Wotan adds that the “end” of the gods, which he once resolved to bring about - during his confession to Bruennhilde - in despair at the inevitability that Alberich and his son Hagen would inherit the real world, he now wills with the happy serenity which arises from his confidence that his legacy, Valhalla, will live on freed from Alberich’s curse in the love of Siegfried and Bruennhilde, who will in effect create a new Valhalla, a new religion, of art. This introduces one of the most important motifs in the entire Ring, #134, which is the closest Wagner comes in the Ring to creating a motif which can genuinely be identified as a “Motif of Redemption,” specifically, a “Motif of Redemption by Love.”
Before assessing the symbolic significance of #134 we must look more closely at what is at stake in Wotan’s crucial conversion from fear to optimism. We can start by distinguishing the legacy which Alberich leaves his son Hagen, from that which Wotan leaves to Siegfried. If one reads this text closely one can see that while Wotan leaves the “world” to the Nibelung’s spite (“Neid,” which Hagen embodies), he leaves his legacy, Valhalla (#20a), to his own heir Siegfried. In other words, Alberich’s son Hagen will inherit religion’s former role of explaining the real world (as scientific inquiry shows us how natural law, and one of its byproducts, egoism, rules our world), because Wotan now acknowledges (as he did to Alberich in S.2.1) that he, the allegedly transcendent being, can do nothing to alter the laws of nature, can introduce no supernatural miracle into the world to change fate. Therefore science inherits from religion its former role of explaining and justifying the basis for the coherence of the real world. That is what Wotan meant when he told Alberich in S.2.1 that he leaves the field to him. What was once explained supernaturally and mythologically, will now be explained from the perspective of nature, natural law. We must consider also that the Norns have been spinning into their web of fate #19, the Ring Motif.
Siegfried the artist-hero, on the other hand, will fall heir to religious man’s longing for transcendent meaning, the feeling, the musical or aesthetic aspect of religious belief, by taking possession of Wotan’s daughter Bruennhilde. She is man’s collective unconscious, which is both the repository for all the objective knowledge which religious faith has repressed throughout the millennia to sustain belief in the gods and avoid having to confront contradictions to that belief, and the womb which will give birth to the redemptive music-drama which reconciles man with life.
Both science (Hagen), and secular art (Siegfried’s love for his muse Bruennhilde), originated in religion, and fall heir to its two primary functions:
[P. 209] “Everything which later became a field of independent human activity, of culture, was originally an aspect of religion: all the arts, all the sciences, or rather, the first beginnings, the [P. 210] first elements – for as soon as an art or science achieves a high state of development, it ceases to be religion – were originally the concern of religion and its representatives, the priests.” [278F-LER: p. 209-210]
And in Feuerbach’s following remark we find a basis for why Hagen is a direct threat to the gods’ rule (i.e., belief in gods), and Siegfried - Wotan’s friendly foe who in defying the gods’ law will, Wotan hopes, redeem what is worth redeeming in the imaginary, divine realm - is an indirect threat, since Siegfried can only fulfill his mission as redeemer by virtue of the gods’ loss of power and the influence of divine authority over the State, which Siegfried himself will help to bring about:
