On a rocky peak, four of the Valkyries are waiting for the rest. The
absent ones soon arrive, galloping through the air with slain heroes,
gathered from the battle-field, hanging over their saddles. Only,
Brynhild, who comes last, has for her spoil a live woman. When her eight
sisters learn that she has defied Wotan, they dare not help her; and
Brynhild has to rouse Sieglinda to make an effort to save herself, by
reminding her that she bears in her the seed of a hero, and must
face everything, endure anything, sooner than let that seed miscarry.
Sieglinda, in a transport of exaltation, takes the fragments of the
sword and flies into the forest. Then Wotan comes; the sisters fly in
terror at his command; and he is left alone with Brynhild.
Here, then, we have the first of the inevitable moments which Wotan did
not foresee. Godhead has now established its dominion over the world by
a mighty Church, compelling obedience through its ally the Law, with its
formidable State organization of force of arms and cunning of brain.
It has submitted to this alliance to keep the Plutonic power in
check--built it up primarily for the sake of that soul in itself which
cares only to make the highest better and the best higher; and now here
is that very soul separated from it and working for the destruction
of its indispensable ally, the lawgiving State. How is the rebel to be
disarmed? Slain it cannot be by Godhead, since it is still Godhead's own
very dearest soul. But hidden, stifled, silenced it must be; or it will
wreck the State and leave the Church defenseless. Not until it passes
completely away from Godhead, and is reborn as the soul of the hero,
can it work anything but the confusion and destruction of the existing
order. How is the world to be protected against it in the meantime?
Clearly Loki's help is needed here: it is the Lie that must, on the
highest principles, hide the Truth. Let Loki surround this mountain top
with the appearance of a consuming fire; and who will dare penetrate to
Brynhild? It is true that if any man will walk boldly into that fire,
he will discover it at once to be a lie, an illusion, a mirage through
which he might carry a sack of gunpowder without being a penny the
worse. Therefore let the fire seem so terrible that only the hero, when
in the fulness of time he appears upon earth, will venture through it;
and the problem is solved. Wotan, with a breaking heart, takes leave
of Brynhild; throws her into a deep sleep; covers her with her long
warshield; summons Loki, who comes in the shape of a wall of fire
surrounding the mountain peak; and turns his back on Brynhild for ever.
The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger
generations of our educated classes as it was forty years ago. In those
days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the
Church's teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the
sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of
pointing out that a whale's throat would hardly have been large enough
to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such
doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments
in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read
this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and
credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner
himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for
the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of
the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki
were a very real terror to all except persons of exceptional force of
character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner
had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find
him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current
superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to
prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still
grovelling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are
the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the
courage to repeal our monstrous laws against "blasphemy."