The stripping-away of the etheric body from a soul that has hardened against the spirit, suffered only by those who never received the Christ-principle.
The second death is the image, in Steiner's reading of Revelation, of a soul losing its etheric body at the end of the earth period because it has shut itself off from the spirit. The first death lays aside the physical body. The second reaches deeper, into the body of life itself, and only a soul still chained by desire to matter can be touched by it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Then in the further stage of evolution there comes a condition where the spiritualizing of the earth has proceeded so far that there can no longer be even an etheric body. Those whose etheric body completely harmonizes with the astral body lay aside this etheric body without pain, for they remain in their astral body which is filled with the Christ-Being. They feel the laying aside of the etheric body as a necessity in evolution, for they feel within them the capacity to build it up again for them-selves because they have received Christ. Those, however, who in this etheric body desire what belongs to the past cannot retain this etheric body, when all becomes astral. It will be taken from them, it will be torn out of them, and they now perceive this as a second dying, as the “second death.”
What it Means Today
Read against the grain of its lurid wording, the second death is Steiner's name for a single inner danger: the hardened ego. A soul can so close itself around its own desires that it loses the supple life-body through which renewal travels, and is left with nothing it can rebuild. Esoteric Christianity has carried this warning for centuries under the older word for that closing-off, induratio cordis, the hardening of the heart that Pharaoh suffers in Exodus and that the medieval mystics feared above any outward sin.
The thread runs unbroken into the anthroposophical present. At the Goetheanum's School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, the Section for Spiritual Striving founded under Steiner in 1924 still works with this picture, not as a threat held over the timid but as a description of how a life can wall itself in. The point is not the far-off cosmic accounting; it is the daily texture of attention. A person who keeps the life-body open does so through ordinary acts that loosen the grip of the self: a meditation held faithfully, an interest taken in another's pain, a willingness to be changed by what one meets. Steiner's first death is simply mortality, shared by saint and miser alike. The second is the one a soul can choose, and the only safeguard he names is the warming, un-hardening presence of the Christ-principle worked patiently into the body of one's life.
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