The portion of this extract of greatest interest for our present discussion is the following: “In this sacred allegory an attempt is made to transmit to worldly minds the mystery of the divine revelation: but the only relation it can bear to what the Religious had immediately beheld, is the relation of the day-told dream [say, Valhalla] to the actual dream of night [say, Alberich’s forging of his Ring in Nibelheim]. (…) … the record left upon our own mind by a deeply moving dream is strictly nothing but an allegorical paraphrase, whose intrinsic disagreement with the original remains a trouble to our waking consciousness … .” Wotan’s present unease is a metaphor for what Feuerbach often described as the unease at least some of the religiously faithful feel in staking their happiness on what their unconscious mind knows to be their own self-deception. Wotan knows deep down that he is cheating, that he’s dishonoring the truth. That is why his self-doubt will lead him to seek out Erda. My suggestion is that authentically unconscious artistic inspiration must partake in some sense of the same self-doubt which prompts Wotan to both seek out the true source of his fear, and to seek the means to forget it.
In our discussion of the transition from R.1 to R.2, I noted that in Alberich’s misadventure with the Rhinedaughters, which inspires his curse on love, theft of the Rhinegold, forging of his Ring of power, and wielding of the Ring’s power over his fellow Nibelungs in Nibelheim, we have what might be described as the original nightmare of inspiration which was sublimated into Wotan’s waking dream of a civilization founded on belief in gods, Valhalla, but which Wotan did not remember upon waking. But by virtue of the fact the motif representing Alberich’s Ring (which he alone could forge), #19, transformed during this transition between scenes one and two into the first segment of the Valhalla Motif, #20a, we intuited that Wagner was telling us the power of Alberich’s Ring (the human mind) gave birth to the illusion that gods (in their abode Valhalla) rule the lives of men. This explains why Wotan says unease holds him fast. By virtue of his dependence on Alberich’s Ring to satisfy the Giants who built Valhalla, so they won’t stake their claim upon the illusion which sustains Valhalla, Freia, the goddess of divine love and immortality, Wotan has become too conscious of the egoism underlying man’s belief in the gods. It is his fear that the illusions upon which the gods (i.e., mortal men) have staked all their happiness might have an insecure foundation which troubles Wotan so much that he feels he must descend to Erda, Mother Nature, to confront this seemingly irresolvable existential dilemma, to draw inspiration from her in order to produce those waking dreams of religious faith and art in which man can substitute a consoling illusion for the truth, and consign the truth to the oblivion of forgetfulness.
Just as Wotan, with the aid of Loge’s (the archetypal artist’s) cunning, penetrated Mother Nature’s “navel-nest” Nibelheim, to draw advantage from Alberich’s sacrifice (“Noth,” which granted Alberich the Ring and its power), so that the gods can safely draw inspiration from this power to sustain Valhalla and the illusions upon which it rests, so Wotan now intends to penetrate the womb of Erda (Mother Nature) herself, to confront the true source of his existential fear and care, so that he can safely draw inspiration from it to sustain Valhalla, by redeeming it from the truth. Wotan need not acknowledge the world’s lovelessness to draw inspiration from the Ring’s power because Alberich’s original sacrifice, his martyrdom for the sake of the Ring’s power, has done the gods’ work for them. We will find in the second half of the Ring that the artist-hero Siegfried’s loving union with his muse of inspiration Bruennhilde - the daughter born of the union with Erda which Wotan now contemplates - is based upon Wotan’s relationship with Erda in the sense that I have just described.
