Erda: (#99:) I’ve grown confused since I was wakened: wild and awry the world revolves (:#99)! (#97:) The valkyrie, the vala’s child, atones in trammels of sleep (:#97) while her (#87) knowing mother slept? (#96:) Does he who taught defiance (:#96) (#87:) scourge defiance (:#87)? (#96:) Does he who urged the deed (:#96) (#87:) grow wroth when it is done (:#87)? (#96) Does he who safeguards rights and helps (#87) uphold sworn oaths gainsay that (#87) right and rule through perjured oath? – (#87) Let sleep descend once more: (#97) let sleep enfold my knowledge!
Making laws only to break them is clearly something which Mother Nature, in her simplicity and self-consistency, would never do, since the universe’s laws are presumably coherent and unitary, just as Alberich’s objective understanding of nature is. On the subject of God’s having the power to make and break his own laws, in contrast with Nature’s laws which remain always the same, Feuerbach said:
“ … just as a prince proves he is a true ruler only by his ability to make and unmake laws, so a God can only prove His divinity by His power to abolish laws, or at least to suspend them temporarily when the situation demands. The only proof that He has made the laws is that He also unmakes them. And such proof is provided by miracles.” [292F-LER: p. 241]
[P. 241] “A will that is not manifested as a will, but as [P. 242] an unalterable law is no will at all, it is only a clerical phrase and circumlocution for natural necessity … . A will that always does the same thing is not a will. If we deny that nature has free will it is only for one reason, because it always does the same thing. [293F-LER: p. 241-242]
Erda’s diatribe is of course the voice of Wotan’s cosmic conscience, i.e., man’s truth-instinct (in contrast to Fricka, Wotan’s socio-religious conscience), the never-ending quest for the reason for everything, a quest which insists on self-consistency and lawfulness, or “fate” in its natural sense. Thus, as Erda speaks, we hear a constant contrast between #96, the motif representing Bruennhilde’s resistance to Wotan’s outward command in favor of his innermost desire (proof that Wotan is divided against himself), and #87, the Fate Motif. Wagner himself evidently described Erda as Wotan’s conscience and superior:
“Although he [Wotan] compels her [Erda] with his magic (‘she can only withdraw when he allows her to,’ Wagner said) she is his superior in that it is from her lips that he hears the inexorable voice of his conscience which nothing can silence.” [877W-{6-8/76} WRR, p. 103]
It is interesting that Wagner should say that Erda is Wotan’s conscience, since Wotan will at the end of this scene consign Erda, who is effectively his truth-conscience, to the oblivion of sleep, castigating her as “primeval mothers’ fear, primeval care,” for she has prophesied Alberich’s inevitable victory over the gods as just one single expression of her cosmic law: “All things that are, end!” Wagner’s own intellectual conscience has again found itself, perhaps inadvertently, sympathetic towards the alleged villains of the Ring.
Erda, Mother Nature, has grown confused since she became conscious of herself in the newly
