[P. 180] “ … a God is an imaginary being, a product of fantasy; and because fantasy is the essential form or organ of poetry, it may also be said that religion is poetry, that a God is a poetic being.
If religion is taken as poetry, may it not be inferred that to abolish religion, to break it down into its basic components, is to do away with poetry and all art? (…) My adversaries throw up their hands in horror at the hideous desolation to [P. 181] which my doctrine would reduce human life, since in their opinion it would destroy poetry along with religion and so deprive mankind of all poetic drive. (…)
(…) Far from annulling art, poetry, imagination, I deny religion only insofar as it is not poetry, but common prose [i.e., Wotan sacrifices his lower, egoistic self, Mime, the basis for that aspect of religious belief which according to Feuerbach is practical, and predicated on fear, in order to free Siegfried, the artist-hero, from those aspects of religious faith which are mere prose, and satisfy vulgar need.]. And this brings us to an essential limitation of the statement that religion is poetry. In a sense it is poetry, but with one important difference: poetry and art in general do not represent their creations as anything but what they are, namely products of art, whereas religion represents its imaginary beings as real beings.” [261F-LER: p. 180-181]
“… where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and revealing their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation. Whilst the priest stakes everything on the religious allegories being accepted as matters of fact, the artist has no concern at all with such a thing, since he freely and openly gives out his work as his own invention. But Religion has sunk into an artificial life, when she finds herself compelled to keep on adding to the edifice of her dogmatic symbols, and thus conceals the one divinely True in her beneath an ever growing heap of incredibilities commended to belief. Feeling this, she has always sought the aid of Art … .” [1019W-{6-8/80} Religion and Art: PW Vol. VI, p. 213] [See also 708W, 1012W and 1023W]
And we can see, by comparing these two extracts, that Siegfried, though taking possession of Alberich’s Ring, whose power can only be fully tapped by amassing a hoard of knowledge of the objective truth and exploiting this knowledge to rule the world, does not overtly use the Ring’s power, but instead transforms it into a symbol of love by giving it to his lover and muse Bruennhilde, his unconscious mind, to keep its power safe, in T.P.2. The point is, Siegfried has taken aesthetic possession of Alberich’s Ring without staking a claim to the power of truth, which is precisely what art does in its profoundest Wagnerian sense. Wagner’s allegorical logic seems very abstract at this point, but when we consider that in the final act of Twilight of the Gods, T.3.2, Siegfried’s career as a hero culminates in the performance of a narrative recounting how he came to grasp the meaning of birdsong, which takes place before an audience, the Gibichungs, the allegory’s true subject becomes clear: Siegfried is a Feuerbachian poet-hero who is the heir to dying religious faith, the heir to the gods of Valhalla.
However, Wotan’s problems are not over. Just as Wotan found always only himself, with loathing, in all that he strove to do to secure the gods’ redemption from Alberich’s curse, even concluding that his own egoism prompted all the seemingly free deeds of heroic, self-sacrificing compassion and love performed by his son Siegmund, so Wotan also lives on in Siegfried, since, in Wagner’s Feuerbachian world-view, religious faith lives on in art, and particularly in the art of music, as pure
