Contents Preface to the English Edition Introduction 1 A Survey of Scholarship 2 The Sources 3 The Scope of the Study I Prehistory and the Minoan–Mycenaean Age 1 The Neolithic and Early Bronze Age 2 Indo-European 3 The Minoan–Mycenaean Religion 4 The ‘Dark Age’ and the Problem of Continuity II Ritual and Sanctuary 1 ‘Working Sacred Things’: Animal Sacrifice 2 Gift Offerings and Libation 3 Prayer 4 Purification 5 The Sanctuary 6 Priests 7 The Festival 8 Ecstasy and Divination III The Gods 1 The Spell of Homer 2 Individual Gods 3 The Remainder of the Pantheon 4 The Special Character of Greek Anthropomorphism IV The Dead, Heroes, and Chthonic Gods 1 Burial and the Cult of the Dead 2 Afterlife Mythology 3 Olympian and Chthonic 4 The Heroes 5 Figures who cross the Chthonic-Olympian Boundary V Polis and Polytheism 1 Thought Patterns in Greek Polytheism 2 The Rhythm of the Festivals 3 Social Functions of Cult 4 Piety in the Mirror of Greek Language VI Mysteries and Asceticism 1 Mystery Sanctuaries 2 Bacchica and Orphica 3 Bios VII Philosophical Religion 1 The New Foundation: Being and the Divine 2 The Crisis: Sophists and Atheists 3 The Deliverance: Cosmic Religion and Metaphysics 4 Philosophical Religion and Polis Religion: Plato’s Laws Notes Bibliography Index of Greek Words Index UXORI English translation © 1985 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Harvard University Press Originally published in German as Gricchifichc Religion der archaischcn und klassischett Epoche, in the series Die Religionen der Menschheit, vol. 15. © 1977 by Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. English translation first published 1985 First published in paperback 1987 12 2012 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Burkert, Walter Greek religion: archaic and classical 1. Greece—Religion I. Title II. Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche. English 292′.08 BL782 ISBN 978-0-631-15624-6 The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com Preface to the English Edition The German edition of this book was published in 1977; the transformation into an English book of 1985 can hardly be complete. The author has used the chance to add references to important new publications that came to his knowledge in the intervening years, especially to newly discovered evidence and to new standard works. Most progress and change is going on in the field of Minoan and Mycenaean religion, so that the short account contained in the first chapter of this book must be taken as a source of clues rather than final results. W.B. Introduction 1 A SURVEY OF SCHOLARSHIP 1 Greek religion has to some extent always remained familiar, but is far from easy to know and understand. Seemingly natural and yet atavistically estranged, refined and barbaric at the same time, it has been taken as a guide again and again in the search for the origin of all religion. But as a historical phenomenon it is unique and unrepeatable, and is itself the product of an involved prehistory. In Western tradition an awareness of Greek religion was kept alive in three 2 ways: through its presence in ancient literature and in all literature formed on that model, through the polemics of the Church Fathers, and through its assimilation in symbolic guise to Neoplatonic philosophy. The allegorical method of exposition, which taught that the names of the gods should be understood on the one hand as natural and on the other hand as metaphysical entities, had at the same time also been taken over in literature and philosophy alike. This offered possibilities for attempting a reconciliation with the Christian 3 religion. Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik is the last largescale and thoroughly unavailing endeavour of this kind. There was, however, another path which could be taken, namely, to construct a self-consciously pagan counter-position to Christianity. The fascination which this idea exercised can be traced from the time of the Renaissance to Schiller’s poem Die Gotter Griechenlands (1788) and Goethe’s Braut von Korinth (1797) and is evident again in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter F. Otto. The historical criticism of the nineteenth century abandoned such efforts to fill ancient religion with direct meaning and relevance and devoted itself instead to the critical collection and chronological ordering of the source material. 4 Foremost in this line is Christian August Lobeck’s Aglaophamus, which reduced the speculations about Mysteries and Orphism to tangible but undeniably banal realities. A more exciting approach was inspired by the Romantic movement: myths were seen as witnesses to a specific Volksgeist, and accordingly the Greek ‘sagas’ were traced back to the individual Greek tribes 5 and their history. Here it was Karl Otfried Mullers who led the way, and the same path was still followed by Wilamowitz, the master of historical philology, 6 right up to the work of his old age Der Glaube der Hellenen. It was, as it were, an extension of the same project when, hand in hand with the rise of Sanskrit studies, the dominant concern for a time became the reconstruction of an Indo- European religion and mythology. With further progress in historical linguistics, however, this enterprise, which had remained deeply indebted to the nature 7 allegorizing of antiquity, was for the most part abandoned. The picture of Greek religion had long been defined by myths transmitted in literary form and by the ideas or beliefs drawn from them, but the study of folk- lore and ethnology brought about a decisive change in perspective. Using new methods of field-work, Wilhelm Mannhardt was able to set European peasant 8 customs alongside their ancient counterparts with the result that the customs of antiquity, the rituals, were brought into focus beside the myths. Customs ancient and modern consequently appeared as the expression of original religious ideas centring on the growth and fruitfulness of plant, animal and man in the course of the year: the Vegetation Spirit which dies to rise anew became the guiding idea. In Germany, Mannhardt’s synthesis of peasant customs and sophisticated nature 9 allegorizing was continued first by Hermann Usener and then by Albrecht 10 Dieterich. With the founding of the series Religionswissenschaftliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten (1903) and the reorganization of the Archiv for Religionswissenschaft (1904), Dieterich established the history of religion as an independent discipline based on the study of the religions of antiquity. Martin P. Nilsson, author of the most important and still indispensable standard works on 11 Greek religion, placed himself unequivocally in this tradition. Developments took a parallel course in England where reports of savage peoples and especially of their religions were flowing in from all parts of the colonial empire; the interest in religion was not entirely surprising since the ethnologists were almost all missionaries. Whatever was alien was understood as primitive, as the ‘not-yet’ of a beginning which contrasted with the Englishman’s own self-conscious progressiveness. The synthesis of this view of 12 Primitive Culture was furnished by E.B. Tylor; he introduced into the history of religion the concept of animism – a belief in souls or spirits which precedes the belief in gods or a god. The stimulus which this gave to the study of the religions of antiquity was made apparent in the Cambridge School. In 1889-90 three books were published almost simultaneously: The Religion of the Semites 13 by W. Robertson Smith, Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens by Jane 14 E. Harrison, and the first edition of The Golden Bough by James George 15 Frazer. Common to all these works is that here, too, the investigation of tual becomes the central concern. Jane Harrison, who as an archaeologist based her studies on the vase paintings and monuments, sought to illuminate a pre- Homeric, pre-Olympian religion: the ‘Year Daimon’, following Mannhardt’s example, became a key concept. Frazer united Mannhardtian ideas with the fascinating theme of the ritual killing of the king and in his collections of material, which grew from edition to edition to monumental proportions, he also 16 17 drew on the newer theories of Totemism and Preanimism. Preanimism was then believed to be the most primitive form of religion: belief in an impersonal 18 mana. This view was also taken over by Nilsson. The Cambridge School gained wide influence, especially with its tracing of 19 myths to rituals: ‘Myth and Ritual’ has remained a rallying cry down to the present day. Jane Harrison’s pupils and colleagues, Gilbert Murray and Francis Macdonald Cornford, advanced, respectively, the theory of the ritual origin of 20 tragedy and the theory that cosmogonic ritual lay behind the Ionian 21 philosophy of nature, and these ideas were to have a profound and stimulating effect not only on the study of antiquity but on literary and philosophical culture in general. Frazer’s mythological motif of the dying god, Adonis–Attis–Osiris, combined with the idea of sacral kingship, offered a key which seemed to open many doors. It is only within the last decades that the influence and reputation of ‘Golden Bough anthropology’ has fallen sharply; a more rigorous methodological awareness has come to prevail in ethnology and in the specialist philologies and archaeologies, and increasing specialization has brought with it a mistrust of generalizations; but at least in Anglo-American literature and literary criticism the Frazer–Harrison tradition is still alive. In the meantime, however, two new schools of thought had emerged about the turn of the century which were to transform intellectual life and its selfawareness: Emile Durkheim developed a radically sociological viewpoint and Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis. In their theses concerning the history of religion both writers closely followed Robertson Smith’s account of 22 the sacrificial ritual. In both schools the alleged absolute and independent status of the mind is compromised, conditioned on the one hand by