observes that though Loge has caused the gods much ill, nonetheless he always manages to ensnare Wotan all over again:
Wotan: Let him threaten! Did you see Loge?
Fricka: So you still prefer to trust in that cunning trickster? Much ill he has caused us already, yet ever again he ensnares you.
Wotan: Where freedom of mind is called for, I ask for help from no man; but to turn to advantage an enemy’s grudge [“Neid”] is a lesson that only cunning and craft can teach of the kind that Loge slyly employs. He who counselled me on the contract promised to ransom freia: on him I now rely.
Fricka: And he leaves you in the lurch!
To grasp Loge’s character, and the nature of his special relationship with Wotan, we must recall Wagner’s remark that the Folk involuntarily and unconsciously gave birth to their gods by condensing human and natural phenomena into idealized human forms, and in this way artistically created the religious myths, through which man unwittingly deluded himself. Loge is the agent of this transformation of mundane experience into magic. Loge embodies man’s artistic capacity for self-delusion motivated by desire and fear, i.e., under the influence of our basic animal instincts, which are represented in the Ring by the Giants Fasolt and Fafner, respectively. In the course of the Ring we will come to recognize Loge also, surprisingly, as the archetype for Wotan’s Waelsung heroes Siegmund and Siegfried, but particularly Siegfried, the artist-hero through whom Wotan continues to try and redeem the gods from the truth, and therefore through whom Wotan deludes himself.
In T.P.2, the Norns – during their recitation of world history - will describe how Loge strove to win his freedom from service to Wotan, just as Feuerbach described how the individual artist of modern times won his freedom from former servitude to religious belief. [See 263F] But Wagner believed that the Folk’s artistic creativity, which gave involuntary birth, through collective dreaming, to the gods, lives on in the modern, secular, individual artist as unconscious inspiration. I will be citing numerous Wagner extracts in the course of this study whose tenor is summed by this assertion.
In Wagner’s description of his artistic nature below, we find the objective basis for Fricka’s accusation that Loge ever and again ensnares Wotan. For here he says that his artistic nature ensnares him with self-delusion ever again, hiding from him the bitter truth of the world which, if contemplated without this protective screen, this veil of Maya (illusion), would be unbearable:
