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Walter F. Otto
Walter F. Otto
German classical philologist whose phenomenological reading of Greek religion restored the Olympian gods to scholarly seriousness after a century in which evolutionist anthropology had reduced them to agricultural residue or tribal hypostasis. Otto’s governing thesis was that the gods of homer arrive as epiphanic forms of being — irreducible modes in which the real discloses itself — and that the “critical moment of original genius” in Greek religion belongs at the beginning rather than at the end of a developmental arc (Otto 1965, Foreword). Against the Nilssonian encyclopaedic handbook, which “neatly and effectively tucked away” each god in “a huge filing cabinet” (Palmer, introduction to Otto 1965), Otto wrote a theogony — a “statement of faith” in the phenomenological rather than the confessional sense.
Otto taught at Frankfurt and Tübingen. His most consequential student, for the lineage, was karl-kerenyi, who became his pupil in 1929 and carried the method into the eranos conferences and into direct collaboration with carl-jung. The line from Otto through Kerényi into archetypal-psychology-charter is the philological spine of the depth tradition’s reading of the gods. james-hillman cites the inheritance explicitly; david-l-miller identifies Otto as the “originator of the existential-archetypal mode of interpretation as participation” (Miller 1974).
Otto’s thesis that Dionysus was among the oldest of the Greek gods, resisted in his lifetime, was vindicated after his death by the Linear B fragment di-wo-nu-so-jo at Pylos (Palmer, introduction to Otto 1965).