sophisticated yet naively expressed Ring libretto seemingly innocuous or negligible remarks such as this carry momentous allegorical significance. This is one reason why Wagner’s music-dramas always feel weightier and more substantial than the fairy-tale tone of their presentation seems to warrant.
The following extracts from Feuerbach and Wagner provide some basis for this allegorical reasoning. I noted that Wotan, in his desire to deny the Giants their due credit and payment for building the gods’ abode Valhalla, is effectively trying to deny that the egoism of desire and fear (the self-preservation instinct) is the root motivation for human action, even the root of man’s more abstract impulses to posit transcendent ideals. According to Feuerbach:
“ … in reality states, even Christian states, are built not on the power of religion, though they have used it too (i.e., credulity, man’s weak point) as a means to their ends, but on the power of bayonets and other instruments of torture. In reality men act out of entirely different motives than their religious imagination leads them to suppose.” [325F-LER: p. 302]
“ … all of us are materialists before we become idealists, we all serve the body, the lower needs and senses, before we rise to spiritual needs and sensibilities … .” [245F-LER: p. 156]
Feuerbach even employs this argument as a basis for his rebuttal of the Judeo-Christian notion of the miraculous creation, that a supernatural spirit, God, willed the cosmos into existence in thought:
“I cannot derive my body from my mind – for I have to eat or to be able to eat before I can think; as the animals demonstrate, I can eat without thinking, but I cannot think without eating; I cannot derive my senses from my faculty of thought, from my reason – for reason presupposes the senses, but the senses do not presuppose reason, for we hold that the animals lack reason, but not senses. No more, or perhaps even less, can I derive nature from God.” [212F-LER: p. 87]
Wagner’s interesting paraphrase of Feuerbach’s derivation of man’s spiritual longings from his egoistic animal drives is his following discussion of the two Adams, the first being physical, the second - derived from the first - spiritual:
“The first man, Adam, is sent into natural life, and the last Adam into spiritual life. But the spiritual body is not the first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual.” [396W-{1-2/49} Jesus of Nazareth: PW Vol. VIII. p. 339]
Wagner’s formulation above corresponds logically with his assertion, noted earlier, that the Holy Grail, the source of spiritual power, is a sublimation of the Nibelung Hoard, associated with earthly power.
If we analyze each Giant’s individual claim to Freia, as opposed to their collective claim, we find that the characteristics which distinguish Fafner from Fasolt also distinguish Freia’s two aspects, as goddess both of love and of immortality. Fasolt represents the natural animal instinct of both sexual desire and the more general desire for love and family, the social desire to belong, whereas Fafner, to whom Siegfried will later look to teach him fear, represents the animal instinct of fear of death,
