The tales Frau Balde tells in The Portal of Initiation, which heal Capesius when she does not understand what she is saying.
Felicia Balde's Fairy Tales in Anthroposophy is the name given to the stories told by Frau Felicia Balde, a character in Rudolf Steiner's first mystery drama, The Portal of Initiation, first staged in Munich in August 1910. Steiner explained their working in a lecture given in Berlin on 31 October 1910, printed in Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Human Being (GA 125). Felicia lives in a lonely cottage with her husband Felix Balde and tells Professor Capesius pictures of beings who dwell in the land of dreams. Steiner's claim is precise: the tale works on Capesius most strongly when Felicia herself does not understand what she is telling. Forces then rise in his soul that banish his paralysis and return his power to speak before an audience, though what he relates afterwards sounds quite different from what she said. In Scene Six she tells one such tale before the Spirit of the Elements.
Felicia Balde's fairy tales are Steiner's picture of how spiritual substance passes from one soul to another without passing through either one's understanding. Felicia does not know what lives in her own soul. Capesius, the trained intellectual, cannot say why her words unlock him. Steiner used the pair to show a transfer that runs beneath the threshold of ordinary consciousness.
In Steiner's Own Words
Felicia has told Capesius her fairy tales. When she tells one that she herself does not understand, the forces arise in his soul that banish his mental paralysis; then he can, in turn, relate something to his audience. It sounds, however, quite different from what Felicia has related. Mysterious forces are active even in Capesius. When one seeks to discover them, he will find their origin in the astral world, where it can be seen how they call forth countercurrents. Wherever there are elemental powers, they call up the kind of reverberations that Felicia's words awaken in the soul of Capesius.
What it Means Today
The closest modern statement of Steiner's odd condition comes from Bruno Bettelheim, whose The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976 and drew on his long directorship of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago. Bettelheim's central practical instruction is that a fairy tale must never be explained to the child hearing it. The moment an adult supplies the meaning, the tale stops working, because its power depends on the child finding, unaided and mostly unconsciously, the one figure or turn that answers a pressure the child cannot yet name. Bettelheim also noticed that children ask for the same story night after night, and then, when they retell it, tell something noticeably different. That is Capesius exactly, relating to his audience something that sounds nothing like what Felicia said.
Thalira synthesis: Bettelheim placed the not-knowing on the listener's side, where it is easy to accept, since children are not expected to analyse. Steiner placed it on the teller's side as well, and that is the harder claim, because it makes the storyteller's own ignorance a working condition rather than a charming defect. The consequence is practical for anyone who tells stories to children, to patients, or to students. The impulse to gloss what you have just told, to check that the point landed, may be the single move that empties the telling. Tell the tale, and stop.
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