Fairy Tales for the Spirit
Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2023 4:25 pm
I would like to share a brief fairy tale from Steiner, and his elaboration on it, which I found very helpful for my own understanding, and also motivating and inspiring for my striving towards the Spirit. It helps to livingly elucidate what we have also been discussing here much more abstractly or theoretically in terms of working through the ego-consciousness, or the reasoning intellect, to unleash the higher spiritual forces which animate it. I have also referred to this in terms of allowing concepts to permeate our life of archetypal Feeling, so they become more intimate to our first-person experience and more fluid within our ideal constellations which help us make sense of that experience.
As we can see from the forum itself, there is a certain wall the intellect always bumps up against when trying to consider this path of higher development too abstractly. The abstract tendency can clothe itself in many forms - it can be in the language of materialism, mysticism/spiritualism, or even that of spiritual science. It can start speaking of 'working through the latent spiritual potential which animates the intellect' without actually inhabiting the inner meaning of such a phrase, or confusing that inner meaning for something it is already familiar with, something it already expects to find within its current inner volume of concepts-feelings-perceptions-experiences. Then it positively convinces itself that its current path must in some way already encompass what is being pointed to.
The reason for why this theoretical tendency continually asserts itself is something transpersonal yet also intimate to every individual soul, in the sense that the latter must look hard at its own context of opinions, interests, preferences, etc. and see whether there is something which always repels it from immersing itself in a fairy tale such as the one below with amazement and reverence, and sacrificially allowing it to work within the soul as something completely fresh, new, and unsuspected. Is there something which constantly tells us that it's not worth the time or effort to follow Steiner's elaboration below with devoted attention to simply discern whether it harmonizes with our innate and fluid power of reasoning, which is entirely dispassionate and disinterested at the personal level? Every individual soul should consider such questions for themselves in contemplative solitude and freedom.
PS - I encourage people to share or reference their favorite fairy tales, which undoubtedly will have a spiritual theme.
*** (Steiner)
It seems to me that the mood of fairy tale is altogether something that mediates between the outer world and everything that human beings once perceived in worlds of spirit in ancient, original clairvoyant vision, and which they can still perceive today if they raise themselves to these worlds of spirit, either through particular, abnormal capacities or through properly schooled clairvoyance. The world of the fairy tale is perhaps the most wholly justified intermediary between this latter world and the world of outer reality, and that of reason and the senses. It seems to me necessary to find a certain explanation for this whole place of the fairy tale and the mood of the fairy tale between these different worlds. Now it is extraordinarily difficult to build a bridge between these two realms. But then it occurred to me that this could be done in the form of a fairy tale itself. A very simple fairy tale does indeed seem to me more apt here than all theoretical explanations. Such a fairy tale might run as follows:
"Once upon a time there was a poor lad who had a clever cat. And this clever cat helped the poor lad—who owned nothing apart from himself—to a great fortune. This is what she did: she persuaded the king that the poor lad owned a great, wondrous and remarkable estate, which the king himself would do well to see. And the clever cat succeeded in getting the king to set off on a journey to see it, and to travel through many, very remarkable regions. Wherever he went, the clever cat arranged for the king to be told that the great estate of this poor lad possessed great fields and meadows and all kinds of wonderful buildings. Finally the king arrived at a great and magical castle. But he arrived a little late, in the terms of a fairy tale, since it was already the time when the great giant or troll returned home from his travels through the universe and wished to enter his palace again. The king was inside the palace and wished to see all its magical wonders. The clever cat stretched out therefore in front of the gateway so that the king should not notice that all this actually belonged to the giant, the troll. When the giant returned home towards morning, the cat began to tell the giant a story, persuading him that he must listen to it. At great length she told him how the farmer ploughs his fields, how he manures it, how he must plough in the manure, how he fetches the seed that he wishes to sow, and then how he sows it. She told him such a long story that morning came and the sun rose. And then the clever cat told the giant, who had never seen this sight, to stay and look upon the golden virgin in the East, the sun. But there’s a law to which giants are subject, and when he turned round to look at the sun, he burst asunder. And so, by delaying the giant in this way, the palace became the poor lad’s property. He no longer had his estate by hearsay only, by the cat’s machinations, but he now did truly own the giant’s palace and everything that belonged to it."
This little, seemingly insignificant fairy tale is actually very central to what we can call the world history of the fairy-tale mood in our time. You see, if we consider human beings in their earthly evolution, most of them—as they have evolved on earth, passing through all incarnations, in all their current incarnations—are now comparable to the poor lad. Today, by comparison to other eras, we really are like the poor lad and possess nothing but a clever cat. But the clever cat is something we certainly possess, for this is our reason, our intellect. And what we possess through our senses today, what we have by virtue of our reason nowadays, which is bound up with the brain, is something very impoverished compared to the whole world of the cosmos, compared to everything we passed through in the conditions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. We are all, really, this poor lad, possessing only our power of reasoning which can set about ascribing to us an imaginary estate. In our present situation we are this poor lad. We are this in terms of our consciousness. But our I is rooted in hidden depths of soul life. These hidden depths of soul life are connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life. But the modern human being has become a poor lad and knows nothing of all this any more, can only at most, through the clever cat, through philosophy, explain all sorts of things about the meaning of what he sees with his eyes or perceives through his other senses. And when modern people wish after all to speak of something that surpasses the world of the senses, if they wish to acquire something that goes beyond the sense world, then they do so—and have been doing so for many centuries now—in art and poetry.
But our time especially—a remarkable time of transition in many respects—shows us very clearly that people do not get very far beyond this ‘poor lad’ sense of things even if they are able to integrate poetry and art into the world of senses as it currently surrounds us. In our era, you see, people have reached towards naturalism through a kind of lack of belief in higher art, higher poetry—a purely external reflection and representation of the outer world. It surely cannot be denied that our epoch has something of a mood of loss and regret, that, despite the inventiveness with which art and poetry represent reality, our age has an underlying sense that all this is illusory, and not truth. This mood does prevail in our time. The king within, who originates in the world of spirit, is in great need of persuasion by the clever cat, by the power of reason that we possess today, to accept that what imagination awakens in art, and endows it with, is indeed in some sense a true human possession. The human being, the king within, is persuaded initially. But this is not worth much, only convinces for a little while. Eventually—and we live at the beginning of such a time—people experience the need to gain access again to the higher, spiritual world, the actual world of spirit. People feel an urge—and this is becoming apparent everywhere today—to re-ascend into spheres of the world of spirit.
A certain transition has to arrive. And this transition can scarcely be better or more easily effected than by re-enlivening the mood of fairy tale. This atmosphere of fairy tales, to put this in purely outward terms, really has the capacity to prepare people’s souls for experiencing occurrences that shine in upon us from higher, supersensible worlds. The very way in which a fairy tale presents itself to us without claiming in any way to represent outer reality, the way in which it simply and pluckily lifts itself beyond all laws of outer reality, enables the fairy tale to prepare our mood of soul to receive the higher world of spirit once again. The rough-and-ready faith achieved in olden times through primitive clairvoyance, has to burst asunder like the troll giant when faced by outward reality. He is subdued by the clever cat’s questions, through the cat’s narratives that are spun far and wide over outward reality. Certainly, we can spin such cat narratives for a long time, showing how reality now and then necessitates us taking refuge in spiritual explanations. We can expound in lengthy philosophical treatises how this or that question can be answered by referring to the world of spirit. In doing so we retain something like a reminiscence of olden times. We can hold the giant’s attention for a while by relating things from the olden days. But faced by the clear language of reality, what has been salvaged in this way from olden times will not stand the test and will explode like the giant when he sees the sun rising. And this mood, the exploding giant, is something we need to know about. Here we touch on something that can in some degree illumine the psychology of the fairy tale. I cannot expound on these things theoretically—I can only discuss the psychology of the fairy tale in terms of inner observation, and I’d like to say the following about this.
Let us say that various aspects of the forms and configurations of the world of spirit—as we have described in brief in the lectures on pneumatosophy75—stand before someone in living imagination. Within anthroposophy, of course, we do relate many things concerning spiritual worlds. This must first stand in living fashion before a person’s soul. But in terms of outer description or depiction not much would result if we were only to describe what unfolds there before a particular soul, even before the clairvoyant soul. A curious disharmony arises in the soul if we try to invest the grim web of modern thinking with truths, such as we expounded here in the last three sessions, about Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions.76 We feel constricted everywhere in relation to the things that then stand before our soul. And the part of us that must capture mysteries of the higher worlds appears to us actually as very trolllike. We become clumping great troll-giants when we try to encompass the forms of the world of spirit. And of course in a sense we have to voluntarily let these forms of spirit explode in the sunlight of day to adapt them to the mood of the modern world; have to let their clairvoyance blow up when they encounter outer reality. And yet we can still retain something. We can retain what the poor lad retains. What we can come to possess in the immediacy of our modern souls is the transformation—but the sober and appropriate transformation—of the gigantic content of the imaginative world in the many layers of meaning of a fairy tale. Then such a human soul will indeed feel like a king who is led to what does not initially belong to this soul at all, what does not belong at all to the soul of the poor lad. The soul comes to possess this, when the gigantic troll bursts asunder, by relinquishing the imaginative world in the face of reality and introducing it into the palace that imagination can build. Whereas, in olden times, human imagination—the imagination of the poor lad—was nourished by the imaginative world, this is no longer possible for souls at our modern evolutionary stage. And yet, even if we first have to relinquish the whole imaginative world, and press it all into the multi-layered mood and meanings of fairy-tale, which does not adhere to external reality, then something that is a deep, deep truth can remain to us in the world of fairy-tale imagination. In other words, the poor lad, who has nothing really apart from the cat, the clever faculty of reason, can possess in the mood of fairy tale something he needs in modern life so that the soul can be educated to enter the worlds of spirit in a new fashion.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation (p. 161). Rudolf Steiner Press. Kindle Edition.
As we can see from the forum itself, there is a certain wall the intellect always bumps up against when trying to consider this path of higher development too abstractly. The abstract tendency can clothe itself in many forms - it can be in the language of materialism, mysticism/spiritualism, or even that of spiritual science. It can start speaking of 'working through the latent spiritual potential which animates the intellect' without actually inhabiting the inner meaning of such a phrase, or confusing that inner meaning for something it is already familiar with, something it already expects to find within its current inner volume of concepts-feelings-perceptions-experiences. Then it positively convinces itself that its current path must in some way already encompass what is being pointed to.
The reason for why this theoretical tendency continually asserts itself is something transpersonal yet also intimate to every individual soul, in the sense that the latter must look hard at its own context of opinions, interests, preferences, etc. and see whether there is something which always repels it from immersing itself in a fairy tale such as the one below with amazement and reverence, and sacrificially allowing it to work within the soul as something completely fresh, new, and unsuspected. Is there something which constantly tells us that it's not worth the time or effort to follow Steiner's elaboration below with devoted attention to simply discern whether it harmonizes with our innate and fluid power of reasoning, which is entirely dispassionate and disinterested at the personal level? Every individual soul should consider such questions for themselves in contemplative solitude and freedom.
PS - I encourage people to share or reference their favorite fairy tales, which undoubtedly will have a spiritual theme.
*** (Steiner)
It seems to me that the mood of fairy tale is altogether something that mediates between the outer world and everything that human beings once perceived in worlds of spirit in ancient, original clairvoyant vision, and which they can still perceive today if they raise themselves to these worlds of spirit, either through particular, abnormal capacities or through properly schooled clairvoyance. The world of the fairy tale is perhaps the most wholly justified intermediary between this latter world and the world of outer reality, and that of reason and the senses. It seems to me necessary to find a certain explanation for this whole place of the fairy tale and the mood of the fairy tale between these different worlds. Now it is extraordinarily difficult to build a bridge between these two realms. But then it occurred to me that this could be done in the form of a fairy tale itself. A very simple fairy tale does indeed seem to me more apt here than all theoretical explanations. Such a fairy tale might run as follows:
"Once upon a time there was a poor lad who had a clever cat. And this clever cat helped the poor lad—who owned nothing apart from himself—to a great fortune. This is what she did: she persuaded the king that the poor lad owned a great, wondrous and remarkable estate, which the king himself would do well to see. And the clever cat succeeded in getting the king to set off on a journey to see it, and to travel through many, very remarkable regions. Wherever he went, the clever cat arranged for the king to be told that the great estate of this poor lad possessed great fields and meadows and all kinds of wonderful buildings. Finally the king arrived at a great and magical castle. But he arrived a little late, in the terms of a fairy tale, since it was already the time when the great giant or troll returned home from his travels through the universe and wished to enter his palace again. The king was inside the palace and wished to see all its magical wonders. The clever cat stretched out therefore in front of the gateway so that the king should not notice that all this actually belonged to the giant, the troll. When the giant returned home towards morning, the cat began to tell the giant a story, persuading him that he must listen to it. At great length she told him how the farmer ploughs his fields, how he manures it, how he must plough in the manure, how he fetches the seed that he wishes to sow, and then how he sows it. She told him such a long story that morning came and the sun rose. And then the clever cat told the giant, who had never seen this sight, to stay and look upon the golden virgin in the East, the sun. But there’s a law to which giants are subject, and when he turned round to look at the sun, he burst asunder. And so, by delaying the giant in this way, the palace became the poor lad’s property. He no longer had his estate by hearsay only, by the cat’s machinations, but he now did truly own the giant’s palace and everything that belonged to it."
This little, seemingly insignificant fairy tale is actually very central to what we can call the world history of the fairy-tale mood in our time. You see, if we consider human beings in their earthly evolution, most of them—as they have evolved on earth, passing through all incarnations, in all their current incarnations—are now comparable to the poor lad. Today, by comparison to other eras, we really are like the poor lad and possess nothing but a clever cat. But the clever cat is something we certainly possess, for this is our reason, our intellect. And what we possess through our senses today, what we have by virtue of our reason nowadays, which is bound up with the brain, is something very impoverished compared to the whole world of the cosmos, compared to everything we passed through in the conditions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. We are all, really, this poor lad, possessing only our power of reasoning which can set about ascribing to us an imaginary estate. In our present situation we are this poor lad. We are this in terms of our consciousness. But our I is rooted in hidden depths of soul life. These hidden depths of soul life are connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life. But the modern human being has become a poor lad and knows nothing of all this any more, can only at most, through the clever cat, through philosophy, explain all sorts of things about the meaning of what he sees with his eyes or perceives through his other senses. And when modern people wish after all to speak of something that surpasses the world of the senses, if they wish to acquire something that goes beyond the sense world, then they do so—and have been doing so for many centuries now—in art and poetry.
But our time especially—a remarkable time of transition in many respects—shows us very clearly that people do not get very far beyond this ‘poor lad’ sense of things even if they are able to integrate poetry and art into the world of senses as it currently surrounds us. In our era, you see, people have reached towards naturalism through a kind of lack of belief in higher art, higher poetry—a purely external reflection and representation of the outer world. It surely cannot be denied that our epoch has something of a mood of loss and regret, that, despite the inventiveness with which art and poetry represent reality, our age has an underlying sense that all this is illusory, and not truth. This mood does prevail in our time. The king within, who originates in the world of spirit, is in great need of persuasion by the clever cat, by the power of reason that we possess today, to accept that what imagination awakens in art, and endows it with, is indeed in some sense a true human possession. The human being, the king within, is persuaded initially. But this is not worth much, only convinces for a little while. Eventually—and we live at the beginning of such a time—people experience the need to gain access again to the higher, spiritual world, the actual world of spirit. People feel an urge—and this is becoming apparent everywhere today—to re-ascend into spheres of the world of spirit.
A certain transition has to arrive. And this transition can scarcely be better or more easily effected than by re-enlivening the mood of fairy tale. This atmosphere of fairy tales, to put this in purely outward terms, really has the capacity to prepare people’s souls for experiencing occurrences that shine in upon us from higher, supersensible worlds. The very way in which a fairy tale presents itself to us without claiming in any way to represent outer reality, the way in which it simply and pluckily lifts itself beyond all laws of outer reality, enables the fairy tale to prepare our mood of soul to receive the higher world of spirit once again. The rough-and-ready faith achieved in olden times through primitive clairvoyance, has to burst asunder like the troll giant when faced by outward reality. He is subdued by the clever cat’s questions, through the cat’s narratives that are spun far and wide over outward reality. Certainly, we can spin such cat narratives for a long time, showing how reality now and then necessitates us taking refuge in spiritual explanations. We can expound in lengthy philosophical treatises how this or that question can be answered by referring to the world of spirit. In doing so we retain something like a reminiscence of olden times. We can hold the giant’s attention for a while by relating things from the olden days. But faced by the clear language of reality, what has been salvaged in this way from olden times will not stand the test and will explode like the giant when he sees the sun rising. And this mood, the exploding giant, is something we need to know about. Here we touch on something that can in some degree illumine the psychology of the fairy tale. I cannot expound on these things theoretically—I can only discuss the psychology of the fairy tale in terms of inner observation, and I’d like to say the following about this.
Let us say that various aspects of the forms and configurations of the world of spirit—as we have described in brief in the lectures on pneumatosophy75—stand before someone in living imagination. Within anthroposophy, of course, we do relate many things concerning spiritual worlds. This must first stand in living fashion before a person’s soul. But in terms of outer description or depiction not much would result if we were only to describe what unfolds there before a particular soul, even before the clairvoyant soul. A curious disharmony arises in the soul if we try to invest the grim web of modern thinking with truths, such as we expounded here in the last three sessions, about Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions.76 We feel constricted everywhere in relation to the things that then stand before our soul. And the part of us that must capture mysteries of the higher worlds appears to us actually as very trolllike. We become clumping great troll-giants when we try to encompass the forms of the world of spirit. And of course in a sense we have to voluntarily let these forms of spirit explode in the sunlight of day to adapt them to the mood of the modern world; have to let their clairvoyance blow up when they encounter outer reality. And yet we can still retain something. We can retain what the poor lad retains. What we can come to possess in the immediacy of our modern souls is the transformation—but the sober and appropriate transformation—of the gigantic content of the imaginative world in the many layers of meaning of a fairy tale. Then such a human soul will indeed feel like a king who is led to what does not initially belong to this soul at all, what does not belong at all to the soul of the poor lad. The soul comes to possess this, when the gigantic troll bursts asunder, by relinquishing the imaginative world in the face of reality and introducing it into the palace that imagination can build. Whereas, in olden times, human imagination—the imagination of the poor lad—was nourished by the imaginative world, this is no longer possible for souls at our modern evolutionary stage. And yet, even if we first have to relinquish the whole imaginative world, and press it all into the multi-layered mood and meanings of fairy-tale, which does not adhere to external reality, then something that is a deep, deep truth can remain to us in the world of fairy-tale imagination. In other words, the poor lad, who has nothing really apart from the cat, the clever faculty of reason, can possess in the mood of fairy tale something he needs in modern life so that the soul can be educated to enter the worlds of spirit in a new fashion.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation (p. 161). Rudolf Steiner Press. Kindle Edition.