Anthroposophy — Steiner's Seven-Fold Human

Physischer Leib — the visible, mineral body, the lowest of the seven members and the only one shared with the inanimate world. Steiner stresses that the physical body 'is built of the same substances and forces as is also found outside, in so-called inanimate Nature' (Theosophie ch. 1) — its peculiarity is not its substance but the fact that it is sustained as a living form. In Anthroposophy the physical body is what remains as a corpse when the higher members withdraw at death. It is also the precondition for the development of the higher members: only an incarnated being can refine astral into spirit-self.

Ätherleib — the etheric or 'life' body: the formative-force body that sustains the physical body's organisation against the entropic pull that would otherwise reduce it to its mineral substrate. Anthroposophy distinguishes the etheric sharply from the merely-physiological vital force: it is the bearer of the laws of the body's growth, regeneration, and morphological coherence, not just its energetic activity. Man shares the etheric body with the plant kingdom — plants have a physical and an etheric body, but no astral body. At death the etheric body is gradually re-absorbed into the cosmic ether over a period of about three days; the death-day rituals of many traditions are read by Anthroposophy as the body's accommodation to that withdrawal.

Astralleib — the astral or sentient body: the bearer of sensation, feeling, desire, and instinctive consciousness. Anthroposophy positions the astral body as the principle shared with the animal kingdom: animals have physical, etheric, and astral but no I. The astral body is what makes the body capable of inwardness, of feeling its own states. In Steiner's later lectures (Vom Menschenrätsel, 1916) the astral is increasingly described as the substrate within which the soul-members (sentient / intellectual / consciousness) operate: feeling, thinking, and willing all happen in the astral, but their organising principle is the I above it.

Das Ich — the I, the ego in the philosophical (not Freudian) sense. This is the member peculiar to the human being: not 'self' in the sense of the felt person, but the being that can refer to itself by the word 'I' and that constitutes the morally accountable centre of the human. The I is what distinguishes the human from the animal in Anthroposophy and what does the work of refining the lower three members into the higher three. Steiner is precise that 'I' is the only word in any language that no person can apply to another person — it is a name only the speaker can speak about themselves; for that reason it names something inaccessible from outside. The I is the central principle of the seven-fold constitution and the engine of spiritual development.

Geistselbst — spirit-self: the astral body transformed and purified by the conscious work of the I. Steiner uses the Sanskrit term manas as a Theosophical loan, but redefines it: manas / spirit-self is what arises when a person's instinctive desires, sympathies, and antipathies have been worked through morally and replaced by chosen, I-consonant feelings. In Anthroposophical evolutionary cosmology, spirit-self is the form of the human being's higher nature as it stands at our current developmental moment, with the work of the I largely incomplete; full manifestation of spirit-self is a future evolutionary stage.

Lebensgeist — life-spirit: the etheric body transformed by the I. Where spirit-self transforms desire, life-spirit transforms the deeper formative forces of the body. The I work that produces life-spirit is more difficult and slower than the I work that produces spirit-self: it requires the conscious participation of the will in processes that ordinarily run below conscious awareness — habit, body-rhythm, sleeping and waking, the re-formation of the body in sleep. Steiner uses buddhi (Sanskrit) as a Theosophical loan for life-spirit, again with a redefined meaning oriented to evolutionary development rather than to a Vedāntic interpretive framework.

Geistmensch — spirit-man: the physical body transformed by the I, the most far-future of the seven members. Anthroposophy treats spirit-man as the developmental endpoint of the work of the I on the lowest substrate; its full realisation belongs to the Vulcan stage of cosmic evolution, beyond the present Earth-stage. Steiner uses atma (Sanskrit) as a Theosophical loan, redefined Christologically as the deified body — the body so completely transformed by the spirit that it becomes the visible expression of the spirit, not its mere substrate. The reference is explicitly to the resurrection body of Pauline anthropology (1 Corinthians 15:44 sōma pneumatikon).