Margaret Murray
Encyclopedia
Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 - 13 November 1963) was a prominent British Egyptologist
and anthropologist
. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis
, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of Christianized Europe and North America were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan
religion devoted to a Horned God
. Whilst this theory is today widely disputed and discredited by historians like Norman Cohn
, Keith Thomas
and Ronald Hutton
, it has had a significant effect in the origins of Neopagan
religions, primarily Wicca
, a faith she supported.
Her work in Egyptology took place largely alongside her mentor and friend, the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, whom she worked alongside at University College London
. One of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship," she was also an ardent feminist
, being actively involved in the Suffragette
movement. From 1953 to 1955, she was the president of the Folklore Society
, although since her death various members of the society have attempted to dissociate the organisation from her and the Murrayite theory of the Witch-Cult.
on 13 July 1863. She attended the University College of London and was a student of linguistics
and anthropology
. She was also a pioneer campaigner for women's rights. Margaret Murray accompanied the renowned Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, on several archaeological excavations in Egypt
and Palestine
during the late 1890s. Murray was the first in a line of female Egyptologists employed at The Manchester Museum
, The University of Manchester. In 1908, she undertook the unwrapping of the Two Brothers
, a Middle Kingdom non-royal burial excavated by Petrie in Egypt. It is regarded as the first interdisciplinary study of mummies and probably kick-started future scientific unwrappings, such as those of Keeper Professor Rosalie David completed in the 1970s.
Her work and association with Petrie helped secure employment at University College as a junior lecturer. Murray's best known and most controversial text, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, was published in 1921. She was consequently named Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University College of London in 1924, a post she held until her retirement in 1935. In 1926, she became a fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute. Murray became President of the Folklore Society
in 1953. Ten years later and having reached 100 years of age, Margaret Murray published her final work, an autobiography entitled My First Hundred Years (1963). She died later that same year of natural causes.
and held ritual sabbaths. Murray maintained that pagan beliefs and religion dating from the neolithic
through the medieval period, secretly practiced human sacrifice until exposed by the witchhunt starting around 1450.
Murray's later books were written for a more popular audience and in a style that was far more imaginative and entertaining than standard academic works. The God of the Witches, 1931 expanded on her claims that the witch cult had worshiped a Horned God
whose origins went back to prehistory. Murray decided that the witches' admissions in trial that they worshiped Satan proved they actually did worship such a god. Thus, according to Murray, reports of Satan actually represented pagan gatherings with their priest wearing a horned helmet to represent their Horned God. Murray also discussed the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury
, Thomas Becket
, claiming to show that he too was a pagan by saying that his death "presents many features which are explicable only by the theory that he also was the substitute for a Divine King" (Murray 171).
Murray now became more and more emotional in her defence of her ideas, claiming that anyone who opposed her did so out of religious prejudice. In The Divine King in England, 1954 she expanded on her earlier claims there was a secret conspiracy of pagans amongst the English nobility, the same English nobility who provided the leading members of the Church. The suspicious death of William Rufus, King of England, was a ritual sacrificial killing of a sacred king
carried out by Henry I
, a man so pious he later founded one of the biggest Abbeys in England. This secret conspiracy, according to her, had killed many early English sovereigns, through to James I
in the early seventeenth century. Saint Joan of Arc
- whose Catholic piety and orthodoxy are attested in numerous documents (such as the letter she dictated threatening to lead a crusade against the Hussites), and who was executed by the English for what even the tribunal members later admitted were political reasons - was rewritten as a pagan martyr by Murray. Her portrait of messianic
(self-) sacrifices of these figures make for entertaining speculation, but they have not been taken seriously as history even by her staunchest supporters, though they have been used in novels (such as Katherine Kurtz's Lammas Night).
remarking that it consisted of "a few well-known works by Continental demonologists, a few tracts printed in England and quite a number of published records of Scottish witch trials. The much greater amount of unpublished evidence was absolutely ignored." Various critics, including historian Norman Cohn
and folklorist Jacqueline Simpson
, have highlighted what they see as Murray's "extreme selectivity" in choosing only sources that backed her argument, and ignoring those that did not. Regarding this, Jacqueline Simpson comments that:
Murray's work involved her rationalizing many elements of the witch trials, particularly those she deemed impossible, such as the accounts of witches flying through the air or the Devil existing as a supernatural entity. However, Simpson criticised her for taking this rationalization too far in claiming that some of them are so ridiculous that they are "unintentionally funny." As evidence for this, Simpson highlights Murray's claim that trial accounts of Satan's cloven hoof were instead referring to "perhaps a specially formed boot or shoe" that the coven-leader wore so that he could be recognized. Subsequent historians examining the Early Modern witch trials, particularly Carlo Ginzburg
, Eva Pocs
and Emma Wilby
have also emphasised that the accounts in many of the witch trials represent visionary experiences, containing within them imaginary and surreal
elements, which goes against Murray's rationalization of the trial accounts.
Murray was also criticised by Simpson for her "passionate system building," developing her own image of a "rigidly codified and uniform [religious] system throughout Britain and Europe" that had its own set "Rites of initiation, dates for festivals, sabbath rituals, discipline and hierarchy within covens."
noted, "Among that small number of scholars who were familiar with the trial records, [Murray's theories] never had a chance. The use of source material which underpinned them was too blatantly flawed." In a 1922 review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in the Folklore journal for instance, W.B. Halliday, an expert on ancient religion, dismissed her theory, and noted that her hypothesis relied upon "documents torn from the background of their own age and divorced from the serious study of their historical antecedents." In a similar vein, C. L'Estrange Ewen, a specialist in the witch trials, referred to them in 1938 as simple "fancies" that were nothing but "vapid balderdash." However, whilst a few historians chose to challenge her theories, most simply chose to ignore them as irrelevant, and as later folklorist and vocal critic of the theory Jacqueline Simpson
noted, "Normally this is an effective technique for ensuring the oblivion of bad books, but in this case it backfired, since it left her theory free to spread, seemingly unchallenged, among an eager public."
Murray responded to much criticism by claiming that it was religiously motivated, coming from Christians who did not want her theories to be true: in one case she stated that her theory had received "a hostile reception from many strictly Christian sects and reviewers, but it made its way in spite of opposition." As Hutton noted, she had "a tendency to deny any good motives or virtues to those who criticized her theories." and "Her own reviews of [L'Estrange Ewen]'s work in the Folk-Lore Society's periodical were amazingly ungracious, avoiding any engagement with his actual arguments or evidence and dismissing him completely in general terms as 'unscientific', 'uncritical', 'dull', and so valueless and worthy only to be ignored."
It was likely owing to the fact that few experts in the witch trials actually bothered to counter her arguments that many Britons, including several historians not familiar with the witch trials, simply assumed that Murray's view was the consensus as to the nature of European witchcraft, and included her ideas in their own works. For instance, the historian G.C. Coulton, an expert on Mediaeval monasteries, included her theories in his work, Five Centuries of Religion, Volume One (1923), as did the novelist John Buchan, who included it into his Witch Wood
(1927).
In 1962, Canadian historian Elliot Rose published A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in Witchcraft and Diabolism, in which he provided one of the first popular history books to openly criticise Murray's interpretation. Later commenting on A Razor for a Goat, Richard Kieckhefer noted that when the book was first published "it was recognised as a biting critique of the views of Margaret Murray… Now, forty years later, Rose's book may perhaps seem more of a revisionist work within Murray's school of interpretation. So much has happened in the historiography of witchcraft that what seemed at first a wide gulf between Rose and Murray now seems narrower, and factors shared by the two have become clearer."
is in agreement with Cohn. Carlo Ginzburg
, on the other hand, regards Cohn's views as a polemic and believes that although Murray was too eager to accept all testimonies as accurate, and failed to critically differentiate those elements introduced by the interventions of judges, inquisitors and demonologists, she still had a "correct intuition" in identifying the remnants of a pre-Christian 'religion of Diana', and in believing that witch-trial testimonies did at times represent actual or perceived experiences.
In 1994, folklorist Jacqueline Simpson
published an article in the Folklore journal entitled "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?" in which she took a particularly critical approach to the Murrayite theory, explaining its faults, and looking at the history of the hypotheses' criticism; within it she remarked that "No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret
Murray without embarrassment." Similar criticism of Murray came from the historian Ronald Hutton
, in both his 1991 book on ancient paganism
, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy and in his 1999 study of Wiccan history
, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. However, one practising Wiccan, the transgender
activist Jani Farrell-Roberts subsequently entered into a publicly published debate with Hutton on the issue in a series of articles published in 2003 in the occult-based magazine The Cauldron.
Jacqueline Simpson
blames contemporary historians for doing little to refute Murray's ideas at the time they were written. It has been claimed by Norman Cohn that in the thirties her books led to the founding of Murrayite covens (small circles of witches), one of which taught Gerald Gardner
in the 1940s. In the 1950s Gardner publicized Wicca
, a form of pagan religious witchcraft, which in turn helped to inspire the modern Neopagan
movement. The phrase "the Old Religion," used by Wiccans and Neopagans to describe an ancestral pagan religion, derives from Murrayite theory. Other Wiccan terms and concepts like coven
, esbat
, the Wiccan Wheel of the Year
, and the Horned God
are, it has been suggested, influenced by or derived directly from Murray's works. Her ideas also inspired other writers, ranging from horror authors like H. P. Lovecraft
and Dennis Wheatley
to Robert Graves
. The character of the obsessed academic Rose Lorimer in Angus Wilson
's 1956 novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
is said to have been inspired in part by Murray and Frances Yates
.
, but never on any account got into arguments about it in public."
Murray had been raised as a devout Christian
by her mother, and had initially become a Sunday School
teacher because of this. However, after entering the academic profession she rejected religion, gaining a reputation amongst other members of the Folklore Society as a noted sceptic and a rationalist
. However, despite her rejection of religion, she continued to maintain a personal belief in a God
of some sort, relating in her autobiography that she believed in "an unseen over-ruling Power," "which science calls Nature and religion calls God." She was also a believer and a practitioner of magic
, performing spells such as cursing against those whom she felt deserved it: as Ronald Hutton noted, "Once she carried out a ritual to blast a fellow academic whose promotion she believed to have been undeserved, by mixing up ingredients in a frying pan in the presence of two colleagues. The victim actually did become ill, and had to change jobs. This was only one among a number of such acts of malevolent magic she perpetrates, and which the friend who recorded them assumed (rather nervously) were pranks, with coincidental effects."
Egyptology
Egyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...
and anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis
Witch-cult hypothesis
The Witch-cult is the term for a hypothetical pre-Christian, pagan religion of Europe that survived into at least the early modern period. As late as the 19th and early 20th centuries, some scholars had postulated that European witchcraft was part of a Satanic plot to overthrow Christianity; most...
, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of Christianized Europe and North America were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
religion devoted to a Horned God
Horned God
The Horned God is one of the two primary deities found in some European pagan religions. He is often given various names and epithets, and represents the male part of the religion's duotheistic theological system, the other part being the female Triple Goddess. In common Wiccan belief, he is...
. Whilst this theory is today widely disputed and discredited by historians like Norman Cohn
Norman Cohn
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent fourteen years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.-Life:...
, Keith Thomas
Keith Thomas (historian)
Sir Keith Vivian Thomas is a Welsh historian, best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World.-Biography:...
and Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
, it has had a significant effect in the origins of Neopagan
Neopaganism
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
religions, primarily Wicca
Wicca
Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...
, a faith she supported.
Her work in Egyptology took place largely alongside her mentor and friend, the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, whom she worked alongside at University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
. One of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship," she was also an ardent feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
, being actively involved in the Suffragette
Suffragette
"Suffragette" is a term coined by the Daily Mail newspaper as a derogatory label for members of the late 19th and early 20th century movement for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom, in particular members of the Women's Social and Political Union...
movement. From 1953 to 1955, she was the president of the Folklore Society
Folklore Society
The Folklore Society was founded in England in 1878 to study traditional vernacular culture, including traditional music, song, dance and drama, narrative, arts and crafts, customs and belief...
, although since her death various members of the society have attempted to dissociate the organisation from her and the Murrayite theory of the Witch-Cult.
Biography
Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta, IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
on 13 July 1863. She attended the University College of London and was a student of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
and anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. She was also a pioneer campaigner for women's rights. Margaret Murray accompanied the renowned Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, on several archaeological excavations in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
during the late 1890s. Murray was the first in a line of female Egyptologists employed at The Manchester Museum
Manchester Museum
The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester. Sited on Oxford Road at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings, it provides access to about six million items from every continent and serves both as a resource for academic research and teaching and as a regional...
, The University of Manchester. In 1908, she undertook the unwrapping of the Two Brothers
Tomb of two Brothers
The Tomb of two Brothers is the modern name given to the burial of the Egyptian priests Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht. The burial was found in 1907 in Rifeh by Flinders Petrie and it was untouched....
, a Middle Kingdom non-royal burial excavated by Petrie in Egypt. It is regarded as the first interdisciplinary study of mummies and probably kick-started future scientific unwrappings, such as those of Keeper Professor Rosalie David completed in the 1970s.
Her work and association with Petrie helped secure employment at University College as a junior lecturer. Murray's best known and most controversial text, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, was published in 1921. She was consequently named Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University College of London in 1924, a post she held until her retirement in 1935. In 1926, she became a fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute. Murray became President of the Folklore Society
Folklore Society
The Folklore Society was founded in England in 1878 to study traditional vernacular culture, including traditional music, song, dance and drama, narrative, arts and crafts, customs and belief...
in 1953. Ten years later and having reached 100 years of age, Margaret Murray published her final work, an autobiography entitled My First Hundred Years (1963). She died later that same year of natural causes.
Thesis
Murray's Witch Cult in Western Europe 1921, written during a period she was unable to do field work in Egypt, laid out the essential elements of her thesis that a common pattern of underground pagan resistance to the Christian Church existed across Europe. The pagans organized in covens of thirteen worshippers, dedicated to a male godGod
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and held ritual sabbaths. Murray maintained that pagan beliefs and religion dating from the neolithic
Neolithic
The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...
through the medieval period, secretly practiced human sacrifice until exposed by the witchhunt starting around 1450.
Murray's later books were written for a more popular audience and in a style that was far more imaginative and entertaining than standard academic works. The God of the Witches, 1931 expanded on her claims that the witch cult had worshiped a Horned God
Horned God
The Horned God is one of the two primary deities found in some European pagan religions. He is often given various names and epithets, and represents the male part of the religion's duotheistic theological system, the other part being the female Triple Goddess. In common Wiccan belief, he is...
whose origins went back to prehistory. Murray decided that the witches' admissions in trial that they worshiped Satan proved they actually did worship such a god. Thus, according to Murray, reports of Satan actually represented pagan gatherings with their priest wearing a horned helmet to represent their Horned God. Murray also discussed the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury
Archbishop of Canterbury
The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...
, Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket
Thomas Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion...
, claiming to show that he too was a pagan by saying that his death "presents many features which are explicable only by the theory that he also was the substitute for a Divine King" (Murray 171).
Murray now became more and more emotional in her defence of her ideas, claiming that anyone who opposed her did so out of religious prejudice. In The Divine King in England, 1954 she expanded on her earlier claims there was a secret conspiracy of pagans amongst the English nobility, the same English nobility who provided the leading members of the Church. The suspicious death of William Rufus, King of England, was a ritual sacrificial killing of a sacred king
Sacred king
In many historical societies, the position of kingship carries a sacral meaning, that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and of judge. The concept of theocracy is related, although a sacred king need not necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position...
carried out by Henry I
Henry I of England
Henry I was the fourth son of William I of England. He succeeded his elder brother William II as King of England in 1100 and defeated his eldest brother, Robert Curthose, to become Duke of Normandy in 1106...
, a man so pious he later founded one of the biggest Abbeys in England. This secret conspiracy, according to her, had killed many early English sovereigns, through to James I
James I of England
James VI and I was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603...
in the early seventeenth century. Saint Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc
Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...
- whose Catholic piety and orthodoxy are attested in numerous documents (such as the letter she dictated threatening to lead a crusade against the Hussites), and who was executed by the English for what even the tribunal members later admitted were political reasons - was rewritten as a pagan martyr by Murray. Her portrait of messianic
Messiah
A messiah is a redeemer figure expected or foretold in one form or another by a religion. Slightly more widely, a messiah is any redeemer figure. Messianic beliefs or theories generally relate to eschatological improvement of the state of humanity or the world, in other words the World to...
(self-) sacrifices of these figures make for entertaining speculation, but they have not been taken seriously as history even by her staunchest supporters, though they have been used in novels (such as Katherine Kurtz's Lammas Night).
Criticism
Ever since its first publication, Murray's theory has come under criticism for flaws in its use of evidence, with later historian Ronald HuttonRonald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
remarking that it consisted of "a few well-known works by Continental demonologists, a few tracts printed in England and quite a number of published records of Scottish witch trials. The much greater amount of unpublished evidence was absolutely ignored." Various critics, including historian Norman Cohn
Norman Cohn
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent fourteen years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.-Life:...
and folklorist Jacqueline Simpson
Jacqueline Simpson
Dr. Jacqueline Simpson is a United Kingdom researcher and author on folklore and legend.She studied English Literature and Medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London. Dr. Simpson has been, at various times, Editor, Secretary, and President of the Folklore Society. She was awarded...
, have highlighted what they see as Murray's "extreme selectivity" in choosing only sources that backed her argument, and ignoring those that did not. Regarding this, Jacqueline Simpson comments that:
- Her manipulation of sources is sometimes so blatant as to be naive, for even a cursory reader can spot what is going on. At one point she is arguing that witches went to their meetings on foot or on horseback in a quite non-magical way, and quotes from the well-known confession of Isobel GowdieIsobel GowdieIsobel Gowdie was a Scottish woman who was tried for witchcraft in 1662. Her detailed confession, apparently achieved without the use of torture, offers one of the most detailed looks at European witchcraft folklore at the end of the era of witch-hunts....
: "I had a little horse, and would say 'Horse and Hattock, in the Devil's name!'" - but without mentioning that the "horse" Isobel was talking about was a magic wisp of straw (Murray 1921, 99-100). Then, five pages later, she quotes the same passage again, but this time in full, straw and all, to show how witches had hallucinations of flight (Murray 1921, 105-6); she does not realise that she has thereby wrecked her previous rationalistic interpretation of the passage.
Murray's work involved her rationalizing many elements of the witch trials, particularly those she deemed impossible, such as the accounts of witches flying through the air or the Devil existing as a supernatural entity. However, Simpson criticised her for taking this rationalization too far in claiming that some of them are so ridiculous that they are "unintentionally funny." As evidence for this, Simpson highlights Murray's claim that trial accounts of Satan's cloven hoof were instead referring to "perhaps a specially formed boot or shoe" that the coven-leader wore so that he could be recognized. Subsequent historians examining the Early Modern witch trials, particularly Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for his Il formaggio e I vermi which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.- Biography :The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, he was born...
, Eva Pocs
Éva Pócs
Éva Pócs is associate professor in the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology at Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, Hungary, and president of the Folklore Section of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society. She is an author of several books dealing with supernatural beliefs and patterns of...
and Emma Wilby
Emma Wilby
Emma Wilby is a British historian specialising in the magical beliefs of Early Modern Britain. An honorary fellow in History at the University of Exeter, England, she has published two books examining witchcraft and the cunning folk of this period...
have also emphasised that the accounts in many of the witch trials represent visionary experiences, containing within them imaginary and surreal
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
elements, which goes against Murray's rationalization of the trial accounts.
Murray was also criticised by Simpson for her "passionate system building," developing her own image of a "rigidly codified and uniform [religious] system throughout Britain and Europe" that had its own set "Rites of initiation, dates for festivals, sabbath rituals, discipline and hierarchy within covens."
1920-1962
As soon as Murray published her theory she received criticism from other historians who had studied the Early Modern witch trials. As later historian Ronald HuttonRonald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
noted, "Among that small number of scholars who were familiar with the trial records, [Murray's theories] never had a chance. The use of source material which underpinned them was too blatantly flawed." In a 1922 review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in the Folklore journal for instance, W.B. Halliday, an expert on ancient religion, dismissed her theory, and noted that her hypothesis relied upon "documents torn from the background of their own age and divorced from the serious study of their historical antecedents." In a similar vein, C. L'Estrange Ewen, a specialist in the witch trials, referred to them in 1938 as simple "fancies" that were nothing but "vapid balderdash." However, whilst a few historians chose to challenge her theories, most simply chose to ignore them as irrelevant, and as later folklorist and vocal critic of the theory Jacqueline Simpson
Jacqueline Simpson
Dr. Jacqueline Simpson is a United Kingdom researcher and author on folklore and legend.She studied English Literature and Medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London. Dr. Simpson has been, at various times, Editor, Secretary, and President of the Folklore Society. She was awarded...
noted, "Normally this is an effective technique for ensuring the oblivion of bad books, but in this case it backfired, since it left her theory free to spread, seemingly unchallenged, among an eager public."
Murray responded to much criticism by claiming that it was religiously motivated, coming from Christians who did not want her theories to be true: in one case she stated that her theory had received "a hostile reception from many strictly Christian sects and reviewers, but it made its way in spite of opposition." As Hutton noted, she had "a tendency to deny any good motives or virtues to those who criticized her theories." and "Her own reviews of [L'Estrange Ewen]'s work in the Folk-Lore Society's periodical were amazingly ungracious, avoiding any engagement with his actual arguments or evidence and dismissing him completely in general terms as 'unscientific', 'uncritical', 'dull', and so valueless and worthy only to be ignored."
It was likely owing to the fact that few experts in the witch trials actually bothered to counter her arguments that many Britons, including several historians not familiar with the witch trials, simply assumed that Murray's view was the consensus as to the nature of European witchcraft, and included her ideas in their own works. For instance, the historian G.C. Coulton, an expert on Mediaeval monasteries, included her theories in his work, Five Centuries of Religion, Volume One (1923), as did the novelist John Buchan, who included it into his Witch Wood
Witch Wood
Witch Wood is a 1927 novel written by the Scottish author and politician John Buchan. Set in the 17th century, it revolves around a group of witches, and according to the historian Ronald Hutton, was based upon the Witch-cult hypothesis of the anthropologist Margaret Murray...
(1927).
In 1962, Canadian historian Elliot Rose published A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in Witchcraft and Diabolism, in which he provided one of the first popular history books to openly criticise Murray's interpretation. Later commenting on A Razor for a Goat, Richard Kieckhefer noted that when the book was first published "it was recognised as a biting critique of the views of Margaret Murray… Now, forty years later, Rose's book may perhaps seem more of a revisionist work within Murray's school of interpretation. So much has happened in the historiography of witchcraft that what seemed at first a wide gulf between Rose and Murray now seems narrower, and factors shared by the two have become clearer."
1963-present
Following Murray's death, critics began to attack her theory more openly and voraciously. Norman Cohn, in his book Europe's Inner Demons, also accused Murray of falsifying her evidence by selectively quoting from the testimony of accused witches, deliberately leaving out fantastical elements to support her claim that real events were being described rather than fantasies; such elements include testimonies of flying to meetings, transforming into animals, or seeing the devil disappear and reappear suddenly. Jani Farrell-Roberts has argued that Cohn is misrepresenting Murray, for she did indeed discuss such fantastical elements at length, and many of the supposedly omitted passages can be found in her books. Ronald HuttonRonald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
is in agreement with Cohn. Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for his Il formaggio e I vermi which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.- Biography :The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, he was born...
, on the other hand, regards Cohn's views as a polemic and believes that although Murray was too eager to accept all testimonies as accurate, and failed to critically differentiate those elements introduced by the interventions of judges, inquisitors and demonologists, she still had a "correct intuition" in identifying the remnants of a pre-Christian 'religion of Diana', and in believing that witch-trial testimonies did at times represent actual or perceived experiences.
In 1994, folklorist Jacqueline Simpson
Jacqueline Simpson
Dr. Jacqueline Simpson is a United Kingdom researcher and author on folklore and legend.She studied English Literature and Medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London. Dr. Simpson has been, at various times, Editor, Secretary, and President of the Folklore Society. She was awarded...
published an article in the Folklore journal entitled "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?" in which she took a particularly critical approach to the Murrayite theory, explaining its faults, and looking at the history of the hypotheses' criticism; within it she remarked that "No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret
Murray without embarrassment." Similar criticism of Murray came from the historian Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...
, in both his 1991 book on ancient paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy and in his 1999 study of Wiccan history
History of Wicca
The history of Wicca documents the rise of the Neopagan religion of Wicca and related witchcraft-based Neopagan religions. Wicca originated in the early twentieth century, when it first developed amongst several secretive covens in England who were basing their religious beliefs and practices upon...
, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. However, one practising Wiccan, the transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
activist Jani Farrell-Roberts subsequently entered into a publicly published debate with Hutton on the issue in a series of articles published in 2003 in the occult-based magazine The Cauldron.
Legacy
Murray's works were to become popular bestsellers from the 1940s onwards and were popularly believed to be accurate. Indeed, Murray's influence is still massive in popular thought, though, as noted above, academics have since cited major flaws in Murray's works that call her conclusions into question.Jacqueline Simpson
Jacqueline Simpson
Dr. Jacqueline Simpson is a United Kingdom researcher and author on folklore and legend.She studied English Literature and Medieval Icelandic at Bedford College, University of London. Dr. Simpson has been, at various times, Editor, Secretary, and President of the Folklore Society. She was awarded...
blames contemporary historians for doing little to refute Murray's ideas at the time they were written. It has been claimed by Norman Cohn that in the thirties her books led to the founding of Murrayite covens (small circles of witches), one of which taught Gerald Gardner
Gerald Gardner
Gerald Brousseau Gardner , who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and...
in the 1940s. In the 1950s Gardner publicized Wicca
Wicca
Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...
, a form of pagan religious witchcraft, which in turn helped to inspire the modern Neopagan
Neopaganism
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
movement. The phrase "the Old Religion," used by Wiccans and Neopagans to describe an ancestral pagan religion, derives from Murrayite theory. Other Wiccan terms and concepts like coven
Coven
A coven or covan is a name used to describe a gathering of witches or in some cases vampires. Due to the word's association with witches, a gathering of Wiccans, followers of the witchcraft-based neopagan religion of Wicca, is also described as a coven....
, esbat
Esbat
An esbat is a coven meeting other than one of the Sabbats within Wicca and other Wiccan-influenced forms of Neopaganism. Janet and Stewart Farrar describe esbats as an opportunity for a "love feast, healing work, psychic training and all."...
, the Wiccan Wheel of the Year
Wheel of the Year
The Wheel of the Year is a Neopagan term for the annual cycle of the Earth's seasons. It consists of eight festivals, spaced at approximately even intervals throughout the year. These festivals are referred to as Sabbats...
, and the Horned God
Horned God
The Horned God is one of the two primary deities found in some European pagan religions. He is often given various names and epithets, and represents the male part of the religion's duotheistic theological system, the other part being the female Triple Goddess. In common Wiccan belief, he is...
are, it has been suggested, influenced by or derived directly from Murray's works. Her ideas also inspired other writers, ranging from horror authors like H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
and Dennis Wheatley
Dennis Wheatley
Dennis Yates Wheatley was an English author. His prolific output of stylish thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling authors from the 1930s through the 1960s.-Early life:...
to Robert Graves
Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
. The character of the obsessed academic Rose Lorimer in Angus Wilson
Angus Wilson
Sir Angus Frank Johnstone Wilson, CBE was an English novelist and short story writer. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and later received a knighthood for his services to literature.-Biography:Wilson was born in Bexhill, Sussex, England, to...
's 1956 novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is a satirical novel by Angus Wilson, published in 1956. It was Wilson's most popular book, and many consider it his best work.-Plot summary:...
is said to have been inspired in part by Murray and Frances Yates
Frances Yates
Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE was a British historian. She taught at the Warburg Institute of the University of London for many years.She wrote extensively on the occult or Neoplatonic philosophies of the Renaissance...
.
Personal life
One of her friends, the antiquarian Hilda Davidson, who knew Murray in her old age, described her as being "not at all assertive ... never thrust her ideas on anyone. [In relation to her Witch-Cult theory,] She behaved in fact rather like someone who was a fully convinced member of some unusual religious sect, or perhaps, of the FreemasonsFreemasonry
Freemasonry is a fraternal organisation that arose from obscure origins in the late 16th to early 17th century. Freemasonry now exists in various forms all over the world, with a membership estimated at around six million, including approximately 150,000 under the jurisdictions of the Grand Lodge...
, but never on any account got into arguments about it in public."
Murray had been raised as a devout Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
by her mother, and had initially become a Sunday School
Sunday school
Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in...
teacher because of this. However, after entering the academic profession she rejected religion, gaining a reputation amongst other members of the Folklore Society as a noted sceptic and a rationalist
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
. However, despite her rejection of religion, she continued to maintain a personal belief in a God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
of some sort, relating in her autobiography that she believed in "an unseen over-ruling Power," "which science calls Nature and religion calls God." She was also a believer and a practitioner of magic
Magic (paranormal)
Magic is the claimed art of manipulating aspects of reality either by supernatural means or through knowledge of occult laws unknown to science. It is in contrast to science, in that science does not accept anything not subject to either direct or indirect observation, and subject to logical...
, performing spells such as cursing against those whom she felt deserved it: as Ronald Hutton noted, "Once she carried out a ritual to blast a fellow academic whose promotion she believed to have been undeserved, by mixing up ingredients in a frying pan in the presence of two colleagues. The victim actually did become ill, and had to change jobs. This was only one among a number of such acts of malevolent magic she perpetrates, and which the friend who recorded them assumed (rather nervously) were pranks, with coincidental effects."
Books
- The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (text in HTML and plain text format)
- Ancient Egyptian Legends ebook