suffering from:] … incomprehension of nature’s true purpose which aims at deliverance from within itself: (Feminine.).” [1126W-{3/21/82 – 4/9/82} BB, p. 204]
In other words, the natural, evolutionary cause of man’s unhealing wound, is also man’s sole source of consolation and healing. Accordingly, Erda, who delivers Wotan’s wound of unbearable foresight of the inevitable end of the gods, the knowledge which Wotan so feared he could not contemplate it consciously, gives birth to Bruennhilde, through whom Wotan can redeem himself from consciousness of Erda’s knowledge and forget his fear. And indeed, Wotan’s heir, the artist-hero Siegfried, will both learn the meaning of Wotan’s fear from Bruennhilde (to whom Wotan has imparted the hoard of knowledge he obtained from her mother Erda), and forget his fear through the consummation of their loving union, i.e., through her unconscious inspiration of his redemptive art.
In Wagner’s remarks below he speaks of what I have described as the unhealing wound, the price of man’s natural, evolutionary gift of consciousness, as the special characteristic of humanity, “its aptitude for Conscious Suffering,” and describes Nature, which he identifies here with Schopenhauer’s concept of the “Will,” as possessing a mysterious capacity for “willing of Redemption,” thereby paraphrasing our extract quoted above:
[P. 280] “… the human species’ bond of union … [is] its aptitude for Conscious Suffering. This faculty we can only regard as the last step reached by Nature in the ascending series of her fashionings; thenceforth she brings no new, no higher species to light, for in it she herself attains her unique freedom, the annulling of the internecine warfare of the Will. The hidden background [P. 281] of this Will, inscrutable in Time and Space, is nowhere manifest to us but in that abrogation; and there it shows itself divine, the willing of Redemption.” [1090W-{6-8/81} Herodom and Christendom – 3rd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 280-281]
So Erda, wakened by Alberich’s Ring of consciousness on Wotan’s finger, becomes the exponent of Alberich’s Ring by inflicting the wound of conscious knowledge on Wotan, while her daughter by Wotan, Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, heals the wound of consciousness by restoring Wotan’s lost innocence. In other words, the bitter truth unconsciously inspires man to create that Wahn, or veil of artistic illusion as found in both religion and secular art, which redeems him from it. Though Wotan is, of course, imparting Bruennhilde’s mother’s wisdom to Bruennhilde, which Erda imparted to him, Erda’s daughter Bruennhilde also naturally inherits her knowledge. Wotan imparted Erda’s knowledge to Bruennhilde, who represents Erda as a sympathetic rather than threatening being, merely to repress Erda’s knowledge into his own unconscious mind. And Wotan’s unconscious mind, Bruennhilde, is his link with Erda (Nature).
In the following passage Wagner affirms that Bruennhilde possesses the knowledge which Erda imparted to Wotan, knowledge which Wagner in turn identifies here as the “Ring’s runes”:
“Bruennhild: [addressing the dead Siegfried] ‘All my rune-lore I bewrayed to thee, a mortal, and so went widowed of my wisdom …: but now that thou must yield it up through death, my knowledge comes to me again, and this Ring’s runes I rede. The ur-law’s [i.e., Erda’s] runes, too, know I now, the Norns’ [again, Erda’s] old saying!” [380W-{6-8/48} The Nibelungen Myth: PW Vol. VII, p. 310]
