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At the start of Gotterdammerung, the third and final drama, the three Norns, daughters of the earth goddess, spin the golden rope which binds together knowledge of past, present and future in an unbroken whole, as typifies the unreflective world of instinct. But when human consciousness emerges, that instinctive continuum is broken, as happens now when the Norns' rope becomes tangled and snaps. Siegfried cannot rest in happy union with his anima, but must go back into the world in search of new adventures, leaving the ring with Brunnhilde as a token of his love.

We then see the hatching of the greed-inspired plot which is to bring the story to its devastating conclusion, as Alberich's son Hagen schemes with his half-brother Gunter to win back the ring. Again by means of a drug, they trick Siegfried into unconsciousness. He forgets Brunnhilde and falls in love with Gunter's sister Gutrune. In the original Norse version, this fatal potion was supplied by their witch-like mother Grimhild: thus making it much more explicit that the hero loses touch with his anima because he has passed under the spell of the Dark Mother. Now bound by brotherhood to Gunter, Siegfried agrees to disguise himself as Gunter and to woo Brunnhilde on his behalf. Since only he can penetrate the flames, he is able to bring her to the hall where they are all assembled, where she sees Siegfried, now wearing her ring, about to marry Gutrune. Swearing vengeance at him for his betrayal, she now herself becomes the `dark feminine', plotting with Hagen to murder Siegfried. As he dies, he remembers who Brunnhilde is and what she means to him. Hagen then kills Gunter as they fight for possession of the ring. Brunnhilde rides her horse into Siegfried's funeral pyre, the flames blaze up, the Rhine overflows, the Rhinemaidens seize the ring and vanish back into the swirling waters. Hagen, desperately trying to grab the ring, is drawn down into the depths after them. As the world dissolves into the opposites of fire and water, we see the apocalypse stretching up to Valhalla itself, as Wotan and his fellow gods are engulfed by the flames. The twilight of the gods darkens into eternal night.

So final and so all-embracing does this triumph of the power of darkness appear to be that it is fascinating to see how insistently those under Wagner's spell have sought to discern in it some positive, life-giving element: an indication that, even in this world-consuming apocalypse, the forces of light have still somehow won the day. Particular attention is paid to the music which hovers above the final orgy of death and destruction, the so-called `redemption motif, although Wagner himself described this motif as `the glorification of Brunnhilde'. The implication is that Brunnhilde's self-immolation in Siegfried's funeral pyre, to be reunited with her hero, by symbolising the power of eternal love, somehow redeems all that has happened. It was even suggested by the late Professor Robert Donington, whose Wagner's `Ring' and Its Symbols: The Music and the Myth interpreted the operas from a Jungian viewpoint, that the `redemption motif' should be called the `transformation motif'; implying that, since the destruction of an old order of consciousness is part of the transformation necessary to allow a new one to emerge, we should regard the ending of the story as pregnant with hope.

The fact remains there is not the slightest evidence for this in the way Wagner presents his story. It is salutary in this respect to go back to the Norse mythology from which he drew his inspiration. In the original version, the climax comes in the world-ending catastrophe of Ragnarok, when the earth is swallowed up in an apocalyptic vision of destruction, along with all that is beneath it and above it, including the gods in Valhalla. But it has long been foreshadowed that, once the old order has been destroyed, a new, unimaginably better world will emerge: centred on the figure of the perfect hero Baldur who, like Siegfried,