Epiphany Against Evolutionism

The nineteenth-century study of religion organized itself around an evolutionist premise: religion moves from primitive to refined, from cult to theology, from the crude to the sublime. H. J. Rose’s handbook — denouncing walter-otto‘s phenomenological work as “windy rhetoric” — is the position’s caricature (Rose, quoted in Kerényi 1944). The same position animated Nilsson’s encyclopaedic reconstruction, in which each god was “neatly and effectively tucked away in a huge filing cabinet” (Palmer, introduction to Otto 1965).

walter-otto‘s thesis inverts the evolutionist arc. In the foreword to Dionysus: Myth and Cult he writes: “Here, on the contrary, the critical moment of original genius is moved back to the beginning which is prior to the activity of individual poets and artists… Compared to this primal creation, the more recent brush strokes applied to the picture, however significant they may be in and of themselves, must appear trifling” (Otto 1965, Foreword). The position is unashamed: the epiphany comes first. What follows is elaboration, not improvement.

The methodological difference determines everything downstream. Evolutionist philology asks: how did Dionysus develop from a primitive vegetation god into the classical figure? Otto’s phenomenology asks: what is Dionysus as a form of being, and what does the development obscure? The tradition the depth psychologists inherit, through karl-kerenyi and james-hillman, is Otto’s — the tradition that refuses to explain away the gods and instead reads them at their own level of reality.

The position is not nostalgic. It is phenomenological. And its vindication, in the specific case of Dionysus, came from the decipherment of Linear B: the fragment di-wo-nu-so-jo at Pylos confirmed Otto’s contested claim that Dionysus belonged to the earliest layer of the Greek pantheon (Palmer, introduction to Otto 1965). The evolutionist reconstruction was, in this case, simply wrong.

Sources

• walter-otto: the epiphanic moment is prior to poetic elaboration
• karl-kerenyi: Otto as the philologist who “cut through the fanatical German classicist penchant for scholarly overkill”
• james-hillman: gods as “formal intelligibility” rather than primitive residue
• Nilsson (library-absent): the encyclopaedic counter-position
• Linear B evidence: di-wo-nu-so-jo at Pylos, vindicating Otto’s early-Dionysus thesis