themselves will lust after it alone. Given the premises of our special allegorical reading, Alberich means that in the long run man (Wotan) will forsake his loyalty to religious mythology, which grants man only psychological and emotional satisfaction, in favor of that knowledge which can grant man actual, concrete power. Mankind, Alberich suggests, will eventually turn secular and scientific. That is to say, Light-Alberich (Wotan) will ultimately become, or be indistinguishable from, Alberich himself (otherwise known as Dark-Alberich). Since I have interpreted Alberich’s hoard of treasure as a metaphor for objective knowledge of nature (recalling that Alberich didn’t admire the gold for its beauty or goodness but only by virtue of the use he could make of it), the notion that man will be lured by gold alone does not merely allude to the power man accrues solely through money and property, but also the power he accrues over his environment and fellow men through scientific knowledge and technology. This is “ownership” or “property” in a much greater sense than that of money, land, or goods and services. It was this power, granted by scientific and secular man’s emancipation from rule by gods (religious faith), his freedom of inquiry unencumbered by religious faith’s censorship of knowledge, which, after all, has allowed him to obtain that objective knowledge of nature which, according to Feuerbach, has given the Western world its modern hegemony (now fast eroding) in political, military, economic, and cultural power:
“Let us not … find fault with Western man for not drawing the practical consequences of his religious faith, for highhandedly ignoring the implications of his faith and in reality, in practice, abjuring it; for it is solely to this inconsistency, this practical unbelief, this instinctive atheism and egoism that we owe all progress, all the inventions which distinguish Christians from Mohammedans, and Occidentals in general from Orientals. Those who rely on God’s omnipotence, who believe that whatever happens and is, happens and is by the will of God, will never cast about for means to remedy the evils of the world, either those natural evils which can be remedied – for there is no cure for death – or the evils of human society.” [253F-LER: p. 167]
And this bestows further insight into the meaning of the Nibelungs’ slave labor, dedicated to accumulating a hoard of treasure in the bowels of Mother Earth (Erda). For Feuerbach said that the illusion of Godhead (Wotan) has two parts, imagination (say, Loge) and nature (Erda). Where Godhead is construed as different and autonomous from nature its worshippers pray to obtain their needs, but where God is acknowledged as just a poetical name for Mother Nature man becomes a worker bee, while the gods remain drones:
“ … the Godhead consists as it were of two components, one originating in man’s imagination, the other in nature. ‘You must pray,’ says the one component, the god differentiated from nature [Wotan]. ‘You must work,’ says the other, the god who is not differentiated from nature and merely expresses the essence of nature [Alberich, who compels his fellow Nibelungs to mine the bowels of Erda, Mother Nature, in order to obtain earthly power]. For nature is a worker bee, while the gods are drones.” [337F-LER: p. 317]
In fact, in the Metropolitan Opera’s most recent production of the Ring the Nibelungs scurrying through the caverns of Nibelheim gathering a hoard of treasure for Alberich resemble the frantic activity of an ant’s nest or beehive.
By the way, it isn’t so much that thanks to Alberich’s gold all the living will renounce love and lust after gold alone (thereby proving that egoism is the sole motive underlying all human feeling,
