Steiner's teaching that each person carries an etheric body of the opposite sex, so physical gender is the outer garment of a hidden dual being.
Man and Woman in the Light of Spiritual Science in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching, given in the Munich lecture of 18 March 1908 (GA 56), that physical sex is only the outer garment of a dual being. Each person bears an etheric body of the opposite sex to the physical body, so a man carries an inner feminine pole and a woman an inner masculine pole. Behind the two visible sexes Steiner places the cosmic polarity of life and form, the masculine answering to ever-becoming life and the feminine to life held in lasting form. Across many earthly incarnations the soul alternates between male and female bodies, so that it gathers the whole of human experience. Sex belongs to the perishable sheath, not the eternal individuality, which sleep and death both leave behind as a being without gender.
Man and Woman in the Light of Spiritual Science names Rudolf Steiner's 1908 account of the sexes, in which the etheric body is of the opposite sex to the physical body. The visible man hides an inner feminine nature, the visible woman an inner masculine one. Sex is a polarity of life and form worn across alternating male and female incarnations, never the deepest truth of the human being.
In Steiner's Own Words
And now the spiritual researcher must say something that will cause many of his contemporaries to accuse him of foolishness: human beings are, in their essence, peculiar organisms; for the etheric body is only partly a kind of copy of the physical body. With regard to sexuality, the situation is different. In the male sex, the etheric body is female, and in the female sex, it is male. As strange as this may seem at first, deeper observation must lead us to recognize this extraordinarily significant fact: hidden within every human being is something of the opposite sex.
What it Means Today
Forty-three years after Steiner spoke in Munich, Carl Jung gave a structurally similar idea its most precise form. In Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works volume 9, part 2, 1951), Jung set out the anima as the unconscious feminine figure in a man and the animus as the unconscious masculine figure in a woman, each a "contrasexual" image that shapes mood, attraction, and the path toward what he called the Self. Jung reached this through dream analysis and comparative mythology at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, founded the same year. Steiner reached his version through what he described as spiritual observation, and he located the opposite-sexed nature in the etheric body rather than the personal unconscious. The two men never settled their well-documented disagreement, yet both arrived at a hidden inner partner of the other sex.
Thalira synthesis: where Jung's animus rises from a personal and ancestral unconscious, Steiner's opposite-sexed etheric body is the residue of a soul that has, in his account, actually lived as the other sex in earlier incarnations, so the inner feminine in a man is less a symbol than a memory. Read this way, the gender question becomes a question of biography stretched across many lives, and the practical task is to let the supra-gender harmony Steiner names work in ordinary relationships rather than to fix either sex into a single role.
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