Alberich’s primal crimes are not merely two distinct instances of the Fall, but are the same crime, committed by the same person, collective humanity, seen from two different viewpoints. Wagner, quite simply, in the parallel stories of Alberich and Wotan, has given us two distinct versions of the same event, man’s Fall from grace with his preconscious life of instinct, through the acquisition of the power of conscious thought, the Ring. But the mere fact that Wotan needed Alberich’s Ring in order to securely inhabit the gods’ heavenly abode, Valhalla, proves, if nothing else does, the logical priority of Alberich’s primal crime.
[V.2.2: D]
Wotan now introduces his nemesis and dark-side, Dark-Alberich, into the tale, but note, without any information which allows us to locate Alberich’s primal actions in the chronology of the Ring relative to Wotan’s actions, either those actions merely recounted by Wotan, or those actions which transpire on the stage:
Wotan: Born of the night, the fearful Nibelung, (#5?) Alberich, severed its bonds; he laid a curse upon love and, by that curse, won (#16?:) the glittering gold of the Rhine (:#16?) and, with it, measureless might. (#19:) The ring that he forged I cunningly wrenched away from him: not to the Rhine though did I return it. with it I paid for Valhalla’s battlements, (#20a:) the bulwark that giants had built for me (:#20a), (#20d:) from which I now ruled the world (:#20d).
In Wotan’s retelling of man’s history, i.e. Wotan’s personal history, by virtue of telling Alberich’s part of the tale of world history after having recounted a portion of Wotan’s own history, Wotan introduces Alberich’s own version of the Fall, man’s forfeiture of the paradise of preconscious animal feeling (the Rhinedaughters’ love, which Alberich renounced to win the Ring of power), as if it occurred at some point later than Wotan’s acquisition of his spear by breaking off a branch of the World-Ash, and obtaining wisdom from the spring which pours out of its roots. But Wotan is Light-Alberich, and, as noted in our discussion of the transition R.1-2, Alberich’s forging the ring of human thought was the logical precondition for the birth of the gods in our imagination, our collective dream or mythmaking. Alberich and Wotan are two sides of the same coin, and their forfeiture of paradise was simultaneous, though Alberich’s “Fall” is logically prior to Wotan’s because Wotan’s is in fact a response to the consequences of Alberich’s Fall.
In view of Wotan’s self-serving manipulation of chronology in world-history, it is well to recall here Feuerbach’s observation, cited earlier, that though the creation of the human mind (Alberich’s forging of the Ring) is the last event in natural evolution, man’s vanity, his assumption that he has a divine origin, inspires him to grant the powers of both the human mind and nature the status of Godhead, with a human name and personality, thus making man’s mind the earliest thing in time, and the world’s creator:
“The mind, to be sure, is the highest part of man; it is man’s badge of nobility, which distinguishes him from the animals; but first in man is not first in nature. On the contrary, what is highest and
