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The cycle of being begins. The deep blue waters of the Rhine River give rise to a daughter.  The red of the earth molds her, and the yellow light grants her vision. While her birth is painful, it is momentary.  The pain that her exposure to the darkness and maladies of earthly life brings is perpetual.  Even though she is under the spell of the ruler, Alberich, Wotan’s shadow, the Rhine maiden has the capacity to tap the power of creation, by sculpting elements and combining the colors of nature. The example of the Rhine River teaches that the life of nature is inseparable from the colors that sustain it.  Shipman may well have been thinking about the first scene of the second part of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s  Faust. Exhausted from his journey, Faust receives healing from spirits of nature. The author helps us see that life resides in the colorful reflections of nature: “Im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” (l. 4727).  For Goethe, the sense of harmony that beauty produces occurs only in momentary flashes of time. Shipman’s representations suggest that, without the spirit of the gold, one is enveloped in darkness and unable to shape oneself, even through the harmonizing forces of nature.  A force greater than nature itself must then constitute the source of Creation. 

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