Wanderer: (#133:) You are not what you think you are (:#133)! (#133?:) The wisdom of primeval mothers draws towards its end (:#133?): your knowledge [“Wissen”] wanes (#96?:) before my will (:#96?). Do you know what Wotan wills? (long silence.)
When Wotan asks Erda specifically how the god can overcome his care, we hear #82, the motif first introduced just prior to Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde, i.e., just prior to his repression of his hoard of fateful knowledge - knowledge he obtained from Erda - into his unconscious mind, their daughter Bruennhilde. It is by virtue of his confession to Bruennhilde, his repression of Erda’s fearful knowledge into his unconscious mind, that Wotan can overcome his care. Wotan’s question is rhetorical because, by virtue of having repressed his hoard of knowledge (and particularly loathsome self-knowledge) into his unconscious mind Bruennhilde, he was reborn, minus consciousness of his true identity and history, in the artist-hero Siegfried. Siegfried is the heir to religious man’s longing for transcendent value, who is protected from Wotan’s fear and self-loathing by Bruennhilde, who holds this knowledge for him.
Erda’s answer to Wotan’s question, how can the God overcome his care, is that the Wanderer is not “what” he says he is, not “what” he calls himself: “Du bist – nicht was du dich nenn’st.” The Wanderer, in disguise, called himself Erda’s “Awakener,” but clearly, whatever the Wanderer’s true identity is, he is nonetheless also her Awakener, because he did indeed wake her, so she can’t be alluding to the name Wotan gave himself at the beginning of their S.3.1 conference when she says he is not what he calls himself. It seems then that Erda must be directly denying that Wotan is what he just called himself, the “God.” And in any case, is it likely that Erda, Wotan’s former lover and the knower of all things (at least all things in the real world, if not the world of man’s imagination, though that too, in the final analysis, has a natural origin), would not recognize the Wanderer as Wotan, when Alberich recognized him immediately? One reason for confusion here is that in Spencer’s English translation, he has, I believe, committed a sin. Where Wagner’s German has Erda say: “Was kam’st du stoerrischer Wilder zu stoeren du Wala Schlaf?”, Spencer wrote: “Stubborn, wild-spirited god, why have you come to disturb the vala’s sleep?” There is not the least hint of the concept or word “God” in the German, “stoerrischer Wilder,” which might best be translated “disruptive madman,” or “disturbing wild-man.” Furthermore, the fact that Erda does not assert that Wotan is not who he says he is, but rather, tells him specifically that he is not “what” he says he is, and given the fact that he is clearly what he says he is, her Awakener, implies that Erda is referring to Wotan’s description of himself as the god.
Wotan, suddenly enraged by Erda’s (Mother Nature’s) seeming arrogance in the face of his self-proclaimed status as a transcendent God (this very claim, however, being a sin against Mother Nature, her law, her truth, which spares no one), now openly proclaims his intent to escape Alberich’s curse, and suppress consciousness of Erda’s objective knowledge, through the magic of his Will, Bruennhilde, before whom, as Wotan says, Erda’s knowledge wanes. This is one of the key lines in the Ring as it tells us unequivocally that by virtue of having confessed the knowledge of world-history and the fatal destiny of the gods (i.e., the destiny of religious belief), which Erda taught him, to their daughter Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, Wotan has freed his conscious mind from Erda’s knowledge, and therefore freed himself temporarily from Alberich’s curse of
