futility of seeking him) was just her love for Siegfried (her unconscious inspiration of Siegfried’s art, in which man’s religious impulse - the gods - will find temporary redemption). And #139 represents the fact that, thanks to Bruennhilde’s magical protection, Siegfried - though fearing Bruennhilde because she holds for him the knowledge of fate which had paralyzed Wotan - can safely wake Wotan’s hoard of knowledge to draw artistic inspiration from it, since Bruennhilde’s love allows him to sublimate it into tragic art, and forget the fear it engenders.
To grasp the import of Hagen’s antidote to his original love and forgetfulness potion, we must understand that both potions, which share the motif #154, are really just one potion, since the final consequence of their effect upon Siegfried is that he fulfills Alberich’s threat to bring Alberich’s Hoard (his Ring) up from the silent depths of night, to the daylight, in order to overthrow the gods of Valhalla. A remarkable aspect of Hagen’s two potions, taken as one, is that what Mime failed to do, get Siegfried to drink his fatal potion (thanks to Siegfried’s being warned by the Woodbird, and being granted the privilege of hearing Mime’s hidden thoughts, by virtue of tasting the dead Fafner’s blood - which also allowed Siegfried to grasp the Woodbird’s music as speech), Hagen succeeded in doing, even though the Rhinedaughters warned Siegfried in general terms of his fate. But this time Siegfried paid no heed to the Rhinedaughters’ more general warning of danger to come. Siegfried’s suspicion has not been aroused either by Gutrune when she offered Siegfried Hagen’s original potion, nor by Hagen as he has offered Siegfried this drink spiced to enhance memory. The reason for this is that Hagen and his potions actually represent a force working from within Siegfried himself, something true to his own nature, the inevitability that the secret he and all other authentically inspired artists and religious visionaries have kept, would someday rise to consciousness, and that the final artist-hero would collaborate unwittingly in his own demise, by exposing to view, within his art, that which art and religious faith had long kept hidden, the secret of its inspiration. How else does Hagen know so much about Siegfried’s and Bruennhilde’s most intimate life!
We are reminded of Tristan’s remark in Act III of Tristan and Isolde, after he had had a revelation of his true identity and fate, and therefore grasped the meaning of his life, that he himself (the artist-hero) had brewed the fateful love-and-death potion which Isolde and he drank, a potion compounded of all the elements in his life (all his hoard of knowledge of the world) which had deeply impressed him, i.e., all that he could take possession of aesthetically, as an artist. Like Siegfried’s Woodbird tunes, Tristan’s “Old Tune” (the “alte Weise”) - which reminds Tristan all at once of his unhealing wound, how his mother died giving him birth (in this similar to Siegfried), and how his muse of inspiration Isolde offered him temporary healing of his unhealing wound - grants Tristan an entre into his formerly unconscious knowledge of his true identity and fate. Like Bruennhilde, Isolde had kept the secret of Tristan’s true identity in silence, and was shattered when Tristan glibly, but apparently unwittingly, let Melot (like Hagen) influence him to betray his true muse of inspiration Isolde by giving her away to another man, his uncle, King Marke (like Gunther, Wagner’s metaphor for his own audience). By giving his muse of inspiration Isolde away to his audience (King Marke), Tristan exposed the secret of their loving union to his audience in the light of day, letting the sunlight of bleak, vulgar consciousness penetrate his sacred womb of night, just as Siegfried is doing now by confessing how he came to grasp the meaning of birdsong.
Therefore Tristan, emulating Bruennhilde, curses the potion which is the symbol for his loving union with his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration, Isolde, which had formerly been the source
