In 1915,
Margaret Murray was an Egyptologist who worked under Sir
Flinders Petrie at
University College London. However, the outbreak of
World War I had meant that many of their staff and students had abandoned scholarship to aid the British war effort, while archaeological excavation to Egypt had been rendered impossible. These events gave Murray more latitude in her studies, and she began to branch out and explore other interests. To aid Britain's war effort, Murray enrolled as a volunteer nurse in the
Volunteer Aid Detachment of the College Women's Union Society, and for several weeks was posted to
Saint-Malo in France. However, after being taken ill herself, she was sent to recuperate in
Glastonbury,
Somerset, where she became interested in
Glastonbury Abbey and the folklore surrounding it which connected it to the legendary figure of
King Arthur and to the idea that the
Holy Grail had been brought there by
Joseph of Aramathea. Pursuing this interest, she published the paper "Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance" in the journal
Ancient Egypt, although few agreed with her conclusions and it was criticised by scholars like
Jessie Weston for making unsubstantiated leaps with the evidence. Returning to London, she began to work on the concept of witchcraft. Her first published work on the subject was an article in the academic journal
Folklore in 1917, which she followed with a second in 1920. Further articles on the subject appeared in the journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute and the
Scottish Historical Review.
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: 1921 . In
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray stated that she had restricted her research to Great Britain, although made some recourse to sources from France, Flanders, and
New England. She drew a division between what she termed "Operative Witchcraft", which referred to the performance of charms and spells with any purpose, and "Ritual Witchcraft", by which she meant "the ancient religion of Western Europe", a fertility-based faith that she also termed "the Dianic cult". She wrote that the cult had "very probably" once been devoted to the worship of both a male deity and a "Mother Goddess" but that "at the time when the cult is recorded the worship of the male deity appears to have superseded that of the female". In her thesis, Murray stated that the figure referred to as the Devil in the trial accounts was the witches' god, "manifest and incarnate", to whom the witches offered their prayers. She wrote that at the witches' meetings, the god would be personified, usually by a man or at times by a woman or an animal; when a human personified this entity, Murray described them as usually dressed plainly, though they appeared in full costume for the witches' Sabbaths. Members joined the cult either as children or adults through what Murray called "admission ceremonies"; Murray asserted that applicants had to agree to join of their own free will, and agree to devote themselves to the service of their deity. She also wrote that in some cases, these individuals had to sign a covenant or were baptized into the faith. At the same time, she wrote that the religion was largely passed down hereditary lines. Murray described the religion as being divided into
covens containing thirteen members, led by a coven officer who was often termed the "Devil" in the trial accounts, but who was accountable to a "Grand Master". According to Murray, the records of the coven were kept in a secret book, with the coven also disciplining its members, to the extent of executing those deemed traitors. Describing this witch-cult as "a joyous religion", she wrote that the two primary festivals that it celebrated were on May Eve and November Eve, although that other dates of religious observation were 1 February and 1 August, the winter and summer solstices, and Easter. She asserted that the "General Meeting of all members of the religion" were known as Sabbaths, while the more private ritual meetings were known as Esbats. Murray said that these Esbats were nocturnal rites that began at midnight, and that they were "primarily for business, whereas the Sabbath was purely religious." At Esbats, magical rites were performed both for malevolent and benevolent ends. She also asserted that the Sabbath ceremonies involved the witches' paying homage to the deity, renewing their "vows of fidelity and obedience" to him, and providing him with accounts of all the magical actions that they had conducted since the previous Sabbath. Once this business had been concluded, admissions to the cult or marriages were conducted; ceremonies and fertility rites took place; and the Sabbath concluded with feasting and dancing. '' (1493). Deeming Ritual Witchcraft to be "a fertility cult", she asserted that many of its rites were designed to ensure fertility and rain-making. She wrote that there were four types of sacrifice performed by the witches: blood-sacrifice, in which neophytes write their names in blood, the sacrifice of animals, the sacrifice of a non-Christian child to procure magical powers, and the sacrifice of the witches' god by fire to ensure fertility. She interpreted accounts of witches' shapeshifting into various animals as being representative of a rite in which the witches dressed as specific animals which they took to be sacred. She asserted that accounts of
familiars were based on the witches' use of animals, which she divided into "divining familiars" used in
divination and "domestic familiars" used in other magic rites. Murray asserted that paganism had survived the Christianization process in Britain, although that it came to be "practised only in certain places and among certain classes of the community." She believed that folkloric stories of fairies in Britain were based on a surviving race of dwarves, who continued to live in the island up until the Early Modern period. She asserted that this race followed the same pagan religion as the witches, thus explaining the folkloric connection between the two. In the appendices to the book, she also alleged that
Joan of Arc and
Gilles de Rais were members of the witch-cult and were executed for it, a position which has been refuted by historians, especially in the case of Joan of Arc. Later historian
Ronald Hutton commented that
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe "rested upon a small amount of archival research, with extensive use of printed trial records in 19th century editions, plus early modern pamphlets and works of demonology". He also noted that the book's tone was generally "dry and clinical, and every assertion was meticulously footned to a source, with lavish quotation." It was not a best seller; in its first thirty years, only 2,020 copies were sold. However, it led many people to treat Murray as an authority on the subject; in 1929, she was invited to provide the entry on "Witchcraft" for the
Encyclopædia Britannica, and used it to present her interpretation of the subject as if it were universally accepted in scholarship. It remained in the encyclopedia until being replaced in 1968.
The God of the Witches: 1931 Murray followed this book with
The God of the Witches in 1931; although similar in content, it was aimed at a mass market audience and published by the popular press
Sampson Low. Whereas the tone in
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe had been "dry and academic, the second bubbles with enthusiasm", as her language becomes "emotionally inflated and coloured with religious phraseology"; in particular she refers repeatedly to the cult as "the Old Religion". In this work she "cut out or toned down" many of the assertions of her previous book which would have painted the cult in a bad light, for instance regarding animal and child sacrifice, and also omitted any mention of sex. In this book she began to refer to the witches' deity as the
Horned God, and asserted that it was an entity who had been worshipped in Europe since the
Palaeolithic. She further asserted that in the Bronze Age, the worship of the deity could be found throughout Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, writing that the depiction of
various horned figures from these societies proved that. Among the evidence cited were the horned figures found at
Mohenjo-Daro, which are often interpreted as depictions of
Pashupati, as well as the deities
Osiris and
Amon in Egypt and the
Minotaur of
Minoan Crete. Within continental Europe, she wrote that the Horned God was represented by
Pan in Greece,
Cernunnos in Gaul, and in various Scandinavian rock carvings. Writing that this divinity had been declared the Devil by the Christian authorities, she nevertheless asserted that his worship was testified in officially Christian societies right through to the Modern period, citing folkloric practices such as the
Dorset Ooser and the
Puck Fair as evidence of his veneration.
The Divine King in England: 1954 In 1954, she published
The Divine King in England, in which she greatly extended on the theory, taking in an influence from
Sir James Frazer's
The Golden Bough, an anthropological book that made the proposal that societies all over the world sacrificed their kings to the deities of nature. In her book, she wrote that this practice had continued into medieval England, and that, for instance, the death of
William II was really a ritual sacrifice. She also wrote that a number of important figures who died violent deaths, such as Archbishop
Thomas Becket, were killed as a replacement for the king. No academic took the book seriously, and it was ignored by many of her supporters. It did however influence a few historical novels e.g.
Philip Lindsay's
The Devil and King John.
Academic reception: 1921–63 Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favourable reception from many readers, including a number of significant scholars, albeit none of whom were experts in the witch trials. Historians of Early Modern Britain like
Sir George Clark and
Christopher Hill incorporated her theories into their work, although Hill later publicly regretted doing so. For the 1961 reprint of
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Medieval historian
Steven Runciman provided a foreword in which he accepted that some of Murray's "minor details may be open to criticism", but in which he was otherwise supportive of her thesis. Her theories were recapitulated by
Pennethorne Hughes in his 1952 book
Witches. It was also adopted and championed by the archaeologist
T. C. Lethbridge, marking his increasing estrangement from mainstream academia; in turn, Murray publicly defended his controversial theories regarding the chalk hill figures of
Wandlebury Hill in the
Gog Magog Hills,
Cambridgeshire. As a result, a commentator writing in 1962 could comment that the Murrayite interpretations of the witch trials "seem to hold, at the time of writing, an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels", being widely accepted among "educated people". Canadian historian Elliot Rose suggested that the reason why Murray's theory gained such support was partly because of her "imposing credentials" as a member of staff at UCL, a position that lent her theory greater legitimacy in the eyes of many readers. He further suggested that the Murrayite view was attractive to many as it confirmed "the general picture of pre-Christian Europe a reader of Frazer or [Robert] Graves would be familiar with". Similarly, Hutton suggested that the cause of the Murrayite theory's popularity was because it "appealed to so many of the emotional impulses of the age", including "the notion of the English countryside as a timeless place full of ancient secrets", the literary popularity of Pan, the widespread belief that the majority of British had remained pagan long after the process of Christianisation, and the idea that folk customs represented pagan survivals. At the same time, Hutton suggested, it seemed more plausible to many than the previously dominant rationalist idea that the witch trials were the result of mass delusion. Related to this, folklorist
Jacqueline Simpson suggested that part of the Murrayite theory's appeal was that it appeared to give a "sensible, demystifying, liberating approach to a longstanding but sterile argument" between the rationalists who denied that there had been any witches and those, like
Montague Summers, who insisted that there had been a real Satanic conspiracy against Christendom in the Early Modern period replete with witches with supernatural powers. As
Hilda Ellis Davidson noted; "how refreshing and exciting her first book was
at that period. A new approach, and such a surprising one." Nevertheless, Murray's theories never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials, and from her early publications onward many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her "factual errors and methodological failings". Indeed, the majority of scholarly reviews of her work produced at the time were largely critical. George L. Burr critically reviewed both of her initial books on the subject for the
American Historical Review. In his review of
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe he asserted that she was not acquainted with the "careful general histories by modern scholars" and criticised her for assuming that the trial accounts accurately reflected the accused witches' genuine experiences of witchcraft, regardless of whether those confessions had been obtained through torture and coercion. He also charged her with selectively using the evidence to serve her interpretation, for instance by omitting any supernatural or miraculous events that appear in the trial accounts. As
Pagan studies scholar Catherine Noble later put it, "Burr has hardly a kind word for Murray". One of the foremost specialists of the trial records, L'Estrange Ewen, brought out a series of books specialising in the archival material which rejected Murray's ideas. Similarly, W.R. Halliday reviewed her work for the
Folklore journal and exposed the flaws in her use of sources. E. M. Loeb criticised her in his review of
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe for
American Anthropologist. In Noble's words, "There is no constructive criticism between peers here; it is a frontal attack on an author Loeb clearly believes has no place among published historians, at least on the topic of witchcraft." In his 1962 work
A Razor for a Goat, Rose asserted that Murray's books on the witch-cult "contain an incredible number of minor errors of fact or of calculation and several inconsistencies of reasoning." He accepted that her case "could, perhaps, still be proved by somebody else, though I very much doubt it." Highlighting that there is a gap of about a thousand years between the Christianisation of Britain and the start of the witch trials there, he asserts that there is no evidence for the existence of the witch-cult anywhere in the intervening period. He further criticises her for treating pre-Christian Britain as a socially and culturally monolithic entity, whereas in reality it contained a diverse array of societies and religious beliefs. In addition to this, he challenged Murray's assertion that the majority of Britons in the Middle Ages remained pagan as "a view grounded on ignorance alone". Simpson noted that despite these critical reviews, within the field of British folkloristics Murray's theories were permitted "to pass unapproved but unchallenged, either out of politeness or because nobody was really interested enough to research the topic." As evidence, she noted that no substantial research articles on the subject of witchcraft were published in the journal
Folklore between Murray's in 1917 and
Rossell Hope Robbins' in 1963. However, she also highlighted that when regional studies of British folklore were published in this period by folklorists like
Theo Brown,
Ruth Tongue, or
Enid Porter, none adopted the Murrayite framework for interpreting witchcraft beliefs, as evidence that Murray's theories were widely ignored by scholars of folklore. Murray did not respond directly to the criticisms of her work, but did react to her critics in a hostile manner; in later life she asserted that she eventually ceased reading reviews of her work, and believed that her critics were simply acting on religious prejudice. Noble later stated that Murray "repeatedly dismissed [her critics] in print as close-minded, bigoted, or uninformed."
Academic reception: 1963–present Murray's work came to be increasingly criticised following her death in 1963, with the definitive academic rejection of the Murrayite witch-cult theory occurring during the 1970s. At this time, a variety of scholars across Europe and North America began to publish in-depth studies of the archival records from the witch trials, leaving no doubt that those tried for witchcraft were not practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian religion. Such critics of Murray included
Alan Macfarlane, Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled, Gerhard Schormann, Bente Alver and Bengt Ankarloo. In his 1971 book
Religion and the Decline of Magic, English historian
Keith Thomas dismissed Murray's thesis when he asserted that scholarship on the Early Modern witch trials had established that there was "very little evidence to suggest that the accused witches were either devil-worshippers or members of a pagan fertility cult". Although accepting that when she first published her ideas, they were "the best alternative" to the dominant "rationalist" view of witchcraft as "total delusion", he stated that her conclusions were "almost totally groundless" because she ignored the systematic study of the trial accounts provided by Ewen and instead used sources very selectively to argue her point. In his 1975 book ''
Europe's Inner Demons'', English historian
Norman Cohn commented on the "extraordinary" manner in which Murray's theory had come to "exercise considerable influence" within scholarship. Cohn was nevertheless highly critical; he asserted that Murray's "knowledge of European history, even of English history, was superficial and her grasp of
historical method was non-existent." Furthermore, he added that her ideas were "firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould." That same year, the Romanian historian of religion
Mircea Eliade, writing in the
History of Religions journal, described Murray's work as "hopelessly inadequate" and full of "numberless and appalling errors". He added that from the perspective of a historian of religion, "her use of comparative materials and, in general, the methods of
Religionswissenschaft have been unfortunate." In 1994, the English folklorist
Jacqueline Simpson devoted a paper in the
Folklore journal to the subject of "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?". She noted that the Murrayite theory was "based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments" and that the discipline of
folkloristics had been damaged by its association with Murray, who had been appointed President of the
Folklore Society. Simpson outlined how Murray had selected her use of evidence very specifically, particularly by ignoring and/or rationalising any accounts of supernatural or miraculous events in the trial records, thereby distorting the events that she was describing. Thus, Simpson pointed out, Murray wrote that the cloven-hoofed Devil appeared at the witches' Sabbath by stating that he was a man with a special kind of shoe, and similarly asserted that witches' reports of having flown through the air on broomsticks were actually based on their practice of either hopping along on broomsticks or smearing hallucinogenic salves onto themselves. In 1996, historian
Diane Purkiss asserted that Murray's thesis was "intrinsically improbable" and that it "commands little or no allegiance within the modern academy". She nevertheless felt that male scholars like Thomas, Cohn, and Macfarlane had committed "ritual slaughter" when setting up their own histories of witchcraft by condemning Murray's. In doing so, she identified a trend for them to contrast their own perceived methodologically sound and sceptical interpretations with Murray's "feminised belief" about the witch-cult, hence ignoring any theoretical considerations regarding the male-centric nature of their own perspectives. In his 1999 book
The Triumph of the Moon, Hutton asserted that Murray had treated her source material with "reckless abandon", in that she had taken "vivid details of alleged witch practices" from "sources scattered across a great extent of space and time" and then declared them to be normative of the cult as a whole. Concurring with this assessment, historian Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander stated that "Murray's use of sources in general is appalling". They went on to assert that "Today, scholars are agreed that Murray was more than just wrong – she was completely and embarrassingly wrong on nearly all of her basic premises." In his sociological study of the Early Modern witchcraft, Gary Jensen highlighted that Murray's work had been "seriously challenged" and that it did not take into account "why it took so long for the heretic witch to be invented and targeted", noting that had the Murrayite witch-cult been a reality, then it would have been persecuted throughout the Medieval and not just in the Early Modern period. ==Later writers==