Wagner, pace Feuerbach, described religious belief as the product not so much of a single artist, who presumably would be largely conscious of the part his own imagination plays in creating a fictional world (even if he is not conscious of the creative process within him), but of collective humanity, or the Folk, whom we may describe as the artist in the aggregate, in the Folk’s unwitting and involuntary creation of imagined supernatural beings, a world-view predicated on religious belief:
“ … religions spring not from the artist’s brain; their only origin is from the Folk.” [429W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 90]
“ … the Folk must of necessity be the Artist of the future … . … in the days of national blood-brotherhood, which preceded the epoch when the absolute Egoism of the individual was elevated to a religion, -- the days which our historians betoken as those of prehistoric myth and fable, -- the Folk, in truth, was already the only poet, the only artist … .” [441W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 207]
And here is how Wagner said collective or historical man, the Folk, gave birth to the gods. The gods, he says, are the folk’s condensation of the inexhaustible phenomena of nature, and of human life, into an idealized human form, an involuntary act of the imagination which lends this imagined being a supernatural aura:
[P. 154] “Just as the human form is to him [i.e., to man] the most comprehensible, so also will the essence of natural phenomena – which he does not yet know in their reality – become comprehensible only through condensation to a human form. Thus in Mythos all the shaping impulse of the Folk makes toward realising … a broadest grouping of the most manifold phenomena … in the most succinct of shapes. [This process of summarizing the entirety of experience under the form of a figure of the imagination, a god, Wagner further describes as:] … that joint operation of multi-human or omni-natural force and faculty which, conceived as merely the concordant action of human and natural forces in general, is certainly both natural and human, but appears superhuman and supernatural by the very fact that it is ascribed to one imagined individual, represented in the shape of Man. By its faculty of thus using its force of [P. 155] imagination to bring before itself every thinkable reality and actuality, in widest reach but plain, succinct and plastic shaping, the Folk therefore becomes in Mythos the creator of Art … .” [489W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 154-155]
This process by which the variety of human experience is condensed into the form of a god is, by the way, identical to Wagner’s concept of the “Wonder,” by virtue of which he could capture the pillars of a drama, its most essential points, in a small number of highly distinctive and memorable musical motifs, which carry the power of all those things, thematically akin, with which they have been associated in the course of the dramatic performance. I will describe this concept in much greater detail later.
Feuerbach’s following succinct description of the “Wonder,” the imagination’s ability to condense a vast array of experience of the natural and human worlds into the form of gods who appear to us in recognizable, and often human shapes, is clearly the foundation of Wagner’s description of the process whereby the folk create their “Mythos,” as described above:
