Volume 43, Number 8 · May 9, 1996
The Uses of God
By Norman Cohn
Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions
by Walter Burkert
Harvard University Press, 272 pp., $29.95
Walter Burkert is professor of Classics at the University of Zurich and a scholar of great distinction. He is also a man of remarkably wide interests. Works of his that have already been published in translation by American university presses cover matters as various as the anthropology of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and myth, ancient mystery cults, and the penetration of Near Eastern religions into archaic Greece. His more general work on Greek religion between 800 to 300 BCE was hailed by a reviewer in these pages as a masterpiece.[*] The aim of Creation of the Sacred is even more ambitious: to uncover the very origins of religion.
Review, 3064 words
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