truth about why Erda says he must live in fear, and, through loving union with her, how to end his fear. These two motives constitute Wagner’s metaphor for man’s ability to know Nature either conceptually through objective understanding, as the scientist does, or to know the world (Erda – Nature) sympathetically through feeling, as in religious belief and art. Bruennhilde, their daughter, born of Wotan’s loving (rather than fearful) union with Erda, is the product of man’s desire to soften the ruthless force of objective truth with subjective feeling, i.e., of religious man’s dubious attempt to enjoy the power of the mind without paying its price.
Feuerbach’s identification of love (subjective feeling) with the feminine, and with nature’s necessity, helps us to grasp why Wagner made Bruennhilde Erda’s (Nature’s) daughter:
“Love is … essentially feminine … . (…) Love apart from living nature is an anomaly, a phantom. Behold in love the holy necessity and depth of nature!” [71F-EOC: p. 72]
Wagner, like Feuerbach, contrasts masculine godhead, the product of the brain’s gifts of abstraction and imagination, which trick us into undertaking a futile quest to transcend the world, and therefore to posit God’s allegedly “incomprehensible will,” with the “necessity of Nature,” or feeling, which we can identify with both Erda and Bruennhilde (Erda’s daughter), providing us another basis for Wagner’s characterization of Bruennhilde as Erda’s daughter:
“[Describing how Western man, during the Roman empire’s latter days, renounced the pagan, classical world for the sake of the monotheism imported from the East, Wagner states that in that historical context:] Thenceforth God ruled the world, -- God, who had made all Nature for the glory of his name. From that time forward, man’s affairs are governed by the ‘incomprehensible will’ of God; no longer by the instinct and necessity of Nature … .” [449W-{2/50} Art and Climate: PW Vol. I, p. 255]
Ultimately, Bruennhilde is Erda’s daughter because that part of man, “man’s inner nature,” which acts unconsciously by instinct, is, according to Feuerbach, nature itself, every bit as much as the outer world in which man lives. Wotan’s own unconscious mind, his “Will” Bruennhilde, is man’s inner nature, the involuntariness and spontaneity of unconscious human thought, the ultimate religious mystery:
[P. 310] “The object of religion is nature [Erda], which operates independently of man and which he distinguishes from himself. But this nature is more than the phenomena of the outside world; it also includes man’s inner nature [Bruennhilde], which operates independently of his knowledge and his will. This statement brings us to our most crucial point, the true seat and source of religion. The ultimate secret of religion [Wotan’s unspoken secret, which Erda imparted to him, and he imparts in turn to Bruennhilde] is the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the [ P. 311] voluntary and involuntary in one and the same individual.” [331F-LER: p. 310-311] [See also 213F]
Why is Bruennhilde Erda’s – i.e., Mother Nature’s - daughter? Wagner provides ample evidence in support of our current interpretation. In the following extract, for instance, Wagner distinguishes Nature – i.e. Erda – as known to man objectively through the understanding (Alberich’s Ring
