Walter Burkert’s Homo Necans (1972; English translation 1983) stands as the defining text through which the depth-psychology and comparative-religion corpus engages the proposition that killing — sacrificial, ritual, and martial — constitutes a founding condition of human civilization rather than an aberration from it. The work’s central argument, articulated with formidable classical and anthropological learning, is that solidarity is achieved through sacred crime: that human communal life is structured by institutionalized violence channeled and sublimated through sacrificial ritual. Burkert draws the term’s conceptual engine from Konrad Lorenz’s ethology of aggression, a genealogy he acknowledges candidly in his preface, and presses it into an account of Greek religion in which sacrifice, hunting, and funerary ritual share a common grammar of killing-and-restitution. The book’s most axiomatic formulation — ‘Only homo necans can become homo sapiens’ — crystallizes its anthropological wager: that lethal violence is not incidental but constitutive of the symbolic and cognitive achievements we name humanity. Burkert’s interlocutors in the wider corpus include Frazer, Harrison, and Lévi-Strauss, and his thesis enters into implicit dialogue with depth-psychological accounts of aggression, guilt, and atonement. The term thus anchors discussions of sacrifice, myth, ritual substitution, and the archaic roots of tragic consciousness across classical studies, history of religion, and depth psychology.
Nourishment, order, and civilized life are born of their antithesis: the encounter with death. Only homo necans can become homo sapiens.
This passage delivers the book’s axiomatic claim: that the capacity for lethal sacrifice is the anthropological precondition for the emergence of human reason and civilization.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
The thrust of Homo Necans runs counter to these trends. It attempts to show that things were different in the formative period of our civilization; it argues that solidarity was achieved through a sacred crime with due reparation.
Burkert explicitly positions Homo Necans against progressive optimism, arguing that archaic communal solidarity was constituted through ritualized transgression and atonement rather than innocence.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
Aggression and human violence have marked the progress of our civilization and appear, indeed, to have grown so during its course that they have become a central problem of the present.
Burkert opens his analytical framework by grounding the study of sacrificial ritual in the evolutionary biology of intraspecific aggression, drawing directly on Lorenz to argue that institutionalized violence underlies all social authority.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
As the idealistic tradition deteriorates, however, secret societies, ecstatic behavior, love of violence and death spring up all the more wildly and destructively amid seemingly rational orders. Ritual cannot be produced artificially.
Burkert warns that the modern dissolution of sacrificial ritual does not eliminate the violence it once channeled, but instead releases it in pathological and uncontrolled forms.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis
The succession of male generations is characterized by conflict and death, and yet culture needs a continuity that can survive catastrophe. In order to attain such continuity and demonstrate it, ritual, starting in the Upper Palaeolithic, apparently found a special device: the symbolizing of the feminine.
Burkert extends homo necans into an account of intergenerational conflict, arguing that ritual sacrifice — including mythic child-sacrifice and its substitutes — serves to negotiate the violent succession of generations and secure cultural continuity.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
Blood sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of animals, has been basic to religion through history, so that it survives in spiritualized form even in Christianity. How did this violent phenomenon achieve the status of the sacred?
The book’s scholarly reception frames homo necans as a milestone contribution to the history of religion, situating it alongside foundational figures such as Frazer, Harrison, and Lévi-Strauss.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
It almost seems as though the aim of war is to gather dead warriors, just as the Aztecs waged war in order to take prisoners to use as sacrificial victims. The erected and consecrated monument is what endures, and it embodies the duty of the following generation.
Burkert extends the homo necans thesis to the institution of war itself, arguing that ritual killing and the consecration of death serve the integrative function of binding youth to the political community.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
Burkert, Homo necans, 250-255 has taken a different direction and, accepting the antiquity of both readings, has tried to reconcile them by suggesting that the Keres, or ‘spooks’ and Kares or ‘primeval inhabitants’ are in fact identical.
Bremmer engages Burkert’s Homo Necans as a primary scholarly authority on Athenian festival religion, specifically its treatment of the Anthesteria, while critically assessing one of its philological proposals.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
Burkert, Homo necans, 251; F. Graf, Gnomon 51 (1979) 213 n. 22.
Homo Necans is cited as a standard reference in the scholarly apparatus surrounding Greek festival and soul-belief research, indicating its canonical status within the field.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
--. 1983. Homo necans [1972]. Trans. P. Bing. Berkeley.
Ruth Padel lists Homo Necans in her bibliography, marking it as a standard reference in scholarly work on Greek tragic selfhood and religion.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994aside
The achievement-subject that understands itself as its own master, as homo liber, turns out to be homo sacer. The sovereign of achievement society is simultaneously his own homo sacer.
Han deploys the cognate construction homo sacer (Agamben) rather than homo necans, but the passage’s meditation on the paradoxical identity of killer and killed, master and slave, occupies adjacent conceptual territory to Burkert’s sacrificial logic.
, The Burnout Society, 2010aside