The Nibelung's Ring: A Study of the Inner Significance of Richard Wagner's Music-Drama (Classic Reprint)

The earth, the water, and the air were populated with hosts of living creatures who, to the qualities proper to the objects of which or rather, of the life in which they were personifications, added the passions and emotions of humanity. Yet perhaps at no period to which we can point was the resemblance between the external life of nature and the inner life of the soul of man wholly unrecognised, and the most ancient myths may be held to symbolize, on their different planes, both the one and the other. Their physical interpretation as of the sun dispelling the darkness of night, or awakening the earth from its wintry slumber remains valid in its own field as a part of the truth, and as itself symbolic of a higher truth. For the contest of light and darkness on the physical plane is but the counterpart of a similar contest on the mental and moral planes. I ndeed, as an ancient philosopher has observed, what is the visible world itself but a myth, suggesting by sensible symbols the truths of that invisible world in which existence is not phenomenal, but real the world of Mind and Soul? But, from many causes, it often happens that the mythological traditions of antiquity which have been handed down to us, have reached us in a form differing doubtless considerably from that in which they were primarily conceived. In the course of ages the original meaning of a myth would become lost; the names applied to the various personifications, and once expressive of their various attributes, would no longer convey Sallust, De Diis et Mundo, c-. III.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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