Walter Burkert

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.

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.