 This feeling can manifest itself negatively as fear, which Feuerbach refers to at one point as “a feeling of dependency on an object without which I am nothing, which has the power to destroy me” (VWR 39/31), but it can also manifest itself in the form of celebratory joy and exaltation. Feuerbach finds both of these powerful emotions expressed in the act of sacrificial offering, which he takes to be the most characteristic act of nature religions (as opposed, presumably, to prayer as the characteristic act of “spiritual”, i.e., monotheistic, religion). In addition to filling a “gap” in the argument put forward in The Essence of Christianity by emphasizing the dependence of “the human essence” upon “the essence of nature”, Feuerbach also sought in The Essence of Religion to identify features shared in common by what he calls “nature religions”, on the one hand, and “spiritual” religions like Christianity, on the other, and to clarify the relationship between these two kinds of religion. Feuerbach uses the term “nature religion” to refer both the pagan religions of classical antiquity, and the religions of various tribal peoples whose beliefs and practices were described for Feuerbach and his contemporaries by European travelers in journals such as Das Ausland, from which Feuerbach derived a number of the examples to which he refers in this book (cf. Tomasoni 1990: 10–11, 127–135). 