Wotan’s confession, with his subliminal acknowledgment, in rage at himself, that everything which gives his life meaning and all his hopes are predicated on his own egoism and self-deception, rather than truth and nobility of spirit. His anger at himself, in other words, will be projected by him on to others.
As Donner’s storm clears to make way for the stunning appearance of the Rainbow Bridge leading from the meadow to Valhalla, we are introduced to its “Rainbow Bridge Motif” #56, the only instance in which it is heard in the entire Ring. It is also in the Nature Motif Family. It represents in effect the bridge of transition between man’s evolutionary status as an animal, and reflectively conscious man, in the sense that only with the finale of Rhinegold are the foundations of human civilization laid. All the gods and mortal beings of The Rhinegold represent aspects of humanity, of the human psyche and heart, rather than specific beings, or at best represent collective, historical man. The essence of this transition, this collective dreaming which gave birth to civilization founded upon religious faith in the rule of supernatural gods, is that all trace of our true, natural origin in evolution is wiped out and replaced entirely by a false mythological past which is recounted as man’s own past, though it is entirely man’s involuntary invention. All memory of man’s debt to Nature (Erda), to animal instinct (first the Rhinedaughters, and then, with the split of instinct into desire and fear, good and evil, the Giants), and to the power of our conscious human mind (Alberich’s Ring), is forgotten. As Feuerbach put it, using Christianity as his example of religious faith in general, all trace of the Christian God’s origin in nature is effaced by man’s religious mythology, and all intellectual inquiry and curiosity which might reveal this origin is instinctively censored so that the physical origin of what we call the supernatural can never be known:
[P. 321] … the God of Christian monotheism is a withered, dried-out God in whom all traces of His origin in nature is effaced; there He stands like a creation out of [P. 322] nothing; on pain of the rod He even forbids the inevitable question: ‘What did God do before He created the world?’ or more correctly: What was He before nature? In other words, He makes a secret of His physical origin, hiding it behind a metaphysical abstraction.” [341F-LER: p. 321-322]
I will later argue not only that Fafner comes to embody Wotan’s fear of intellectual inquiry into the foundations of Valhalla, as a metaphor for religious faith’s fear of knowledge, but also that this fear is the true motive underlying Lohengrin’s insistence that neither Elsa nor anyone else who seeks redemption from their “Noth” through Lohengrin, inquire after his true identity or origin.
[R.4: P]
Wotan now invokes the full burden of the labor which man required to win for himself this strange compromise between truth and self-deception in a civilization predicated upon both practical knowledge of the means to survival, and the illusion that man has one foot in a spiritual, transcendent realm:
Wotan: (#20a modulation or #20b?:) In the evening light the sun’s eye gleams; in its glittering glow (:#20a modulation or #20b?) (#20a?:) the stronghold shines resplendent: (#20b?:) glinting bravely
