“Certain moments, objects and events are endowed for us with a meaning that could be called ‘transcendental’. … they have a significance that cannot be clearly spelled out in ordinary empirical terms. (…) These moments correspond to the ‘rites of passage’ that anthropologists have documented in the life of the tribe … .” [P. 269]
“… [Siegfried’s] supreme moments of transition - such as the forest murmurs, the encounter with the wood-bird, the waking of Brünnhilde and the passage from fear to desire and from desire to love - … are consummate musical explorations of deep and shared states of mind.” [P. 278]
”There is another person beneath his [Siegfried’s] impetuous activity, and this other person is less an individual than a universal, composed from the critical moments of transition in the life of Everyman.” [P. 278-279]
And, echoing Kitcher and Schacht, Scruton proffers the possibility that Siegfried is redeemed and has his purity restored in his final moment of self-consciousness just before and after Hagen spears him fatally in his back, finally dying after Hagen’s antidote to his potion of love-and-forgetting grants Siegfried remembrance of his formerly loving relationship with Brünnhilde:
”By regaining his purity at the moment of death, Siegfried shows the triumph of love over machination, of the ideal over the real, and therefore our values over the calculations that constantly erode and replace them. His life then ceases to be his private possession, and becomes an offering on the altar of all our loves and fears.” [P. 283-284]
How interesting that Hagen’s potion of remembrance, intended to bring about Siegfried’s death, and the product of Siegfried’s betrayal of Brünnhilde’s love, should have made Siegfried’s restoration of lost innocence possible! Somehow this doesn’t convince, in view of the self-evident fact that both Siegfried and Brünnhilde, under whatever construction we wish to interpret their motives, have betrayed their mutual love under Hagen’s (in my interpretation, the Ring Curse of consciousness’s) influence. Siegfried in his final moment of remembrance has as much cause to become aware for the first time of his full historical guilt, as the heir to Wotan and Alberich's Ring Curse, as to regain whatever purity he’s supposed to have possessed. In my allegorical reading Siegfried, thanks to his artistic muse and unconscious mind Brünnhilde, has remained only ostensibly innocent because Brünnhilde held knowledge for Siegfried of Wotan’s guilt and fear, which unconsciously prompted Siegfried to do all that he has done in the course of the Ring. On waking to full consciousness of himself as Wotan’s heir Siegfried if anything would become conscious that he, as an artist-hero, had perpetuated Wotan’s original sin against all that was, is, and will be (against the truth), religious man’s sin of pessimism (world-renunciation) which Alberich’s Ring Curse was predestined to punish. Since, in my reading, Brünnhilde is Siegfried’s unconscious mind, which in betraying her Siegfried has now awoken to full consciousness, Brünnhilde’s final words are actually Siegfried’s final words (or even, ultimately, Wotan’s final words), Siegfried having become fully conscious of who he is. Siegfried has now succumbed to Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness which also destroyed Wotan, a point Brünnhilde makes in her final apostrophe to Siegfried.
