Fairy Tales in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

It is not my habit to interpret such things in an abstract way and to introduce intellectual concepts. But it is a different matter to have a feeling for the results of investigation—that the human soul in its depths is united with what happens in the world, to be grasped only spiritually, that the human soul is connected with all this and has a hunger to savor its deepest unconscious experiences in pictures. In citing the fairy tale just outlined, one feels a reverberation of what the human soul experienced as the original Sun, and as the arising of sun and moon during the fish epoch of the Earth. It was in some respects a quite momentous experience for me—this is once more the personal note—when I came across this fairy tale, long after the facts I have mentioned stood printed in my Esoteric Science. Though the notion of interpreting the whole matter abstractly still does not occur to me, a certain kindred feeling arises when I consider world evolution in the context of another, parallel portrayal—when I give myself up to the wonderful pictures of this fairy tale.