[P. 320] “Human ignorance is bottomless, and the human imagination knows no bounds; deprived of its foundations by ignorance and of its limits by the imagination, the power of nature becomes divine omnipotence. (…)
(…) In short, an object considered as subject, the essence of nature differentiated from nature and seen as a human being, the essence of man differentiated from man and seen as a not-human being - this is the essence of divinity and religion, [P. 321] the secret of mysticism and speculation, this is the great thauma, the wonder of all wonders, which fills men with the profoundest amazement and rapture.” [338F-LER: p. 320-321]
In the modern world, which is so much more self-conscious than the earliest epochs of human existence, the individual artistic-genius, Wagner says, inherits what once was the collective mythic creativity of the Folk who invented the gods, and in a sense becomes the Folk’s voice. What links the modern, individual genius to the primal Folk who dreamed the various religions into existence is the involuntary, unconscious nature of inspiration, which Wagner describes below as a “force” or “faculty:”
[P. 288] [Wagner attributes:] … the force which we commonly call Genius … [to a certain faculty.]. That which operates so mightily upon this force that it must finally come forth to full productiveness, we have … to regard as the real fashioner and former, … and this is the Art already evolved outside that separate force, the Art which from the artworks of the ancient and the modern world has shaped itself into a universal Substance … . (…) [and speaking of:] [P. 289] … so-called prehistoric times, the times when Speech, and Myth,and Art were really born … [Wagner says that:] the thing we call Genius was unknown: no one man was a Genius, since all men were it. Only in times like ours, does one know or name these ‘Geniuses’; the sole name that we can find for those artistic forces which … open out new pathways and fill them with their innate life. Yet if we look a little closer, we shall find that these new openings are in no wise arbitrary and private paths, but continuations of a long-since-hewn main causeway; down which, before and with these solitary units, a joint and many-membered force of diverse individualities has poured itself, whose conscious or unconscious instinct has urged it to the abrogation of those forms by fashioning newer moulds of Life and Art.” [559W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 288-289]
One way of understanding Wotan’s (the Folk as artist’s) creative dream of inspiration which, in a sense, gives birth to Valhalla, i.e., to society predicated upon religious belief, is that Alberich's renunciation of love, theft of the Rhinegold, and forging it into the Ring representing the power of conscious thought, is the actual dream of inspiration which gave birth to Valhalla. But we must recall the proviso that Wotan upon waking forgets the true source of his inspiration, which remains unconscious, and instead credits himself with this inspiration, just as religious man, the product of unconscious processes of nature, credits figures of his own imagination, his gods (that is to say, himself), with his creation. If we describe Wotan as the Primal Folk Artist who creates Valhalla, himself, and his fellow gods as a work of art, then we ought to take account of Wagner’s description of himself as an authentic (i.e., unconsciously inspired) artist for whom his artwork remains a puzzle, since he is unconscious of its true mainsprings:
“ … how can an artist hope to find his own intuitions perfectly reproduced in those of another
