The preserved life-body of the ancient Persian initiate, woven after his death into a reborn disciple who became Moses, as Steiner relates in GA 109.
The Etheric Body of Zarathustra in Anthroposophy is the preserved life-body of the great initiate who founded ancient Persian culture, held intact in the spiritual world after his death instead of dissolving into the general ether. Rudolf Steiner gives the account in The Principle of Spiritual Economy (GA 109, 1909), relating that Zarathustra, foremost pupil of the great Sun initiate after the Atlantean catastrophe, sacrificed this sheath for one of his two intimate disciples. The etheric body carried the power to read the Akasha Chronicle, the perception of evolutionary phases following one another in time. When that disciple was reborn, the life-body of his teacher was woven into him and awakened in earliest childhood, while the infant lay enclosed in a box upon the water; the reborn disciple, Steiner says, is Moses. Students of spiritual science read this account as the clearest single picture of how a perfected sheath carries a culture forward.
When an ordinary person dies, Steiner taught, the life-body dissolves soon afterward into the general ether, and only an extract remains. The etheric body of Zarathustra met a different fate. Charged with the Sun wisdom of ancient Persia, it was held back as a treasure of evolution, waiting for the infant in the ark of bulrushes in whom its forces would one day germinate.
In Steiner's Own Words
A kind of initiation had to take place. As a very small child, before his own individual development came into play, the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body had to be awakened in this reborn disciple. Therefore, the child was enclosed in a box and placed in water so that he was cut off from the rest of the world and it could not influence him. There the forces of Zarathustra's etheric body germinated. This reborn disciple of Zarathustra is Moses, and in the story of Moses and his abandonment we have given nothing other than that deep mystery which took place behind the scenes of the outer world, the preservation of Zarathustra's etheric body and its reawakening in Moses. This enabled Hermes and Moses to pass on the post-Atlantean culture as it happened.
What it Means Today
Every tradition faces the problem of succession: how does a founder's capacity, and not only his doctrine, outlive him? The Zarathustra stream is the place in Steiner's work where that question receives its most concrete answer. In the Munich lecture of 7 March 1909, the etheric body is no abstraction. It is the living architecture of memory and habit in which a lifetime of Sun wisdom had been worked, and by holding that organ back from dissolution the spiritual world could transplant the capacity itself into a new bearer. Steiner asks his listeners to reread the abandonment of the child in the ark of bulrushes as the outer image of an initiation: enclosed in the box upon the water, sealed away from every earthly influence, the infant felt the preserved forces germinate before his own judgment or ego could interfere. He even names a trace the reader can check, for the wisdom carried by that sheath, he says, can still be found in the books of Moses in the Old Testament.
Read beside its twin gift, the stream reveals a deliberate division of labor. The astral body of Zarathustra gave Hermes the vision of what spreads out side by side in space; his etheric body gave Moses the vision of what follows in time, the Akasha Chronicle unrolling as sacred history. For readers working with the 1986 Anthroposophic Press edition of The Principle of Spiritual Economy, the genealogy of Egypt and Israel becomes something stranger than influence: two cultures germinating from the sacrificed sheaths of one Persian teacher.
Where to Read More