Wotan has, he feels, successfully produced a hero who will instinctively perform that deed which the gods need. Siegfried has after all already slain Fafner and taken aesthetic possession of the Ring and Tarnhelm (and thereby also Alberich’s Hoard of knowledge), and slain Wotan’s conscious head, Mime. But in order to wholly fulfill Wotan’s longing for redemption from Alberich’s curse, Siegfried must still leave the Ring, Alberich’s curse of consciousness, safely in Bruennhilde’s protective hands (just as Wotan once stored his confession in Bruennhilde), so that Siegfried can draw artistic inspiration from her, and effectively recreate the world according to her music, without suffering the effects of Alberich’s curse of consciousness. And the key point for Wotan is that Siegfried seems to have achieved this, or at least seems to be on the point of achieving it, without intervention from, or even knowledge of, Wotan himself. The fact that Siegfried doesn’t know that Wotan himself (“Light-Alberich”) forged the original sword Wotan takes for the surest sign of Siegfried’s independence, which is why he laughs so complaisantly when hearing Siegfried protest the insignificance of Wotan’s question.
Since there is a very real analogy between Wotan and God-the-Father of the Old Testament, and between Siegfried and Jesus-the-Savior from the New Testament, Wotan’s insistence that he find none of what he loathes in himself (what might be described as the “Judaism” of his true nature), in his ostensibly independent hero Siegfried, finds a parallel in Wagner’s belief that though the Christian God is tainted by his derivation from the Jewish creator-god Jehovah, the creator of this terrible world (who Wagner was glad to sacrifice to modern science if only he could still keep his purified savior Jesus), Jesus, commonly described as this god’s son, should be freed from any association with Jehovah:
[P. 77] “That a heartfelt, truly blest relation to Christ’s precepts exists among the generality of present Christians, is certainly not so easy to aver. The educated doubts, the common man despairs. Science makes God the Creator more impossible each day; but from the beginning of the Church the God revealed to us by Jesus has been converted by Theologians from a most sublime reality into an ever less intelligible problem. That the God of our Saviour [the artist-hero Siegfried] should have been identified with the tribal god of Israel [Wotan, i.e., Light-Alberich, whose realm Valhalla (#20a) is the product of Alberich’s Ring power (#19)], is one of the most terrible confusions in all world-history; it has avenged itself in every age, and avenges itself to-day by the more and more outspoken atheism of the coarsest, as the finest minds. [P. 78] (…) And it almost seems right that Jehova at last should quite suppress the God so monstrously mistakenly derived from him [Wotan’s debt to Alberich, to Wotan’s Nibelung heritage, forces Wotan to abdicate his role as God-the-Father, in favor of the savior, the artist-hero Siegfried, whom Wotan hopes can redeem the world by wholly emancipating himself from all that Wotan loathes in his own self]. If Jesus is proclaimed Jehova’s son [Siegfried is Wotan’s grandson], then every Jewish rabbi can triumphantly confute all Christian theology, as has happened indeed in every age. (…) Historical criticism [Wagner is referring to Nietzsche, but he could just as easily say Feuerbach] … casts in its lot with Judaism, and, just like every Jew, it wonders that the bells on Sunday morn should still be ringing for a Jew once crucified two thousand years ago.” [926W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 77-78]
Wagner ultimately went so far in his futile effort, late in life, to purge his theoretical purely-human race, the Aryans, from any implication in the taint of evolution of species (though his intellectual conscience – for he did not believe in a creator God - did not allow him to posit any other
