Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Stubborn Facts
Walter Burkert (1931-2015), Greek Religion, tr. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985; rpt. 2001), pp. 217-218 (on structuralist explanations of the pantheon):
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The danger of this approach is, of course, that the historically given reality will perforce be curtailed for the sake of the system and its logical structure. Such relationships are good for thinking, but reality does not always follow suit; a certain stubbornness of the facts remains. Just as the Greek mind does not exist as a unified and definable structure, so the Greek pantheon cannot be regarded as a closed and harmonized system.
