as if under a spell, reveals to his audience what should have remained concealed from them, and from him, his true, but formerly unconscious source of artistic inspiration by Venus, i.e., by earthly rather than divine inspiration).
Kitcher and Schacht also register their fear that they might be missing something very important in Siegfried, in quite a different way, in another passage in which they suggest, thanks to Wagner’s hints in the Ring libretto, that Siegfried might after all be a sort of savior, a Christ-like figure predestined to be sacrificed for man’s sake:
“The fourth opera is more than Götterdämmerung; it is also Heldendämmerung. Indeed, there seems to us to be an interesting connection between the two; for it may be no accident that Siegfried echoes the words of Christ on the Cross (‘Mich durstet’ [I thirst]) or that his drinking-horn spills over, to ‘bring refreshment’ to ‘Mother Earth.’ Moreover, Siegfried does not merely die. He is a sacrificial victim … .” [P. 188-189]
It would be odd, indeed, if such a silly and deplorable pretext for a hero, an impression of Siegfried Kitcher and Schacht are at such pains to establish, also had credentials as man’s redeemer! What their struggle to make sense of Siegfried’s obvious links not only to pagan German and Norse, but also to Christian, mythology, is missing, is an awareness that Wagner incorporated his Feuerbachian notion that man’s age-old, universal religious longing for transcendent value and meaning is satisfied by inspired secular art (particularly Wagner’s own art of the future, the revolutionary music-drama) when religion as a faith, a set of beliefs (claims on the truth), can no longer be sustained in the face of the rise of objective scientific knowledge, into the Ring’s plot. Wagner grants Siegfried (and also, obviously, Walther and Parsifal, and more covertly, Tristan) echoes of Christ because in his Feuerbach-influenced Ring allegory the secular artist-hero is conflated with Christ the redeemer, as a secular substitute for him who, in a sense, redeems Christ the redeemer from the error of religious faith.
Since for Wagner the gods, including the monotheistic God of Christianity, are human inventions, the product of self-deception, but the deep human longing for transcendent value formerly institutionalized in organized religions survives our loss of faith in the gods, it’s the unconsciously inspired secular artist-hero who replaces Christ’s original offer of redemption in a transcendent, spiritual heaven, with the earthly paradise of art. The symbolism of a lost paradise restored is the key to Walther’s redemptive mastersong in Mastersingers, in which Walther’s muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Eva is modeled on that mythological Eve whose sin, of sharing forbidden, divine knowledge with our progenitor Adam, expelled us from paradise, since Walther in his mastersong points man’s way back to the Tree of Life in Eden. According to Hans Sachs’s private confession to Eva in Act II, it’s Eva’s duty to compensate the world for Eve’s original sin which expelled us from paradise, by inspiring the secular artist-hero Walther to produce a redemptive mastersong in which we can feel that lost paradise has been regained.
But in the Ring allegory Siegfried is sacrificed to pay for man’s original sin just at the moment he’s become so self-conscious he can no longer draw on his unconscious artistic inspiration by his former muse Brünnhilde, because as an artist he'd unwittingly perpetuated Wotan’s (religious man’s) original sin against the world, the truth, Erda’s knowledge of all that was, is, and will be, by proffering art (artificial or surrogate reality) instead of objective reality as our source of value.
