Wagner, clearly heavily influenced here by Feuerbach, describes how - through a similar process of purgation of all of man’s links to his own history and development, a purgation of all things which make man man - it is possible to posit a mythical, purely-human being freed from all implication in the world’s corruption, a timeless, pristine, innocent man, such as Wotan hopes Siegfried will be. It is noteworthy that in our second extract below Wagner actually echoes Feuerbach’s language by describing Siegfried as the “real naked man,” just as Feuerbach critiques the history-less immortal man - which religious belief has conjured from the imagination - as the “naked individual.”
[P. 357] “In the struggle to give the wishes of my heart artistic shape, and in the ardour to discover what thing it was that drew me so resistlessly to the primal source of old home Sagas, I drove step by step into the deeper regions of antiquity, where at last to my delight, and truly in the utmost reaches of old time, I was to light upon the fair young form of [P. 358] Man, in all the freshness of his force. My studies thus bore me, through the legends of the Middle Ages, right down to their foundation in the old-Germanic Mythos; one swathing after another, which the later legendary lore had bound around it, I was able to unloose, and thus at last to gaze upon it in its chastest beauty. What here I saw, was no longer the Figure of conventional history [say, Wotan], whose garment claims our interest more than does the actual shape inside; but the real naked Man [i.e., Siegfried] … . At like time I had sought this human being in History too. Here offered themselves relations, and nothing but relations; the human being I could only see in so far as the relations ordered him: and not as he had power to order them [Wotan, Lord of treaties, trapped by his treaties]. To get to the bottom of these ‘relations,’ whose coercive force compelled the strongest man to squander all his powers on objectless and never-compassed aims, I turned afresh to the soil of Greek antiquity, and here, again, was pointed at the last to Mythos … . … Mythos lead me to this Man alone, as to the involuntary creator of those relations [Wotan], which in their documento-monumental perversion, as the excrescences of History (Geschictes-momente), as traditional fictions and established rights, have at last usurped dominion over Man and ground to dust his freedom.” [574W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 357-358]
“With the conception of ‘Siegfried,’ I had pressed forward to where I saw before me the Human Being in the most natural and blithest fulness of his physical life. No historic garment more, confined his limbs [thanks to the fact that Wotan repressed his knowledge of history into his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, who will hold this knowledge for Siegfried and protect him from suffering consciousness of it]; no outwardly-imposed relation hemmed in his movements, which, springing from the inner fount of Joy-in-life, so bore themselves in face of all encounter, that error and bewilderment … might heap themselves around until they threatened to destroy him, without the hero checking for a moment, even in the face of death, the welling outflow of that Inner fount [i.e., Siegfried is fearless, thanks to Bruennhilde holding for him, and protecting him from, Erda’s knowledge, which paralyzed Wotan with existential fear of the end] … . It was ‘Elsa’ who had taught me to unearth this man [since Elsa offered to share with Lohengrin the secret of his identity and origin, and protect him from the anguish (i.e., “Noth”), which bringing this knowledge up from the silent depths of the unconscious to the light of day might inflict on Lohengrin]: to me, he was the male-embodied spirit of perennial and sole creative instinct (Unwillkuer) [i.e., an unconsciously inspired artist-hero], of the doer of true Deeds, of Manhood in the utmost fulness of its inborn
