The spiritual archetype-pattern of the physical body, damaged in Lemuria and re-established as the Resurrection Body of Christ.
The Phantom Body in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the spiritual archetype-pattern of the physical body, the imperishable form-template that gives the body its specifically human configuration. Steiner systematized this reading in From Jesus to Christ (GA 131, Karlsruhe 1911), especially Lecture VIII of 13 October 1911. Humanity's original Phantom was damaged by the Luciferic temptation in the Lemurian epoch; the Resurrection of Christ re-established a perfect Phantom as the seed-template now offered to every human individuality.
In Steiner's Own Words
We said yesterday that the human Phantom, the primal form which draws into itself the material elements that fill out the physical body and are laid aside at death, had degenerated in the course of time up to the Mystery of Golgotha. At the beginning of human evolution it was intended that the Phantom should remain untouched by the material elements that man takes for his nutrition from the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But it did not remain untouched. For the Luciferic influence brought about a close connection between the Phantom and the forces which man absorbs through his earthly evolution; a connection particularly with the ashy constituents.
What it Means Today
Steiner's Phantom is not the etheric body and not the astral body. It is the form-template of the physical body itself, the configuration that determines why the same calcium and protein that compose a stone or a fish arrange themselves, in us, into a specifically human shape. Steiner traced this Phantom back through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods of cosmic evolution. The Thrones laid down its germ on Old Saturn, the Spirits of Wisdom worked it further on Old Sun, the Spirits of Movement on Old Moon, and only in the Earth period did the Spirits of Form bring it to the threshold of visibility. The Luciferic temptation in Lemuria interrupted that intended sequence. The Phantom became bound to the ashy, mineral residues the human being takes in through eating; instead of remaining a clear, volatile form, it began to break down with the physical substances at death. This, in Steiner's reading, is the occult meaning of disease and of mortality itself.
The anthroposophic Christology developed from this point onward in From Jesus to Christ is precise: at the Crucifixion the Phantom of Jesus of Nazareth, into which the Christ-Being had entered at the Jordan Baptism, was found to be free of the ashy constituents. What rose from the empty tomb was the restored Phantom, the body Paul calls in 1 Corinthians 15 the soma pneumatikon or spiritual body. Sergei Prokofieff develops this reading most carefully in The Encounter with Evil (Temple Lodge, 1999), where he treats the restored Phantom as the imperishable seed-template that humanity now receives through Christ across the consciousness-soul age, the modern bulwark against the dissolution worked by Ahrimanic and Sorathic forces. For the meditant the corollary is concrete and not speculative. The work is to bring one's thinking, feeling, and willing into a quality of inner activity that the restored Phantom can take hold of, so that the physical organism gradually becomes a vessel for the seed-body Christ rescued at the empty tomb rather than for the elements alone.
Where to Read More