of day which, once conscious, will overthrow the gods of Valhalla (i.e., end the influence of religion, and its morality of self-sacrifice and martyrdom for the sake of an ideal, upon mankind).
{{ As further evidence for this reading the conjuncture here of #12 and #20b is heard again in V.2.2 during Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde, when he tells her that her mother Erda foresaw that the gods’ days will be numbered once a woman has given birth to Alberich’s son (Hagen). }} This compound motif #12/#20b, whenever it is heard, is the motival expression of Wotan’s premonition that Alberich and his agent Hagen will inevitably overthrow the gods of Valhalla, fulfilling Mother Erda’s (Mother Nature’s) prophecy of the twilight of the gods.
Wagner was very much a student of Feuerbach in his acknowledgment that scientific inquiry will eventually overthrow religious mythology, that what was once unknown or unconscious will inevitably become known, rising from the silent depths of man’s unconscious mind to the daylight of full consciousness. As an example, we have Feuerbach’s remark that what was once explained supernaturally would eventually be construed objectively as natural phenomena, through advancement in scientific understanding of man and his world:
“… though there are numerous phenomena in nature whose physical, natural ground we have not yet discovered, it is absurd to resort to theology for that reason. What we do not know, posterity will find out. How many things that our ancestors could explain only through God and His purposes we have derived from the workings of nature! There was a time when even the simplest, most natural, most necessary things were explained exclusively by teleology and theology. (…) On the one hand man’s ignorance, on the other his egoist tendency to explain everything with reference to himself, to think the world in his own image, lead him to transform the involuntary into the voluntary, the natural into the intentional, the necessary into the arbitrary.” [234F-LER: p. 134]
Wagner himself noted that an arbitrary (and false) view of nature which man had involuntarily formed through the influence of religious mythology, would eventually be the subject of scientific scrutiny, liberating man from error, fancy, and religious belief, so that he could embrace knowledge, reality, and nature:
“Whilst Man involuntarily moulds his Life according to the notions he has gathered from his arbitrary views of Nature, and embalms their intuitive expression in Religion: these notions become for him in Science the subject of conscious, intentional review and scrutiny.
The path of Science lies from error to knowledge, from fancy (‘Vorstellung’) to reality, from Religion to Nature. [417W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 72]
Wagner described this historical advancement of knowledge, this rise from unconsciousness to consciousness, as a natural evolutionary progress from ignorance to knowledge:
“… the march of human evolution is the rational and natural progress from the unconscious to the conscious, from un-knowledge to knowledge … .” [426W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 80]
