Synopses & Reviews
We often think of classical Greek society as a model of rationality and order. Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece, whose potentially violent and destructive energies, Burkert argues, were harnessed to constructive ends through the interlinked uses of myth and ritual.
For example, in a much-cited essay on the Athenian religious festival of the Arrhephoria, Burkert uncovers deep connections between this strange nocturnal ritual—in which two virgin girls carried sacred offerings into a cave and later returned with something given to them there—and tribal puberty initiations by linking the festival with the myth of the daughters of Kekrops. Other chapters explore the origins of tragedy in blood sacrifice; the role of myth and past crime in the ritual of the new fire on Lemnos; the ties among violence, the Athenian courts, and the annual purification of the divine image; several well-known myths, often retold in poetry, that refer to religious festivals; and how failed political propaganda about the miraculous birth of a king entered the realm of myth at the time of the Persian Wars.
With Savage Energies, Burkert convincingly shows how the lessons of myth and ritual interacted to construct—and reconstruct—classical Greek society. Classicists, historians of religion, and mythologists should all benefit from his insights.
Review
“The English-speaking world is now being invited, forty years after the original date of publication . . . to read or reread some of the seminal insights that Walter Burkert introduced to the austere tribunal of classical philology. These insights were the basis for an anthropological . . . hermeneutics that advanced an exemplary and resolutely bold thesis.”
Review
“The author of this study is the foremost living interpreter of Greek religious ritual, whose theoretical influence extends well beyond the world of classical studies. . . . It is very good to have these essays, three of them oft-cited classics, published together.”
Review
“There can be no question that Walter Burkert is the preeminent historian of Greek religion of our time. In this book are five of his early essays . . . all of them dealing with aspects of the relationships between sacrificial ritual and myth in ancient Greece, in which brilliant new light is cast on obscure and enigmatic examples.”
Synopsis
Burkert, Girard, and Smith hold important and contradictory theories about the nature and origin of ritual sacrifice, and the role that violence plays in religion and culture. These papers and conversations derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture, especially one based on violence.
Synopsis
Burkert, Girard, and Smith hold important and contradictory theories about the nature and origin of ritual sacrifice, and the role violence plays in religion and culture. These papers and conversations derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture, especially one based on violence. The special value of this volume is the conversations as suchthe real record of working scholars engaged with one another's theories, as they make and meet challenges, and move and maneuver.
Girard and Burkert present different versions of the same conviction: that a single theory can account for ritual and its social function, a theory that posits original acts of group violence. Smith sharply questions both the possibility and the utility of such a general theory. Among the highlights of this stimulating interchange of ideas is a searching criticism of Girard's theory of generative scapegoating, which he answers with clarity and conviction, and a challenging of Burkert's theory of the origin of sacrifice in the hunt by Smith's argument, posed as a jeu d'esprit, that sacrifice originates with the domestication of animals.
About the Author
Walter Burkert is an emeritus professor of classics at the University of Zürich. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age and Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Peter Bing is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of the Classics at Emory University.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Glenn W. Most
1. Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual
2. The Legend of Kekrops's Daughters and the Arrhephoria: From Initiation Ritual to Panathenaic Festival
3. Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire at Lemnos: A Study in Myth and Ritual
4. Buzyges and Palladion: Violence and the Courts in Ancient Greek Ritual
5. Demaratos, Astrabakos, and Herakles: Kingship, Myth, and Politics at the Time of the Persian Wars