“What Poetry perceived from that high seat, was after all but Life: the higher did she raise herself, the more panoramic became her view; but the wider the connection in which she was now enabled to grasp the parts, the livelier arose in her the longing to fathom the depths of this great whole. Thus Poetry turned to Science, to Philosophy. To the struggle for a deeper knowledge of Nature and of Man, we stand indebted for that copious store [Hoard?, i.e. Hort?] of literature whose kernel is the poetic musing (gedankenhaftes Dichten) which speaks to us in Human – and in Natural – History, and in Philosophy [in other words, Dark-Alberich’s and Light-Alberich’s – Wotan’s – Hoard of objective knowledge imparted by Erda, mother nature]. (…) But the deepest and most universal science can, at the last, know nothing else but Life itself; and the substance and the sense of Life are naught but Man and Nature. Science, therefore, can only gain her perfect confirmation in the work of Art … Thus the consummation of Knowledge is its redemption into Poetry; into that poetic art, however, which marches hand in hand with her sister arts towards the perfect Artwork; -- and this artwork is none other than the Drama.” [i.e., Wagnerian music-drama, and the Ring in particular] [439W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 139]
Wotan’s hoard of knowledge of himself and the world, identical with Alberich’s hoard of treasure, and ultimately born of Alberich’s Ring of consciousness, is the seed, the poetic intent, which Wotan plants in his wish-womb Bruennhilde, to give birth to Siegfried, the artist who redeems himself from Wotan’s existential fear through the production of redemptive works of art:
“ … the new Form could only have been a genuine art-form, provided it showed itself as the explicit utterance of a specific musical Organism; but every musical organism is by its nature -- a womanly; it is merely a bearing, and not a begetting factor; the begetting-force [i.e., Wotan’s confession of his Hoard of knowledge to Bruennhilde, which provides the words, the drama, for music to redeem in the loving union of the music-drama] lies clean outside it, and without fecundation by this force it positively cannot bear.” [484W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 109]
And here Wagner offers a very explicit insight into the manner in which Wotan’s confession of mankind’s horrific history to his unconscious mind Bruennhilde generates music which redeems this knowledge and allows man to forget his fear:
[P. 152] “… seeing how fond people are of ascribing to Music, particularly of the passionate and stirring type, a simply pathologic character, it may surprise them to discover … [P. 153] how delicate and purely ideal is her actual sphere, since the material terror of reality [Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde of thoughts so abhorrent that he can’t bear to speak them aloud to himself, i.e., to be conscious of them] can find no place therein, albeit the soul of all things real in it alone finds pure expression [The essence or distillate of Wotan’s history is transmuted into redemptive musical motifs which neutralize its material terror, allowing us to forget our fear.] – Manifestly then, there is a side of the world, and a side that concerns us most seriously, whose terrible lessons can be brought home to our minds on none but a field of observation where Music has to hold her tongue: this field perhaps may best be measured if we allow Shakespeare, the stupendous mime, to lead us on it as far as that point we saw him reach with the desperate fatigue we assumed as reason for his early withdrawal from the stage. And that field might be best defined, if not exactly as the soil, at least as the phenomena of History. To portray its material features for
