#165, the motif representing Siegfried’s employment of his phallus Nothung to separate himself from this true muse, Bruennhilde, is strongly emphasized as Bruennhilde cries out in shock about the shameful deceit of which she is victim, and we hear #170/#164 as she screams for vengeance for this betrayal. It will be recalled that #164 stems originally from #81B (Wotan’s punishment of Bruennhilde for protecting Siegfried’s father Siegmund), via #137, and #137 expressed Siegfried fear of waking the sleeping Bruennhilde, i.e., it expressed Siegfried premonition that he would be falling heir to the burden of Wotan’s guilt, Wotan’s sin against the truth, if he woke and won her. Since #165 represents Siegfried’s honorable intent not to have sexual union with Bruennhilde, but to preserve her chastity for Gunther’s sake, we must recognize that Siegfried could only offer redemptive works of art to his audience, represented by Gunther, if he had metaphorical sexual union with Bruennhilde, i.e., drew unconscious artistic inspiration from his muse. The fact that he preserved her chastity shows that he is no longer capable of achieving unconscious artistic inspiration, for he is becoming too conscious of both the mechanism or processes of his inspiration, once hidden from both him and his audience, and also too conscious of the unspoken secret his unconscious kept for him. Again, this is all due to his taking the Ring, representing the curse of consciousness, and now standing in for Alberich’s and Wotan’s hoard of knowledge, out of Bruennhilde’s protective hands, and making its secrets available to his audience, the Gibichungs.
The vassals cry out in fear and confusion, asking who has betrayed whom. But Bruennhilde ignores them and speaks aloud, only for her own benefit, of things she alone can understand. Bruennhilde, accompanied by #164, asks the gods if this is what they whispered in their counsel. She alludes, obviously, to Wotan’s confession to her in V.2.2, which began essentially as Wotan’s attempt to explain what lies behind the motif #81, which expressed Wotan’s finding, with loathing, only always just himself in all that he undertakes to bring about the gods’ redemption from Alberich’s curse, #164 being an elaborate variant of #81B. What Wotan whispered to her in his counsel was that he could never create a free hero able to expiate the gods’ sin against all that was, is, and will be: neither he nor any of his proxies can ever attain transcendence of the natural world or free themselves from man’s egoistic motives. And Bruennhilde’s foolhardy insistence on living for love when Wotan had resigned himself to the fact there is none, is the cause of her present tragedy. Of course, Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s betrayal of the love they shared, the most exalted love imaginable, proves Wotan’s cynicism to have been well founded.
Since there can be no redemption from this tragedy, no escape from Alberich’s curse, Bruennhilde wishes to demolish her ideal world by bringing about her own destruction and that of her former lover Siegfried, just as her father Wotan in his confession wished only for “das Ende!” Thus she exclaims, to a combination of #40 (Tragic Love) and #164 that, if the gods would teach her suffering such as none ever suffered, greater shame than anyone ever felt before, that the gods must also teach her (#19 Variant) vengeance as never yet raged, such wrath as was never tamed. And now, most poignantly of all, accompanied by #59 variants she cries out: “Bid Bruennhilde break her heart in twain to destroy the man who betrayed her!” The essence of Bruennhilde’s love for Siegfried, was that through her protective magic, the unconscious mind, it was as if Siegfried had temporarily thrown the Ring back into the Rhine, and restored the stolen Rhinegold to the Rhinedaughters, where they can wash away Alberich’s curse on his Ring. The flood of Bruennhilde’s passion for Siegfried is his surrogate Rhine, his artificial substitute for an actual ending of the Ring curse, which could only obtain if the Ring were dissolved in the Rhine’s flood. Thus we hear #59 variants, #59 being the Rhinedaughters’ lament for the lost gold, as Bruennhilde
