In memoriam Walter Burkert (February 2, 1931 – March 11, 2015)

Abstract

With the passing of Walter Burkert, all of us who study ancient religions and myths have lost a scholar to whom we are indebted for important paths forward, and a colleague and teacher of seemingly boundless enthusiasm and generosity. It truly seems as if an epoch has ended. Walter Burkert began his studies in Erlangen, where in 1955 he wrote a dissertation under the direction of Otto Seel, entitled Zum altgriechischen Mitleidsbegriff. His Habilitation was awarded in 1962, and his Habilitationsschrift was published that same year under the title Weisheit und Wissenschaft. Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos und Platon. Its translation into English ten years later (Lore and Learning in Ancient Pythagoreanism) marked the beginning of a pattern: almost every book that Burkert wrote was translated into English, as well as into other languages in many cases. The pattern reflects the eagerness with which a world of scholars awaited Burkert’s insights. His other major books (I give here their English titles, followed by the year of original publication and year of translation) were: Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (1972; 1983), Greek Religion (1977; 1983), Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (1979), The Orientalizing Revolution (1984; 1992), Ancient Mystery Cults (1987), Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece (1990; 2001), Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religion (1996), Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (2004). Nor was it only through books that the impact of Burkert’s explorations of ancient religion was felt; he was the master of the tide-turning essay: ‘ΓΟΗΣ: Zum griechischen “Schamanismus”’ (1962), ‘Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual’ (1966), ‘Apellai und Apollo’ (1975), ‘Orphism and Bacchic Mysteries: New Evidence and Old Problems of Interpretation’ (1977), ‘Itinerant Diviners and Magicians: A Neglected Element in Cultural Contacts’ (1983), and ‘Oriental and Greek Mythology: The Meeting of Parallels’ (1987), for example, changed the ways we look at the ancient world, its rituals, and its beliefs. Luckily for us, his students edited eight volumes of Kleine Schriften, published between 2001 and 2011 as supplements to Hypomnemata (volumes I and VI include a complete bibliography of his publications through the year 2000). Four of these are dedicated to his work on religions and myths. But no one’s work can be represented by titles alone. What Burkert gave us was new ways of looking at ancient Greek religions and myths that forever changed our ideas about who the Greeks were. Three contributions stand out in particular. First, under the influence of Karl Meuli, who had brought classics into contact with ethnology, and of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who had studied animal behavior, Burkert offered us models for how ancient Greek sacrifice and other rituals had developed that were anchored in what he argued was basic human nature (Homo Necans, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, and a host of articles). Especially striking were his proposals that much of Greek religion had deep roots in the communal need