Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth

Name: Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth
Author: Walter Burkert

Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth is a work by Walter Burkert (1972).

Core claims

Burkert’s central provocation is not that the Greeks were violent but that violence itself — specifically the ritualized killing of animals — functioned as the generative grammar of all Greek sacred experience, myth, and social order, making the act of killing constitutive rather than incidental to consciousness.
Homo Necans collapses the boundary between ethology and philology by arguing that sacrificial ritual carries a continuous behavioral signature from Palaeolithic hunting bands through Athenian civic religion, positioning guilt and restitution — not belief or theology — as the engine of religious continuity.
The book’s deepest structural claim — that the threefold rhythm of inhibition, killing, and restitution recurs “with almost monotonous regularity” across festivals, mysteries, and myths — constitutes a depth-psychological argument about compulsion repetition operating at the civilizational level, whether or not Burkert names it as such.

How does Burkert’s derivation of the Great Goddess from hunting-band social dynamics challenge or complicate Erich Neumann’s archetypal account in The Great Mother, and what are the consequences for clinical amplification of goddess imagery?
Burkert and Girard published their central works on sacrificial violence in the same year (1972): where exactly do Homo Necans and Violence and the Sacred diverge on the question of whether the victim’s guilt is real or projected, and how does this divergence map onto Jung’s concept of the shadow?
If Burkert is correct that ritual imprinting precedes and conditions mythological elaboration, what does this imply for James Hillman’s privileging of image over behavior in Re-Visioning Psychology — does Hillman’s archetypal psychology rest on a second-order phenomenon?