With my treasures you paid your debts (:#81; :#?); (#?: [some different music which may recur in association with Bruennhilde’s exposure of Siegfried’s weaknesses to Hagen in T.2.5?]) my ring rewarded the toil of those giants (:#?) (#20a/#20b:; #21?:) who built your stronghold for you; (#21:) what you once agreed with those insolent creatures (#21) (#27?:) is still preserved today in runes (:#27?) (#28 >>:) on your spear’s all-powerful shaft. What you paid the giants by way of tribute (#21 chromatic vari:) you cannot wrest from them again (:#28; :#21 chromatic vari): you yourself would shatter (#21?) the shaft of your spear; in your hand the all-powerful staff, (#33) so sturdy, would scatter like chaff. ((#@: b) = #20b &/or #33b?)
Wotan: (#112:) By the faithful runes of contract it bound you not (:#112) (#21 vari: [perhaps including some sharp notes which seem to cut into the “Spear Motif,” as heard when Fasolt was shocked by Wotan’s evident intent to break his promise to pay the giants Freia in exchange for building Valhalla in R.2?]) to me, you knave: it bends you to my will by virtue of its might: and so I ward it well in case of war.
Alberich has informed Wotan that he is much more knowledgeable about the world, and about Wotan’s cunning, than he was in those primal times, long past, when Wotan, with the aid of Loge’s artistic cunning (self-deceit), was so easily able to dispossess Alberich of his Ring of power (i.e., reasoning consciousness), and its derivative powers, the Tarnhelm (of imagination) and the Hoard (of knowledge). In other words, man’s gift of reason (Dark-Alberich’s Ring), which initially involuntarily and unconsciously reified itself, projecting its own nature onto an idealized human-like form produced by the imagination, called God (Wotan, i.e., Light-Alberich), inevitably emancipates itself from its initial mistake, the mistake which gave birth to those figments of the imagination, the gods of Valhalla, and replaces the gods with nature’s (Erda’s) implacable laws. As Feuerbach notes in his following remarks, human reason (Alberich) has acquired enough experience of itself and nature (Light-Alberich – Wotan as the Wanderer - has continued to amass Dark-Alberich's Hoard of knowledge in spite of religious faith’s - Fafner’s – choke-hold on freedom of inquiry), that it will no longer posit itself as Godhead, and therefore Wotan must cease to play any active role in the world:
“Reason, the mind of the species [Alberich in possession of the Ring], operates on the subjective, uncultured man only under the image of a personal being.” [During man’s historical childhood man reifies his Ring of power, his conscious, reasoning mind, and projects it on to a supernatural being of his imagination, the god Wotan: thus #19>#20a] [121F-EOC: p. 208]
“Religion is the childlike condition of humanity … . … the historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognized as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceived to be something human. (…) But the essence of religion, thus hidden from the religious [Wotan – Light-Alberich],
