9. Interpretations of Fairy Tales

Now, when a person is in such a state of consciousness, there is something else that he experiences in his soul, something that can only be grasped in a very intimate way. In such a state of soul, the human being is removed from ordinary physical perception. Now he says to himself: Yes, what I see there is actually contained in what I see during the day, what becomes clear to my intellectual soul during the day; but when I see it during the day, it is exactly the opposite. When the human being in the intermediate state remembers the impressions of the day, they appear to him reversed in relation to what he feels when he remembers the intermediate states during the day, the various fleeting figures of his astral system. Now, when he remembers the impressions of the day, it is as if what are actually the fine, ethereal forms behind ordinary reality appear to him in rigid forms. That is why objects appear to man as if they were enchanted and contained within themselves what their essence is. Wherever enchanted forms appear, whether they are enchanted in plants or in something else, this has come about in the following way: Man sees the content of a wise being that is behind the physical appearance, and he remembers: Yes, during the day this is only a plant, and it is separated from my intellectual soul, so that I cannot actually reach it during the day. When humans feel this strangeness between the objects of the day and what lies behind them, for example, the object of the day, the lily, and what lies behind it, the figure related to their own intellectual soul, then they feel the desire of their intellectual soul to connect with what lies behind the object during the day as a “marriage,” like a growing together of the night form with the day form. What the consciousness soul is, arose in man at a time when he had already distanced himself very far from the forces of nature, when he could no longer see behind the secrets of existence, so to speak. What the consciousness soul is capable of is far, far removed from those powerful forces we described earlier. Cleverness is the ability of the consciousness soul, but it is far removed from strength, from great power. With the consciousness soul, we see those spiritual beings who have remained at the stage where human beings initially had only the shell of the I. Human beings see these beings living there; they cannot do much, their powers are small. And since human beings see in images forms that correspond to their inner nature, they appear as “dwarfs.” Thus, in such intermediate periods, when human beings are free from sensory perception, the entire realm that lies behind sensory perception is populated with such figures. When human beings feel, in their higher moments, so to speak, that they have this relationship with the spiritual world, then the external events of life appear to them as they really are, as an expression of all these relationships with the spiritual world. And if a person is particularly astute in life, if they do not view life in a dry and prosaic way, but clarify for themselves the relationships of life to spiritual reality, especially in such states where people can still know something of spiritual reality, then the following can happen to them. Let us assume that he is a somewhat thoughtful person and observes that certain people are clever and, through all kinds of cleverness, overcome the raw forces that otherwise prevail in human life. Then the person says to himself: What actually happens in life, where cunning overcomes the raw forces, is thanks to those powers behind us with which we are related, and which allow a force to become conscious within us that, through intelligence, overcomes the raw forces that we ourselves still had within us when we were at the stage of giants. And the events within him appear to man as mirror images of external world events that have receded but can still be perceived in the spiritual world. The spiritual world reflects the struggles of those beings who are weaker in physical strength but have become stronger in spiritual power. Wherever the defeat of brute forces or giants occurs in fairy tales, the underlying perception is that of such an intermediate state. Man wants to enlighten himself about himself. The spiritual world has disappeared from him, but he says to himself: I can enlighten myself when I am in such an intermediate state. There I will become so wise that cleverness and cunning will triumph over brute force! - And then the powers that actually exist in the spiritual world and correspond to our powers of cleverness appear. They appear and act and enlighten man about what happens in the spiritual world.