And so, wonder of wonders, we can now see how Wotan’s co-opting of the power of Alberich’s Ring, i.e., religion’s manipulation of the human mind through imagination in service to subjective fear and desire (multiplied to infinity by the gift of conscious thought, Alberich’s Ring-power), is itself the fulfillment of Alberich’s curse on his Ring (as indeed it is the fulfillment of his promise in R.1 to venge himself on the world for not satisfying his desire for love), and is its own punishment. For the essence of religion is that here man seeks transcendent value and being, a quest which because it is predicated on self-deception is inherently unfulfillable, irredeemable, futile, and therefore insatiable. Alberich’s curse on his Ring to punish Wotan and the gods for co-opting his Ring-power is the punishment which inheres in man’s futile quest to reach for the impossible, to attempt to transcend natural law and the limits of the mortal body, to kill Mother Nature by denying her truth and positing an untruth as substitute. Alberich’s curse punishes Wotan’s religious sin of world-denial. It is the price religious man pays for pessimism.
In Wagner’s following remarks he paraphrases Feuerbach’s suggestion that because the human mind has a seemingly infinite, limitless desire for satisfaction, to complete what seems to it to be incomplete, it inevitably posits the existence of a supernatural realm in which such infinite desire can be sated, as for instance the gods’ promise that men, mortal on earth, can enjoy immortal life in heaven. Thus, as we’ll learn in The Valkyrie, Wotan offers immortal life in Valhalla to heroes inspired by his Valkyrie daughters to martyrdom on the field of battle. Wagner, unlike Feuerbach, finds the entire value of life in this quest to assert and affirm man’s transcendent value:
“To the religious eye (der religioesen Vorstellung) the truth grows plain that there must be another world than this, because the inextinguishable bent-to-happiness cannot be stilled within this world, and hence requires another world for its redemption.” [701W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 23-24]
“… belief in miracles must be comprehensible to us as an almost necessary consequence of the reversal of the ‘will to live,’ [i.e., religious man’s belief that his immortal soul grants him the ability to break his subjection to natural egoism] in defiance of all Nature. To the natural man this reversal of the Will is certainly itself the greatest miracle, for it implies an abrogation of the laws of Nature; that which has effected it must consequently be far above Nature, and of superhuman power, since he finds that union with it is longed for as the only object worth endeavour.” [1021W-{6-8/80} Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 215]
I noted previously Feuerbach’s notion that the difference between the egoism practiced by practical men who accept their status as natural beings (Alberich’s employment of the Ring’s power) and religious men (Wotan), is that the egoistic desires of practical men who embrace our earth remain within the realm of possibility, and can therefore be satisfied, at least in the course of man’s history, whereas the infinite desires of the religious man are inherently insatiable and therefore excessive. This unsatisfiable longing for transcendent meaning is the cause of man’s unhealing wound, the cause of Alberich’s curse on the Ring, the curse of consciousness. Alberich’s quest for power is only limitless in the sense of having no specific limit, but it is finite and realizable because it remains within the realm of the possible, whereas the gods, as Loge noted, have staked everything on Freia’s golden apples of sorrowless youth eternal, i.e., on the futile hope of immortal life in heaven. For these reasons Feuerbach calls the concept of God the luxury of egoism:
