prisoner without actually staking a claim to its power which would bring him into an unwinnable conflict with Alberich, who alone can rightfully stake a claim to the terrible power of objective truth. Wotan needs a hero, in other words, freed from the constraints of religious faith and belief who, of his own nature, without ulterior motive or consciousness that Wotan’s fear of the twilight of the gods inspires him, can take aesthetic possession of Alberich’s Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard. This is a form of possession which neither employs the Ring’s actual power nor stakes an indefensible claim to it, a claim which Alberich’s knowledge presumably cannot contradict. In other words Wotan’s hero will be truly free and autonomous from both the gods’ vulnerabilities (illusion which stakes a false claim to be the truth) and Alberich’s curse on his Ring (the truth) if he has no conceptual relationship to the truth whatsoever. The practical effect of this will be to neutralize Alberich’s curse on his Ring, the curse of consciousness, at least temporarily (just as Loge initially helped Wotan secure Alberich’s Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard to keep them out of Alberich’s hands).
Wotan is paralyzed into inaction because he is hamstrung by consciousness of a contradiction, which cannot be resolved, between religious belief and reality, a contradiction which could be suppressed so long as man remained secure within the mytho-poetic phase of human history, but which will rise to consciousness from the silent depths if Alberich regains control of human consciousness by regaining control over the Ring. Wagner may well have based his conception of Wotan as paralyzed into inaction by virtue of his too great consciousness of the existential dilemma which lies at the root of human existence, on Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“… ‘Hamlet.’ R. … says that everything in this is agitation, dawning madness, Hamlet the modern man, disintegrated and incapable of action, seeing the world for what it is.” [1062W-{1/31/81} CD Vol. II, p. 612] [See also 1100W]
And not only Hamlet, but another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, Othello, granted Wagner an insight into the paralyzing effect caused by too great consciousness of the egoism which is presumably at the root of all human behavior, even seemingly at the root of self-sacrificial action, which is presumed to be the antithesis of egoism:
“… he [Wagner] thinks of Othello [think here of Wotan’s despair] and Desdemona, and I remind him of the remark he once made to me – that O. killed Desdemona because he knew she must one day be unfaithful to him. He continues by saying that natural tendencies hold sway over acts of enthusiasm, and once the image had arisen in his mind, even if put there by such a despicable rogue [say, Alberich], life became impossible, everything was finished … .” [978W-{10/1/79} CD Vol. II, p. 373]
By confessing his horrific history of corruption and self-deception to Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, and thus transmuting or distilling the essential elements of the Ring drama into musical motifs, Wotan purges his mind of the burden of conscious thought in order to restore the involuntary unconsciousness which has been lost. By imparting his unbearable thoughts to feeling, it is as if Alberich’s curse of consciousness has been obviated, as if Wotan has regained pristine, childlike innocence. In this way Wotan can figuratively give birth to his ideal hero who is freed from Wotan’s own intolerable consciousness, freed from ulterior motivation and conscious intent and egoism, who acts seemingly only upon the prompting of spontaneous instinct, Siegfried.
