inspiration). Wotan’s “thought” is, of course, his entire confession to Bruennhilde, Wotan’s hoard of runes which Bruennhilde has imparted to Siegfried subliminally, i.e., musically. Wotan’s thought was, in essence, the desire to create a free hero, who could do what Wotan could not do in order to redeem the gods (religious faith) from Alberich’s curse on the Ring, the curse of consciousness. Thus Bruennhilde and Siegfried feel what Wotan thought. And what Wotan thought, without fully grasping it, was how religious feeling could live on freed from the contradictions of religious thought, in Wagnerian music-drama, safe in the refuge of musical feeling, Wagner’s and Feuerbach’s inner chamber of the heart. This is the redemption of the gods through secular art, the product of the loving union of the artist-hero Siegfried and his muse Bruennhilde, who grants Siegfried unconscious inspiration by Wotan’s repressed thoughts.
Now here is the clincher: Siegfried told Bruennhilde that he did not grasp faraway (“fernen”) things, but could only see and feel her and her singing. In other words, Wotan’s thought, his confession of a hoard of knowledge of things far distant in time and space, is known to Siegfried only through feeling, i.e., through music, and particularly Wagner’s musical motifs. These redemptive motifs, through the Wagnerian “Wonder,” impart all those things which are faraway in both time and space, all those distant, forgotten, and therefore now subliminal things with which the musical motifs have been associated in the course of the drama, to Siegfried, in the singlest space and time, condensed into the here and now:
“The condensation of the most varied and extended phenomena, where many members harmonise to produce one, single, definite effect; the perspicuous presentation of such a harmony, which to us remains unseizable without the deepest research and widest experience [i.e., through Alberich’s and Wotan’s gradual accumulation of a hoard of knowledge throughout human history], and fills us with amazement when beheld, -- in art, … this is to be obtained through nothing save the miraculous [the Wagnerian “Wonder”]. Here in poetic fiction the tremendous chain of connection embracing the most heterogeneous phenomena is condensed to an easily-surveyed bond of fewer links [Wagner’s musical motifs], yet the force and might of the whole great chain is put into these few: and in art this might is miracle.” [478W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 371]
All that is past and future, all that is distant, “fernen” (Erda’s knowledge of all that was, is, and shall be, or fate, which she imparted to Wotan both during his figurative union with her, and throughout his wanderings over the earth – i.e., Erda) becomes present, through the Wagnerian “Wonder.” Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde, the womb of his wishes, his unconscious mind and birthplace of inspired music, imparted his thoughts of these faraway things, with which Siegfried claims to be unconcerned, those things the implications of which were so abhorrent and fearful that Wotan could not bear to think them aloud, to Bruennhilde, who in turn imparted them to Siegfried as musical motifs. Therefore, thanks to his muse Bruennhilde, Siegfried lives fearlessly in the present, seemingly invulnerable to Alberich’s curse of consciousness, seemingly innocent of all ulterior, egoistic motives.
Siegfried having unsuspectingly drunk Hagen’s antidote to the love and forgetfulness potion, we hear #149 (Bruennhilde as Siegfried’s muse of artistic inspiration), #66 (the motif of woman’s sympathy for the Waelsung heroes’ “Noth”, and the martyrdom the Waelsung heroes suffer as Wotan’s unwitting agents of his futile quest for redemption from the truth), and #150 (the motif
