Spirit Man, or Atma, is the seventh member of the human being: the physical body itself made transparent to the conscious I.
Spirit Man in Anthroposophy is the seventh and highest member of the human being, the part of the physical body that the I has learned to control and spiritualise. Rudolf Steiner names it Atma, borrowing the Sanskrit term, and in his Kassel lectures of June 1907, published in English as Theosophy and Rosicrucianism (GA 100), he links the word to the German atmen, to breathe, because the transformation begins in the breathing process. It completes a sequence: the I working on the astral body yields Spirit-Self, on the etheric body Life-Spirit, and on the physical body Spirit Man. Steiner placed its full unfolding at the end of Earth evolution, when the Tree of Life lives once more within the human being rather than outside him. Practically, the term marks the far end of a path, not a technique: it names what conscious work on habit, temperament, and bodily will points toward.
Spirit Man is what Steiner calls the physical body once the I has taken conscious hold of it. He gives it the Sanskrit name Atma and counts it as the seventh member of human nature, above Spirit-Self and Life-Spirit. Because the physical body is the densest and most finished part of us, Steiner treats its transformation as the longest work, reaching completion only at the close of Earth evolution.
In Steiner's Own Words
We can only form an idea of what it means to control one's physical body consciously, through the Ego, if we bear in mind how little we really know of our physical body. This knowledge has nothing to do with the assertions of modern anatomy concerning man's physical body. Long before modern anatomy existed, there were ancient teachings, which of course were not known publicly, but which contained a knowledge concerning man's inner being. This knowledge enabled the wise men of ancient times to follow, for instance, the currents of life and of the blood, and they were thus able to observe themselves inwardly, to observe the physical body and all its organs. When we shall have reached this stage of development, not one portion of our body will move without the conscious participation of our will. This is the transformation into Atma, the Spirit-Man.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern restatement of what Steiner meant by Spirit Man comes from Owen Barfield, the British philosopher and lawyer who joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1923 and spent decades among the Inklings alongside C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. In Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957), Barfield traces the history of human consciousness as a movement out of what he calls original participation, the archaic condition in which people experienced the world as saturated with the beings that made it, through the detached spectator consciousness of modern science, toward a third condition he names final participation. Final participation is not a return to the archaic state. It is the same felt continuity with the world, held this time by a fully awake I that knows itself to be the one holding it. Barfield built the argument on grammar, etymology, and the history of words rather than on clairvoyance, which is why philosophers who reject Steiner's spiritual research still read him.
Thalira synthesis: Barfield's final participation and Steiner's Atma describe the same terminus from two directions, one from the history of language and one from the history of the human bodies, and the reason both land on the far horizon is that the physical body is the only member humanity did not build. That is also why Steiner ties Spirit Man to the breath. Breathing is the one bodily process a person can take under conscious control at will and then hand back to itself, a small daily rehearsal of the whole distant work.
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