Giegerich has rescued and brought to life the gods of sacrifice. Feeling his way into the ‘95 to 99 percent of human history [that] was determined by … killing … as the centre out of which human existence acquired its meaning’, he identifies the reality of the ancient gods in ‘the trembling of the soul vis-à-vis the blow with the axe' upon the neck of the sacrificial animal. Those gods were not human-like entities walking about on mountain tops above the clouds. They were not entities at all.