9. Interpretations of Fairy Tales

Anyone who wanders through the world today as a sensible person can still find the last remnants of atavistic clairvoyance. Here and there, someone will come up to them and tell them what they have seen in the astral world as their own experiences. Such a person, wandering through the countries in this way, can then hear about those who still have an inkling of the true reality, the fairy tales. This is how they are recorded in our books. This is how the Brothers Grimm collected fairy tales. This is how others collected them, most of whom were not clairvoyants themselves, but received the fairy tales from third, fourth, fifth, and sometimes even tenth hand, so that they came to them in a manifold distorted form. But the time of twilight was drawing to a close, when people still had their intimate connection with the spiritual world, which has just been characterized. People are increasingly withdrawing from this spiritual world. Atavistic clairvoyance is becoming rarer and rarer, at least that which can be described as healthy, and true clairvoyance will increasingly be something that can only be attained through training. And of what people saw in ancient times, most people who still know something about these things will be able to say in a certain future: Once upon a time, old people told this or that from their astral experiences. Where was it? It could have been anywhere. But today you will rarely find anyone who can tell you about it from a real source. And one will be able to say of fairy-tale experiences: They happened once—and if they have not died, these fairy-tale experiences, they still live today. But for most people who are inwardly entangled with the physical plane, they died long ago.