Sacrifice, Ritual and the Systematic Study of Greek Cult

Burkert's central claim was methodological as much as substantive: Greek religion has no scripture and no fixed creed, so its coherence has to be read out of the coordinated practice of sacrifice, festival, oracle and myth rather than assumed in advance. Homo Necans traced how the guilt of killing embedded in sacrificial ritual, projected in myths of a slain god or hero, gave Greek religious life its distinctive tragic undertone, an argument that drew on ethology and psychoanalysis as freely as on inscriptions and vase painting, and that some colleagues found more speculative than his later, more cautious synthesis.

Greek Religion, still assigned as the standard one volume account of the subject decades after its translation, worked outward from Burkert's comparative instincts: it set Greek cult beside its Near Eastern neighbors, treated the Eleusinian and Dionysian mysteries as functioning ritual systems rather than literary curiosities, and gave equal weight to household piety and civic festival. Burkert's later work, notably The Orientalizing Revolution (1984, English 1992), extended the comparative method to trace Near Eastern influence on early Greek religion and myth directly, a position that met resistance from scholars invested in Greek cultural originality but that subsequent archaeology has broadly vindicated. His synthesis remains the working framework against which most later studies of Greek religion still define themselves.