above the limits of his individuality, and not above the laws, the positive essential conditions of his species; that there is no other essence which man can think, dream of, imagine, feel, believe in, wish for, love and adore as the absolute, than the essence of human nature itself.” [139F-EOC: p. 270]
“ … Christians worship the human individual as the supreme being, as God. Not indeed consciously, for it is the unconsciousness of this fact which constitutes the illusion of the religious principle. (…) Man is the God of Christianity, Anthropology the mystery of Christian theology. The history of Christianity has had for its grand result the unveiling of this mystery – the realisation and recognition of theology as anthropology.” [175F-EOC: p. 336]
Thus man emancipates himself from the gods, his own invention, and takes responsibility for himself:
“ … fortunately for them and for us, the Christians, in conformity with the spirit and character of the Western and especially the Germanic peoples, have asserted autonomous human activity [i.e. individual conscience and freedom of thought] in opposition to the consequences of the religious dogmas and doctrines derived from the Orient.” [254F-LER: p. 168]
And here, Wagner’s explanation of Wotan’s hope that Siegfried, in whom Wotan has subliminally planted his own divinity, will freely assume the gods’ guilt and expiate it, displays its debt to Feuerbach’s notion that men will ultimately emancipate themselves from their delusion of Godhead and take responsibility for themselves without invoking divine authority or intervention:
[P. 302] “… only a free Will, independent of the Gods themselves, and able to assume and expiate itself the burden of all guilt, can loose the spell; and in Man the Gods perceive the faculty of such free-will. In Man they therefore seek to plant their own divinity, to raise his strength so high that, in full knowledge of that strength, he may rid him of the Gods’ protection, to do of his free will what his own mind [P. 303] inspires. So the Gods bring up Man for this high destiny, to be the canceller of their own guilt; and their aim would be attained even if in this human creation they should perforce annul themselves, that is, must part with their immediate influence through freedom of man’s conscience. [377W-{6-8/48} The Nibelungen Myth: PW Vol. VII, p. 302-303]
Wotan doesn’t fear the end Erda foresaw because he (religion) lives on in Siegfried (secular art). Wotan wills his own end because Alberich’s threat to raise his Hoard of knowledge from the silent depths of Nature’s sleep, and man’s unconscious, to the light of day, will inevitably destroy belief in the gods in time, so Wotan is merely willing the necessary. But Wotan believes that the love Siegfried and Bruennhilde share will be invulnerable to Alberich’s curse of consciousness. Wotan, God-the-Father, in other words, wills the inevitable, the death of gods, for the sake of the love of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, which is merely Wagner’s metaphor for the unconscious inspiration of redemptive art, particularly his art, the music-drama:
“… love is a higher power and truth than deity. Love conquers god. It was love [the savior Jesus, a model for Siegfried, and the virgin Mary, a model for Bruennhilde] to which god [God-the-Father Wotan] sacrificed his divine majesty. (…) As god has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce god… .” [62F-EOC: p. 53] [See also 517W]
