Eve is the model for both Erda and Bruennhilde since it was through Eve’s acquisition of forbidden knowledge, her disobedience of God’s injunction not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that man was exiled from the paradise of preconscious animal instinct, and had to satisfy his needs and desires through conscious labor, but also, and more importantly to our current discussion, that man sought to restore his lost paradise of innocence by resorting to religious mythology and secular art. Thus Eve becomes, in effect, the muse for religion and art, and is the model not only for Bruennhilde but for most of Wagner’s other heroines, namely, Venus and Elsa in the Romantic Operas, and Isolde, Kundry, and most obviously, Eva, in the mature music-dramas. As Hans Sachs tells Eva during his cobbling song confession in Act Two of The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, since Eva in paradise was responsible for committing that original sin which made God punish both Adam and her with exile from paradise, Eva must compensate man for this crime by serving as muse of inspiration for Walther Von Stolzing’s redemptive work of art, the Mastersong, which is man’s substitute for the sacred in a secular age.
This novel concept, that Erda is a muse of inspiration who both teaches Wotan fear (and the meaning of his fear, the unbearable truth which prompts this fear in Wotan), and also teaches him how to forget – or redeem himself from - it (through their daughter Bruennhilde), I believe explains what might otherwise be construed as contradictory in Wagner’s following cryptic remark, in which Wagner speaks of:
“ … nature’s true purpose which aims at deliverance from within itself: (Feminine).” [1126W-{3/21/82 – 4/9/82} BB, p. 204]
The meaning of this is simply that, not only is our foresight of our inevitable end (which inspires existential fear) and capacity to obtain objective knowledge from nature (which may be intolerably bitter) gifts of nature, but our ability to heal the wounds inflicted by objective knowledge through the creation of consoling illusions, the product of our unconscious mind, is also a gift of Nature. Figuratively speaking, our mind, the product of nature, both delivers the unhealing wound of existential fear caused by the overreaching in man’s illusion of transcendence, and provides us the means to heal it, if only temporarily.
Wagner has also captured this distinction between the two, antithetical kinds of knowledge Wotan seeks to acquire from Erda, in his description below of his own redemptive music-dramas. Here he suggests that man’s bitter knowledge of the objective truth, such as we obtain through science and technology, can find its sublimation and redemption in drama, specifically that synthesis of the arts, the Wagnerian music-drama:
[P. 138] Thus hovered in the air the Poet’s Thought, like a human-outlined cloud that spread its shadow over actual, bodily earth-life, to which it evermore looked down; and into which it needs must long to shed itself, just as from earth alone it sucked its steaming vapours. (…) [P. 139] So should the Poet’s thought [Wotan’s fear and longing for knowledge] once more impregnate Life [Erda] … .”
What Poetry perceived from that high seat, was after all but Life: the higher did she raise herself, the more panoramic became her view; but the wider the connection in which she was now enabled to grasp the parts, the livelier arose in her the longing to fathom the depths of this great whole. Thus Poetry turned to Science, to Philosophy. To the struggle for a deeper knowledge of
