Walter Burkert was born in 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and trained in classical philology at Erlangen, Munich and Tubingen, in the rigorous textual tradition of German classical scholarship. He held professorships at Berlin and then, from 1969, at the University of Zurich, where he remained for the rest of his career and became a Swiss citizen. Where an earlier generation of classicists had treated Greek myth chiefly as literature to be edited and interpreted on the page, Burkert brought to it the comparative methods of social anthropology and the history of religions, reading myths as scripts inseparable from the rituals, above all animal sacrifice, that Greek communities actually performed.
That reorientation produced Homo Necans in 1972, his most provocative book, arguing that the anxiety and guilt structuring Greek sacrificial ritual descended from the psychology of the Paleolithic hunt, in which killing an animal that resembled a fellow creature required ritual absolution. Five years later Greek Religion, translated into English in 1985, gave the field its most complete synthesis: gods, rites, festivals, mystery cults and popular belief organized as a working system rather than a gallery of myths. Burkert died in Zurich in 2015, having also written influential studies of Near Eastern influence on early Greek culture and shaped the study of the ancient mystery religions for a generation of students who followed him.