of the outer one. It gives the animal its instincts and the human being its passions, and it is in the astral body that the temperaments show their sanguine aspect, the quick play of feeling from one impression to the next. Thinking as such does not belong to it; thinking belongs to the I. But the pictures in which feeling lives, the images of dream, the colour of a mood, are astral.

The astral body also works downward. It is what makes the human and animal organism different from a plant's: an inner space hollowed out in the life processes, in which sensation can arise. In anthroposophic medicine the astral body is read wherever there is pain, inflammation, cramp, and nervous exhaustion, since these are the astral body working too strongly into the life body or the physical, and remedies from the animal and mineral kingdoms are chosen for their relation to it.

When it is born

The astral body is born at puberty, around fourteen, as the etheric body is born at the change of teeth and the I at about twenty-one. Before fourteen the astral body is still enclosed in a sheath and works from within, shaping the life of feeling under the protection of the surrounding adults. At puberty it is set free, and the young person's own feelings, desires, and judgments become their own for the first time, with all the turbulence that the freeing brings. This is why the Waldorf school waits until the high school for the formal exercise of independent judgment: judgment rests on the astral body, and the astral body has only then been born.

In sleep, dream, and death

Every night the astral body and the I withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies, which remain in the bed and are restored. Consciousness goes with the astral body, which is why sleep is unconscious for the ordinary human being; dreams are what the astral body perceives at the moment of loosening or returning, expressed in pictures. In sleep the astral body is in the world of the stars it comes from, and brings back from it the forces the waking day has used up.

At death the astral body leaves together with the I and the etheric body, and after the etheric body has dissolved, about three days on, the astral body carries the soul through the period Steiner calls, with the older term, Kamaloka: a passage backward through the life, lasting about a third of its length, in which every desire that could only be satisfied through the physical body is lived through and released. What the astral body has taken up of the I's work is carried on; the rest is given back to the astral world.

Its transformation

The whole esoteric path of anthroposophy is, in one aspect, the work of the I on the astral body. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, the organs of higher perception, the lotus flowers, are organs of the astral body, formed by the exercises. The twelve-petalled lotus in the region of the heart is developed by the six subsidiary exercises, which train thought, will, and feeling to a steadiness the astral body does not have on its own. What the I has purified of the astral body becomes, in Steiner's terms, Spirit Self, Manas, the first of the higher members, and the fruits of this work are carried from one life to the next.

What distinguishes it

The astral body is not the vehicle of astral projection; the term is not used in anthroposophy, and the astral body's leaving of the physical body is not a feat but the ordinary event of every night's sleep. It is not the etheric body, which builds and lives but does not feel. It is not the soul in Steiner's stricter usage: in Theosophy, the sentient soul is the portion of the astral body that the I has already taken hold of and made its own, and the astral body proper is what the I has not yet reached. Its origin lies in the Old Moon stage of evolution, the third of the planetary embodiments of the earth, in which sensation first arose.