half, Siegfried’s (and Hagen’s) half, details the history of Wotan’s two heirs, Siegfried and Hagen, Siegfried representing the secular artist who falls heir to religious man’s longing for transcendent value, and Hagen, whom we will come to know as Wagner’s metaphor for the scientific, secular world-view which falls heir to religion’s former role in explaining ourselves and our world, a world-view which alone can attain worldly power. In this scheme, God-the-Father, The Old Testament and its laws of fear and prohibition, stands toward Christ the Savior and his New Testament law of love, as Wotan, identified here with religious belief (the gods of Valhalla), stands toward the secular artist Siegfried, to whom Wotan looks as savior. This explains, by the way, why Walther Von Stolzing, the artist-hero and unconsciously inspired music-dramatist of Wagner’s comedy The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, is symbolically equated with Christ the Savior throughout the entirety of that music-drama.
The following extract provides a justification in Wagner’s own words for the equation of Wotan with Christianity’s God-the-Father, and for the equation of Siegfried with Jesus:
[P. 287] “The abstract Highest God of the Germans, Wuotan, did not really need to yield place to the God of the Christians; rather could he be completely identified with him: merely the physical trappings with which the various stems had clothed him in accordance with their idiosyncrasy, their dwelling-place and climate, were to be stripped off; the universal attributes ascribed to him, for the rest, completely answered those allotted to the Christian’s God. (…)
(…)
[P. 289] In the German Folk survives the oldest lawful race of Kings in all the world: it issues from a son of God, called by his nearest kinsmen Siegfried, but Christ by the remaining nations of the earth … .” [372W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 287; p. 289]
[V.2.2: I]
Wotan now describes the hero-redeemer of his dreams as a friendly foe who, in breaching faith with the gods, will actually unwittingly serve their need for redemption from Alberich’s curse. But Wotan despairs of ever finding such a hero in the real world, because Wotan will always find only his craven, egoistic, fearful self behind his longing for this hero, and therefore in the hero himself. Wotan therefore feels that his longing for such a friendly foe, and hope of redemption, is futile:
Wotan: (#83?:) He who, against the god, would fight for me, O how might I find that friendly foe? How fashion a free man whom I never sheltered and who, in his own defiance, is yet the dearest of men to me (:#83)? (#81 [compressed?]:) How can I make that other man who’s no longer me (#83b [based on #53’s inversion]) and who, of himself, achieves what I alone desire (:#81 compressed?)? – (#5?; #83a [based on #53]; [[ #84 embryo: ]]) O godly distress [“goettliche Noth”]! O hideous shame! (#21voc?:; [[ #84 embryo: ]] [in the harmony]) To my loathing [“Ekel”] I find only ever myself in all that I encompass (:#21voc?; :#84 embryo)! (#83:) That other self for which I yearn,
