Taking as point of departure Walter Burkert's work, this article seeks to theorise the relationship between needing and getting, choreographed by ritual and mythology, and the formal excess that characterises religious practices. While the formal complexity that characterises ritual activity and doctrinal elaboration reminds us of the parallels between religions and the aesthetic realm, the fact that the satisfaction of the needs of organisms is sought against a background of scarcity reminds us of the role of power. It is, however, to work-that is, to what human organisms generally do in order to satisfy their needs-that one must turn, if one is to understand religion. Despite the formal parallels between the organisation of work and the organisation of rituals, and of the role played by rituals in the timing of agricultural and other kinds of labour, 'work' is largely absent from studies of religion. This absence, related to the turning away from concepts even vaguely connected with Marx, seems to go hand in hand with the repression of the working body in contemporary 'theory'. Rejecting such repression, this article focuses on human labour as a key for understanding the emergence of religion.
2000 Academic Press
In the inaugural lecture he delivered at the Technical University of Berlin more than thirty years ago, Walter Burkert (1967) spoke about the Urgeschichte of technology as reflected in ancient religion. 1 Could one think nowadays, when, perhaps as the result of millennial expectations, 'post' reigns supreme, of a word more unfashionable than Ur? 2 Yet for more than three decades, oblivious to fashions, Burkert has been concerned with UrsprΓΌnge-with origins. 3 Those who, undeterred by the title, keep on reading the text of Burkert's lecture will find references to Urwaffe (p. 284), Urmensch (pp. 284, 296), ursprΓΌnglich (p. 287), Ur-BehΓ€ltnis, Ur-Gestus (p. 293), Ur-Wagen (p. 295), urzeitliche Technik (p. 297), Ur-Behausungen (p. 298) and Ursprung (p. 299). Nevertheless, Burkert, unlike romantic historians of religion, 4 is interested not just in that which can be removed from the realm of the ordinary by virtue of its being attached to an Ur. The lecture is in fact about the interaction between religion and that which is subject to necessary, if sometimes slow, change, namely technology. How to understand, however, the intersection between the realm of origins and that of change? What is it that, appearing at the intersections of these domains, regulates their interaction? The answer is need. For Burkert-but not just for him-religion is the name to be given to the practices and beliefs that grow out of the needs of the organisms we happen to be (see 1981, p. 130). From the early article on technology to Homo Necans (1972/1997) to his contributions to Le sacrifice dans l'antiquitΓ© (1981) to Violent Origins (1987) and to Creation of The Sacred (1996), 'need' (BedΓΌrfnis 1967, p. 281) is always present, explicitly or implicitly. The parade of Greek and Near Eastern rituals one encounters in his writings can be regarded as the luxuriant transformation of the thirty-one functions involving loss and retrieval identified by Propp (see Propp). Many of Burkert's writings in fact seem to be ruled by a rhythm that goes back and forth between amplification and concentration: from the ritual expansion of Propp's sequence to its reduction, first to twenty-one functions, then to the one essential command of 'get': 5 the basso continuo of needing and getting being orchestrated-in fact, choreographed-by needy bodies. It is this aspect of Burkert's theorising, even more than his Frazer-like penchant for ransacking the world's mythologies, that is likely to disturb some of his readers, for the process of theoretical distillation that leads from a body of rituals to the most elementary 2000 Academic Press