This also is the whole import of Wagner’s last music-drama Parsifal, in which Siegfried, in his final incarnation as the pure fool Parsifal, for the first time wakes up to his full guilt in having (as a formerly unconsciously inspired artist-hero) unwittingly perpetuated religious man’s sin against all that was, is, and will be, renunciation of Mother Nature. Parsifal’s guilt at having caused his mother Herzeleide's death (symbolic of religious man’s denial of his true mother, Nature) through neglect has overwhelmed him, just as Siegfried and Tristan become conscious that their mothers died giving them birth. Parsifal therefore rebuffs the overtures of his former muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Kundry, his surrogate, artificial mother (the artificiality of art as a substitute for Mother Nature symbolized in Klingsor’s Magic Garden and the seductive Flower Maidens), in favor of his true Mother, Nature, whom man now embraces.
But Scruton undermines his tentative attempt to rehabilitate Siegfried in two distinct ways. First, he concedes that since Siegfried hasn’t undergone Everyman’s traditional socially sanctified rites of passage, but has had to be the author of his own rites of passage, “He is marked out from the beginning as the outsider, the scapegoat, the one who can be sacrificed for the benefit of the tribe”:
“… Wagner had perceived that human life is built around a series of transitions, and that these transitions have a meaning that is, in the broad sense, religious. (…) Siegfried has entered the world without such a rite of passage … . He is marked out from the beginning as the outsider, the scapegoat, the one who can be sacrificed for the benefit of the tribe. He himself, therefore, is the author of the rites that mark his passage to maturity - the forging of the sword, the slaying of the dragon, the defiance of the father-figure, and the awakening of the bride.” [P. 284-285]
But an “outsider” can’t also be an “Everyman.” The whole point Wagner is at such pains to make in conceiving his character Siegfried is that he, like his father Siegmund, is heroic precisely because he isn’t Everyman (who's represented archetypally in the Ring instead on the prosaic level by the Nibelung Mime, poetically by the lord of the gods Wotan, and in a dilute form both by Hunding and by Gunther), but totally unique and original, the forger of his own unprecedented personality, so to speak, living outside conventional society, as a rebel, a liminal, even a pre-Fallen man. Note the artist-hero Wagner’s own self-assessment, as recorded and seconded by Cosima:
"... I maintain to R. that there are many things of which he understands nothing, since genius has no part in original sin. He: 'I live like a sort of animal.' I: 'Yes, in innocence.' " [977W - {9/21/79} CD Vol. II, p. 367]
Siegfried’s unique status is precisely Wagner’s conception of the unconsciously inspired artist-hero who alone is worthy of the muse Brünnhilde, and who exists outside of a social setting by living in his own head, his own singular creativity, except insofar as he carries forward the heroic creativity of prior culture heroes (a “long since hewn causeway”) as symbolized in his re-forging of his father Siegmund’s sword Nothung, and with the exception that he must traffic with society to bring his redemptive art to an audience. This is precisely what’s dramatized in Twilight of the Gods in Siegfried’s relationship with the Gibichungs, before whom he performs his final heroic act, singing the narrative of his heroic life, and how he came to understand the voice of the Woodbird (i.e., how Wagner in his Ring disclosed the heretofore unconscious source, the hidden historical roots, of inspiration for redemptive music). Siegfried’s final creative-heroic act is his
