divine attribute, and Man with this divine attribute is a piteous object, he is like Brahma before the Maya spread before him the veil of ignorance, of deception; the divine privilege is the saddest thing of all.’ ” [809W-{11/29/71} CD Vol. I, p. 435-436]
Significantly, the punishment Zeus metes out to Prometheus for granting mortal man these divine gifts is to be bound to the top of a mountain (shades of Wotan’s punishment of Bruennhilde in V.3.2-3), where a vulture perpetually eats his liver – creating a wound that will never heal, the very wound which I believe is the basis for all the wounds, both literal and figurative, which belabor so many of Wagner’s protagonists. It is man’s inherent gift of foresight, the hallmark of the human species, which is the cause of that unhealing wound. Prometheus, the giver of divine foresight to mortal man (which was more than man could bear, according to many of the origin myths found throughout the world), must also therefore be the inspirer of that Wahn, that veil of Maya or self-deception, through which man no longer foresees the end, and therefore can escape existential fear. It is no accident, therefore, that Wotan echoes the last line from this passage in Cosima’s Diaries, that he is the saddest of all the living, for Erda has granted him foresight of the inevitable end of the gods. In saying this, Wotan, representing collective, historical man, is merely saying that man is the saddest of all living creatures. Like Prometheus in our present reading, just as Erda delivers the wound of fatal knowledge, her daughter Bruennhilde offers temporary healing of this wound by taking knowledge away from Wotan. By imparting the knowledge to Bruennhilde which her mother Erda imparted to him, Wotan represses this knowledge and loses consciousness of it. Thus Bruennhilde takes Wotan’s self-knowledge away, allowing him to be reborn as Siegfried, who is Wotan himself, but minus self-knowledge. This is precisely why Bruennhilde, in S.3.3, tells Siegfried that what he does not know she knows for him, i.e., his fateful history and true identity, i.e., his knowledge of his true, egoistic motives which underlie his evidently spontaneous and free actions. And the fact that Wagner’s Fate Motif (#87) sounds just at the moment Bruennhilde is telling Siegfried this clinches the matter.
In the following passages Wagner elaborates on this theme that redemption, freeing man to attain the highest creativity, depends upon being unconscious of one’s artistically creative thought processes, which he clearly identifies with “woman.” Conscious knowledge, which Wagner regards as a stumbling block (as it clearly is for both Alberich and Wotan), must be repressed to release man’s (i.e., the artist’s) latent creativity:
“Consciousness [which Wagner identifies with the male, as opposed to the female] is the end, the dissolution of unconsciousness: but unconscious agency is the agency of nature [Bruennhilde is the agency of her mother Erda], of the inner necessity … . … Not ye, but the folk – which deals unconsciously – and for that very reason , from a nature-instinct – will bring the new to pass; but the might of the folk is lamed for just so long as it lets itself be led by the chain of an obsolete intelligence, a hindering consciousness: only when this is completely annihilated by and in itself, -- only when we all know and perceive that we must yield ourselves, not to our intelligence, but to the necessity of nature [by which, in this instance, Wagner means feeling, or music, or what is universal and therefore purely-human], therefore when we have become brave enough to deny our intellect [Wotan represses his knowledge by confessing it to Bruennhilde], shall we obtain from natural unconsciousness [from Bruennhilde], from want [“Noth”], the force to produce the new, to bring the stress of nature to our consciousness through its satisfaction.” [465W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 345]
