obtained their sense of value from the Siegfrieds of the world - away from the consolations of self-deception, and predicate all life instead on the power of objective truth, with no consolations of illusion.
Hagen does not undertake this quest to free his fellow men from self-deception because of any moral imperative to have his fellow men acknowledge the truth, or because he loves his fellow men: it is simply that only through such acknowledgment of the truth can Hagen restore the Ring power, the power of the human mind, to its rightful owners, the men who alone have the courage to acknowledge the truth, represented by Alberich. In Alberich’s domain only such ruthless men are worthy of worldly power. So Gunther, when he finally succumbs to Hagen’s suggestion that he can only obtain worldly power by renouncing Siegfried and killing him, will make the mistake of assuming that by sacrificing the very thing which had given all men, up until this point in history, a reason for living, he will somehow draw advantage from this. In point of fact, in Alberich’s and Hagen’s world, only those who can ruthlessly maintain their power have any right to it, and all who stake a claim to it are forever at risk. In such a world there would never be any plausible rationale for kindness or compassion or even fair-play. And this is, of course, part of what Alberich meant when, in cursing his Ring, he said all would seek its power but none find ultimate consolation in it, and all claimants to its power would remain forever fearful.
Another way of seeing this is the following: it is through Siegfried’s secret, his unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse Bruennhilde, that Siegfried provides Gunther and his society with a feeling of having transcendent value. However, should this secret be revealed, by Siegfried or others, Siegfried will no longer be able to help Gunther and his society sustain the self-deception which lends their life all the value it has. Therefore, so long as the true nature of Siegfried’s relationship with his muse Bruennhilde, i.e., the hidden process of unconscious artistic inspiration, remains a secret hidden from Gunther and his society (Wagner’s audience), Siegfried can honor his oath to Gunther and aid him in preserving his false values. But if the true nature of Siegfried’s relationship with his muse Bruennhilde is revealed, if the unconscious process whereby man obtained divine revelation and artistic inspiration was to rise from silent depths to the light of day, Gunther and his society would be exposed as having only false honor, and therefore no honor at all. If Siegfried himself betrays his own secret (i.e., both the hidden mechanism of unconscious artistic inspiration, represented by his loving union with Bruennhilde, and the hoard of unbearable knowledge which is the true source of his artistic inspiration) to consciousness by granting his own audience (Gunther) insight into those inner processes to which the artist-hero alone ought to be privy, it is as if Siegfried himself became Alberich, and forced Wotan to disgorge the hoard of knowledge he had repressed into Bruennhilde in his confession, and to confront this knowledge consciously, the very knowledge which Wotan could not bear to contemplate. This would bring irrevocable, irredeemable dishonor to Wotan, the gods, and the Gibichung society which is sustained by the ideals incarnate in the idea of godhead, and would bring about that twilight of the gods which Erda foresaw.
The primary purpose of Siegfried’s oath is that he has sworn to honor Gunther by abducting Bruennhilde (unbeknownst to Siegfried, his own true love) in order to give her away to Gunther in marriage. Formerly, the artist-hero had sustained man’s false honor, his values predicated on self-deceit, by creating inspired works of art in which their true source of inspiration was hidden from both the artist-himself (who is unconsciously inspired) and his audience. But in this case, instead of giving Gunther a redemptive work of art in which the illusion is sustained, and Loge’s ring of fire,
