Homo Necans

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Homo Necans is a book on ancient Greek religion and mythology by Walter Burkert. The book's core thesis is that when paleolithic man became a hunter, in spite of the generally omnivorous orientation of the great apes, lack of a predator instinct was made up for by turning patterns of intra-species aggression against the prey. Thus, the animal hunted by ancient man automatically acquired aspects of an equal, as if it were of one of the hunter's relations. Burkert uncovers 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 historical Greek ritual, and in human religious behaviour in general. Burkert admitted that a decisive impulse for the thesis of Homo Necans derived from Konrad Lorenz' On Aggression (1963).

The thesis set out in the first chapter is an extension of the hunting hypothesis, which states that hunting as a means of obtaining food was a dominant influence on human evolution and cultural development (as opposed to gathering vegetation or scavenging).

The remainder of the book supports the opening thesis by integrating a multitude of examples that elaborate basic ritual as it is reflected in Greek mythology.

The book 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. By chance, 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).

[edit] Bibliography

(1972) Homo Necans: Interpretationen Altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (in German). Berlin: De Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-003875-7.
- (1983) Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing, Berkeley: University of California. ISBN 0-520-05875-5.
(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.