Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece)

Name: Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece)
Author: Walter F. Otto

Die Götter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece) is a work by Walter F. Otto (1929).

Core claims

Otto does not recover Greek religion as an aesthetic curiosity but demonstrates that the Olympian gods represent a mode of cognition — a “rational” apprehension of reality in which seeing and understanding are identical, and form itself is the highest category of the divine.
The book’s central polemical move is to reverse the standard charge of anthropomorphism: the Greeks did not humanize the divine but divinized the human, discovering in the primal image of natural man the only adequate vessel for a spirituality that refuses to flee the world.
Otto’s rigid exclusion of Dionysus from this volume is not an oversight but a structural confession: the Olympian theology he describes is defined precisely by its refusal of the chthonic, the ecstatic, and the magical — the very domains Dionysus would later force him to confront.

How does Otto’s argument that the Greek gods are “eternal forms of existence” rather than psychic projections challenge or complement Jung’s theory of archetypes as presented in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious?
In what ways does Otto’s deliberate exclusion of Dionysus from Die Götter Griechenlands anticipate the crisis that Hillman identifies in Re-Visioning Psychology when archetypal psychology must confront experiences that resist the clarity of Apollonic form?
How does Otto’s account of the Olympian displacement of the chthonic earth-religion compare with Erich Neumann’s treatment of the Great Mother archetype in The Origins and History of Consciousness — and where do the two frameworks fundamentally diverge?