former relationship with Bruennhilde, and in so doing expose to Gunther what will appear at first to be Siegfried’s breaking of the implicit oath he made to Gunther to bring Bruennhilde to him a virgin, unsullied. Hagen is out to prove that Siegfried had sexual relations with Bruennhilde on the night he spent with her disguised (through the Tarnhelm’s magic) as Gunther, but obviously it would not be in Hagen’s interest for Siegfried to reveal that he had had romantic relations with Bruennhilde prior to meeting the Gibichungs, since, in that case, Hagen himself would be exposed as having collaborated with Gunther and Gutrune to make Siegfried forget his true love Bruennhilde and marry Gutrune, under the potion’s influence. In a fully realistic drama Hagen would surely have taken this possibility that he would be exposed as the guilty party into account, so we must suppose either that Wagner’s dramaturgy got clumsy at this point, or that there is something else, far deeper, at work here in Hagen’s machinations.
For this intrigue is, after all, just a cover for what Hagen really wants. If we consider Bruennhilde not merely as Siegfried’s lover, but as his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, who holds for Siegfried the unspoken secret Wotan imparted to her in his confession, his hoard of forbidden knowledge which embraces acknowledgment of the inevitability of Alberich’s victory over the gods, and grasp Gunther as Wagner’s metaphor for Wagner’s (Siegfried’s) audience, then the ultimate goal of Hagen’s influence upon Siegfried, both through his original potion of love and forgetfulness, and his current antidote to it, the potion of remembrance, is to make Siegfried expose the secrets of his unconscious mind to Siegfried’s audience, consciously. In other words, thanks to Hagen’s influence, Siegfried – ironically, also Wotan’s unwitting agent – is involuntarily fulfilling Alberich’s old threat to bring his hoard of knowledge from the silent depths to the daylight. The exposure of Siegfried’s true romantic relationship with Bruennhilde to Gunther, making it appear that Siegfried has dishonored Gunther, when in fact Gunther dishonored Siegfried by exploiting him and fooling him into betraying his own true love, is merely a metaphor for the fact that the Wagnerian artist-hero, modeled on the trickster Loge, helps his audience (mankind – i.e., Wotan) to deceive itself, and is likewise exploited by his audience to serve its needs. The audience would naturally hope to project its own shame on to the artist-hero, just as Wotan and the other gods projected the shame implicit in the gods’ dependence on the liar god Loge, on to Loge himself. This is Wagner’s original twist on the Christian notion that Christ the savior takes upon himself the sins of the world (our sins).
Now several of the Gibichung vassals, warming to the story, ask Siegfried what else the Woodbird told him. We find astounding confirmation of our allegorical reading in a passage here which surely would otherwise be entirely ignored, but which, thanks to our allegory, possesses extraordinary metaphorical power. As Hagen mixes the antidote to his original potion of forgetfulness and love in a drink, and prepares to give it to Siegfried, he says, accompanied by both #153 (“Seduction”) and #154 (both Hagen’s original potion and the antidote to it), as well as the end fragment of #42 (the “Tarnhelm”): “(#153) Drink first, hero, from my horn. (#153) I’ve seasoned a sweet-tasting drink (#153) to stir your memory afresh (#42 End Frag: he hands the horn to Siegfried) (#154) so that distant (“fernen”) things don’t escape you!” Hagen’s remark about distant (“fernen”) things, which Siegfried will now be able to remember thanks to Hagen’s potion, is an oblique reference to the hoard of knowledge which Wotan confessed to Bruennhilde. In S.3.3, after Bruennhilde told Siegfried that what he does not know, she knows for him (accompanied by the Fate Motif #87), she told him that what Wotan thought, she felt, and what she felt was just her love for Siegfried (accompanied at this point by #134, which represents redemption through unconscious artistic
