Modern witchcraft
Margaret Alice Murray
Egyptologist and folklorist whose rejected witch-cult hypothesis nevertheless supplied modern witchcraft with a usable story about its own antiquity.
- Dates
- 13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963
- Dating
- documented dates
- Born
- Calcutta
- Died
- Welwyn, England
The life
Murray had a substantial career in Egyptology and at University College London. In the 1920s she argued that the people prosecuted as witches had belonged to a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. The theory reached a much larger audience through her books and her long-lived Encyclopaedia Britannica article.
Place in the tradition
Historians rejected her thesis, but Gardner's presentation of Wicca drew heavily on the world she described.
a note on the record
History and later legend
Historians reject the witch-cult hypothesis: trial records do not support one organised pagan religion surviving underground across early modern Europe. Its place here reflects its influence on modern witchcraft.
the written record
Principal works
-
1921
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
Argues from witch-trial material for an organised pre-Christian religion surviving into the early modern period.
-
1931
The God of the Witches
A more popular restatement of the witch-cult thesis centred on a horned god.