Quick Answer
The Greeks had no bible, no creed, no clergy, no church and no obligation to believe anything, and they killed an enormous number of animals. Burkert's book is the standard account of what they actually did rather than what they told stories about, and the gap between the two is the most useful thing in it. Nearly everything written popularly about Greek religion is retold mythology with modern meanings attached. This is the documented practice, and it is stranger.
Key Takeaways
- Ritual first, myth second. The stories were variable; the practices were not.
- Orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Doing it right mattered; believing it did not.
- Sacrifice is the centre, and most meat eaten in a Greek city came through it.
- He is restrained about the mysteries because the evidence genuinely is thin.
- A reference work, not a narrative. Consult it by section.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Greek Religion appeared in German in 1977 and in English translation in 1985, and it has been the standard single-volume scholarly account ever since.
It covers the archaic and classical periods, roughly from the eighth to the fourth centuries before the common era, and it is organised by category rather than chronology: the prehistory, the forms of ritual, the individual gods, the dead and the heroes, the religion of the city, the mysteries, and the philosophers' relationship to all of it.
It is a reference work. The footnotes are extensive, the prose is efficient rather than warm, and the organisation assumes you will look things up.
What makes it valuable to a non-specialist is its subject. This is not a book about Greek mythology. It is a book about Greek religious practice, and the two turn out to have less to do with each other than almost everyone assumes.
What it is not. There is no retelling of the myths here, no character studies of the gods as personalities, and no psychological interpretation. If you want the stories, this is the wrong book and there are many right ones.
Who Walter Burkert Was
Burkert was born in Germany in 1931, trained in classics, and spent the bulk of his career as professor of classical philology at Zurich. He died in 2015.
His method was unusually broad for a classicist. He worked across philology, archaeology, epigraphy, comparative religion, anthropology and, in his more speculative moods, ethology and evolutionary theory.
He was also willing to make large claims. Alongside this reference work he produced arguments about the origins of sacrifice, about Near Eastern influence on Greek culture, and about the biological substrate of religion generally, several of which were contested and one of which was widely rejected.
The relationship between the two modes is worth knowing. This book is Burkert being careful. His other books are Burkert being adventurous, and the difference shows.
Ritual Before Myth
The organising conviction of the whole enterprise.
Burkert's position is that ritual is the substance and myth is commentary. What existed in Greek religion was a body of practice: sacrifices performed at particular altars on particular days by particular people in a particular order.
The stories attached to those practices varied enormously. The same festival was explained differently in different cities. Poets altered myths freely for literary purposes and nobody objected, because there was no authoritative version to violate.
What did not vary, or varied far more slowly, was what people did. The procedure of a sacrifice is recognisable across centuries and across the Greek world, while the myth explaining any given rite might have three incompatible versions in circulation simultaneously.
The consequence for a modern reader is significant. We approach Greek religion through the myths because the myths are what survived in literature and what gets retold. Burkert's argument is that we are therefore approaching it through its least stable and least important layer.
A Religion With No Church
The section every reader should absorb, because the absences are so complete that they are difficult to hold in mind.
There was no sacred text. Homer and Hesiod were foundational cultural documents and they were not scripture, could be criticised, and carried no authority to settle a religious question.
There was no creed. Nobody was ever required to affirm a proposition about the gods. The category of religious belief, in the sense of assenting to doctrines, is not one the Greeks had.
There was no church. No institution existed that spanned the Greek world, defined orthodoxy, or governed practice. Each city ran its own cults.
There was no clergy as a profession. Priesthoods were offices, frequently held for a term, sometimes allotted, often hereditary within a family, and generally held by ordinary citizens who had other lives. Nobody trained for the priesthood as a vocation.
There was no theology in the systematic sense, no salvation for most people, no scripture-based ethics, and no requirement that religion be the organising principle of a life.
What there was instead: a calendar of festivals, an inherited set of correct procedures, and the strong conviction that performing them correctly mattered enormously and that failing to do so endangered the whole community.
This is genuinely difficult to hold onto because the categories we bring to religion were shaped by traditions that have scripture, creed and clergy. Ask what a Greek believed about Athena and the question barely lands. He sacrificed to her at the right times, in the right way, along with everyone else in his city, and whether he held propositions about her existence was not a question anyone put to him. Orthopraxy without orthodoxy is not a deficient version of what we mean by religion. It is a different kind of thing, and reading it as deficient is the standard error.
The Central Act
Burkert puts sacrifice at the centre and refuses to let the reader look away from it.
The basic religious act in the Greek world was the killing of a domestic animal at an altar, the burning of specified portions for the god, and the distribution and consumption of the rest by the participants.
This was not an occasional dramatic event. It was constant. Sacrifices marked festivals, oaths, departures, arrivals, births, deaths, treaties, assemblies, athletic contests and the opening of almost any collective undertaking.
The scale at major festivals was substantial: hecatombs of a hundred animals are attested, and large civic festivals involved slaughter and distribution on a scale that fed a significant portion of the population.
Burkert's insistence on this is deliberate. Popular treatment of Greek religion focuses on temples, statues, oracles and myths, all of which are aesthetically comfortable. The daily reality was blood, smoke, the smell of burning fat, and a great deal of butchery, and a picture of Greek religion that omits it is not a picture of Greek religion.
What Sacrifice Actually Involved
The procedural detail is one of the book's most useful sections because it shows how much was structured.
The animal was led to the altar, decorated, and ideally made to appear willing. Water was sprinkled on it so that its shudder could be read as assent. Barley grains were scattered. Hair was cut from its forehead and burned. The killing was done with a concealed knife, and at major sacrifices the women present cried out at the moment of death.
The thigh bones wrapped in fat were burned for the god, along with the tail, whose curling was watched. The organs were roasted and eaten first by the immediate participants. The meat was then divided, frequently by lot to ensure fairness, and distributed.
Burkert notes the structural oddity, familiar from a myth about how the division was established: the gods receive bones and fat, and the humans receive the meat. The story explains this as a trick played on the gods; the practice is what it is regardless.
Several features of the procedure work to distribute or deflect responsibility for the killing: the concealed knife, the animal's staged consent, the ritual that follows in which the guilt is displaced. Burkert reads these as evidence that the killing was felt as a problem requiring management, which is the seed of his larger and more contested thesis.
The Hunting Thesis
Worth covering because readers will encounter it, and worth flagging as not accepted.
In a separate book, Burkert argued that sacrificial ritual descends from Palaeolithic hunting practice, that the guilt and awe surrounding the killing of a large animal is the deep root of religion generally, and that the procedures around Greek sacrifice preserve behaviour developed over hundreds of thousands of years of hunting.
The argument drew on ethology, on Freud, and on comparative material, and it was made at roughly the same moment as related theories about violence and the sacred by other scholars.
It has not held up in its strong form. The evidence for continuity across that timespan is not available, the ethological arguments were of their period, and specialists have generally treated it as an interesting speculation rather than an established account. Burkert himself moderated it in later work.
In this book it appears in restrained form: the observation that the killing was evidently felt as requiring management, without the large evolutionary claim attached. That restraint is one reason this book has aged better than the other one.
How He Handles the Gods
The chapter on individual deities is the one most readers turn to and it is deliberately unsatisfying in a productive way.
Burkert treats each major god by asking what is documented: where their sanctuaries were, what was sacrificed to them, what epithets they carried in which places, what their festivals involved, what the archaeological record shows.
What emerges is that the tidy characterisations we inherit are largely literary. Athena is not simply the goddess of wisdom; she is a cluster of local cults with different functions, connected by a name and by some shared imagery, and the Athena worshipped in one city may have little functional overlap with the Athena of another.
Epithets do enormous work. A god with one epithet in one sanctuary and a different epithet elsewhere may effectively be two different objects of cult, and Greeks appear to have been comfortable with that in a way that a reader expecting coherent divine personalities is not.
The gods, in short, are considerably messier than the mythology suggests, and the messiness is the historical reality.
The Dead, Heroes and the Underground
A dimension the popular version almost entirely omits.
Alongside the Olympian cults ran a substantial body of practice directed at the dead: tending graves, making offerings, and the festivals at which the dead were understood to return.
Hero cult was separate from and important as the worship of gods. A hero was a dead human being, usually with a known tomb, who received offerings and was expected to help the locality. The rituals differed from Olympian sacrifice in specific ways: performed at a tomb rather than a raised altar, at night rather than by day, with the offering destroyed rather than shared.
Burkert also covers the chthonic dimension, the gods and powers of the earth and the underworld, and the distinct procedures attached to them, including the figures associated with crossroads and boundaries.
The practical religion of an ordinary Greek involved a great deal of this and comparatively little of the grand Olympian material that dominates the literature.
Religion as Civic Machinery
The model Burkert works within, which is also the thing most revised since.
Greek religion was, on this account, inseparable from the city. Cults were civic institutions, priesthoods were public offices, sanctuaries were state property, festivals were funded and organised by the city, and the calendar was a civic calendar.
Participation was participation in the community rather than a personal spiritual matter. A citizen sacrificed with his fellow citizens because that was what belonging consisted of.
The consequence Burkert draws is that impiety was a political offence rather than a matter of private conscience: it endangered the community's relationship with powers on which the community depended, which is why the charges brought against certain philosophers were taken seriously.
This is broadly right and it is not the whole story, as later scholarship has established.
On the Mysteries
Readers of esoteric literature will find this chapter frustrating, and the frustration is the correct response.
Burkert covers the mystery cults, the initiations at Eleusis above all, and he is careful about what can be said.
What is documented: that initiation was open to a wide range of people including women and enslaved persons, that it involved a procession, fasting, a drink, a night in a hall, and something shown; that participants reported a changed relationship to death; and that the secret was kept extraordinarily well across many centuries.
What is not documented: what was actually done or shown. The reconstructions in circulation are built from later Christian polemic, from scattered allusions, and from a good deal of inference.
Burkert declines to reconstruct. He sets out the evidence, indicates its limits, and stops.
Readers arriving from the esoteric literature on the mysteries, which is confident and detailed, should notice that the confidence is not coming from the sources.
The Bronze Age Question
The opening chapters cover prehistory and the position is more careful than the popular version.
The Linear B tablets, deciphered in the 1950s, show that several familiar divine names were in use in Mycenaean Greece: names recognisable as Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Hermes, Dionysus and others appear in administrative records of offerings.
That establishes continuity of names across the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces and the following centuries.
It does not establish continuity of anything else. The tablets are inventories, not theology. What those names meant, what practices attached to them, and whether the god called by a name in 1300 was in any meaningful sense the same god in 700, are questions the evidence does not answer.
Burkert is appropriately cautious, which distinguishes him from a long tradition of confident reconstruction of a Minoan goddess religion underlying everything, for which the evidence is considerably thinner than its proponents suggest.
The Eastern Connection
An argument Burkert pressed elsewhere and which appears here in the background.
Against a long-standing tendency to treat Greek culture as a self-generating miracle, he argued that the archaic period saw substantial transmission from the Near East: in craft, in mythological motifs, in divinatory technique, in the alphabet itself, and in religious practice.
Specific parallels between Greek and Mesopotamian material, including in myths of succession among the gods and in techniques of reading omens from entrails, are close enough to require explanation.
The argument has been broadly accepted and it took work, because the alternative view was ideologically entrenched.
For a reader, the useful consequence is that Greek religion was not sealed. It was one node in a wider eastern Mediterranean world, borrowing and adapting continuously.
What Has Been Revised
Four decades of scholarship has qualified the book in specific ways and an honest review should name them.
The civic model. Burkert's picture of religion as essentially a function of the city has been challenged as underplaying individual and household practice: the offerings made at home, the personal vows, the private consultation of specialists, the religion of people who were not citizens. Later work has recovered a great deal of lived religion the civic model does not capture.
Athenian bias. The evidence is heavily Athenian because that is where the texts survive, and the book reflects it. Substantial work since has documented practice elsewhere and found more variation than the standard picture allows.
Magic. The material on curse tablets, binding spells and ritual specialists operating outside civic cult is far richer than was recognised when he wrote, and the boundary between religion and magic has been substantially redrawn.
Women. Women's religious activity, which was extensive and in some cults exclusive, has received a great deal of attention since and is thinner here than it should be.
Against the Popular Version
The reason this book matters to a general reader.
Most writing about Greek religion available to a non-specialist is retold mythology with interpretation added: the gods as psychological archetypes, the myths as encoded wisdom, the mysteries as a system of initiatory transformation whose content is confidently described.
Burkert supplies the documentary floor. Here is what was done, where, by whom, how often, and how we know. Here is what is inferred. Here is what is not known.
The effect on a reader is calibrating rather than deflating. The actual practice is stranger than the tidy version: more blood, more local variation, more comfort with contradiction, less interest in belief, and a relationship between humans and gods that is closer to careful management of a powerful neighbour than to devotion.
Anyone writing or thinking about Greek religious material is better for knowing where the documented ground ends.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you work with Greek material and want the practice rather than the stories.
Read it if you are interested in what a religion is when it has no scripture, no creed and no clergy, which is a genuinely instructive case and unlike anything most readers have encountered.
Read it alongside van Gennep and Turner for the theoretical frameworks that make sense of ritual, and alongside the Presocratics for what happened when philosophers started asking about the gods.
Do not read it for the myths, do not read it front to back, and do not expect the mysteries chapter to satisfy you.
The idea worth carrying out of this book is that belief may be a much more recent and much more local requirement than we assume. For centuries, in a culture that produced philosophy, drama and mathematics, a person's religion consisted of doing certain things at certain times with their neighbours, and nobody asked what they thought was happening. That is not primitive and it is not hypocrisy. It suggests that the modern assumption, that religion is fundamentally a matter of holding propositions and that practice follows from belief, is one arrangement among several, and that the traditions organised the other way round were not obviously worse at it.
What they actually did, as against what they told stories about.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Greek Religion by Burkert?
The standard single-volume scholarly account of ancient Greek religious practice, published in German in 1977 and in English in 1985. It covers the archaic and classical periods and organises the material around ritual rather than around mythology.
Who was Walter Burkert?
A German classicist, 1931 to 2015, who taught for most of his career at Zurich and became the leading authority on Greek religion in the second half of the twentieth century. He worked across archaeology, philology and comparative religion.
What is the book's central argument?
That ritual, not myth, is the substance of Greek religion. What the Greeks had was a set of things people did at particular times and places, and the stories were secondary, variable and never authoritative in the way a scripture is.
Did Greek religion have scripture or creed?
No. There was no sacred book, no creed, no church, no clergy as a separate profession, no doctrine of salvation and no requirement to believe anything. Correct practice mattered; correct belief was not a category.
How central was animal sacrifice?
Entirely central. The killing of an animal, the burning of specified portions and the distribution of the meat was the basic religious act, and the great majority of meat eaten in a Greek city had been sacrificed. Burkert insists readers face this.
What is the Homo Necans thesis?
Burkert's argument in a separate book that sacrificial ritual descends from Palaeolithic hunting behaviour and that the experience of killing is foundational to religion. It is contested, was never widely accepted in its strong form, and appears here only in restrained form.
Is there Bronze Age continuity?
Partly. The Linear B tablets show that several Olympian names were already in use in Mycenaean times, which establishes continuity of names. What those names meant then and whether practice was continuous is much less clear.
What does he say about the mysteries?
Less than most readers want, because the evidence is thin. Initiates kept the secret effectively, and Burkert restricts himself to what can be documented rather than reconstructing the rites from later and hostile sources.
Is it readable?
It is clear and it is not narrative. The book is organised as a reference work, densely footnoted, moving systematically through categories, and it is best consulted by section rather than read continuously.
What has scholarship changed since?
A great deal of work has appeared on religion outside Athens, on individual and household practice as against civic religion, on magic, and on women's religious activity, and the civic-centred model Burkert works within has been substantially qualified.
How does it relate to popular writing on Greek myth?
It functions as a corrective. Most popular treatment is retold mythology with modern psychological interpretation attached. Burkert documents what people actually did, which is considerably stranger and less tidy than the stories suggest.
Who should read it?
Anyone who works with Greek material seriously and wants the documented practice rather than the retold myths, and anyone interested in what a religion looks like when it has no scripture, no clergy and no requirement to believe.
The documented version is the interesting one
There is a persistent assumption that the scholarly account of an ancient religion will be the dry version and the esoteric account will be the rich one. With Greek religion the reverse is true. The confident reconstructions of what happened at Eleusis are thinner than they sound, because they are built on almost nothing. What Burkert documents, a civilisation that ran on correct procedure without any requirement to believe, that killed animals constantly and felt the killing as a problem, that worshipped gods who were different objects in different cities and was untroubled by it, is considerably stranger than anything invented for it. The evidence rewards going to it.
Sources & References
- Burkert, Walter (1977, English 1985). Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical.
- Burkert, W. Homo Necans, for the contested sacrifice thesis.
- Burkert, W. The Orientalizing Revolution, on Near Eastern influence.
- Linear B evidence for Mycenaean divine names.
- Later scholarship on lived religion, household cult and non-Athenian practice.
- Research on Greek magic, curse tablets and ritual specialists.
- Documentary evidence for the Eleusinian mysteries and its limits.