follows hard on your heels? [[ #81 ]] For him you thrust the sword in the tree trunk; [[ #81 ]] (#68?:) you promised him the noble weapon (:#68?): [[ #81 ]] will you deny that your cunning alone lured him to where he might find it?
Wotan needs a hero who can win the Ring from Fafner before Alberich, inevitably, wins it back to bring about the twilight of the gods, i.e., the end of belief in gods. Since the Ring in our allegory is a symbol for human consciousness itself, the reflective mind, this means that Wotan fears Alberich’s objective consciousness, a scientific consciousness based on the power of objective knowledge of man and nature, will ultimately become the guiding force in society, and supplant religious belief and the ideal of selfless morality it engendered (as expressed in Wotan’s longing to redeem himself from his loathsome egoism through the Waelsungs’ love). Wotan and the gods can’t get involved in this effort because, to even admit that faith and its assumptions might be under threat from the truth, is to lose the battle before it has started. Fafner, now transformed through the Tarnhelm into a Serpent (Dragon), and having inherited Alberich’s Serpent Motif #48, now guards access to Alberich’s Hoard of knowledge, the Tarnhelm (imagination), and the Ring (symbolic consciousness), to insure that it sleeps and is never woken by free intellectual inquiry. Fafner therefore represents property, security, quiet, and fear of change in the sense that man, having established divine law, fears anything which might call its eternal truth into question, and invokes “faith” to insure man will not seek to know its true source. Therefore Wotan longs for a hero who can take possession of that knowledge, imagination, and conceptual thought in such a way that Alberich’s threat to use these agencies of power to overthrow religious belief and its transcendent values will be somehow neutralized. The god Wotan longs, in other words, for a hero freed from religious faith’s fear of the truth. It is no surprise then that Fricka, the embodiment of faith, instinctively fears that Wotan’s very efforts to redeem the gods will in fact undermine them, since his insistence on seeking redemption outside the safe bounds of faith calls faith in the gods itself into question.
Feuerbach devoted much of his writing to examining the manner in which unexamined customs, laws, institutions, and religious beliefs, and in general the fear of the new, established in the earliest period of human culture, often stifled change and innovation through long stretches of history. In Feuerbach’s following comments we find a basis for Fricka’s fear of the new and also for Wotan’s praise of innovation. Here, he speaks of man’s mistake in concluding that what once was good must be good for all time:
[P. 211] “ … precisely because man made sacraments of the first medicines, of the first elements of human civilization and well-being, religion always became, in the course of development, the antithesis of true civilization, an [P. 212] obstacle to progress; for it opposed every innovation, every change in the old traditional ways.” [279F-LER: p. 211-212]
“World-old usages, laws, and institutions continue to drag out their existence long after they have lost their true meaning. … what was once good, claims to be good for all times.” [85F-EOC: p. 117]
Wagner appropriated much of Feuerbach’s stance, adding however his own idiosyncratic twist which clearly influenced his conception of Wotan’s relationship with Fricka, namely, that society’s
