Walter Burkert

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks about Greek religion. By the time he died in Zurich on the 11th of March 2015, he had produced seventeen books and two hundred essays. He had trained generations of scholars across three countries. And he had done something genuinely unusual: he made the blood and fire of ancient sacrifice legible to a modern audience.

  The question Burkert spent his life pursuing was deceptively simple. Why did the Greeks kill animals at the altar? Not as a poetic curiosity, but as a serious anthropological problem. Why was ritual slaughter so central to Greek religious life? What did it do for the community? And why did its structure persist across centuries and across wildly different festivals?

  The answers he developed drew on archaeology, epigraphy, the work of poets and historians, and the behavioral biology of Konrad Lorenz. They pointed toward something unsettling at the heart of ancient piety. The chapters ahead trace how Burkert built that argument, where his ideas came from, and what it means that sacrifice, in his reading, was not incidental to Greek religion but foundational to it.

• 2. A Scholar Shaped by Two Cities

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  Erlangen and Munich were the two poles of Burkert's formation. He studied classical philology, history, and philosophy at the University of Erlangen and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen between 1950 and 1954. His doctorate in philosophy came from Erlangen in 1955. These were years spent reading ancient texts with the close attention that German philology demanded.

  He married Maria Bosch in 1957, and the couple had three children: Reinhard, Andrea, and Cornelius. That same year he became a teaching assistant at the University of Erlangen, a post he held for five years. He then returned as a lecturer until 1966. From early 1965, he spent a year as a junior fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. That American appointment gave him early contact with a different intellectual culture.

  His first professorship was in classical philology at Technische Universitat Berlin, where he served from 1966 to 1969. A guest professorship at Harvard followed in 1968. Then, in 1969, he took up the post that would define his mature career: professor of classical philology at the University of Zurich, a position he held until his retirement in 1996.

  Along the way he served as dean of the philosophical faculty at Zurich from 1986 to 1988, delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews in Scotland in 1989, and held visiting professorships in California in 1977 and 1988. In 1990 he received the Balzan Prize for the Study of the Ancient World.

• 3. Homo Necans and the Sacred Crime

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  Homo Necans appeared in German in 1972, and Burkert described himself, in the preface to its English translation, as "a philologist who starts from ancient Greek texts and attempts to find biological, psychological and sociological explanations for religious phenomena." The phrase captures the unusual combination the book embodied.

  The impetus came partly from Konrad Lorenz. Burkert confirmed that Lorenz's On Aggression "seemed to offer new insight into the disquieting manifestations of violence." That biological framework combined with the functionalism found in Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis and with structuralist methods to produce an ethology of Greek religion. German readers in 1972 found the book's consistent focus on the interrelationship of myth and ritual somewhat revolutionary.

  The book's central argument is that solidarity was achieved among the Greeks through what Burkert called a sacred crime with due reparations. His own words from the preface: "for the strange prominence of animal slaughter in ancient religion this still seems to be the most economical, and most humane explanation." The gods, he concluded, remain a fluid concept; sacrifice is a fact.

  The opening chapter, titled "Sacrifice as an Act of Killing," sets out conclusions that the remaining chapters test against specific myths, festivals, and rituals. Burkert deliberately set aside the role of poetic creation in order, as he put it, "to confront the power and effect of tradition as fully as possible."

  The book's reach grew slowly. An Italian translation appeared in 1981, nearly a decade after the German original. The English translation followed in 1983. By the time Burkert retired, Homo Necans was considered an outstanding account of the concepts that shaped Greek religion.

• 4. The Ritual Anatomy of Sacrifice

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  In 1985, drawing on both literary and visual sources, Burkert assembled the most detailed reconstruction then available of how Greek sacrificial ritual actually proceeded step by step. The sequence he recovered was precise and carefully ordered.

  Under the direction of a priest, priestess, father, mother, or king depending on the occasion, a basket holding the necessary utensils and a bowl of water were arranged around the altar. Participants dipped their hands into the consecrated water and sprinkled it on the altar, the victim, and the person making the offering. Salted barley corns from the basket were thrown onto the animal's head and into the altar fire. A lock of the animal's hair was cut and burned, and a libation was poured on the altar with prayer. After silence was proclaimed, the music of flutes began, and the animal was slain.

  Larger animals were killed with a sacrificial axe. The head was turned toward the heavens, the throat was cut, and the blood spread across the altar and was caught in a vessel. At this point in the ritual, early literary sources including the Homeric epics recorded that onlooking women raised a cry of worship called the ololugma.

  After skinning and dividing the carcass, the inner parts were tasted and shared, and a portion was burned on the altar with incense. If the entrails were normal in shape and color, that was taken as an omen that the gods had accepted the offering. The thigh pieces, wrapped in fat, were burned on the altar, a practice described in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. The worshippers then shared the roasted meat while music and dance continued in the gods' service. At certain special festivals, the scale was immense: the sources record instances where hundreds of animals were consumed in a single banquet.

• 5. Greek Religion and the East

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  Burkert's 1977 book on Greek religion, published in English translation in 1985 as Greek Religion, has been widely accepted as a standard work in the field. It sits alongside Homo Necans and Ancient Mystery Cults as one of the three works at the base of modern scholarship on Hellenic religion.

  A persistent theme in his scholarship was that Greek religion did not develop in isolation. He published a study in 1984 on what he called the orientalizing epoch in Greek religion and literature, examining the reception of Near Eastern and Persian culture in the Hellenic world. That project reappeared in two later works: Die Griechen und der Orient in 2004 and Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, also published by Harvard University Press in 2004. Together these set Greek religion in its wider Aegean and Near Eastern context, tracing the lines of influence that crossed the ancient Mediterranean.

  His earliest major monograph had looked at a different kind of cultural boundary crossing. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, translated into English in 1972, examined the balance between mythological tradition and emerging scientific thinking among the followers of Pythagoras.

  Ancient Mystery Cults, published in 1987, grew from lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1982. It addressed the mystery religions that ran alongside and sometimes beneath official Greek cult, offering initiates a different relationship to the divine. That book extended his reach into aspects of Greek religious life that official state religion left only partially visible, and it drew on his established method of reading ritual practice as analytically prior to theological belief.