must be vetted! }} The joke is that Mime is Wotan’s head, representing those aspects of the gods’ rule (i.e., of man’s belief in the gods) which can be traced back to purely egoistic, practical motives, like fear of death and longing for eternal life, the very aspects of religion which Wotan loathes and wishes now to sacrifice to Alberich so that Siegfried can be freed from their vulnerability. The sounding of motif #114 again in the current context suggests that Wotan is about to pull off a cunning stunt: he will sacrifice his prosaic self to Alberich, insofar as Alberich’s power of conscious thought can expose Wotan’s alleged divinity as motivated solely by Mime’s egoism, in order to pave the way for his hero Siegfried, now presumably purged of Wotan’s egoism, to freely recreate the terrible world in his own image through aesthetic intuition, unconsciously inspired art, which Wotan presumes will be invulnerable to Alberich’s curse of consciousness.
Siegfried, Wotan’s heart, in other words, will win the Ring, Tarnhelm, and Hoard, after killing Fafner (i.e., after overcoming faith’s fear of the truth), but he will take possession of them with his heart, aesthetically, rather than with his head. That is to say, he will not use their potential power because he, as an artist, will not employ reason and imagination to obtain the power which knowledge can give. To this end Siegfried will also kill Mime, the metaphor for Wotan’s head, which is burdened by those things Wotan must jettison in order to give birth to his free hero Siegfried. Wotan is no longer fearful that Alberich will regain possession of his sources of power because religion (the gods in Valhalla) will live on in the art which Siegfried and Bruennhilde will produce, in feeling, which, because it does not stake a claim on the truth (the Ring’s power) which Alberich could refute, will apparently be freed from his threat. So Wotan is willing to jettison that part of religious thought, its head (Mime), which clearly satisfies man’s egoism, the practical desire to overcome fear of death through the promise of painless, eternal youth, and which stakes a false claim on the truth which scientific thought could contradict, so long as its other part, its feeling, or love, can live on in the union of the artist-hero with his heroine-muse.
Wagner expressed this challenging concept succinctly in his following plea:
“Is it so utterly impossible to Theology, to take the great step that would grant to Science [Alberich and Hagen] its irrefutable truths through surrender of Jehova [i.e., the loathsome, egoistic aspects of the Old Testament God, God the Father, Wotan, represented by Mime], and to the Christian world its pure God [Wotan minus consciousness of his true, egoistic motives] revealed in Jesus [Siegfried] the only?” [928W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 79]
Jehovah here can be read as Wotan, and Jesus as Siegfried. In other words, the part of Wotan that he loathes, his head, his conscious, rational, egoistic mind (Jehovah, or Mime), must go under, in order that Wotan’s ideal part, his ageless part, his aesthetic feeling or music, can live on in the love shared by Siegfried and Bruennhilde, i.e., the secular art to which their loving union will give birth.
As Alberich accuses Wotan of hypocritically seeking, through his proxy hero Siegfried, to do what Wotan cannot do himself, we hear #81 again, reminding us that Siegfried is likely to be as much a product of what Wotan loathes in himself, as Siegmund was. This seems to be the point Alberich is making, because he astutely notes that Wotan has nurtured Siegfried to do what he himself can’t, though Wotan has disavowed any involvement. #81, we recall, was repeated numerous times in V.2.1 as Fricka bore down on Wotan with the argument that Wotan had nurtured the hero Siegmund, whom Wotan dared present to Fricka as his own free agent.
