Through Bruennhilde, whom Wotan has made the unconscious repository for his unspoken secret, i.e., the hoard of knowledge which Erda imparted to him, and whom Wotan will leave to Siegfried as his inheritance, Wotan will plant the seed of his longing for redemption in the hero Siegfried’s unconscious mind. Bruennhilde will be for Siegfried what she is for Wotan, a safe repository of dangerous knowledge, and his muse of unconscious inspiration, the womb of his wishes:
[P. 302] “Wotan himself … cannot undo the wrong without committing yet another: only a free Will, independent of the Gods themselves, and able to assume and expiate itself the burden of all guilt [when Siegfried wakes and wins Bruennhilde, he also falls heir to Wotan’s burdensome hoard of knowledge, the historical account of his guilt which he imparted to Bruennhilde], can loose the spell; and in Man the Gods perceive the faculty of such free-will. In Man they therefore seek to plant their own divinity [through his muse, his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, Siegfried will draw subliminal inspiration from Wotan’s confession, his hoard of knowledge], to raise his strength so high that, … he may rid him of the Gods’ protection, to do of his free will what his own mind [P. 303] inspires. So the Gods bring up Man for this high destiny, to be the canceller of their own guilt; and their aim would be attained even if in this human creation they should perforce annul themselves, that is, must part with their immediate influence through freedom of man’s conscience.” [377W-{6-8/48} The Nibelungen Myth: PW Vol. VII, p. 302-303] [See also 440W]
And, as so often, we find a basis for Wagner’s concept of the emancipation of the sciences and arts from religious belief and the protection of religious faith, in Feuerbach:
[P. 212] “ … today smiths and metalworkers in general know their trade without having any particular god as their patron … . … as long as an art is still imperfect, as long as it is in its swaddling clothes, it requires [P. 213] the protection of religion.” [280F-LER: p. 212-213] [See also 263F]
And of course this means the creative genius Wagner once identified with the collective, historical Folk, i.e., with Feuerbach’s definition of God, is now inherited by the individual revolutionary genius of art, Siegfried. Only the single secular artist, freed from any tie to religious belief, free to breach faith, can preserve the essence of religion which is the feeling of transcendence, the sublime, when religious thought, its set of dogmatic beliefs, trapped now in contradictions which have become too conscious, can no longer be sustained in the face of the advancement of knowledge. Staking no claim to the power of truth, the artist-hero should be invulnerable to collective man’s accumulation of a hoard of objective knowledge.
Now that Wotan has introduced his longing for an heir into his confession, we can better understand the Ring’s overall conceptual structure. While it is well known that Wagner based his four-part tetralogy structure on the plan for Greek tragedies, i.e., a trilogy and satyr-play, the fundamental structure of the Ring is a division into two halves, the first - covering The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie - being Wotan’s half (i.e., detailing the history of God-the-Father and his involvement with mankind, as in the Christian Old Testament), the second half, Siegfried’s half, presenting the history of the saviour as in the Christian New Testament. This second half covers Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods. Further applying our allegorical scheme to this structure, we can see that the first half, Wotan’s story, concerns the history of religious belief, while the second
