This also tells us something profound about racist hatred, that unconsciously hoping to purge the egoism in one’s own nature by projecting it on to an unfairly demonized adversary is a longing which can never be satisfied, and this futile desire will never fail to seek out and find an adversary: if one adversary is eliminated another will take his place. Therefore the only reconciliation Wotan can hope for is to resign himself and acknowledge his own true identity and natural limitations. And last, it tells us something about the unreasoning passion religiously faithful men exhibit whenever their faith is called into question. Their volatility, their unwillingness to subject their faith to the same standards of critique they insist on extending to all others outside of their faith, suggests that deep down in their unconscious minds they know they are deceiving themselves.
Alberich, Light-Alberich’s (Wotan’s) true identity, holds the key to the religious mystery, the secret source of inspiration for Wotan’s waking dream, the realm of the gods Valhalla, by virtue of the fact that he himself gave birth to it. Therefore Alberich for much of the rest of the Ring will sit outside Fafner’s lair watching and waiting for his chance to regain possession of the Ring (the conscious mind) and its power, which have now been co-opted temporarily by man’s first form of thought, religious mythology. Here at Fafner’s Envy-Cave, and transformed into the serpent whose very form Alberich also took, Fafner (religious faith’s fear of the truth) will guard access to the truth, to keep the faithful from seeking it. Alberich will wait for man himself (Wotan) to breach this faith so that Alberich can restore his lost power and reaffirm Mother Nature’s objective truth. Wotan, deep down, knows this and he is troubled now, because he must find some means to pre-empt Alberich’s intent, without however troubling the religious faith, upon which men depend, with doubt. Alberich’s sole concern from now on will be to discredit religious mythology (the gods), so he can replace it with that objective knowledge which grants man concrete power.
Feuerbach described the kind of doubt (Wotan’s unease) which must inevitably beset religious man over time in the following passage, suggesting that in the course of history man’s experience of the world (represented in the Ring not only by Wotan’s visit to Erda to learn the full truth, but also by Wotan’s wanderings over the face of the earth – Erda - in quest both of objective knowledge and its antidote, the consoling illusion of aesthetic intuition) will eventually engender doubt in his religious articles of faith:
[P. 302] “But whence comes this weakness of faith? From the fact that the power of belief is nothing other than the power of imagination, and that reality is an infinitely greater power, directly opposed to the imagination. (…) [P. 303] … as even the greatest heroes of faith have confessed, it flies in the face of sensory evidence, natural feeling, and man’s innate tendency to disbelief. How, indeed, can anything built on constraint, on the forcible repression of a sound inclination, anything exposed at every moment to the mind’s doubts and the contradictions of experience, provide a firm and secure foundation?” [326F-LER: p. 302-303]
[R.4: O]
Valhalla at its very inception being tainted with corruption by virtue of its discreditable origin, the god Donner now strives to clear the air of all doubt through an impressive feat of magic, which will hopefully clear the way for the gods to enter their new abode Valhalla without fear of Alberich’s host of night (i.e., without dread of the truth):
