9. Interpretations of Fairy Tales

So now we have another fairy tale before us, one that contains different elements. The first thing we must unlearn if we want to understand the content of true fairy tales or legends is that they are some kind of fiction created by the imagination of the people. They are never that. The first starting point for the origin of fairy tales lies in ancient times, in times when all human beings, who had not yet matured to intellectual culture, possessed a certain degree of clairvoyance, which remained as a remnant of an original clairvoyance. People who retained such clairvoyance for a long time experienced intermediate states between sleeping and waking. And when such people, who had this remnant of ancient clairvoyance, were in these intermediate states, they actually experienced the spiritual world, the spiritual world in its most diverse forms. It was not what we call a dream today. For most people today, not all, a dream is something chaotic. In those ancient times, people with this old clairvoyance experienced something very regular, so regular that the experiences were the same or at least typically similar among different people.