The perfected Phantom that Christ won at Golgotha, the incorruptible archetype-body that now seeds the future spiritual evolution of every human being.
The Resurrection Body in Anthroposophy is the pure, incorruptible Phantom of the physical body that Christ established at the Mystery of Golgotha and made available as the seed-template for human spiritual evolution. Rudolf Steiner systematized this in From Jesus to Christ (GA 131, Karlsruhe 1911). It is not the resuscitated corpse of Jesus, but the spiritual-corporeal form-body that the Divine Beings had intended for humanity from the start of Earth-evolution.
In Steiner's Own Words
Let us think of the body of Christ that rose out of the grave. Just as from the body of Adam the bodies of earth-men are descended, in so far as these men have the body that crumbles away, even so are the spiritual bodies, the Phantoms for all men, descended from that which rose out of the grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave of Golgotha. It is possible for man to receive into his organism those forces which then rose from the grave.
What it Means Today
Esoteric Christianity has always carried a different reading of Easter than the doctrinal mainline. Steiner's contribution, given to his Karlsruhe audience in October 1911, was to spell that reading out with anatomical precision. The Phantom is the spiritual form-body that the Thrones, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Movement, and the Spirits of Form had been building through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. The Luciferic influence corrupted it. Death entered. From that moment, every physical body inherited from Adam carried a degraded Phantom that crumbled at the grave. The Mystery of Golgotha was the cosmic surgery that produced a second, uncorrupted Phantom and made it inheritable.
This is where Sergei Prokofieff's The Encounter with Evil (Temple Lodge, 1999) sharpens the picture for the present age. Prokofieff reads the Resurrection Body as the answer humanity will need to the late-twentieth-century intensification of the Sorath impulse and the materialised counter-image of Christ. The Christian Community Easter celebration, founded in 1922 under Friedrich Rittelmeyer with Steiner's direct guidance, treats the Resurrection Body not as a past miracle to be commemorated but as a present substance to be received at the altar. The Act of Consecration of Man does this work weekly. Anthroposophic moral-imaginative practice does the corresponding inner work: the Christ-Impulse is taken into the willing rather than merely the believing, and the soul gradually weaves a connection to the pure Phantom that stood up out of the empty tomb. The cosmic horizon is the Future Vulcan stage, when the Resurrection Body becomes the collective body of Spirit-Man, the seventh and final transformation Steiner names in his anthropology. What was won once is what will be lived everywhere.
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