This new religion, the redemption of the terrible world through music (love), the language of the unconscious, would give birth to a new world constructed according to man’s heart, an aesthetically conceived world of music-drama. This would be reversing the natural progress of evolution described by Feuerbach, in which the physical world gave birth to man, who in turn invented the transcendent, illusory world of gods, and ultimately resorted to music to express man’s longing for transcendent value when belief in gods was no longer sustainable in the face of man’s advancement of knowledge. Wagner describes this reversal of the natural order, Siegfried the artist-hero’s perpetuation of Wotan’s sin against Mother Nature, below:
[P. 121] “Everywhere we see the inner law, only conceivable as sprung from the spirit of Music, prescribe the outer law that regulates the world of sight … . But that paradise was lost: the fount of motion of a world ran dry. Like a ball once thrown, the world spun round the curve of its trajectory, but no longer was it driven by a moving soul; and so its very motion must grow faint at last, until the world-soul has been waked again [Wotan wakes Erda; Siegfried wakes Bruennhilde]. It was the spirit of Christianity that rewoke to life the soul of Music. (…)
[P. 123] As for our present Civilisation, especially insofar as it influences the artistic man, we certainly may assume that nothing but the spirit of our Music, that music which Beethoven set free from bondage to the Mode, can dower it with a soul again. And the task of giving to the new, more soulful civilisation that haply may arise herefrom, the new Religion to inform it – this task must obviously be reserved for the German Spirit alone … [i.e., it must be reserved for Wagner’s music-drama].” [791W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 121; p. 123]
It seems self-evident that Siegfried’s waking of Bruennhilde, Erda’s (Mother Nature’s) daughter, directly following Wotans’ waking of Erda herself, can be construed as what Wagner described above as a paradise – once lost - which has now been regained, because Siegfried has wakened the world-soul (music) again. It is, to all intents and purposes, Siegfried’s waking of Bruennhilde which Wagner identifies in our extract above with Feuerbach’s notion of a new, secular religion, which uplifts the human species and its mother, nature, by consigning the gods, products of man’s fantasy, and an insult to nature, to oblivion. This secular religion, which locates the source of all value in the human species itself, will replace the old belief in gods. In this sense Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s love is a figurative twilight of the gods, as will become clear in Bruennhilde’s final invocation and dismissal of the gods which closes this act.
Wagner develops the idea spelled out in his comments above in his remark below that music is actually his name for the aesthetic impulse or intuition behind all the arts, and that in his music-drama it will re-assume its ancient dignity as the drama’s mother-womb, much as what Wagner described as Mother-melody, his metaphor for animal instinct (represented motivally by Woglinde’s Lullaby #4), the life of feeling, gave birth to the word (i.e., to human consciousness):
[P. 301] “ … the word ‘music’ denotes an art, originally the whole assemblage of thearts, whilst ‘drama’ strictly denotes a deed of art. (…) [P. 302] Of a truth she is ‘the part that once was all,’ and even now she feels called to re-assume her ancient dignity, as the verymother-womb of Drama. Yet in this high calling she must neither stand before nor behind the Drama: she is no rival, but its mother. She sounds, and what she sounds ye see upon the stage; for that she gathered you together: what she is, ye never can but faintly dream; so she opens your eyes to behold her through the scenic likeness, as a mother tells her children
