Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/463

 Wagner has this idea vaguely in his mind in Wotan's lament over Brunhilde:

"None as she knew my inmost thought; None knew the source of my will As she; She herself was The creating womb of my wish; And so now she has broken The blessed union!"

Brunhilde's sin is the favoring of Siegmund, but, behind this, lies incest: this is projected into the brother-sister relation of Siegmund and Sieglinde; in reality, and archaically expressed, Wotan, the father, has entered into his self-created daughter, in order to rejuvenate himself. But this fact must, of course, be veiled. Wotan is rightly indignant with Brunhilde, for she has taken the Isis rôle and through the birth of the son has deprived the old man of his power. The first attack of the death serpent in the form of the son, Siegmund, Wotan has repelled; he has broken Siegmund's sword, but Siegmund rises again in a grandson. This inevitable fate is always helped by the woman; hence the wrath of Wotan.

At Siegfried's birth Sieglinde dies, as is proper. The foster-mother[63] is apparently not a woman, but a chthonic god, a crippled dwarf, who belongs to that tribe which renounces love.[64] The Egyptian god of the underworld, the crippled shadow of Osiris (who celebrated a melancholy resurrection in the sexless semi-ape Harpocrates), is the tutor of Horus, who has to avenge the death of his father.