This inspires Wagner with the following insight. He notes that if we (i.e., religious men) disown our true relationship with the beasts (i.e., don’t acknowledge that mankind evolved from animal ancestors, but believe instead that mankind is divine in origin, or even go only so far as to regard ourselves as bound by divine rather than natural law), we see the real, physical world as animalised and devilish:
“The wisdom of the Brahmins, nay, of every cultured pagan race, is lost to us: with the disowning of our true relation to the beasts, we see an animalised – in the worst sense – and more than an animalised, a devilised world before us.” [986W-{10/79} Letter to E. von Weber ‘Against Vivisection’: PW Vol. VI, p. 204]
And both Feuerbach and Wagner note how ironic it is that the human mind, which is after all the product of a natural evolution of species, i.e., a product of Mother Nature, invented the gods, and therefore religious man disavows his true dependence on, and origin in, Mother Nature, and his subjection to the needs of his body:
“The mind, to be sure, is the highest part of man; it is man’s badge of nobility, which distinguishes him from the animals; but first in man is not first in nature. On the contrary, what is highest and most perfect is the last and latest. Thus to make mind or spirit into the beginning, the origin, is to reverse the order of nature. But it pleases men, in their vanity, self-love, and ignorance, to believe that what is qualitatively first preceded everything else also in time.” [243F-LER: p. 155]
Wagner echoes Feuerbach’s opinion obliquely in his observation below that, because our most conditioned faculty, the mind, hubristically exalts itself, in its arrogance it thinks it can employ its preconditions as the handmaids of its own caprice:
“But the most conditioned faculty [the mind, Alberich’s Ring: #19] is at like time the most exalted [Wotan and the other denizens of Valhalla, #20a, imagine themselves gods]; and the joy in his own self, engendered by the knowledge of his higher, unsurpassable attributes, betrays the intellectual-man [Wotan] into the arrogant imagining that he may use those attributes which are really his foundation-props [the Giants, upon whom Wotan and the gods are entirely dependent] as the handmaids of his own caprice [Wotan deludes himself into thinking the gods can escape their debt to the Giants].” [432W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 94]
But Wotan and the gods can’t escape either their debt to the Giants, their underlying animal motives for all they feel, think, do, and say, or their debt to Alberich’s forging of the Ring of human consciousness, which made man’s involuntary, unconscious invention of the gods (the building of Valhalla) possible.
So we now have the conceptual tools at our disposal to grasp several aspects of the Giants’ relationship with Wotan and the gods which might otherwise be incomprehensible. The two problems to be solved are: (1) Why did Wotan offer Freia to the Giants in exchange for building Valhalla, when Wotan had no intention of actually giving Freia to the Giants (aside from the obvious fact that Loge promised to redeem her); and (2) why did the Giants accept the Rhinegold in lieu of Freia in payment for building Valhalla? Loge provides us with our solution, for he is the embodiment of man’s artistic capacity for self-deceit, i.e., imagination in the service of self-deceit,
