expression, the genitive, can mean many different things: in the first place, it could mean that in the field λήθη occurs and appears. Taken in this way the field and λήθη are indifferent to one another. But the field can also be determined in its character as a field precisely on the basis of λήθη and become in that way a region appropriate to λήθη alone. Here field and λήθη are indeed still distinguished, but they are no longer indifferent to one another. Finally the field and its character as field can belong to λήθη itself. Now field and λήθη are not distinguished from each other, but λήθη itself is field. It is the place, the "where," in such a way that withdrawing concealment does not occur at some spot or other within the field but instead is itself the "where" for what must belong to it. Accordingly, what is to be thought is "the field of λήθη." This field belongs together with other places, and as a whole they make up a τόπος δαιμόνιος: a "demonic district."
The elucidation of the essence of the δαιμόνιον leads to a clarification of the essence of the θεῖον. Together, these provide an indication of the essence of the Greek divinities. This indication would certainly be very much misunderstood if it were to engender the view that henceforth "we" could straightaway be certain on our own of the essence of the Greek gods and therewith be assured of their proximity. The indication does not reach that far. It can only remind us that as long as the essence of ἀλήθεια is not completely disinterred, we will not have preserved the one thing by which we might endure the remoteness of the Greek gods, acknowledge this remoteness as an event of our history, and experience these gods as the ones they used to be. Instead of that, we are still in constant danger—from literary works, books, conferences, and feuilletons—of being talked into and persuaded of an immediate relation to the Greek gods. It makes no matter here whether this literature is professorially boring in the style of the historiography of religion or whether the results of the historiography of religion are elaborated and recounted more poetically. The way to these gods, even to their remoteness, certainly leads through the word. But this word cannot be "literature" (Experts know of course that the fine book of W. F. Otto, Die Götter Griechenlands, does not belong to this literature; but even here the step into the domain of ἀλήθεια is lacking.)
For the Greeks the divine is based immediately on the uncanny in the ordinary. It comes to light in the distinction of the one from the other. Nowhere do we find here a display of unusual beings, by means of which the divine would first have to be awakened and a sense for it first aroused. Therefore also the question of the so-called "Dionysian" must be unfolded first as a Greek question. For many reasons we may doubt whether the Nietzschean interpretation of the Dionysian can justly be maintained, or whether it is not a coarse interpreting back of an uncritical nineteenth century "biologism" into the Greek world.