transcendent realm is base, earthly egoism. In Feuerbach’s critique of religion below he decries its need to take illusion for reality:
“… unless religion enters in, an artist merely expects his images to be faithful and beautiful; he does not claim that a semblance of reality is reality itself. Religion, on the other hand, deceives people, or rather people deceive themselves in religion; for it does claim that the semblance of reality is reality, that an image is a living being. But this being lives only in the imagination … .” [262F-LER: p. 183]
And according to Porges Wagner himself described Loge as the gods’ (i.e., religion’s) bad conscience:
“Wagner was particularly anxious that the tone of irony, which conceals Loge’s true nature, should contain no trace of affectation or mannerism. For it is he who embodies the bad conscience of the world of the gods presented to us in all its glitter and glory.” [864W-{6-8/76} WRR, p. 21]
We find the foundation for Loge’s false promise in Feuerbach’s rumination on the human imagination and its relationship with religious faith. Faith, Feuerbach says, is based on imagination’s power to make the real unreal, and the unreal real:
“Faith is the power of the imagination, which makes the real unreal, and the unreal real: in direct contradiction with the truth of the senses, with the truth of reason.” [132F-EOC: p. 242]
Wotan again tries to reconcile the gods to his friendship with, and dependence on, Loge, noting – accompanied by a new Loge Motif #36 - that Loge’s advice’s value increases the more he delays giving it. Dunning has coined #36 “Loge’s Deceptions.” #36’s embryo is #27, associated in R.2 with Fasolt’s doubt that the gods mean to honor their contract with the Giants. #36 is the musical basis for motifs #44 (often called Scheming, initially associated with Mime’s question to Wotan and Loge: “Who will help me?” – i.e., who will help him escape his brother Alberich’s Ring power?), #101 (a variant of “Mime’s Scheming” which combines #36 with #19’s – i.e., the Ring’s – harmony), and #116, associated in T.Pwith the Norns’ statement that Wotan whittled hallowed runes of treaties’ bonds into the shaft of his spear. In sum, #36 seems to convey the embarrassing fact, one the gods can’t even consciously acknowledge, that the gods depend on Loge to help them deceive themselves. Its association at its inception with Wotan’s remark that Loge’s advice’s value increases the more he delays giving it, seems to be Wagner’s way of expressing the fact that the full value of Loge’s advice will only be known in the end, when Wotan and gods finally take it. Loge will, in fact, advise Wotan five times during The Rhinegold to give Alberich’s Ring back to the Rhinedaughters, but Wotan will not act on that advice until the end, when he finally acknowledges that his own council, including his dependence on his proxies the Waelsungs to redeem the gods from Alberich’s curse, was ill-advised. The reasoning behind the link of this family of motifs with Mime will become clear later as Mime’s status as Wagner’s metaphor for the loathsome egoism which Wotan is horrified to discover at the root of his own allegedly noble motives becomes clear. This, it turns out, is the source of all of Wotan’s self-deceptions.
