strength and proved loveworthiness.” [579W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 375] [See also 498W]
So it appears that Wagner found his formula for the truly free, fearless, purely-human hero, miraculously disconnected from Wotan’s historical time and context, from the natural necessity or fate, Erda’s knowledge, which her daughters the Norns spin, in Feuerbach’s critique of immortality. But Wagner here adds the most striking point of all, that it was his heroine Elsa, from Lohengrin, who taught him to unearth his de-contextualized Siegfried, a man freed from all natural preconditions and debts. The following extracts from Wagner’s writings will provide clues through which we can grasp what lies behind not only Wagner’s claim that Elsa taught him to unearth his Siegfried, but also the self-evident fact that Feuerbach led him to Siegfried.
Our key clue is to be found in a comparison between the following extracts from Feuerbach and Wagner’s paraphrases of them. In our first, cryptic passage, Feuerbach implies that illusion, Maya, effectively protected the world-creator Brahma from foreseeing the terrible nature of the world he was about to create so well, that instead of being paralysed into inaction by depressing foreknowledge of his prospective creation, which presumably would otherwise have kept him from proceeding, he joyously gave birth to the world:
“Maya once drove away the melancholy of the ancient Brahma so that a depressed person was changed into a creator of the world.” [38F-TDI: p. 250]
It appears that thanks to self-deception, the sort of self-blinding or madness called Wahn, the world-creator Brahma no longer foresaw the evil his creation of the world would bring about, and so he was able to freely, fearlessly create what previously, through his foresight of the terrible truth, he was too depressed to create. We can’t help being reminded of the relationship between the sorrowful Wotan, who confesses his self-abhorrence, and abhorrence of the world he has created, to his daughter Bruennhilde, and Siegfried, who, thanks to Bruennhilde’s protection, is freed from the knowledge which paralyzed Wotan into inaction, so that Siegfried can spontaneously, joyously create art without fear.
Now in the following passage from Wagner, clearly influenced by Feuerbach’s remarks above, we must remember that “Prometheus” means foresight or foreknowledge in Greek. The implication for our (and presumably Wagner’s) reading of the Prometheus myth is that when Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods in order to grant this gift to mortal man, he also bestowed foresight on mortal man. This foresight included that of man’s inevitable end, which, according to Plato, is what makes humans unique and prone to philosophize, to reflect on the mysteries of existence. Foresight not only granted man a conceptual power through which he surpassed all other animals, but it also engendered existential fear of the end, since, alone among animals, man can contemplate the inevitability of his death. But here Wagner says that Prometheus, who we must assume granted mortal man the gift of divine – though forbidden - knowledge, also took knowledge away from man, presumably to protect him from this divine foresight and the fear it engenders. In other words, he who delivered the wound of consciousness alone can heal this wound:
[P. 435] “On his return R. says to me, ‘Prometheus’s words “I took [P. 436] knowledge away from Man” came to my mind and gave me a profound insight; knowledge, seeing ahead is in fact a
