Results of Spiritual Research is the working title given to GA 62, a cycle of fifteen public lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Berlin between October 1912 and April 1913. Held across a single winter season at the Architektenhaus, the series was addressed to a general audience rather than to members of an esoteric school, and its purpose was to show how the methods of spiritual science could be turned toward the great questions of life, the meaning of cultural achievement, and the inner sources of art. The lectures range widely, from the justification of spiritual research and the paths of psychic cognition to studies of Jacob Boehme, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci. Two of the sessions treat the poetry and hidden meaning of fairy tales, and one is devoted to the worldview of the art historian Herman Grimm.
Place in Steiner's Work
By the winter of 1912, Steiner had spent more than a decade lecturing publicly in Berlin, and this cycle belongs to the mature phase of that effort. The years around 1912 and 1913 were a turning point for him personally, marking the separation of his movement from the Theosophical Society and the founding of the independent Anthroposophical Society. Against that background, GA 62 reads as an attempt to demonstrate the breadth of spiritual science to a wider public, not by argument alone but by applying it to subjects any cultivated person of the time would recognize.
The volume sits within a long run of Berlin winter courses that Steiner gave year after year for the same audience. What distinguishes this particular cycle is its confident reach into cultural history. Rather than presenting doctrine in the abstract, Steiner takes up painters, mystics, storytellers, and philosophers, and asks what the achievements of these figures reveal about the human soul. The result is a bridge between his more technical esoteric writings and the ordinary reader's experience of art and literature, a bridge he built repeatedly throughout his Berlin period.
Steiner set out the plan of the series in the opening lecture. He told his listeners that the course would first show what spiritual science has to say about the questions of life, then move on to illuminate important cultural facts and outstanding personalities of the past, and finally consider the relationship between spiritual science and the spiritual currents of the immediate present. That three-part arc, from method to history to living culture, gives the cycle its shape and explains why studies of Renaissance painters sit beside lectures on dreaming, morality, and the folk tale. For a reader coming to Steiner for the first time, GA 62 offers an unusually accessible doorway, because it keeps returning to figures and stories already familiar from ordinary education.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens by facing objections head on. In the first lectures Steiner does not begin by defending spiritual research but by stating the strongest cases against it, then asking how such research can be justified at all and what its tasks are for the present and the future. He describes the paths of psychic cognition and reports on what spiritual investigation has to say about the vital questions of human existence, before turning to the relationship between natural science and his own method.
From there the lectures move into cultural portraiture. A study of Jacob Boehme treats the shoemaker mystic of Görlitz as an early witness to spiritual perception. The session on Herman Grimm considers a modern art historian who, in Steiner's reading, stood as a mediator between the world of Goethe and the spiritual life of the present day. Lectures on Raphael and Leonardo examine how the great painters embodied impulses that reach beyond their individual biographies, while a later talk weighs morality in the light of spiritual research and another reckons with the legacy the nineteenth century left behind.
At the heart of the cycle stand the two fairy-tale lectures. Here Steiner argues that the genuine folk tale springs from a level of the soul deeper than the one that gives rise even to tragic drama. A tragedy, he suggests, shows a single person caught in a particular fate, whereas a fairy tale touches something common to every human being at every age. He traces the source of the fairy-tale mood to hidden experiences the soul undergoes without knowing it, the quiet battles of falling asleep and waking, the dreaming that runs on beneath waking thought, and the ancient clairvoyant closeness to the spiritual world that older peoples once felt more directly. In this reading, a tale like Rumpelstiltskin becomes a picture of the soul's meeting with a wiser helper hidden within itself. Steiner puts the nourishing role of such stories plainly:
"Just as our body has to have nutritive substances circulating through the organism, the soul needs fairy tale substance flowing through its spiritual veins."
The claim is not that fairy tales encode secret formulas to be decoded, but that they answer a real hunger of the soul, feeding it as food feeds the body, whether or not the listener ever understands why. Steiner is careful throughout to insist that explanation should never spoil the freshness of the tale itself. He draws his examples from the collections of the brothers Grimm and from folk stories gathered among distant peoples, reading each as a picture of something the soul lives through but does not consciously grasp. In one striking passage he sets a simple tale of a resin man whose two sons become the sun and the moon beside his own account, in the book he called Occult Science, of the earth's ancient sun and moon stages, suggesting that the folk imagination and spiritual research arrive at kindred pictures from opposite directions.
Across the fifteen sessions a single conviction holds the varied subjects together: that the works of culture, whether a painting by Raphael, the writings of a mystic, or a story told to children, carry traces of realities the soul knows in its depths. Steiner does not ask his audience to abandon their ordinary appreciation of art. He asks them to notice that their delight in a picture or a tale rests on foundations far larger than conscious thought can survey, and that spiritual science can point toward those foundations without dissolving the delight itself.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 62. Each of the terms below is treated in this cycle and links to its full glossary study:
The fairy-tale entry rests on the two Berlin lectures where Steiner set out his view of the folk tale as a picture of hidden soul experience, while the Herman Grimm entry draws on the January 1913 lecture in which Steiner presented the art historian, son of Wilhelm Grimm of the celebrated brothers, as a figure standing between the age of Goethe and the modern spiritual outlook.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the Berlin cycle alongside the original German. Printed editions and related titles can be found through the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because several of the individual lectures circulate under their own titles, searching for a specific talk, such as the poetry and meaning of fairy tales, will often surface the most accessible version.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas in this volume, you might:
- Browse the complete Thalira glossary to see how terms from across Steiner's lectures connect into a single vocabulary.
- Read the dedicated entry on Fairy Tales to follow Steiner's account of the folk tale as nourishment for the soul.
- Explore the entry on Herman Grimm to understand why Steiner treated this art historian as a bridge from Goethe to the present.
- Return to the GA Work Library to place this cycle among Steiner's other Berlin lecture courses.