between those fragments, could only fortify the Christian view of Nature.” [491W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 158]
[492W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 159]
[P. 159] {FEUER} “This dying, with the yearning after it, is the sole true content of the Art which issued from the Christian myth; it utters itself as dread and loathing of actual life, as flight before it, -- as longing for death.” [492W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 159]
[493W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 161-162]
[P. 161] {FEUER} “In the case of one of these sagas – that of Siegfried – we now may look with tolerable clearness into its primordial germ, which teaches us no little about the essence of myths in general. We here see natural phenomena, such as those of day and night, the rising and the setting sun, condensed by human Phantasy into personal agents revered or feared in virtue of their deeds; at last, from man-created Gods we see them transformed into actual human Heroes, supposed to have one-time really lived, and from whose loins existing stems and races have boasted themselves as sprung. (…) A boundless wealth of cherished haps and actions filled out the breadth of this religious Mythos, when fashioned into the Hero-saga: yet how manifold soever these sung and fabled actions might give themselves to be, they all arose as variations of one very definite type of events, which, on closer examination, we may trace back to one simple religious notion. In this [P. 162] religious notion, taken from the beholding of Nature, the most varied utterances of the endless-branching Sagas – amid the undisturbed development of a specific Mythos – had each their ever-fruitful source. Let the shapings of the Saga enrich themselves as they might with fresh stores of actual events, among the countless stems and races: yet the poetic shaping of the new material was instinctively brought about in the one and only way that belonged to the poetic intuition … , and this was rooted deeply in the same religious beholding of Nature which once had given birth to the primordial Mythos.
{FEUER} Thus these peoples’ poetic shaping-force was a religious one withal, unconsciously common to them and rooted in their oldest intuition of the essence of things. On this root, however, Christianity now laid its hands. (…) Christianity upheaved the religious faith, the ground-view of Nature’s essence, and supplanted it by a new belief, a new way of beholding, diametrically opposed to the older.” [493W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 161-162]
[494W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 164]
[P. 164] {FEUER} “This bent [to create the chivalrous Christian romances of the Middle Ages] at last the Christian view could no more guide, albeit itself, at bottom, had been its generator; for this bent was primarily nothing but the stress to flee from an un-understood reality, to gain contentment in a world of fancy. But this fancied world, however great the divagations of Phantasy, still must take its archetype from the actual world and nothing else: the imagination finally could only do over again what it had done in Mythos; it pressed together all the realities of the actual world – all that it could comprehend – into close-packed images, in which it individualised the essence of totalities and thus furbished them into marvels of monstrosity. In truth this newer thrust of Phantasy, just as with the Mythos, made again toward finding the reality; and that, the reality of a vastly extended outer world. (…) The passion for adventures, in which men yearned to realise the
