Walter Burkert and a natural theory of religion

In his studies of ancient cultures, Walter Burkert has usually focused on materials derived from Greece and the ancient Near East. In Creation of the Sacred, he examines religious universalia in order to account for the ubiquity and persistence of the phenomenon of religion and to produce a general theory of religion. The themes and problems he has examined in previous books have led him to the claim in Creation of the Sacred that religion can be traced to origins in biology, and that religion derives from biology and language as genes and culture co-evolve. © 2000 Academic Press.