Steiner reads the five husbands of John 4:18 as the five principles working on the soul from outside; the sixth, the Spirit Self, purifies from within.
The Five Husbands of the Woman of Samaria in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of John 4:18, in which the five husbands the Samaritan woman has had stand for the five principles that work upon the human soul from outside: the etheric body, the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, and the consciousness soul. The sixth companion, who is not her husband, is the Spirit Self (Geistselbst), which no longer works in the old external way because it purifies the soul from within. Steiner gave this interpretation in Basle on 21 November 1907, in the lecture cycle on the Gospel of St. John published as GA 100. He paired it with the five porches of the pool of Bethesda (John 5:2), reading both fives as the five post-Atlantean cultural epochs through which humanity descends into matter before the Christ-impulse begins its ascent.
The Five Husbands of the Woman of Samaria belong to what Steiner called the Mystery of Number in St. John's Gospel, the secret arithmetic he traced to the school of Pythagoras. Christ names the five at Jacob's well without explanation. For Steiner they are the five members that shaped the soul from outside across five cultural epochs, while the sixth, the Spirit Self, arrives as an inner presence rather than an outer husband.
In Steiner's Own Words
The consequence of this constant influence of the male principle on the female is first the development of the etheric body, then of the astral body, the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. In the latter, the spiritual self then takes shape. This is indicated in the conversation of Christ with the Samaritan woman (ch. 4,18) with the words: “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” The five husbands that the woman has had are the five spiritual bodies that have affected the physical body, and the sixth, the spirit self, is no longer the man in the old sense. The other five are lower, more transient stages of development, while the sixth, the spirit self, represents the divine, the eternal.
What it Means Today
Modern critical scholarship reached its own refusal to read the five husbands literally, by a different road. Raymond E. Brown, in The Gospel According to John (Anchor Bible, volume 29, 1966), weighed a symbolic interpretation with roots in patristic exegesis: the five husbands as the gods of the five foreign nations that Assyria settled in Samaria after 722 BC (2 Kings 17:24), cults that Josephus also counted as five in his Antiquities of the Jews. On that reading the woman's marital history is Samaria's religious history, and the sixth relationship is Samaria's irregular worship of the true God on Mount Gerizim. Brown noted the difficulty that 2 Kings actually names seven deities, yet he took seriously that the fourth evangelist writes in symbols. Steiner belongs to the same interpretive family but turns the symbol inward: the five are not Samaria's imported gods, they are the imported members of the human constitution itself, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, each unfolded in one post-Atlantean epoch. Thalira synthesis: where the Anchor Bible's five point outward to the history of a nation's worship, Steiner's five point inward to the biography of every soul, and both readings agree that the sixth stands in a different order, no longer an outer husband but an inner presence that keeps the temple pure from within.
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