OTTO, WALTER F. Walter Friedrich Otto (1874–1958) was a German scholar of classical philology, mythology, and the history and philosophy of religions. The son of pharmacist Hermann Ernst Otto, Walter Otto was born in Hechingen, a small town below Mount Hohenzollern in Swabia. His family, marked by strong pietistic principles, soon moved to Stuttgart, where Otto attended secondary school at the humanistic Eberhard Ludwigs Gymnasium beginning in 1882. After winning the Konkurs in 1892, he was admitted to the Stift, an evangelical college in Tübingen that had been in earlier times the school of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling. The following year Otto switched to classical studies under Otto Crusius, Wilhelm Schmid, and Ludwig Schwabe. He continued these studies in 1894 in Bonn, where he was strongly influenced by Hermann Usener and Friedrich Bücheler. Under the...