Richard Wagner and the Divine Feminine: Wagner and Feminism

Nietzsche was wrong. God is far from dead. Our world is ruled by Yahweh Elohim—He rules over a patriarchal world-order of masculine hate and war. Through a web of deceit, tribe is set against tribe in brutal warfare. The dark world of The Ring is our very own world. Wotan lives.

Wotan lives!

In Religion and Art (1880) Wagner clearly states that he viewed the Abrahamic Yahweh Elohim as the God of war:

How, without this falling back to the Jewish spirituality and its placement on an equal footing to that of that of the pure Christian Gospel, would it have been possible up till the present day, to have elevated the claims of the church on the civilised world, whose people are armed to the teeth for the sake of their mutual annihilation, the prosperity of peace squandered, ready at the first sign of the warlord to systematically pounce into mauling one another? Obviously, it is not Jesus Christ, the Saviour, whom our military clergy praise as a paragon in front of the assembled battalions, before the beginning of the slaughter. Even if they name Him, they really mean: Jehova, Yahweh or one of the Elohim, who hates all other gods other than himself, and who wants to be enchained to his beloved people. 

Religion and Art (1880). My emphasis

Wagner demonstrates his awareness of the fact that the Hebrew word, Elohim, is the plural of El. Wagner correctly states that Yahweh Elohim is only "one of the Elohim," making him the Semitic tribal equivalent of Wotan—the chief of the gods. In Religion and Art, Wagner even calls Yahweh Elohim "der Stammgott eines kleinen Volkes" (the tribal God of a minor people). Like Wotan, Yahweh too was god of storms and war:

Yahweh was not always God in Israel and at every social level. Rather, initially he belongs only to the storm and war gods like Baal, Anath, Hadad, Resheph and Chemosh  

Erhard S. Gerstenberger: p.151 of Theologies of the Old Testament 

George Bernard Shaw got it completely right when he wrote in his Perfect Wagnerite that Wotan represents the Godhead. Wotan in The Ring represents the Abrahamic God, only Wagner is saying that to worship the Semitic tribal God of war and storms is about as barbaric and primitive as worshipping his Germanic tribal equivalent, Wotan. It is interesting to note some members of the National Socialist party condescended to doing exactly that. In reality, there could be little more pacifist than the glorious annihilation of the God of war in the fires of Brünnhilde's love: the Eternal Feminine.

Götterdämmerung thus represents the annihilation of the masculine order of war and hatred in the all consuming flames of the Divine Feminine. It is woman—Brünnhilde—who casts her flaming torch into Valhalla, consuming it in the flames of her all embracing love. It is the flame of her Love that climbs up to consume the patriarchal God of hatred and war—Yahweh Elohim, the ultimate symbol of the patriarchal oppression of women. Wagner himself calls Brünnhilde the supreme embodiment of the Eternal Feminine (das ewig Weibliche). Goethe was to conclude Part II of his Faust with the words:

the Eternal Feminine draws us upwards  

das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan

In Wagner, the burning flames of feminine love are drawn heavenwards until they consume God Himself. The Death of the God happens in feminine hands. This moment is also the death of the patriarchal order of hate and war. In Wagner, the divine is feminine and the feminine divine. To put it in Wagner's own words:

Siegfried alone (the male alone) is also not the complete ‘man’; he is only one half, it is only with Brünnhilde that he becomes the redeemer ... the suffering, self-sacrificing woman is the final true and knowing redeemer: for love is really ‘the Eternal Feminine’ itself. 

Letter to August Röckel; Zurich, 25/26 January, 1854

Not only that, but Brünnhilde is, in fact, the child of Erda, the ancient and chthonic Earth Mother. It is perfectly apt that the doomed fate of the masculine divine order is announced by Erda—a woman. Brünnhilde is merely the mediator, the hand that fulfills fate and destiny in casting the flaming torch into Valhalla. The Death of the patriarchal God of Hate and War is both announced by, and fulfilled by a woman. Woman has given birth to the phenomenon of the Death of God.

The thing to note is that ancient societies were often matriarchal, matricentric or at least permitted women to play a major role in religion as shamans and priestesses. This stands in contrast to later social orders ruled over by masculine tribal war gods such as Wotan and his Semitic equivalent, Yahweh Elohim, where women were increasingly excluded from playing a dominant role in religion, and masculine war-gods came to dominate over all others. This remains the case today in many religions, which are fundamentally based on worship of patriarchal gods of hate and war. The rise of more patriarchal war gods meant that Earth Mother goddesses simultaneously retreated into the background, like Erda, deep into mother earth. In The Ring, the chthonic Erda emerges out of the earth to give birth to the end of the order ruled by the masculine God of war. That apocalypse is the child of Erda's wisdom.

It should further be noted that female characters in The Ring are as far away from oppressive Victorian ideals of submissive femininity as could possibly be imagined. Far from riding politely sidesaddle, the Valkyries ride through the skies astride in full battle armour, laughing like hyenas, as they fly impetuously through raging thunder storms. Brünnhilde dares to follow her own conscience, and courageously stand up to Wotan himself even at the risk of total annihilation by the God of storms. Then, rather than flee Wotan's rage, she stands up and faces him fearlessly to protect Sieglinde. Even that most vulnerable and feminine of heros, Sieglinde, who has been "given" to her husband, Hunding, as gift like cattle, chooses love and freedom overly slavery to a patriarchal beast—even if that choice should cost her own life. Deep down almost every female character in Wagner's mature works is a courageous, deeply principled woman who dares to live and die by what her heart believes*.

In Die Walküre, Sieglinde even explains to us that she feels that she is virtually the property of Hunding:

This house and this woman are Hunding's property 

Dies Haus und dies Weib sind Hundings Eigen 

Wagner: Die Walküre; Act I, Scene I

Note that Wagner writes Eigen—with a capital first letter. Wagner is using the word Eigen to mean property. The archaic word Weib also has extremely pejorative connotations in modern German, and to a modern audience serves to emphasise barbaric misogynistic attitudes to women.

Even Nietzsche fully confirms the correctness of a feminist reading of The Ring:

Wagner had believed in the Revolution all his life, as only a Frenchman could ever have believed in it. So he searched through all the mythic runes, and believed that in Siegfried he had found his perfect revolutionary.

‘Whence comes all evils in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient oaths,’ he answered, like all ideologues of Revolution. Put plainly: from conventions, laws, moralities, institutions — everything that the old world, the old society is supported by. ‘How can one rid the world of its evils? How can one do away with the old society?’ Only by declaring war against ‘oaths’ (traditions, morals).   

This is just what Siegfried does. ... Siegfried continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he throws everything traditional, all respect, all fear overboard. ... He irreverently runs down ancient deities. But his principle undertaking is to emancipate woman—to redeem Brünnhilde—Siegfried and Brünnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the rise of the golden age; the Götterdämmerung for the old morality—all evil has been disposed of.   

From der Fall Wagner—my own translation (my emphasis)

Siegfried's greatest act of heroism is to grant Brünnhilde her liberation as a woman, freed from the contraints imposed by the old patriarchal order, including the oppressive role played by phallocentric religion. Even today, women are widely barred from playing key roles in many patriarchal religious orders—little wonder when God, Yahweh Elohim, Allah**, Wotan or whatever one calls Him, is male. It is this liberation that sets Brünnhilde free to ultimately cast the flaming torch into the towers of Valhalla, which burns in the flames of her earthly human love.

It is particularly important that this emancipation also becomes Brünnhilde's sexual liberation in Act III of Siegfried: the most blatantly erotic moment of the Ring cycle. The Brünn in Brünnhilde is related to the word brünstig, which can mean a burning with sexual ardour. Her burning desire for union with Siegfried at the end of Götterdämmerung is, however, equally frankly sexual in its symbolism. Götterdämmerung is also the destruction of the old patriarchal religious order in the burning flames of a woman's sexuality***. God dies in the fires of female sexual passion****.

Of course, similar feminist themes abound in Wagner's other works, to the point of being a virtual idée fixe. For example, Isolde is "given" to King Mark as a trophy wife, as though she could be traded like cattle. Isolde is reduced to a mere object, a commodity in a patriarchal order that deprives her of her liberty and humanity. We have also seen how the relationship between the English Tristan and the Irish Isolde is symbolic of the dominion of England over Ireland. Isolde's personal humiliation is also the political humiliation of a nation. A million people died in the Irish potato famines. The dominion of man over woman, says Wagner, is every bit as much a brutal political dominion—one every bit as barbaric as the brutal "ownership" of Sieglinde by Hunding. Even the name Hunding means "son of a dog", or "houndling" to emphasise his patriarchal bestiality.

Another example is that of Eva in Die Meistersinger. She too is to be "given away" as a trophy or prize in a song contest, as though she were an object or commodity fit for trade. The essence of Die Meistersinger lies in Eva's success in subverting her own brutal commodification, to instead find liberty and love. Likewise, it is a sign of Han Sach's that he should selflessly help her attain that goal. It turns out that Eva is a spiritual sister to Sieglinde. Likewise, Beckmesser turns out to be spiritual kin to Hunding.

Although Nietzsche took the idea of the death of God from Wagner, and likewise even wrote a book called Gotzendämmerung—his own twist on Götterdämmerung—in reality Nietzsche could hardly have been more wrong. Church hierarchies still show their deep seat faith to the masculine god of storms and war, Yahweh Elohim, by systematically excluding women from participation in major roles starting with their ordainment as priests. Similar misogynistic thinking pervades all Abrahamic religions. The Earth Mother, Erda, has yet to arise from the depths of the earth to give rise to the child who will cast her flaming torch into the towers of Valhalla. The ultimate Götterdämmerung for a world order ruled by a patriarchal God of storms and war is yet to arrive.

All this is all the more potent when one considers the recent news of the attempt of the Taliban, fanatical worshippers of the same Abrahamic Yahweh Elohim, to barbarically murder a little girl for daring to question the oppression of women, through their brutal exclusion from education. The Taliban are our latter-day tribe of Hundings. The same systematic exclusion of woman by Abrahamic religions is built into the very core of its masculine mythico-symbolic structure: the worship of the patriarchal God of storms and war. In its belief in a total submission to supreme masculine God, it is misogynistic to its very core. Erda, the Earth Goddess, shows little more than contempt for such barbarism, by having God burn in the flames of her daughter's love: an earthly and humanistic love at that.

In the words of Erda to Wotan in Das Rheingold:

Hark! Hark! Hark!
All that is will end.
A gloomy day
dawns for the Gods
I council you: shun the ring! 

Höre! Höre! Höre!
Alles was ist endet.
Ein düst'rer Tag
dämmert den Göttern:
dir rat' ich, meide den Ring!

The end of the Gods is nigh.



If hoards of modern Hundings wish me to burn in hell, then I wish for their Wotan—or whatever name they wish to confer "Him"—to gloriously burn in the flames of Valhalla.

Further Reading:

Naomi Wolf. Vagina: A New Biography. For a feminist view linking liberation of female sexuality with a release of the Divine Feminine. It can be read as a Götterdämmerung for the male God of storms and war, followed by a rebirth of the feminine Earth Goddess, the womb of creation. In a sense, Wolf is the new Freud, who emphasises the inseparability of religiosity and sexuality.

Rosemary Ruether. Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. For a social anthropological look at the background of Mother Goddess mythology and its reception by modern feminism.

Lotte Motz. The Faces of the Goddess For another social anthropological look at the background of Mother Goddess mythology.


Notes:


* It is not without good reason that it has been said about Wagner that "it ain't all over till the fat lady sings". While this is meant to be pejorative, it is certainly true that in Wagner, the final say is often given to a woman.  Brünnhilde is the ultimate harbinger of truth and hand of destiny. Tristan is long rendered a pathetic, wounded and whimpering figure, almost a weakling beside Isolde.

**In the 112th Sura of the Qur'an it states that:

Say He is Allah, the One and Only;
Allah the Absolute;
He does not beget, nor is He begotten;
And there is none like unto Him!

The Abrahamic God clearly remains masculine.

*** When our old Papist friend Joachim Köhler realises this, he will go into a writing frenzy, penning another ten dozen books trying by concoct all sorts of bizarre alien abduction fantasies to try to get the tired old Nazi mud to stick (yawn). A staunchly Catholic belief in rigid chastity and the virtues of virginity are the last thing that Wagner cared for, right to point of burning God in the all-consuming flames of female erotic passion! Götterdämmerung is clearly intended as the ultimate insult to any pious Catholic. I am unsure who would be likely to go the more frenzied jihad/crusade against Wagner on the basis of this—Köhler or the Taliban. The Vatican definitely needs to put The Ring on their list of banned books, ripe for a good burning. The Taliban would agree with them. Little wonder that Köhler prefers a Nazi interpretation of Wagner: anything would be better than the truth.

**** Nietzsche's blatant misogyny is clearly intended to be a reactionary anti-Wagnerian gesture, through and through. Most of Nietzsche can be understood as Wagner turned on its head, and mistaken for originality. Even the idea of the death of God are mistakenly attributed to Nietzsche, and its Wagnerian roots totally forgotten.