A survey of the religious beliefs of ancient Greece covers sacrifices, libations, purification, gods, heroes, the priesthood, oracles, festivals, and the afterlife.

This book is neither a history nor a survey but a comparative phenomenology, concentrating on five major cults.

Burkert is. His book is a marvel of professional scholarship." London Review of Books "This book has established itself as a masterpiece, packed with learning but also rich in ideas and connections of every sort.

. It will find a place alongside the works of Jane Ellen Harrison, Sir James George Frazer, Claude Levi-Strauss, and van Gennep."—Wendy Flaherty, Divinity School, University of Chicago "This book is a professional classic, an absolute ...

For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional ...

Based on lectures about Greek mythology given in Berkeley in spring 1977 as part of the Sather Lectures series.

Ancient Greek culture is often described as a miracle, owing little to its neighbors. Walter Burkert argues against a distorted view, toward a more balanced picture.

In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion.

Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece, whose potentially violent and destructive ...

This book traverses the ancient world's three great centers of cultural exchange--Babylonian Nineveh, Egyptian Memphis, and Iranian Persepolis--to situate classical Greece in its proper historical place, at the Western margin of a more ...