And here, in one of his most intriguing remarks, Wagner explains why he alone was privileged to grasp the true basis of redemption which Schopenhauer had missed. It was, he says, because he, as both composer and poet of his music-dramas, i.e., as master of both the unconscious and conscious minds, had an insight into inner processes unique to himself:
“… I always hark back to my Schopenhauer, who has led me to the most remarkable trains of thought … in amendment of some of his imperfections. The theme becomes more interesting to me every day, for it is a question here of explications such as I alone can give, since there never was another man who was poet and musician at once in my sense, and therefore to whom an insight into inner processes has become possible such as could be expected of no other.” [665W-{12/8/58} Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 78] [See also 363W]
With respect to Bruennhilde’s chastity flaring up into passion, we find an excellent explanation in Wagner’s following Feuerbach-inspired critique of Christianity’s emphasis on chastity, which is one of several ways in which Christians proclaim their alleged autonomy from the real world:
“… we decide that the excesses to which the insistence on chastity led constituted a terrible feature; they were due to the impossibility of realizing something felt to lie deep within the human character, the desire to set oneself outside nature and yet to go on living.” [948W-{11/3/78} CD Vol. II, p. 188]
Bruennhilde’s Valkyrie chastity is the product of a religious injunction to deny the body in favor of a life of the spirit, as Wagner describes above. But this was destined to failure because, as Feuerbach pointed out, all human longing to transcend nature and the body stems from nothing more than the self-delusion of man’s abstract, symbolic mind, which imagines it is possible to shed all aspects of life which bring grief, and preserve only those aspects of life which are blissful, in heaven, without any debt to the earth, as if heavenly bliss were a gift from the heavens above rather than a subtle sublimation of earthly, bodily feelings. The mistake was, as Wagner says above, in thinking that man could set himself outside of nature (i.e., commit Wotan’s sin of killing the Mother, Erda), yet go on living eternally. Thus the gods staked the entire meaning of their lives on Freia’s golden apples of sorrowless youth eternal, but Erda set them straight by warning that all things end, and that a dark day is dawning for the gods. The secular art which is Wotan’s only hope to preserve religious feeling in the face of science’s prospective destruction of religion as a way of understanding the world, will not renounce the world and the body but embrace them, but make us feel as if we are lifted above them. Thus Bruennhilde’s chastity flares up now with passion.
In the second half of our current passage from the Ring, just after Bruennhilde announced that heavenly knowledge (i.e., Wotan’s hoard of knowledge and its concerns) has flooded away, driven hence by love, Bruennhilde, accompanied by #48 (Alberich’s and Fafner’s transformation into the Serpent which represents, first, fear of death, and later, fear of knowledge), asks Siegfried whether or not he is blinded by her gaze, and whether he burns for her. And finally, she inquires, in the context of #77 and #78b: “Do you fear, Siegfried, do you not fear this wildly raging woman?” With this she embraces him. So Bruennhilde has now inherited Alberich’s and Fafner’s Serpent Motif #48, the motif representing the fear of the truth which sustains religious faith, and its true source in the fear of death and pain. Bruennhilde inherits #48, and teaches Siegfried fear where Fafner could not, because Bruennhilde, man’s collective unconscious, is now the repository for man’s religious
