described Alberich’s brother Mime. But it is also the case that Wotan is not only dependent on Alberich, but in fact is Alberich, just as the Ring Motif, #19, transforms into the Valhalla Motif’s first segment, #20a. Wotan is dependent on Alberich not only in this subliminal sense, but also in the obvious sense that Wotan can only secure the realm of the gods, Valhalla, from the Giants’ claims and from Alberich’s threat, thanks to Alberich’s forging of the Ring and accumulation of the Hoard of treasure, since it is with these that Wotan pays off the Giants for building Valhalla.
The philosophical - as opposed to mythological - source of Wotan’s (i.e., Wagner’s) distinction of Alberich from Wotan, as Dark-Alberich from Light-Alberich, and prime evidence for my assumption that Alberich represents consciousness of objective reality, while Wotan represents the longing of conscious man for redemption from reality, can in fact be found in Feuerbach’s writings. In the following argument Feuerbach makes the case that the Christians can’t get away with positing a perfect God as the foundation of an imperfect and even evil cosmos, and that therefore the only way to account for what humans describe as good and bad in the world is to trace both of them back to the beginning, or rather, to accept them as immutable aspects of the world:
“God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light [Light-Alberich – Wotan] and a principle of darkness [Dark-Alberich]. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning. But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material, Nature strictly, as distinguished from intelligence. Hence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature [Erda], Matter, cannot be explained as a result of intelligence; on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness develops itself only out of Nature.” [78F-EOC: p. 87]
“ …a few modern theist thinkers or philosophers of religion abandoned the old doctrine of a creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing], which is a necessary consequence of the notion that the world sprang from the spirit – for where is this spirit to derive matter, the material substances, if not from nothingness? – and transformed God Himself into a material, corporeal being, precisely in order to explain the world through Him. (…) Schelling and Franz Baader have argued this doctrine. But it originated with certain older mystics, notably Jakob Boehme, who was born in 1575 in Oberlausitz and died in 1624. A Shoemaker by trade, Boehme was undoubtedly a most extraordinary thinker. He distinguished positive and negative attributes in God, light or fire [i.e., Wotan and his aide-de-camp, the cunning fire God Loge] and darkness [Alberich], good and evil, mildness and severity, love and wrath, in short, spirit and matter, soul and body.” [244F-LER: p. 156]
What is remarkable about the influence of Feuerbach’s distinction of a light and dark principle in God, on Wagner’s distinguishing Dark-Alberich from Light-Alberich, is that this distinction is central to Feuerbach’s argument that when we speak of a God as a creator, in order to explain the real world we find ourselves in, God must partake not only of spirit (or really, the human mind), but also of matter. This was of course the basis of much of Spinoza’s thought as well, and Feuerbach often spoke of the Jewish philosopher as almost the patron-saint of the modern, secular,
