Author: Sieglinde W. Alexander
Chapter 1
Bearing the Names of the Gods
For most of my life, Norse mythology and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen were not simply stories I admired. They functioned as internal maps—systems through which I tried to understand power, sacrifice, obedience, rebellion, and survival. Long before I had the language for it, these myths felt personal.
Only much later did I understand why. They were already embedded in my life, encoded in the names I was given at birth—and in the roles those names quietly imposed.
On March 27, 1949, I was born, and my father named me Sieglinde. He was a man consumed by grandiosity and a pathological obsession with Richard Wagner—an obsession steeped in the same mythologized fantasies of purity, destiny, and heroic suffering that had once fueled Hitler’s worldview. To him, Sieglinde was not a fictional character but an ideal: noble through pain, meaningful through sacrifice. Her value lay not in who she was, but in what she endured—and what she was expected to produce.
From a developmental standpoint, this mattered profoundly. Identity does not emerge in a vacuum. It is scaffolded early through naming, expectation, and repetition. Long before a child can reflect, the brain is already learning which states are rewarded, which are punished, and which are invisible. My father did not see a daughter. He saw a role—and my nervous system learned this distinction immediately.
My mother gave me my second name: Waltraud. This, too, was not a gift. It was an assignment. In her mind, the name signified emotional service, duty, silence, and loyalty. Waltraud was expected to carry burdens, absorb distress, and remain useful without complaint. From the perspective of attachment psychology, this was a clear script: proximity would be granted not for being, but for serving.
Names are not merely labels. They are among the earliest narratives imposed on the developing self. When a name arrives already saturated with meaning, it becomes a behavioral instruction long before the child has any capacity to refuse it.
Sieglinde and Waltraud were not neutral. They were mythic commands.
I was not allowed to discover who I was. Identity arrived prewritten—stitched together from my father’s grandiosity and my mother’s demands. I grew up suspended between two archetypes: Sieglinde, the tragic vessel of destiny, and Waltraud, the silent caretaker of a failing order.
But neither myths nor brains are fixed. Both are plastic.
It was under the weight of these names that I began to study the stories they came from. Who was Sieglinde, really? Yes, she is violated, displaced, and used—but she also escapes. She survives. She carries the future in her body and gives birth to transformation.
And who was Waltraute, Wagner’s inspiration for Waltraud? A Valkyrie not of battle, but of witness. In Götterdämmerung, she pleads for salvation even as the gods retreat into denial. She speaks truth into a collapsing system.
These figures became more than reflections; they became confrontations. Questions about agency, obedience, and worth. And in understanding them, I began—slowly—to understand myself.
This is not a meditation on mythology alone. It is an excavation of how stories—cultural, familial, neurological—shape a life.
Chapter 2
Mythic Names, Neural Scripts
Names are stories we are asked to carry. When those names are drawn from mythology, they carry more than memory—they carry expectation, repetition, and command.
In Wagner’s Die Walküre, Sieglinde is trapped in violence, swept into a destiny she never chooses, and rendered meaningful through what she suffers and produces. To my father, this was not tragedy but idealization. Suffering was aestheticized. Silence was purity. Worth was conditional.
My naming was theater. I was cast without consent.
My mother’s choice—Waltraud, echoing Waltraute—completed the script. In Götterdämmerung, Waltraute appears not as a figure of power, but of loyalty. She serves faithfully even as the gods await destruction. She carries messages no one wants to hear.
This was the role imposed on me: emotional regulator, loyal daughter, silent absorber of family dysfunction.
From a neuroscience perspective, the combination was potent. Chronic exposure to expectation without agency trains the stress-response system to prioritize vigilance over exploration. The developing brain learns that safety depends on compliance. Over time, the default self becomes not “Who am I?” but “What is required of me now?”
I did not consciously understand this as a child. But the nervous system always understands first. I felt it as constriction. As invisibility. As the quiet certainty that my pain only mattered if it served someone else.
And yet—myth contains its own antidote.
Sieglinde escapes. Waltraute speaks. Neither saves the old order, but both carry truth forward.
That recognition began to loosen the script. I could see how my father’s own abused childhood had fueled his grandiosity—how unmet needs metastasize into delusion. I could see how my mother’s control masqueraded as duty, how fear passed itself off as loyalty.
What had felt personal was, in fact, patterned.
The Gods Who Failed Us
Power, Collapse, and Inherited Stress
Behind every mythic woman stands a failing god.
Odin, in Norse mythology, is brilliant, manipulative, emotionally remote. He sacrifices himself for knowledge, gathers the dead for a battle he knows he cannot win, and remains fundamentally detached from care. His intelligence never matures into wisdom.
Wotan, Wagner’s reimagining, is more psychologically revealing. He creates laws he cannot escape, longs for a free hero, yet cannot relinquish control. His tragedy is not powerlessness, but ambivalence. He wants transformation without surrender.
My father imagined himself as Wotan—misunderstood, burdened, betrayed. But he was not a god in decline. He was a man who displaced his failures onto his child, demanding redemption he had not earned.
From a biological perspective, this matters because stress is transmissible. Not genetically in the simple sense, but behaviorally, hormonally, epigenetically. Children inherit not only stories, but nervous systems shaped by unresolved fear.
And I—named Sieglinde and Waltraud—was left to carry both their unfinished myths.
Reclaiming the Script
But neither myth nor neurobiology is destiny.
Sieglinde is not only tragedy. She is survival. She leaves. She endures. She initiates change.
Waltraute is not only loyalty. She is witness. She names the end. And naming the end is the first act of freedom.
For decades, I lived as their echo—regulated by scripts I did not write. But understanding them gave me distance, and distance creates choice. The brain, once it recognizes a pattern, can begin to inhibit it.
I learned I could also be Brünnhilde: the one who sees clearly, who steps into the fire—not to die, but to end what must end.
Wagner’s Ring does not conclude with divine victory. It ends with collapse, fire, and release. Valhalla burns. The curse dissolves. And something unnamed begins.
This is where I stand now: un-naming what was imposed, interrupting what was inherited, and walking forward—not bearing the gods’ burdens, but my own becoming.