Savage Energies: Lessons of Myth and Ritual in Ancient Greece (review)

This book, a translation of Wilder Ursprung: Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen, published in 1990 by Klaus Wagenbach, appears to be a new offering from one of the most important scholars of ancient Greek myth and religion, but it is in fact not original material. On close inspection of the notes, it becomes evident that the book is composed of five separate papers written and published or delivered between 1964 and 1970, and, with one exception, no revisions to the text or the notes of the pieces were made for this edition.

As such, the book will not add substantially to the ongoing debate over the nature and meaning of Greek myth. Nor does it offer a conspectus of Burkert's tremendous contribution to the field. Instead, it can be read as a primer on the point of view that he has come to champion, that ancient myth can best be understood as complementary to ritual, each explaining and enacting the other. The complex of ritual and myth in the religious life of the Greeks functions, in Burkert's view, to express primaeval anxieties and conflicts arising from human beings' relationship to other humans and to their environment. Basic human needs and behaviors—the need to hunt, the need for purification, initiation into adulthood—generate anxieties that are expressed and resolved in the myth-ritual complex.

Central to Burkert's approach is his position that sacrifice represents a working out of the anxiety caused by early man's need to kill his food. This view of sacrifice in Greek cult was developed in his book Homo Necans (De Gruyter, 1972); two of the pieces in the current work are earlier statements of this position. The first essay, "Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual," applies this position to the origins of Greek tragedy. In another piece, "Buzyges and Palladion: Violence and the Courts in Ancient Greek Ritual," Burkert knits together the evidence for a ritual and its associated myth to argue for the centrality of the ox sacrifice in the ritual and for the expiation of the bloodguilt that it symbolically causes. Although very influential, Burkert's reading of sacrifice has garnered considerable opposition on the grounds that it is reductive, that it reads meanings into the rituals that are not expressed in the literature, and that it presupposes a background for much of the Greek myth-ritual complex in the activities of ancestral hunter-gatherer communities whose continuity with the historical Greeks is entirely hypothetical.

Burkert also identifies the processes of initiation and purification in several obscure myth-ritual complexes. In "The Legend of Kekrops's Daughters and the Arrephoria: From Initiation Ritual to Panathenaic Festival," he explores a mysterious Athenian ritual and the related myth of Kekrops's daughters, but the essay is dated in the light of more recent archaeological finds. In "Jason, Hypsipyle, and New Fire at Lemnos: A Study in Myth and Ritual," Burkert digs into the meaning of the "Lemnian Crime." The story, known from the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece, tells of the slaughter of all the men of Lemnos by their wives and daughters, who then lived in an all-female paradise until the arrival of the Argonauts released them from their chastity. Explaining the myth as an adjunct to a purification ritual seems flat. Burkert himself acknowledges that the myth, in its various literary forms, carries a full load of meaning—"love, hatred, and their conflict, murderous instincts and piety, solidarity of women and family bonds, hateful separation and lustful reunion" (p. 78)—and the same can be said for the ritual. Furthermore, Burkert here, as elsewhere, fills in gaps in the evidence by drawing on comparanda from other rituals elsewhere; he finds them in abundance, but the practice threatens to conflate meanings from...