god both light and dark principles, the light principle identified with the realm of spirit, and the dark principle with the material world, out of which, however, the realm of spirit was born, since the material world is its precondition:
“God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning. But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material, Nature strictly, as distinguished from intelligence. Hence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature, Matter, cannot be explained as a result of intelligence; on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness develops itself only out of Nature.” [78F-EOC: p. 87]
“ …a few modern theist thinkers or philosophers of religion abandoned the old doctrine of a creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing], which is a necessary consequence of the notion that the world sprang from the spirit – for where is this spirit to derive matter, the material substances, if not from nothingness? – and transformed God Himself into a material, corporeal being, precisely in order to explain the world through Him. (…) Schelling and Franz Baader have argued this doctrine. But it originated with certain older mystics, notably Jakob Boehme, who was born in 1575 in Oberlausitz and died in 1624. A Shoemaker by trade, Boehme was undoubtedly a most extraordinary thinker. He distinguished positive and negative attributes in God, light or fire and darkness, good and evil, mildness and severity, love and wrath, in short, spirit and matter, soul and body.” [244F-LER: p. 156]
On this reading evil is identified with the material world, and good, the ideal, with the spiritual or supernatural realm, and thus we have our villain Alberich, identified in the Ring with worldly power, and Wotan, the god, identified with divine power. In the extracts below Wagner lends our argument further support. Here he is comparing two royal houses, one, the Welfs (whom we may compare with the Valhallan gods) providing leadership for the Christian church, the other, the Wibelungs (clearly a model for Wagner’s Nibelungs, and Alberich in particular), providing worldly (and pagan) rulership, and identified therefore with the state:
[Wagner states that in:] “… the poetic literature of the Hohenstaufen period, … we may plainly distinguish in the Christian-chivalrous poems the Welfian element become at last a churchly one, in the newly-furbished Nibelungenlieder that utterly contrasting Wibelungian principle with its often still ur-pagan cut.” [366W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 269]
[Wagner adds that:] “… we may call everything related hereto [i.e., the churchly principle] the ‘Welfic’ principle … in opposition to that of the Wibelungen, which developed into nothing less than a claim to world-dominion.” [367W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 271]
