of the truth provides the solution: by relinquishing the Ring to the Giants Wotan can suppress consciousness of the bitter truth by submerging it in his unconscious mind, and sublimate its bitterness into blissful feeling. Thus Wotan can redeem himself from having to foresee the inevitable end of the gods. He can replace truth with an illusion held to be the truth, and prohibit the freedom of inquiry which might contradict this false belief, through the requirement of unquestioning religious faith, sanctioned by fear. It is Fafner, transformed by virtue of the Tarnhelm into a fearsome serpent, who, as the embodiment of faith’s taboo on freedom of thought, will prohibit access to the source of Alberich’s power, his Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard of knowledge. This is how Wotan will fulfill Erda’s intent that he flee the Ring’s curse by shunning it.
We will learn later, in fuller detail, what Wagner means in his commentary on his alteration to Erda’s prophecy, when he says that we must learn to die, and that fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness. At its most obvious, Wagner means that the self-preservation instinct (fear of the end) is selfish and antithetical to love, and that therefore we can only restore the love we have lost because of fear, by overcoming fear of the end, and willing the necessary by resigning ourselves to our mortality. This is at least partly what Wagner tried to convey in his following commentary on Wotan’s fateful decision to will the necessary, the destruction of the gods, in S.3.1:
“ … the remainder of the poem [the Ring] is concerned to show how necessary it is toacknowledge change, variety, multiplicity and the eternal newness of reality and of life, and to yield to that necessity. Wodan rises to the tragic heights of willing his own destruction. This is all that we need to learn from the history of mankind: to will what is necessary and to bring it about ourselves.” [615W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 307]
But I will anticipate our argument by stating briefly here that Wotan will finally acquiesce in the fated doom of the gods (i.e., learn to die) only because man’s religious impulse, man’s longing for transcendent value, lives on reborn in inspired secular art, particularly the art of music (pure feeling, or love) produced through the metaphorical union of Siegfried the artist-hero and his muse of inspiration, Wotan’s daughter by Erda, Bruennhilde. We will find in Twilight of the Gods that Siegfried will be freed from Wotan’s fear of the end which Erda has foretold, because Bruennhilde’s magic will protect Siegfried from foresight of the end. The practical reason for his fearlessness will be that, unlike those who practice and believe in a religious faith, the secular artist stakes no claim to the truth (the Ring) which could be proven to be false, because he openly proclaims his art a form of play or fiction which does not concern itself with truth or falsehood. Or, in the best case, as in music, his art is the expression of a feeling which, being pre-lingual, is entirely freed from claims to truth, or accusations of falsehood. And finally, we will realize that Siegfried’s fearlessness, won for him through Bruennhilde’s protective magic, frees him to restore the love which Wotan has lost. Thus, we will see that if Wotan, even in willing the end of the gods, does not fear the end, this is only because Valhalla will live on in the love Siegfried shares with Brunnhilde, the secular art they will produce, and Wotan himself will be reborn in his heir Siegfried. Therefore Wotan no longer anticipates or fears the end which Erda foretold.
Erda’s great revelation is that what we call divine is merely mortal man, his mind, plus nature. And because man, the unwitting, involuntary inventor of the gods, who collectively dreamed them into existence, is himself a product of Mother Nature, the gods like man are ephemeral. This is, according to Wagner, the secret behind the religious mysteries:
