feeling, animal instinct, preconscious animal life, human love of all kinds, and even music. It represents the life of feeling, animal life’s innocence before the birth of human consciousness and its power, power which Wagner identifies with language and with masculinity, and ultimately with the Fall, with which #37, the “Loveless Motif,” can certainly be identified. I have also noted that this life of feeling inevitably, inexorably, evolves over time into the life of thinking: the evolution from unconscious to consciousness is a natural necessity. Therefore the seeds of the “Fall,” in the sense of the potentiality for the evolution of reflective consciousness, are presumably inherent to physical existence per se, which is precisely why humanity logically expects eventually to find other life forms, and specifically conscious life forms, in other parts of the cosmos.
Therefore, Loge immediately contradicts what he just said (i.e., that no living being will renounce love), for he adds that he found in his world travels only one man who forswore love, for gold’s sake, namely, Alberich. And very soon the Giants Fafner and Fasolt will also forswear love for gold’s sake when they agree to accept payment of Alberich’s Hoard of treasure, his Tarnhelm, and Ring, in lieu of Freia. Why the contradiction? Curiously, for Wagner there is something unnatural in the natural evolution of human consciousness, something perverse in natural necessity. Surely there is something strange in the fact that the first animal on earth to attain full reflective consciousness, man, begins his career not only in ignorance of his true origin in nature (there being nothing surprising or unnatural in that!), but by denying his true origin and nature and positing instead a supernatural foundation. At any rate, man alone among all the animals, including his immediate forebears, renounces nature in favor of an imagined world which transcends nature. I have previously detailed Feuerbach’s rational explanation for how this could have transpired naturally, as a logical consequence of the make-up of the human mind. But however that may be, both Feuerbach, Wagner’s mentor, and Nietzsche, Wagner’s primary philosophic protegee, are in agreement in seeing in man’s religious beliefs a figurative strangling of life itself, a sin, as Alberich suggested, against Mother Nature. We will find that in the Ring anything, including law, which stifles nature’s self-renewal and change is considered dead, not living. This includes scientific man’s propensity for discovering the constants and laws of nature, i.e., those things in nature which are invariant and unchanging. Similarly, Wagner, emulating Feuerbach, regards social laws which attempt to fix rules of behavior for all time as a form of possessiveness and obsession with holding property which kills life and thwarts natural change.
There is no escaping the fact that Alberich’s forging of his Ring of consciousness is as much an expression of natural necessity as love itself. While the onset of human consciousness ends the first phase of evolution, i.e., physical evolution of species, it nonetheless introduces the next, specifically human phase of evolution, the evolution of symbols, or cultural evolution. It is through cultural evolution that man builds ever more complex and comprehensive structures of both religious and scientific thought. Wagner is on to something here since, if we survey the world’s cultural traditions with their numerous origin myths, we will find that they are metaphors for the Fall, the Fall through man’s acquisition of consciousness (as in Genesis, where Adam and Eve are exiled from the paradise of preconscious animal existence by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge). In other words, a constant of most origin myths is that human nature itself (original sin) is man’s punishment by the spirits for his hubris in seeking divine prerogatives like knowledge or fire. In Genesis, the price man pays for his acquisition of God’s forbidden knowledge, i.e., the natural price man must pay by virtue of his own nature as a reflectively conscious animal, is shame at having an animal nature (thus Adam’s and Eve’s desperation to cover their naked bodies after
