German classical philology and alphabet mysticism

Franz Dornseiff

1888 – 1960

Franz Dornseiff was a German classical philologist who earned his doctorate at Heidelberg in 1916 under Franz Boll, expanding his dissertation into Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie (1922), a foundational scholarly study of letter symbolism, number mysticism, and magical uses of the alphabet in antiquity. He held chairs at Greifswald and Leipzig, and despite persecution during the Nazi era for Jewish ancestry, remained one of the leading classicists of twentieth-century Germany.