Pharisee's "Look thou to that,"
replies, "Your promise does not bind me. The ring, my capture,
I shall keep."

"But you will have to lay it down with the ransom," Fafner insists.

"Ask what else you please, you shall have it; but not for the whole
world will I give up the ring."

Fasolt instantly lays hands again upon Freia and draws her from
behind the Hort. "Everything then stands as it stood before. Freia
shall come with us now for good and all." An outcry of appeal goes
up from all the gods to Wotan. He turns from them unmoved. "Trouble
me not. The ring I will not give up." And the idleness of further
appeal, howsoever eloquent, cannot be doubted.

But now unaccountable darkness invades the scene; from the hollow
alcove in the rocks, letting down to the interior earth, breaks a
bluish light; while all, breathless, watch the strange phenomenon,
the upper half of a woman becomes discernible in it, wrapped in
smoke-coloured veils and long black locks. It is the Spirit of
the Earth, the all-knowing Erda, whose motif describes the stately
progression of natural things, and is the same as the Rhine-motif,
which describes a natural thing in stately progression. She lifts
a warning hand to Wotan. "Desist, Wotan, desist! Avoid the curse
on the ring... The possession of it will doom you to dark ruin...."

Wotan, struck, inquires in awe, "Who are you, warning woman?"

The one who knows all that was, is, and shall be, she tells him;
the ancestress of the everlasting world, older than time; the mother
of the Norns who speak with Wotan nightly. Gravest danger has brought
her to seek him in person. Let him hear and heed! The present order
is passing away. There is dawning for the gods a dark day.... At
this prophesied ruin, the music reverses the motif of ascending
progression, and paints melancholy disintegration and crumbling
downfall, a strain to be heard many times in the closing opera of
the trilogy, when the prophecy comes to pass and the gods enter
their twilight. The apparition is sinking back into the earth.
Wotan beseeches it to tarry and tell him more. But with the words,
"You are warned.... Meditate in sorrow and fear!" it vanishes. The
masterful god attempts to follow, to wrest from the weird woman
further knowledge. His wife and her brothers hold him back. He
stands for a time still hesitating, uncertain, wrapped in thought.
With sudden resolve at last he tosses the ring with the rest of the
treasure, and tur