Fairy Tales in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 62/1913-02-06/p005 ·1913-02-06 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
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Even so, with the methods of spiritual science it proves possible nonetheless to illumine at least to some extent those regions of the soul-life from which fairy tale moods arise. Actual experience would seem to gainsay the second reservation as well. Just because the origin of fairy tales has to be sought at such profound depths of the human soul, one arrives as a matter of course at the conviction that what may be offered as a kind of spiritual scientific explanation remains something that touches the source so slightly after all as not to harm it by such investigation. Far from being impoverished, one has the feeling that everything of profound significance in those regions of the human soul remains so new, unique and original that one would like best of all to bring it to expression oneself in the form of a fairy tale of some kind. One senses how impossible any other approach is in speaking out of these hidden sources.

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Cite: GA 62/1913-02-06/p005 · edition English