“The crafty Creon [King of Thebes in Sophocles’s Greek tragedy Antigone] … recognized … the essence of Public Opinion; seeing its kernel to be nothing but Wont, Care, and dislike of Innovation. … the strongest social interest … [is] that of absolute Wont, i.e. of joint self-seeking. Wherever this ethical conscience fell into conflict with the practice of society, it severed from the latter and established itself apart, as Religion; whereas practical society shaped itself into the State.” [504W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 186] [See also 1126W]
In other words, society, as Feuerbach suggests, is held together not so much by love, as by egoistic fear of harm from others. This insight will be a basis for my subsequent interpretation of Fafner, newly transformed into a serpent, as the embodiment of fear in this social sense, i.e., fear of anything which might call into question the sanctity, and therefore the immutability, of a supposedly divinely ordained social order. This we will subsequently recognize as the basis of religious faith, which fears self-examination and intellectual inquiry.
Fasolt provides us further insight into the nature of the gods. Moments ago he told Wotan that the gods are gods by virtue of their laws and contracts, and that they can sustain their rule only by honoring the laws they themselves make. But Fasolt has added that the gods rule through beauty, and that for this reason they were foolish to place woman’s delights in pawn for the sake of a fortress. Fasolt reminds us here that though religious thought partakes of the power of conscious thought, i.e., Alberich’s Ring, nonetheless religious thought is guided or tempered by subjective value, feeling, aesthetics, and not by objective truth. Thus the gods do indeed rule by laws, but laws guided by feeling (“beauty”), and Fasolt points out the gods are at risk of being in contradiction with themselves, dividing their loyalty between the quest for power (truth, in the sense of that objective knowledge of the real world which grants us power), and love.
With Fasolt’s help we now have a better idea of why the Giants contracted with the gods to build their heavenly home Valhalla. It is because the religious illusions of transcendent love (that aspect of Freia which appeals to Fasolt) and sorrowless youth eternal, i.e., immortality (which would naturally appeal to Fafner, the incarnation of man’s self-preservation instinct), purport to satisfy man’s egoistic animal instincts in a manner with which normal, natural human life cannot compete. And religious faith, the product of man’s gift of symbolic thought and abstraction (Alberich’s Ring), does this by deluding man’s animal instincts into supposing that they can obtain infinite satisfaction, just as the Rhinedaughters told Alberich that through the Ring he would obtain limitless power. God, or the gods, presumably have limitless power to satisfy man’s needs. But note, these are physical needs. Even man’s quest for a transcendent paradise is motivated by man’s earthly, and therefore limited and bounded needs.
And here Wagner gives us the secret reason why the giants made their contract with the gods. Inspired by his egoistic animal impulses (the Giants), once they have been granted unlimited reach by the onset of fully human consciousness (i.e., by Alberich’s forging of his Ring), man first invents the gods, and then makes this contract with his gods so they will offer man a heavenly reward for the world’s ills and imperfections:
“The really perplexing problem … is always how, in this terrible world of ours, beyond which there is only nothingness, it might be possible to infer the existence of a God who would make life’s immense sufferings merely something apparent, while the redemption we long for is seen as
