Witches, gnomes, and dwarfs from the German fairy tale world remove their masks in this book. The folklorist, collector of legends, and Bern politician Sergius Golowin presents them to us as initiated witnesses of the forbidden sciences of the human subconscious. He decodes the symbolic language of fairy tales and makes the secret teachings of Celtic priests and the magical knowledge of Nordic sorcerers transparent. Golowin shows that mandrake and henbane, monkshood and fly agaric had their effects even in the days of cavemen. For those who knew their secrets, they granted superhuman strength and wisdom. The ability for cosmic vision, the possibility of revealing new "realities" to the human mind, is here recalled as the oldest, albeit always outlawed, human knowledge.