gods into existence in the earliest days after the onset of full human consciousness. We must have dreamed them into existence unconsciously and involuntarily, because, had we been conscious of inventing them, we could never have believed in them or have faith in their power to help or hinder us. Now, since neither Feuerbach nor Wagner believed in god, or gods, the Valhallan gods Wagner portrays in the Ring may be construed allegorically as representing man’s religious impulse, or religious mythology, which after all has been the primary source of all value, and all explanations of the world, for most human societies from the earliest times up to the present, and which even influences the most modern, secular societies today. We, who invented the gods, are in fact the gods, in whom, as Feuerbach put it, we merely project our own idealized nature, but religious men remain unconscious of this fact.
Wotan, as the god of gods, or God-the-father, is – as I will demonstrate later - Wagner’s poetic representation of Feuerbach’s concept that collective, historical man, is the literal foundation of our concept of Godhead, that divine knowledge is nothing more than the collective wisdom of all men, accumulated over time. Thus, when Wotan - collective man, the unwitting and involuntary product of evolution - sleeps during the Giants’ construction of Valhalla, Wotan is dreaming the gods and their abode into existence. It is precisely for this reason that Wotan has said, upon waking and observing the newly built Valhalla, that it appears to him as he dreamed it.
His wife Fricka, on the other hand, equates waking with reflection and objective knowledge, and equates Wotan’s dreaming, and his dream-inspired Valhalla, with self-deception, for she asks him to wake from the self-deception of dreams and reflect. Fricka is making a distinction crucial to our understanding of the Ring allegory, suggesting indirectly that Alberich has a monopoly on objective, waking consciousness of the bitter truth, the product of reflection which will be a stumbling block to Wotan’s ideal plans, while Wotan seeks contentment in the self-deception of dreams.
Feuerbach was Wagner’s guide in describing religion as the product of man’s collective dreaming:
[P. 140] “It is the same ego, the same being in dreaming as in waking; [P. 141] the only distinction is that in waking, the ego acts on itself; whereas in dreaming it is acted on by itself as by another being. (…) Feeling is a dream with the eyes open; religion the dream of waking consciousness: dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion.” [102F-EOC: p. 140-141] [See also 268F]
On this view, what is called divine revelation, a supposed message from god to mortal man, Feuerbach would describe as a message from within ourselves, from our unconscious mind. The same could be said of what Wagner himself describes as unconscious artistic inspiration. It seems to us as if it came from another world, because it comes to us unwittingly and involuntarily, but that other world lies within us, though it is rarely accessible to us. The same is true of our dreams.
