Comptes rendus

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Julia Kindt, Rethinking Greek Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, XIII+ 235 pages, ISBN 978-0-521-11092_ 1.1 Scholarship is a complex and ever-shifting endeavor. Rarely is knowledge produced once and for all, since every field of academic research involves interpretive models that compete with each other and change over time. The study of ancient Greek religion is no exception. The ancient Greeks had no church, clergy, revealed and sacred scriptures, nor, even if they perfected philosophical speculation, a formal system of theology (in the Christian sense). There are instead innumerable deities and heroes, strange rituals, and a rich and shifting mythology. How did a civilization that advanced democracy, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and other arts and sciences remain so “ primitive” in religion ? Influenced by Christian determinism and a Judeo-Christian outlook, it is easy to see why scholarship on Greek religion over the last century and a half has asked such a question and has tended to deny any real religious character – faith, spirituality, personal relationship with the divine sphere – to a system based on communal ritual. The meaning of ancient rituals is still one of the most important questions in the study of Greek religion, and various interpretations have succeeded one another. In the first half of the twentieth century scholars such as James G. Frazer and Ludwig Deubner thought fertility made sense of rituals, while in the second half the emphasis shifted to initiatory rites (for example, in the work of Henri Jeanmaire or Claude Calame). Blood sacrifice, the main ritual act in polytheistic societies, has been extensively studied since the nineteenth century, but the latter half of the twentieth marked a turning point in scholarship : Walter Burkert and Jean-Pierre Vernant in the 1970s managed to transcend the Christian-centered conception of «communion » with God. Burkert, inspired by Karl Meuli’s ethnological work, thought sacrifice originated in the feeling of personal guilt that arose when prehistoric hunters killed animals for food. The French sociological tradition of Émile Durkheim and two works in particular – Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice

(1898) by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss and

Le génie grec dans la religion by Louis Gernet (1932) – influenced Vernant, who saw sacrifices at the core of the socio-political structure formed by the Greek city-state, the polis.

Scholars such as Marcel Detienne or Jean-Louis Durand working with Vernant on Greek blood sacrifice, as well as Burkert himself in his Greek Religion (1985), focused on ways in which religion is embedded within the polis : the frame of reference for dealing with Greek religion became the archaic and classical city-state, considered as an internally coherent political and cultural system. Thus the notion of «polis religion » was born, an idea shaped by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood in two seminal papers published in the 1980s and republished in the 1990s. While scholarship has been thus far concerned with the ways in which religion was embedded within the polis, Julia Kindt’s new work invites us to rethink Greek religion by exploring it beyond the polis. She investigates aspects of the Greek religious experience that «polis religion » would not explain and examines elements that would be impossible to understand in that interpretive framework. This little book has big ambition. Kindt charges the «polis religion » perspective with reducing the complexity of ancient Greek religion and neglecting the role of individuals and personal religion. Several case studies,