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GREEK RELIGION GREEK RELIGION Archaic and Classical Walter Burkert Translated by John Rallan 1 BLACKWELL UXORI English translation Copyright © 1985 by Basil Blackwell Ltd and Harvard University Press Originally published in German as Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche, in the series Dic Religionen der Menschheit, vol. 15, © 1977, Verlag W. Kohlhainnier, Stuttgart English translation first published 1985 First published in paperback 1987 R e p rin te d 1994. 1996 Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road. Oxford, 0 X 4 1J F , U K All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, 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, without the prior permission o f the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to thc condition that it shall not. by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form o f binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Burkert, Walter Greek religion: archaic and classical I . G re e c e — R eligion I. Title II. Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche. English 2 9 2 '.0 8 B L 782 IS B N 0- 6 3 1 - 1 5 624-0 Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd. Gateshead. Tvne & Wear Contents Prefacc to the English Edition ix Introduction i 1 A Survey of Scholarship i 2 The Sources 4 3 The Scope of the Study 7 I Prehistory and the Minoan-Myccnacan Age 1 The Neolithic and Early Bronze Age 10 2 Indo-Eu ropean 15 3 The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion 19 3.1 A Historical Survey 19 3.2 The State of the Sources 22 3.3 The Cult Places 24 C aves ^ 24 Peak Sanctuaries 26 Tree Sanctuaries 28 House Sanctuaries 29 T em ples 31 G raves 33 3.4 Rituals and Symbols 34 3.5 The Minoan Deities 39 3.6 The Mycenacan Gods and Linear B 43 4 The ‘Dark Age’ and the Problem of Continuity 47 II Ritual and Sanctuary 1 ‘Working Sacred Things’: Animal Sacrifice 55 1.1 Description and Interpretation 55 1.2 Blood Rituals 59 1.3 Fire Rituals · 60 i.4 Animal and God 64 2 Gift Offerings and Libation 66 2.1 First Fruit Offerings 66 2.2 Votive Offerings 68 2.3 Libation 70 3 P rayer 73 4 Purification 75 4.1 Function and Methods 75 4.2 The Sacred and the Pure 77 4.3 Death, Illness, and Madness 79 4.4 Purification by Blood 80 4.5 Pharmakos 82 5 The Sanctuary 84 5. i Te menos 84 5.2 Altar 87 5.3 Temple and Cult Image 88 5.4 Anathemata 92 6 Priests 95 7 The Festival 99 7. i Pompe 99 7.2 Agermos 101 7.3 Dancing and Hymns 102 7.4 Masks, Phalloi, Aischrologia 103 7.5 Agon 105 7.6 The Banquet of the Gods 107 7.7 Sacrcd Marriage 108 8 Ecstasy and Divination 109 8 .1 Enthousiasmos 109 8.2 The Art of the Seer 111 8.3 Oracles 114 III The Gods 1 The Spell of Homer 119 2 Individual Gods 125 2.1 Zeus 125 2.2 Hera 131 2.3 Poseidon 136 2.4 Athena 139 2.5 Apollo 143 2.6 Artemis 149 2.7 Aphrodite 152 2.8 Hermes 156 2.9 Demeter 159 2.10 Dionysos 161 2.11 Hephaistos 167 2 .12 A rcs 169 3 The Remainder of the Pantheon 170 3. ι Lesser Gods 170 3.2 Societies of Gods 173 3.3 Nature Deities «74 3.4 Foreign Gods 176 3.5 Daimon «79 4 The Special Character of Greek Anthropomorphism 182 IV The Dead, Heroes, and Chthonic Gods ι Burial and the Cult of thc Dead 190 2 Afterlife Mythology «94 3 Olympian and Chthonic *99 4 The Heroes 203 5 Figures who cross the Chthonic-Olvmpian Boundary 208 5. i Heracles 208 5.2 The Dioskouroi 212 5.3 Asklepios 214 V Polis and Polytheism 1 Thought Patterns in Greek Polytheism 216 General Considerations 216 Thc Family of the Gods 218 Pairs of Gods 219 Old and Young 221 Dionysos 222 2 The Rhythm of thc Festivals 225 2.1 Festival Calendars 225 2.2 Year Ending and New Year 227 2.3 Karneia 234 2.4 Anthesteria 237 2.5 Thcsmophoria 242 3 Social Functions of Cult 246 3.1 Gods between Amorality and Law 246 3.2 Thc Oath 25O 3.3 The Creation of Solidarity in thc Playing and thc Interplay o f Roles 254 3.4 Initiation 260 3.5 Crisis Management 264 4 Piety in the Mirror of Greek Language 268 ‘Sacrcd ' 269 Theos 271 Eusebeia 272 Mysteries and Asceticism Mystery Sanctuaries 276 General Considerations 2 7 6 Clan and Family Mysteries 278 Thc Kabciroi and Samothrace 28 I Eleusis 2 8 5 Bacchica and Orphica 290 Bacchic Mysteries 29 0 Bacchic Hopes for an Afterlife 293 Orpheus and Pythagoras 296 Bios 3 0 1 Philosophical Religion Thc New Foundation: Being and thc Divine 305 The Crisis: Sophists and Atheists 311 Thc Deliverance: Cosmic Religion and Metaphysics 317 Prc-Socratic Outlines 317 Plato: Thc Good and thc Soul 321 Plato: Cosmos and Visible Gods 325 Aristotle and Xcnocratcs: Spirit, God, and Demons 329 Philosophical Religion and Polis Religion: Plato's Laws 332 Notes 339 Bibliography 473 Index of Greek Words 479 Index 482 Preface to the English Edition l he German edition of this book was published in 1977; the transformation into an English book of 1985 can hardly bc complete. The author has used the chancc 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 Mycenacan religion, so that the short account contained in the first chaptcr of this book must bc taken as a sourcc of clues rather than final results. VV.B. Introduction I A SURVEY OF SCHOLARSHIP 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 histoncal phenomenon it is unique and unrepeatable, and is itself thc product of an involved prehistory. In Western tradition an awareness of Greek religion was kept alive in three 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 Ncoplatonic philosophy. The allegorical method of exposition, which taught that thc names of the gods should be understood on thc one hand as natural and on the other hand as meta physical 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 religion. Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik1 is the last large- scale and thoroughly unavailing endeavour of this kind. There was, however, another path which could bc taken, namely, to construct a self-consciously pagan counter-position to Christianity. Thc fascination which this idea exercised can be traccd from the time of thc Renaissance to Schiller’s poem Die Götter Griechenlands (1788) and Goethe’s Braut von Korinth (17 9 7 ) 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 ancicnt religion with direct meaning and relevance and devoted itself instead to thc critical collection and chronological ordering of thc source material. 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 thc individual Greek tribes and their history. Here it was Karl Otfried Müller5 who led the way, and thc same path was still followed by Wilamowitz, the master of historical • 2 A SURVEY OF SCHOLARSHIP philology, right up to the work of his old age Der Glaube der Hellenen/’ It w as, 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 reconstruc tion of an Indo-European religion and mythology. With further progress in historical linguistics, however, this enterprise, which had remained deeply indebted to the nature allegorizing of antiquity,7 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 customs alongside their ancient counterparts*' with the result that the customs of antiquity, the rituals, were brought into focus beside the myths.