Mime: That he’d been slain was all she said (:#66); to me she commended the fatherless child: - (#41 duple vari:; #105 frags:) ‘And when you grew bigger, I waited upon you; I made you a bed so you’d sleep more softly … (:#41 duple & #105 frags)’
Siegfried: Stop that eternal squawking (“Staarenlied,” i.e., “starling song”)!
Siegfried has now learned from Mime that his mother Sieglinde died giving Siegfried birth. While Sieglinde is Siegfried’s literal blood-mother, I have already noted that Bruennhilde is his metaphysical mother, by virtue of the fact that Wotan inseminated Bruennhilde, Wotan’s wish-womb, with the seed of his unspoken secret, his confession of his corrupt history and true identity as a loathsome being, and also with his desire for a new being unencumbered by Wotan’s burden of guilt. Bruennhilde has figuratively given birth to Siegfried, who is Wotan reborn, minus consciousness of his history and identity and guilt. Siegfried does not know who he is because Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, holds this knowledge for him.
But pursuing this metaphor further, Siegfried’s metaphysical mother is ultimately Bruennhilde’s mother Erda, Mother Nature. Since, as I pointed out in my discussion of Wotan’s sin against Erda (the sin against all that was, is, and will be, which Alberich accused Wotan of committing, in R.4), Wotan, as the embodiment of man’s religious beliefs, which deny the real world in favor of an illusory one, is figuratively guilty of matricide, of killing Mother Nature. The fact that not only Siegfried, but Tristan and Parsifal, are guilty in some sense of causing their mother’s death (Tristan’s mother, like Siegfried’s, having died giving him birth, and Parsifal’s mother having died of a broken heart due to Parsifal’s neglect), is a metaphor for the fact that Wagner’s artist-heroes have inherited religious man’s (Wotan’s) sin against the truth, and are figurative murderers of their mother, since their art is ultimately motivated by man’s religious longing for transcendence. It is for this reason, as we’ll see, that Siegfried meditates in anguish on how he brought about his mother’s death by being born. Tristan’s meditation on how he was born through his mother’s death, and how this tragedy is connected with his love for his muse Isolde, is one of the main subjects of Tristan and Isolde Act Three. And finally, Parsifal’s anguish at having unwittingly murdered his mother Herzeleide will constitute a significant part of the substance of Act Two and Act Three of Parsifal.
#66 now gains added richness in meaning by being associated here with Siegfried’s meditation on the fact that his mother died giving him birth, with all that this implies, all of its suggestiveness regarding what Siegfried has inherited ultimately from Wotan’s conflict with Alberich. For Siegfried, by perpetuating mankind’s religious longing for transcendence of the real world, and therefore Wotan’s sin against Mother Nature, in art, and Siegmund, by preserving the religiously inspired morality of transcendent altruism and compassion, are both in their way inheritors of Wotan’s sin against the truth, and of Wotan’s futile conflict with Alberich over the truth, a conflict neither Wotan nor his moral-hero or artist-hero proxies can win.
It was, of course, Jewish monotheism - the belief in an unnamable and unknowable, mysterious, disembodied creator god - which Christianity inherited. As we can see by comparing Feuerbach’s prior analyses with Wagner’s paraphrases of them, Wagner’s critique of the gods of Valhalla is an
