Wagner evidently was deeply impressed with Feuerbach’s analysis of Godhead into light and dark, good and evil, spiritual and earthly principles, in order to bridge the gap between an immaterial god and a material creation incorporating evil and imperfection. Accordingly, in Wagner’s following remarks he draws the inevitable moral conclusion from this, that spirit and nature are only antitheses for the religious imagination, and that the primal being is neither good nor evil, and is therefore amoral:
“ ‘But, alas, how is culture possible when religion has such defective roots, and even terminology is so little defined that one can talk of spirit and Nature as if they were antitheses?’ ” [828W-{6/29/72} CD Vol. I, p. 505]
“R. spoke recently of the heresy of the Marcionites, which consisted in recognizing a primal being who was neither completely good nor completely evil; admiration for this sensible form of cognition.” [854W-{7/1/74} CD Vol. I, p. 770]
However, Wagner in his writings was often self-contradictory, and we do find occasional indirect evidence that Wagner did not think Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold and forging of the Ring, i.e., Alberich’s version of the “Fall,” was necessarily prior in time to Wotan’s manufacture of his spear (which is Wotan’s version of the “Fall”). In our following extract, for instance, Wagner says Alberich could not have harmed the gods unless they were already susceptible, and that the germ of evil in the Ring was not the Rhinedaughters’ rejection of Alberich’s bid for love, but was actually Wotan’s artificial attempt to sustain his love for his wife Fricka long after it has ceased to have any heartfelt conviction:
“But it is not the fact that Alberich was repulsed by the Rhine-daughters which is the definitive source of all evil – for it was entirely natural for them to repulse him; no, Alberich and his ring could not have harmed the gods unless the latter had already been susceptible to evil. Where, then, is the germ of this evil to be found? Look at the first scene between Wodan and Fricka … . The firm bond which binds them both, sprung from the involuntary error of a love that seeks to prolong itself beyond the stage of necessary change and to obtain mutual guarantees in contravention of what is eternally new and subject to change in the phenomenal world – this bond constrains them both to the mutual torment of a loveless union.” [614W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 307]
This implies, of course, that Alberich’s introduction of evil into the world was nothing new, Wotan having already made his personal contribution to it. Furthermore, Wagner once considered depicting Wotan bathing in the Rhine as a witness to the events of R.1, the opening scene of the Ring during which Alberich steals the Rhinegold from the Rhinedaughters. [Darcy: p. 39-40] We can reconcile this apparent contradiction if we grasp Alberich and Wotan as two aspects of the human mind, the objective and the subjective, respectively, and that Alberich’s contribution to the Fall by forging human consciousness (the Ring) is not so much prior chronologically to Wotan’s creation of the spear embodying man’s allegedly divinely inspired law, the social contract, as prior logically, since the human mind is the precondition for the imagination’s creation of the gods.
