Category:The Fairy Tale of the Green Serpent and the Beautiful Lily

Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily is the last story in the cycle of novellas «Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten», which was first published in 1795 in the journal «Die Horen» edited by Friedrich Schiller. The fairy tale shows in pictorial form how man can enter into a conscious, free relationship with the supersensible world in a form appropriate to the age of the consciousness soul. Goethe's secret revelation, as Rudolf Steiner also called the fairy tale, formed the starting point for the development of anthroposophy (see below); Steiner's detailed reflections on this can be found, for example, in GA 53, p. 329ff and GA 57, p. 23ff. Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas were also based on the fairy tale (Lit.:GA 14).