as a first cause, and therefore as free and autonomous from nature, and in the most extreme instance as the creator of nature, as Feuerbach suggests:
“… the being in whom nature becomes personal, conscious, and rational is man. … unconscious nature is the eternal, uncreated being, the first being … in time but not in rank, physically but not morally; man with his consciousness is … second in time, but in rank the first.” [193F-LER: p. 21]
“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] [See also 228F]
And we see in our following comparison of Feuerbach’s and Wagner’s hypotheses about the mental process through which man reified the nature of his mind and reason (the Ring), the product of evolution, and called it god (i.e., the Ring was transformed into Valhalla), that it was inevitable that the power our natural mind gave us would we would misconstrue as in some sense our original cause, our lord and master, our god, and therefore our dependence upon and origin in nature, i.e., our debt to Mother Nature, we would to that degree deny:
“The understanding … inquires for the cause of all things … . (…) The understanding is thus the original, primitive being. (…) The understanding derives all things from god as the first cause; it finds the world, without an intelligent cause, given over to senseless, aimless chance; that is, it finds only in itself, in its own nature, the efficient and final cause of the world … . (…) And thus, the understanding posits its own nature as the causal, first, premundane existence – i.e., being in rank the first but in time the last, it makes itself the first in time also.” [51F-EOC: p. 37]
“[Speaking of] … the physical reality of Nature, [Wagner says that] where thought casts aside this linking cable; where … it fain would look upon itself as its original cause; where Mind (‘Geist’) instead of as the last and most conditioned, would conceive itself as the first and least conditioned energy (‘Thatigkeit’), and therefore as the ground and cause of Nature, -- there also is the fly-wheel of Necessity upheaved, and blind Caprice runs headlong …, and hurls herself, a raging stream of madness, upon the world of actuality.” [427W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 83]
The punishment or curse which is the price Wotan and the gods (i.e., those who depend on belief in the gods to give their life meaning) will have to pay for co-opting Alberich’s Ring power in order to deny man’s true nature, and true place in nature, is that, as Alberich suggested previously, there is no escaping nature’s truth, and religious man will eventually undermine his own belief in the gods and his transcendent value through his drive to acquire objective knowledge. Alberich warned that he is behind everything, the hidden will impelling man’s incessant activity, and will reappear where least expected. As Feuerbach put it, even man’s most spiritual aspirations, his longing to transcend reality, will always fall back to earth (disclose their earthly, bodily origin) by virtue of gravity:
