It is fascinating to consider to what extent Wagner has modeled Wotan’s relationship with Erda (Mother Nature) upon Adam’s (man’s) relationship with Eve, both inside and outside of paradise (i.e., before the Fall and after the Fall, the exile from paradise, respectively). Clearly, Wotan seeks Erda to obtain two types of knowledge, i.e., objective knowledge of the bitter truth he fears, and subjective, aesthetic intuition through which he can sublimate her terrible knowledge into a safe form as religious mythology, and later, secular art (especially music), and thereby forget the fear engendered by objective truth. The first kind of knowledge he obtains from Erda, objective knowledge of the terrible truth, is of course comparable to the fateful knowledge Eve obtained from the Tree of Knowledge in paradise and imparted to Adam, thereby prompting God to exile them from paradise in punishment. The second kind of knowledge, subjective, aesthetic intuition, represents an attempt to restore the paradise which has been lost through acquisition of the first kind of knowledge, just as Eve’s crime, which banished man from paradise, is the inspiration of Christ’s offer of redemption, the restoration of paradise. It is in this sense that Eve is for Wagner the archetypal muse for art, which Wagner of course dramatized in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, in which Eva is the muse who inspires the music-dramatist Walther Von Stolzing, in a dream, to create his Mastersong, in which the Tree of Knowledge (Erda’s objective knowledge) and the Tree of Life (aesthetic intuition, i.e., Erda known through love rather than through objective understanding) become one.
Through Wotan’s union with Erda, Erda will give birth to their daughter Bruennhilde. During Wotan’s sojourn with Erda she will figuratively impart knowledge to Wotan through sexual union, and not just carnal knowledge. I believe we can construe the first form of knowledge Wotan seeks from Erda, objective knowledge, as that knowledge Wotan the Wanderer – collective, historical man – acquires through his wanderings in space and time, i.e., man’s historical experience of the world. It is this scientific, objective knowledge of Mother Nature which Wagner rejects in our following extract, in favor of what he describes as a loving or sympathetic relationship with nature, which we can usefully identify as the second form of knowledge Wotan wishes to learn from Erda, the knowledge of how to forget the fear and care the first kind of knowledge engendered in him:
“I am not so out of touch with nature as you suppose, even though I myself am no longer in a position to have scientific dealings with it. (…) It is only when nature is expected to replace real life – love – that I ignore it.” [624W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 312]
The mere fact that Wagner is not embarrassed to distinguish what he calls “nature” (as known through “scientific dealings”) from “real life – love” in our extract, demonstrates that Wagner holds two antithetical views of the real world, because “real life – love” is a part of nature. Clearly what Wagner means is that nature can be known in two distinct ways, scientifically on the one hand, and aesthetically, or musically, on the other. On this reading, it seems likely that the product of Wotan’s union with Erda, Bruennhilde, will represent Mother Nature as known to us aesthetically.
The second form of knowledge is dependent upon the first, since man’s need to substitute a consoling illusion for an intolerable truth depends for inspiration upon some kind of awareness of that truth which we are inspired to deny. This process must be unconscious because, were religious man aware that he is deceiving himself in his beliefs, he could not believe them. As Wagner said, we had to lose our innocence before we could value its restoration.
