in the ordinary. Both words, θεάοντες and δαίοντες express the same thing, if thought of essentially. But the usual meaning of the names θεοί and δαίμονες, ("gods and demons") no longer signifies the origin they express. Often what a word expresses is distorted and suppressed by its "meanings."
The ones who shine into the ordinary appear in this ordinary as something ordinary. The looking ones are present as ones who look into the ordinary, i.e., as men in the form of men. In what is ordinary, man appears as one who is present by way of looking. The animal, too, in a certain sense appears that way, which is why at the outset the divine also has the form of the animal. But precisely this circumstance testifies that neither the "animal" as such nor the "man" as such, but instead their look, is what is decisive for the appearance of the uncanny. Thus the gods appear in the form of man not became they are thought of as "human" and are anthropomorphized, but because the Greeks experience man as the being whose Being is determined through a relation of self-disclosing Being itself to what, on the basis of this very relation, we call "man." Therefore the look of the god who stems from Being can emerge "in" man and can look out from the form of "man" as gathered in the look. Therefore men are often divinized and thought of according to a divine form, since gods and men receive their respective distinct essence from Being itself, i.e., from ἀλήθεια.
The "anthropomorphic" and the "theomorphic" precepts of the modern "explanation" of the Greek gods are erroneous in every case. This "explanation," that the gods are deprived of divine attributes according to the measure of man, and that men are unhumanly divinized, is essentially erroneous, since it relates to a way of questioning that is mistaken already in the raising of the question and must wander around in error, for the essential domain of ἀλήθεια, which alone elucidates everything, is not acknowledged or experienced. It is not in the reign of the individual gods that the divinities of the Greeks display the astonishing and the demonic in the true sense, but that is grounded in the provenance of their essence.
It may indeed be obvious that the Greek gods, who are no more, remain experienceable on the basis of Being as thought by the Greeks. Yet we do not think the Being which is to be expressed here, and we do not in advance reflect on it, but instead, in our usual haste, according to our pleasure or fancy, or quite thoughtlessly, we presuppose some idea of Being that is not experienced in a decisive manner and is not correspondingly elucidated. In this way again and again the most facile precept imposes itself, that these divinities must be explained as a "product of man" or more particularly of "religious" man. As if this man,