Etheric Body: What It Is in Anthroposophy

The etheric body is the second member of the fourfold human being: the body of life forces that builds, maintains, and repairs the physical body, and without which the physical body would be a corpse and follow the laws of the mineral world. Steiner also calls it the life body and the body of formative forces. It is what the human being has in common with the plant. A stone has a physical body only; a plant has a physical body and an etheric body; an animal adds the astral body; the human being adds the I. The etheric body is described in Theosophy and in An Outline of Occult Science, Steiner's own revised written works, and its birth and its role in education are set out in The Education of the Child.

What it does

The etheric body is the bearer of growth, nutrition, reproduction, and the healing of wounds: the whole life process by which the physical substances are held in a living form against their own tendency to decay. It does not stop at the outline of the body; it is a body of forces, of streaming and forming, and it works in rhythm and time as the physical body works in space. A plant's etheric body draws the physical substances up into leaf, flower, and fruit against gravity, in time with the year; the same kind of body does that work in the human organism.

In the human being the etheric body also carries what has become habit and rhythm: the temperament in its phlegmatic aspect, the lasting inclinations, the things done without thinking, and memory in the sense of what is retained and can be recalled. The memory of a life is held in the etheric body, which is why, at death, when the etheric body loosens from the physical, the whole life stands before the soul as a single tableau for about three days, until the etheric body dissolves into the general world of life.

When it is born

At physical birth the physical body is set free from the mother's body; the etheric body is not yet free. Through the first seven years it is fully occupied in building the organs, and the tradition is exact that it must not be called on for anything else in that time. The change of teeth, around seven, is its birth: the second teeth are the last thing the etheric body forms as a body-builder, and with them a portion of its forces is released from growth into the life of soul, where they become the forces of memory, of rhythm, and of the inner picture. This is the finding on which the whole Waldorf curriculum rests. Formal teaching begins with the change of teeth because it works on the etheric body, and the etheric body is only then available; the years between seven and fourteen are taught through picture, rhythm, and memory because those are the etheric body's own activities.

In sleep and in illness

In sleep the astral body and the I withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies, which remain together in the bed. This is why sleep restores: the etheric body works undisturbed on the physical, repairing what the day's consciousness, which is a wearing-down process, has used up. Waking is the astral body's return.

Anthroposophic medicine reads much of illness in the relation between the etheric body and the members above it. Where the etheric forces work too strongly and unchecked, growth runs beyond form; where they are too weak or too much invaded by the astral body, the body hardens and dries. Plant remedies in potency, rhythmical massage, and the warmth applications of the tradition address the etheric body directly, and biodynamic farming works on the etheric life of the soil with the same understanding.

The four ethers

Steiner's later lectures distinguish four ethers within the etheric world: warmth ether, light ether, chemical or sound ether, and life ether, corresponding to the four elements below them and to the successive planetary stages of evolution in which they arose. Guenther Wachsmuth developed this in The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man, and the Goethean scientists of the tradition, Ernst Lehrs in Man or Matter and Theodor Schwenk in Sensitive Chaos, read the etheric in the forms that water, plant growth, and the moving air leave behind.

What distinguishes it

The etheric body is not an aura, an energy field, or a subtle double that can be projected. It is life itself, as a body. It is not the astral body, which feels, desires, and suffers, and which the plant does not have. It is not the physical body's shape, though it holds that shape in being. In Theosophy, Steiner is careful that the word ether here carries none of the meaning of physics; it names the life-giving member of the human being, known to spiritual research as directly as the physical body is known to the senses.