 Although Feuerbach is most often associated with the slogan underlying The Essence of Christianity, according to which “theology is anthropology” (insofar as the predicates attributed by Christians to God are in fact predicates of the human species-essence), in a number of works on religion published in the 1840s and 1850s Feuerbach advanced explanations of the origin of religious concepts and beliefs that are strikingly different from, and apparently at odds with, the more familiar position put forward in that book. The primary works in which Feuerbach advanced these new theoretical proposals are the previously referenced Luther book (1844), a short book entitled The Essence of Religion (1846), the essay, “Belief in Immortality from the Standpoint of Anthropology” (1847), the Lectures on the Essence of Religion originally delivered in 1848–9, but first published in 1851 (hereafter Lectures), and the Theogony (1857). The question of the relationship between the account of religion contained in The Essence of Christianity and the views put forward in these later writings is a complex one, the most penetrating analysis of which is to be found in Harvey (1995). Here Harvey identifies five distinct “explanatory principles” employed by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity, among which he distinguishes those that are conceived along Hegelian lines from those that tend instead toward the “existentialist-naturalist” themes which predominate in Feuerbach’s later writings on religion (Harvey 1995: 68–69). Harvey’s thesis is that, in those later writings, Feuerbach in fact develops a new, bipolar model of religion that is both incompatible with, and more compelling than, the earlier one, which relied too heavily on abstract Hegelian conceptions that are no longer viable. Whereas, in The Essence of Christianity, the emphasis was on God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, and on the infinity and perfection of the species, the new bipolar model sees religion as meeting deep-seated psychological needs resulting from the contingency and precariousness of the finite, embodied existence of individual human subjects seeking to preserve themselves and expand their natural powers.