artist-heroes to create. For this reason Walther never abducts his muse to force her into marriage with another, unworthy, man (his audience), and never becomes conscious of his true identity as a matricide, i.e., a formerly unwitting perpetuator of Wotan’s sin against Erda’s, Mother Nature’s, knowledge of all that was, is, and will be, religious man’s sin of world-renunciation.
And of course Parsifal, finally becoming fully conscious of who he is, a formerly unconsciously inspired artist-hero who’d unwittingly perpetuated man’s religious sin of world-renunciation (Wotan’s sin against all that was, is, and will be, which Alberich’s Ring Curse was intended to punish) in that art inspired in his former lives by his muse Kundry, and understanding that Kundry’s balms no longer heal man’s (Amfortas’s) wounds of consciousness but actually rip those wounds open, renounces any further implication in this sin and embraces the objective world, Mother Nature, instead. In Parsifal it is in fact Klingsor, who like Siegfried and Tristan has effectively castrated himself insofar as love for Kundry is concerned, who gives the muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Kundry and her dangerous secrets away to another man, Amfortas (again, a metaphor for Wagner’s audience). Amfortas therefore can’t even temporarily enjoy the feeling of having healed his un-healing wound of consciousness in Kundry’s balms, and therefore suffers unbearable guilt until Parsifal reveals the religious mysteries formerly hidden in the Grail (Wagner’s symbol for man’s age-old bid for transcendent value), and reconciles man to his status as a product of, and part of, Mother Nature. Parsifal redeems man and world from man’s futile bid for transcendence, from man’s unending quest to redeem himself from Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness, by ceasing to strive for transcendent meaning any longer. Kundry, Parsifal’s unconscious mind, ceases her existence, loses her raison d’être, once her secrets have attained full consciousness, having fully awoken in Parsifal and his audience. Siegfried similarly says of Brünnhilde that her eyes are now open (she wakes) forever.
It’s only because Scruton doesn’t grasp these points (which he was unlikely to grasp in any case since he didn’t have access to my research on any of Wagner’s other operas or music-dramas besides the Ring when he wrote The Ring of Truth) that he can also say the following:
“Siegfried is rescued from judgment, if at all, only in the deep unconsciousness that sets him apart from the human world, and which is only incompletely explained by Hagen’s drug.” [P. 276]
“Those who find the character of Siegfried unsatisfactory are rightly troubled by the unconsciousness that obliterates such vast areas of his psyche … .” [P. 285]
What’s obscure and mysterious for Scruton in Siegfried’s unconsciousness becomes transparently logical in my allegorical reading: Siegfried is unconscious of who he is because, as Brünnhilde tells him in Siegfried Act Three, Scene Three, she knows for him what he doesn’t know. And Brünnhilde knows this because her father Wotan, by imparting his unbearable hoard of knowledge of the guilt and self-deception at the bottom of all human history to her in his confession, including his foresight of the historical inevitability of the twilight of the gods (the death of religious faith), and also including Wotan’s evidently futile longing for a hero, freed from all that Wotan loathes in himself, who could redeem man from this collective guilt, repressed this hoard of world-and-self-knowledge into his unconscious mind Brünnhilde. In this way Brünnhilde, the womb of Wotan’s wishes, metaphysically gave rebirth to Wotan as Siegfried, who is Wotan minus
