Homo Necans
 | |
| Author | Walter Burkert |
|---|---|
| Original title | Homo Necans: Interpretationen Altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Subject | Ancient Greek religion |
Publication date | 1972 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (German: Homo Necans: Interpretationen Altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen) is a 1972 book on ancient Greek religion and mythology by the classicist Walter Burkert. It won the Weaver Award for Scholarly Literature, awarded by the Ingersoll Foundation, in 1992.
Summary
Burkert's core thesis is that when
religious history,[1] Burkert confronts the power and effect of tradition in uncovering traces of ancient hunting rituals so motivated in historical animal sacrifice and human sacrifice (by his thesis unified as deriving from the same fundamental principle) in specific historical Greek rituals with relevance to human religious behaviour in general. Burkert acknowledges that a decisive impulse for the thesis derived from Konrad Lorenz' On Aggression
(1963).
The thesis is an extension of the
cult-complexes in detail, confronting "sacrificial ritual with its tension between encountering death and affirming life, its external form consisting of preparations, a frightening central moment, and restitution",[2]
and affirming in detail the initial hypothesis.
Reception
Homo Necans was conceived in the 1960s; it controversially introduced
functionalism, along the lines of Jane Ellen Harrison's Themis, to a German audience, and employed a form of structuralism in interpreting complexes of ritual and festival, to apply some findings of ethology for the first time to mythology. René Girard's Violence and the Sacred appeared the same year. The book that was controversial at its first appearance was less revolutionary when it finally appeared in English, Burkert noted, in an introduction to the English translation (1983). The historian Peter Gay praised Homo Necans as a suggestive discussion of the impulse to revenge.[3]
Journal of Hellenic Studies
, remarked that the book was "an exceptional intellectual experience".
See also
- Killer ape theory
- Origin of religion
- Religious violence
Notes
- ^ Burkert 1983: "Introduction" p. xiii; Burkert in his introduction to the English edition remarked upon the emergence of sociobiology.
- ^ Burkert 1983:83.
- ISBN 0-00-638089-1.
Bibliography
- Homo Necans: Interpretationen Altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (in German). Berlin: De Gruyter. 1972. ISBN 3-11-003875-7.
- Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. trans. Peter Bing. Berkeley: University of California. 1983. ISBN 0-520-05875-5.)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link - (1997) Homo Necans: Interpretationen Altgriechischer Opferriten Und Mythen: 2., Um Ein Nachwort Erweiterte Auflage (Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche Und Vorarbeiten, Vol 32) (2nd edition, with a 1996 postscript) de Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-015098-0.