[R.4: I]
This is why Erda now foretells the inevitable doom of the gods:
Erda: (#50:) But gravest danger (#51?:) brings me myself to you today (:#50; :#51?): (#5:) Hearken! Hearken! Hearken! (:#5)! (#53:) All things that are – (#53 modulating [with octave drop:]) end (:#53). [[ #54: ]] A day of darkness dawns for the gods (:#54) (#53): (#19:) I counsel you: shun the ring (:#19)!
In her proclamation that all things that are, end, Erda proclaims Nature’s self-knowledge, for transience and change are the very essence of Mother Nature’s phenomena. This puts Erda, spokesperson for the truth, at odds with the gods, who proclaim their immortality and the divine inalterability of their mandate and laws. Feuerbach’s meditations on nature’s transience [see above] gave Wagner the cue for Erda’s expression of her own nature. Here are a few others especially relevant to Erda’s prophesy of the twilight of the gods:
“Nature brings death, God alone confers immortality.” [302F-LER: p. 266]
“ … in nature it is impossible to tell who is the lord and who the vassal, because all things are equally important, equally essential; here there are no privileges; the lowest is as important, as necessary as the highest … . And this very fact that the organism is a republican community, that it owes its existence to cooperation among equal beings, is the source of material evil, of struggle, illness, and death; but the cause of death is also the cause of life, the cause of evil is also the cause of good.
A God, on the other hand, is a monarch, an absolute, unrestrained monarch who does what he pleases, who is ‘above the law,’ but makes his arbitrary commandments into laws for his subjects, regardless of how contrary such laws may be to the subjects’ needs.” [237F-LER: p. 137] [See also 303F]
But according to Erda even the gods, like all other phenomena of nature, are subject to change, to becoming and perishing, to mortality. And their fated doom is a logical consequence of Erda’s (Nature’s) essential law, that all things which are, end. Wotan will inform us in his confession to Bruennhilde in V.2.2 that her mother Erda has foreseen that the gods’ end will be brought about specifically through Alberich’s as yet unborn son Hagen, once a mortal woman won over by Alberich (with gold) has given birth to him. So Hagen becomes the agent not only of Alberich’s revenge on the gods for co-opting his Ring power, the agent of Alberich’s curse on the Ring, but also the agent of natural law, of fate, of Erda herself, by fulfilling her prophecy and her law.
Erda’s octave drop on “Endet,” by the way, is the basis for what will later be introduced as the first segment of the Sword Motif #57, namely #57a. #57 is otherwise known as the Motif of Wotan’s Grand Idea for Redemption from Alberich’s Curse, i.e., redemption from Erda’s prophecy of the twilight of the gods. 57’s second segment, #57b, is identical to the Primal Nature Motif #1 with which the Ring begins. #1 represents both natural necessity, i.e., the evolutionary creativity in the
