{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 127/1911-12-19/p030","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"For Capesius, fairy tales stimulate imaginative knowledge. What works and weaves from them into his soul is not their content, not their plot, but rather how they take their course, how one motif moves into the next. A motif may induce certain powers of soul to strive upward, a second motif persuades other powers to venture downward, still others will induce the soul forces to mingle and intertwine upward and downward. It is through this that Capesius' soul comes into active movement; out of his soul will then emerge what enables him finally to see into the spiritual world. For many people, a fairy tale can be more stimulating than anything else. We will find in those that originated in earlier times motifs that show elements of ancient clairvoyance. The first tales did not begin by someone thinking them out; only the theories of modern professors of folklore explaining fairy tales begin like that. Fairy tales are never thought out; they are the final remains of ancient clairvoyance, experienced in dreams by human beings who still had that power. What was seen in a dream was told as a story—for instance, “Puss in Boots,” one version of which I have just related. All the fairy tales in existence are thus the last remnants of that original clairvoyance. For this reason, a genuine fairy tale can be created only when—consciously or unconsciously—an imagination is present in the soul of the teller, an imagination that projects itself into the soul. Otherwise, it is not a true fairy tale. Any sort of thought-out tale can never be genuine. Here and there today, when a real fairy tale is created, it arises only because an ardent longing has awakened in the writer toward those ancient times mankind lived through so long ago. The longing exists, although sometimes it creeps into such secret soul crevices that the writer fails to recognize in what he can create consciously how much is rising out of these hidden soul depths, and also how much is disfigured by what he creates out of his modern consciousness.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas","date":"1911-12-19","location":null,"word_count":347,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/127/1911-12-19/p030","alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/127/1911-12-19/p030"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/127/1911-12-19/p030","paragraph_aligned":true}],"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1911-12-19","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 127/1911-12-19/p021","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/127/1911-12-19/p021"}],"bead_confidence":"medium","length_check":{"de_words":341,"en_words":347,"ratio":1.02,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative and this passage's lecture alignment is imperfect. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."}}