‘A motion for a new feast day’:
We should celebrate gratefully the day when
Eve misled Adam, for she only did it out of her love for us.” [37F-TDI: p. 250]
Bruennhilde’s defiance of Wotan’s law in favor of mortal man (Bruennhilde’s intervention on behalf of Siegmund’s and Sieglinde’s love, and their unborn child Siegfried), and her status as the muse who inspires the artist-hero subliminally by imparting to him, unconsciously, Wotan’s unspoken secret, his divine knowledge (so to speak), makes her a virtual metaphor for Feuerbach’s praise of Eve. Like Eve, whose guilt (eating and sharing the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge) exiled man from paradise, Bruennhilde owes the world compensation for disobeying God-the-Father’s holy injunction in favor of mortal man’s emancipation from faith. In Eve’s case, her disobedience - which exiled man from paradise - was the muse of inspiration for Christ’s sojourn on earth and martyrdom, whose sole purpose was man’s redemption from the Fall caused by Eve. In Bruennhilde’s case, her inspiration of Siegfried’s secular art is the substitute for lost religious faith, and compensation for modern secular man’s self-imposed exile from the paradise of faith (which is a sort of second Fall). In other words, Eve becomes the symbol for Wagner’s muse of art. Eve becomes the muse for Wagner’s art - just as (according to Feuerbach) Eve’s disobedience to God’s divine injunction breached religious faith and started mankind on the path of independence from religion, a process which culminates in Christ, in whom man recognizes God as just himself - because Wagner’s secular art cannot flourish but by the death of traditional religion, a twilight of the gods, since his secular art is the heir to lost religious faith, and can only preserve and redeem religious feeling when religion as thought must die out in the face of scientific understanding.
Another way of putting this is that the death of God, Wotan’s renunciation of active involvement in man’s world, is the muse for Wagner’s art. Religious belief was predestined to fail in the face of the scientific mind’s disobedience to the divine injunction of faith, by breaking the prohibition on asking forbidden questions about man’s origin and true identity, and about the origin of religious faith in particular. Feuerbach’s heroine Eve is a natural metaphor for this because her disobedience to God’s injunction not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge constitutes an archetypal instance of scientific skepticism regarding received opinion. Since religious belief must fail in order that Wagner’s secular music-drama can become religious faith’s substitute or heir, Eve therefore becomes the symbolic muse for Wagner’s art. A close analysis of virtually all of Wagner’s heroines from Lohengrin on through his four mature music-dramas demonstrates that they - Elsa, Bruennhilde, Isolde, Eva (in whom Wagner’s identification of the muse for art with Eve is self-evident), and Kundry – are all metaphors for Feuerbach’s Eve. To an extent this can also be said of Tannhaeuser’s muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, Venus.
Not only that, but Bruennhilde, a virgin – like Mother Mary - by virtue of her status as a Valkyrie, as Siegfried’s figurative mother, gives birth to the savior from the seed, the confession of Wotan’s need for a free hero, which Wotan planted in her, his wish-womb. Wotan is, of course, the pagan equivalent of God-the-Father in the Old Testament. This gives a whole new meaning to the Biblical notion that Christ was born of God’s word. In this way also, acting the part of Mother Mary through the virgin birth of the savior Siegfried, Bruennhilde also compensates for Eve’s sin - which
