Alberich’s Ring in effect speaks its truth through Erda. Having attained full objective consciousness in man, Mother Nature becomes self-conscious and wakes in Wotan as she did in Alberich. Wagner finds a basis for this concept in Feuerbach:
“ … the reason is the most indispensable being – the profoundest and most essential necessity. In the reason first lies the self-consciousness of existence, self-conscious existence; in the reason is first revealed the end, the meaning of existence.” [55F-EOC: p. 43]
“… the being in whom nature becomes personal, conscious, and rational is man. … unconscious nature is the eternal, uncreated being, the first being … .” [193F-LER: p. 21]
In one of Wagner’s paraphrases of Feuerbach previously cited, he observes that though at its inception man’s newborn consciousness - thanks to man’s limited knowledge of the world - begins in error (in religious belief), the history of the birth of knowledge from error is the history of man’s scientific correction of the religious view that the cause of nature is outside of nature, in supernatural beings. [See 414W] And Wagner explains that: “Through this knowledge does Nature grow conscious of herself, and verily by Man himself, who only through discriminating between himself and Nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by making her his ‘object.’ “
Now that Wotan has taken possession of Alberich’s Ring and is wearing it on his finger, preparing to exploit its full power, Erda, Mother Nature as known to man (i.e., Alberich) objectively, has woken to offer Wotan a vision of the bitter truth which he can’t face, but Alberich can. Erda, Mother Nature, has in other words woken and become conscious of herself in Wotan as she does for Alberich. Alberich’s Ring is the human mind in its fullest power, objectively conscious of the world as it is. How significant it is that Wagner also noted in this passage that by making Nature our object of knowledge, over time our accumulation of this objective knowledge will correct man’s initial error in inventing divine beings who either created the real world or at least are autonomous from it and its laws. Erda’s, Mother Nature’s, waking for Wotan is therefore automatically tantamount to the twilight of the gods which she will soon foretell, an end of the gods which will come about as a result of Alberich’s curse on his Ring, the instrument of his vengeance against the gods for co-opting his Ring power. Erda is, in effect, telling Wotan the price he will pay if he insists on staking his claim to the power of truth by keeping for himself Alberich’s Ring of consciousness. To be conscious of the truth constitutes nothing less than the end of the gods.
As Erda delivers her initial warning that Wotan should flee the Curse on the Ring, presumably by yielding it to the Giants, and proclaims that its gain will ordain him irredeemable dark destruction, we hear #53, sometimes known as “Erda’s Motif.” It is a slower, heavier, darker, harmonised variant of #1 via #2, the Primal Nature Motif and its first variant which included the Rhine River’s Motion, with which the Ring began. #53 is also associated at this point with Erda’s description of her (Nature’s) self-knowledge, that it embraces all that was, is, and will be (that is, the world composed of time, space, matter, and energy, abiding by natural laws including causation, the secular version of fate). This proves that the sin against all that was, is, and will be, which Alberich said Wotan would commit if he stole Alberich’s Ring and co-opted its power, is actually religious man’s sin of pessimism, of world denial, figurative matricide, the murder of Mother Nature.
