The Homeric Gods

Die Götter Griechenlands (1929), translated into English by Moses Hadas as The Homeric Gods (1954). The book is not directly held in the library — its presence in this node is attested through citation by karl-kerenyi, who names it “a forerunner of myth studies with a soulful outlook” (Kerényi 1944, preface to Hermes: Guide of Souls), and through walter-otto‘s own foreword to Dionysus: Myth and Cult, where he identifies the earlier volume as dedicated to “the true Olympians” from whose circle Dionysus had to be excluded.

The book reads the twelve Olympians as phenomenological realities — as forms of divine encounter inscribed in Homeric poetry itself. Kerényi’s preface preserves the long Otto passage on Hermes and the night that became load-bearing for archetypal-psychology-charter: the experience of the world at night, in which “nighness vanishes, and with it distance,” is read as the Hermetic mode of disclosure rather than as a primitive confusion.

The work is the hinge between nineteenth-century rationalist philology (Max Müller, H. J. Rose) and the twentieth-century archetypal reading of the gods. karl-kerenyi‘s entire corpus presupposes it; james-hillman‘s polytheism inherits its method.

Concepts introduced or developed

• gods-as-forms-of-being
• epiphany
• hermes

Cited by

• karl-kerenyi
• james-hillman
• david-l-miller