Margaret Murray

Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was an Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London (UCL) from 1898 to 1935. She was president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely.

Born to a wealthy middle-class English family in Calcutta, British India, Murray divided her youth between India, Britain, and Germany, training as both a nurse and a social worker. Moving to London, in 1894 she began studying Egyptology at UCL, developing a friendship with department head Flinders Petrie, who encouraged her early academic publications and appointed her junior lecturer in 1898. In 1902–1903, she took part in Petrie's excavations at Abydos, Egypt, there discovering the Osireion temple, and the following season investigated the Saqqara cemetery, both of which established her reputation in Egyptology. Supplementing her UCL wage by giving public classes and lectures at the British Museum and Manchester Museum, it was at the latter in 1908 that she led the unwrapping of Khnum-nakht, one of the mummies recovered from the Tomb of two Brothersthe first time that a woman had publicly unwrapped a mummy. Recognising that British Egyptomania reflected the existence of widespread public interest in Ancient Egypt, Murray wrote several books on Egyptology targeted at a general audience.

Murray became closely involved in the first-wave feminist movement, joining the Women's Social and Political Union and devoting much time to improving women's status at UCL. Unable to return to Egypt due to the First World War, she focused her research on the witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God. Although later academically discredited, the theory gained widespread attention and proved a significant influence on the emerging new religious movement of Wicca. From 1921 to 1931, she undertook excavations of prehistoric sites on Malta and Menorca and developed her interest in folkloristics. Awarded an honorary doctorate in 1927, she was appointed assistant professor in 1928 and retired from UCL in 1935. That year she visited Palestine to aid Petrie's excavation of Tall al-Ajjul and in 1937 she led a small excavation at Petra, Jordan. Taking on the presidency of the Folklore Society in later life, she lectured at such institutions as the University of Cambridge and City Literary Institute, and continued to publish until her death.

Murray's work in Egyptology and archaeology was widely acclaimed and earned her the nickname of "The Grand Old Woman of Egyptology", although after her death many of her contributions to the field were overshadowed by those of Petrie. Conversely, Murray's work in folkloristics and the history of witchcraft has been academically discredited and her methods in these areas heavily criticised. The influence of her witch-cult theory in both religion and literature has been examined by scholars, and she herself has been dubbed the "Grandmother of Wicca".

Early life

Youth: 1863–1893

Margaret Murray was born on 13 July 1863 in Calcutta, then a major military city and the capital of British India. She lived in the city with her parents James and Margaret Murray, an older sister named Mary, and her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. James Murray, born in India of Anglo-Irish descent, was a businessman and manager of the Serampore paper mills who was thrice elected President of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. Margaret (née Carr) had moved to India from Britain in 1857 to work as a missionary, preaching Christianity and educating Indian women. She continued with this work after marrying James and giving birth to her two daughters.

Although most of their lives were spent in the European area of Calcutta, which was walled off from the Indian sectors of the city, Murray encountered members of Indian society through her family's employment of ten Indian servants and through childhood holidays to Mussoorie. The historian Amara Thornton has suggested that Murray's Indian childhood exerted an influence over her throughout her life, expressing the view that Murray could be seen as having a hybrid transnational identity that was both British and Indian. During her childhood, Murray received no formal education, and in later life expressed pride that she had never had to sit an exam before entering university.

In 1870, Margaret and her sister Mary were sent to Britain, moving in with their uncle John, a vicar, and his wife Harriet at their home in Lambourn, Berkshire. Although John provided them with a strongly Christian education and a belief in the inferiority of women, both of which she would reject, he awakened Murray's interest in archaeology through taking her to see local monuments. In 1873, the girls' mother arrived in Europe and took them with her to Bonn in Germany, where they both became fluent in German. In 1875 they returned to Calcutta, staying there until 1877. They then moved with their parents back to England, where they settled in Sydenham, London. There, they spent much time visiting The Crystal Palace, while their father worked at his firm's London office.

In 1880, they returned to Calcutta, where Margaret remained for the next seven years. She became a nurse at the Calcutta General Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of the Anglican Sisterhood of Clower, and there was involved with the hospital's attempts to deal with a cholera outbreak. In 1881, at age 18, Margaret heard about James Murray (no relation) and his "general appeal to English speakers around the world to read their local books and send him words and quotations" for entry into the OED. She had a routine of taking a book onto the roof in the cool early-morning air. She began with William L'Isle's edition of Aelfric's ''Saxon Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament'', from which she submitted 300 entries to Murray. She continued as a volunteer until 1888, submitting a total of 5,000 entries.

In 1887, she returned to England, moving to Rugby, Warwickshire, where her uncle John, now widowed, had moved. She took up employment as a social worker dealing with local underprivileged people. When her father retired to England, she moved into his house in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, living with him until his death in 1891. In 1893 she travelled to Madras, Tamil Nadu, where her sister had moved to with her new husband.

Later in 1893, Murray received her first introduction to Egyptology when her elder sister, Mary, alerted her to an advertisement in ''The Times'' for classes in Egyptian hieroglyphs taught by Flinders Petrie, Murray's future mentor. Reflecting upon this in her autobiography, Murray notes it was her sister's insistence on attending these classes, largely spurred on by her own inability to do so, which set her down the path of her Egyptological career.

Early years at University College London: 1894–1905

Encouraged by her mother and sister, Murray decided to enrol at the newly opened department of Egyptology at University College London (UCL). At the time of Murray's enrolment, Egyptology was not a formally trained degree, with the exception of the University of Oxford, which offered Middle Egyptian amongst a trio of "Oriental languages". Having been founded by an endowment from Amelia Edwards, one of the co-founders of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), the department was run by the pioneering early archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, and based in the Edwards Library of UCL's South Cloisters. Murray began her studies at UCL at age 30 in January 1894, as part of a class composed largely of other women and older men. She took courses in the Ancient Egyptian and Coptic languages which were taught by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Walter Ewing Crum respectively.

Murray soon got to know Petrie, becoming his copyist and illustrator and producing the drawings for the published report on his excavations at Qift, ''Koptos''. In turn, he aided and encouraged her to write her first research paper, "The Descent of Property in the Early Periods of Egyptian History", which was published in the ''Proceedings of the Society for Biblical Archaeology'' in 1895. Becoming Petrie's ''de facto'' though unofficial assistant, Murray began to give some of the linguistic lessons in Griffith's absence. In 1898 she was appointed to the position of junior lecturer, responsible for teaching the linguistic courses at the Egyptology department; this made her the first female lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom. In this capacity, she spent two days a week at UCL, devoting the other days to caring for her ailing mother. As time went on, she came to teach courses on Ancient Egyptian history, religion, and language.

Among Murray's students – to whom she referred as "the Gang" – were several who went on to produce noted contributions to Egyptology, including Reginald Engelbach, Georgina Aitken, Guy Brunton, and Myrtle Broome. She supplemented her UCL salary by teaching evening classes in Egyptology at the British Museum.

At this point, Murray had no experience in field archaeology, and so during the 1902–1903 field season, she travelled to Egypt to join Petrie's excavations at Abydos. Petrie and his wife, Hilda Petrie, had been excavating at the site since 1899, having taken over the archaeological investigation from French Coptic scholar Émile Amélineau. Murray at first joined as site nurse, but was subsequently taught how to excavate by Petrie and given a senior position.

This led to issues with some of the male excavators, who disliked the idea of taking orders from a woman. This experience, coupled with discussions with other female excavators (some of whom were active in the feminist movement), led Murray to adopt openly feminist viewpoints. While excavating at Abydos, Murray uncovered the Osireion, a temple devoted to the god Osiris which had been constructed by order of Pharaoh Seti I during the period of the New Kingdom. She published her site report as ''The Osireion at Abydos'' in 1904; in the report, she examined the inscriptions that had been discovered at the site to discern the purpose and use of the building.

During the 1903–1904 field season, Murray returned to Egypt, and at Petrie's instruction began her investigations at the Saqqara cemetery near Cairo, which dated from the period of the Old Kingdom. Murray did not have legal permission to excavate the site, and instead spent her time transcribing the inscriptions from ten of the tombs that had been excavated in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette. She published her findings in 1905 as ''Saqqara Mastabas I'', although would not publish translations of the inscriptions until 1937 as ''Saqqara Mastabas II''. Both ''The Osireion at Abydos'' and ''Saqqara Mastabas I'' proved to be very influential in the Egyptological community, with Petrie recognising Murray's contribution to his own career.

Feminism, the First World War, and folklore: 1905–1920

On returning to London, Murray took an active role in the feminist movement, volunteering and financially donating to the cause and taking part in feminist demonstrations, protests, and marches. Joining the Women's Social and Political Union, she was present at large marches like the Mud March of 1907 and the Women's Coronation Procession of June 1911. She concealed the militancy of her actions in order to retain the image of respectability within academia. Murray also pushed the professional boundaries for women throughout her own career, and mentored other women in archaeology and throughout academia. As women could not use the men's common room, she successfully campaigned for UCL to open a common room for women, and later ensured that a larger, better-equipped room was converted for the purpose; it was later renamed the Margaret Murray Room. At UCL, she became a friend of fellow female lecturer Winifred Smith, and together they campaigned to improve the status and recognition of women in the university, with Murray becoming particularly annoyed at female staff who were afraid of upsetting or offending the male university establishment with their demands. Feeling that students should get nutritious yet affordable lunches, for many years she sat on the UCL Refectory Committee. She took on an unofficial administrative role within the Egyptology Department, and was largely responsible for introduction of a formal certificate in Egyptian archaeology in 1910.

Various museums around the United Kingdom invited Murray to advise them on their Egyptological collections, resulting in her cataloguing the Egyptian artefacts owned by the Dublin National Museum, the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, being elected a Fellow of the latter in thanks.
Petrie had established connections with the Egyptological wing of Manchester Museum in Manchester, and it was there that many of his finds had been housed. Murray thus often travelled to the museum to catalogue these artefacts, and during the 1906–07 school year regularly lectured there.

In 1907, Petrie excavated the Tomb of the Two Brothers, a Middle Kingdom burial of two Egyptian priests, Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht, and it was decided that Murray would carry out the public unwrapping of the latter's mummified body. Taking place at the museum in May 1908, it represented the first time that a woman had led a public mummy unwrapping and was attended by over 500 onlookers, attracting press attention. Murray was particularly keen to emphasise the importance that the unwrapping would have for the scholarly understanding of the Middle Kingdom and its burial practices, and lashed out against members of the public who saw it as immoral; she declared that "every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant". She subsequently published a book about her analysis of the two bodies, ''The Tomb of the Two Brothers'', which remained a key publication on Middle Kingdom mummification practices into the 21st century.

Murray was dedicated to public education, hoping to infuse Egyptomania with solid scholarship about Ancient Egypt, and to this end authored a series of books aimed at a general audience. In 1905 she published ''Elementary Egyptian Grammar'' which was followed in 1911 by ''Elementary Coptic (Sahidic) Grammar''. In 1913, she published ''Ancient Egyptian Legends'' for John Murray's "The Wisdom of the East" series. She was particularly pleased with the increased public interest in Egyptology that followed Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922. From at least 1911 until his death in 1940, Murray was a close friend of the anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman of the London School of Economics, and together they co-authored a variety of papers on Egyptology that were aimed at an anthropological audience. Many of these dealt with subjects that Egyptological journals would not publish, such as the "Sa" sign for the uterus, and thus were published in ''Man'', the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. It was at Seligman's recommendation that she was invited to become a member of the Institute in 1916.

In 1914, Petrie launched the academic journal ''Ancient Egypt'', published through his own British School of Archaeology in Egypt (BSAE), which was based at UCL. Given that he was often away from London excavating in Egypt, Murray was left to operate as ''de facto'' editor much of the time. She also published many research articles in the journal and authored many of its book reviews, particularly of the German-language publications which Petrie could not read.

The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, in which the United Kingdom went to war against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, meant that Petrie and other staff members were unable to return to Egypt for excavation. Instead, Petrie and Murray spent much of the time reorganising the artefact collections that they had attained over the past decades. To aid Britain's war effort, Murray enrolled as a volunteer nurse in the Volunteer Air Detachment of the College Women's Union Society, and for several weeks was posted to Saint-Malo in France.

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 for making unsubstantiated leaps with the evidence by the likes of Jessie Weston.

Later life

Witch-cult, Malta, and Menorca: 1921–1935

Murray's interest in folklore led her to develop an interest in the witch trials of Early Modern Europe. In 1917, she published a paper in ''Folklore'', the journal of the Folklore Society, in which she first articulated her version of the witch-cult theory, arguing that the witches persecuted in European history were actually followers of "a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any cult in the end". She followed this up with papers on the subject in the journals ''Man'' and the '' Scottish Historical Review''. She articulated these views more fully in her 1921 book '' The Witch-Cult in Western Europe'', published by Oxford University Press after receiving a positive peer review by Henry Balfour, and which received both criticism and support on publication. Many reviews in academic journals were critical, with historians claiming that she had distorted and misinterpreted the contemporary records that she was using, but the book was nevertheless influential.

As a result of her work in this area, she was invited to provide the entry on "witchcraft" for the fourteenth edition of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' in 1929. She used the opportunity to propagate her own witch-cult theory, failing to mention the alternate theories proposed by other academics. Her entry would be included in the encyclopedia until 1969, becoming readily accessible to the public, and it was for this reason that her ideas on the subject had such a significant impact. It received a particularly enthusiastic reception by occultists such as Dion Fortune, Lewis Spence, Ralph Shirley, and J. W. Brodie Innes, perhaps because its claims regarding an ancient secret society chimed with similar claims common among various occult groups. Murray joined the Folklore Society in February 1927, and was elected to the society's council a month later, although she stood down in 1929. Murray reiterated her witch-cult theory in her 1933 book, ''The God of the Witches'', which was aimed at a wider, non-academic audience. In this book, she cut out or toned down what she saw as the more unpleasant aspects of the witch-cult, such as animal and child sacrifice, and began describing the religion in more positive terms as "the Old Religion".

At UCL, Murray was promoted to lecturer in 1921 and to senior lecturer in 1922. From 1921 to 1927, she led archaeological excavations on Malta, assisted by Edith Guest and Gertrude Caton Thompson. She excavated the Bronze Age megalithic monuments of Santa Sofia, Santa Maria tal-Bakkari, Għar Dalam, and Borġ in-Nadur, all of which were threatened by the construction of a new aerodrome. In this she was funded by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund. Her resulting three-volume excavation report came to be seen as an important publication within the field of Maltese archaeology. During the excavations, she had taken an interest in the island's folklore, resulting in the 1932 publication of her book ''Maltese Folktales'', much of which was a translation of earlier stories collected by Manuel Magri and her friend Liza Galea. In 1932 Murray returned to Malta to aid in the cataloguing of the Bronze Age pottery collection held in Malta Museum, resulting in another publication, ''Corpus of the Bronze Age Pottery of Malta''.

On the basis of her work in Malta, Louis Clarke, the curator of the Cambridge Museum of Ethnology and Anthropology, invited her to lead excavations on the island of Menorca from 1930 to 1931. With the aid of Guest, she excavated the talaiotic sites of Trepucó and Sa Torreta de Tramuntana, resulting in the publication of ''Cambridge Excavations in Minorca''. Murray also continued to publish works on Egyptology for a general audience, such as ''Egyptian Sculpture'' (1930) and ''Egyptian Temples'' (1931), which received largely positive reviews. In the summer of 1925 she led a team of volunteers to excavate Homestead Moat in Whomerle Wood near to Stevenage, Hertfordshire; she did not publish an excavation report and did not mention the event in her autobiography, with her motives for carrying out the excavation remaining unclear.

In 1924, UCL promoted Murray to the position of assistant professor, and, in 1927, she was awarded an honorary doctorate for her career in Egyptology. That year, Murray was tasked with guiding Mary of Teck, the Queen consort, around the Egyptology department during the latter's visit to UCL. The pressures of teaching had eased by this point, allowing Murray to spend more time travelling internationally; in 1920 she returned to Egypt and in 1929 visited South Africa, where she attended the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose theme was the prehistory of southern Africa. In the early 1930s she travelled to the Soviet Union, where she visited museums in Leningrad, Moscow, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, and then in late 1935 she undertook a lecture tour of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia.

Although having reached legal retirement age in 1927, and thus unable to be offered another five-year contract, Murray was reappointed on an annual basis each year until 1935. At this point, she retired, expressing the opinion that she was glad to leave UCL, for reasons that she did not make clear. In 1933, Petrie had retired from UCL and moved to Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine with his wife; Murray therefore took over as editor of the ''Ancient Egypt'' journal, renaming it ''Ancient Egypt and the East'' to reflect its increasing research interest in the ancient societies that surrounded and interacted with Egypt. The journal folded in 1935, perhaps due to Murray's retirement. Murray then spent some time in Jerusalem, where she aided the Petries in their excavation at Tall al-Ajjul, a Bronze Age mound south of Gaza.

Petra, Cambridge, and London: 1935–1953

During Murray's 1935 trip to Palestine, she visited Petra in neighbouring Jordan. Intrigued by the site, in March and April 1937 she returned in order to carry out a small excavation in several cave dwellings at the site, subsequently writing both an excavation report and a guidebook on Petra. Back in England, from 1934 to 1940, Murray aided the cataloguing of Egyptian antiquities at Girton College, Cambridge, and also gave lectures in Egyptology at the university until 1942. Her interest in folklore more broadly continued and she wrote the introduction to ''Lincolshire Folklore'' by Ethel Rudkin, in which she discussed how superior women were as folklorists to men.

During the Second World War, Murray evaded the Blitz of London by moving to Cambridge, where she volunteered for a group (probably the Army Bureau of Current Affairs or The British Way and Purpose) who educated military personnel to prepare them for post-war life. Based in the city, she embarked on research into the town's Early Modern history, examining documents stored in local parish churches, Downing College, and Ely Cathedral; she never published her findings. In 1945, she briefly became involved in the " Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" murder case.

After the war ended she returned to London, settling into a bedsit room in Endsleigh Street, which was close to University College London (UCL) and the Institute of Archaeology (then an independent institution, now part of UCL); she continued her involvement with the former and made use of the latter's library. On most days, she visited the British Museum in order to consult their library, and twice a week she taught adult education classes on Ancient Egyptian history and religion at the City Literary Institute; upon her retirement from this position she nominated her former pupil, Veronica Seton-Williams, to replace her.

Murray's interest in popularising Egyptology among the wider public continued; in 1949 she published ''Ancient Egyptian Religious Poetry'', her second work for John Murray's "The Wisdom of the East" series. That year she also published ''The Splendour That Was Egypt'', in which she collated many of her UCL lectures. The book adopted a diffusionist perspective that argued that Egypt influenced Greco-Roman society and thus modern Western society. This was seen as a compromise between Petrie's belief that other societies influenced the emergence of Egyptian civilisation and Grafton Elliot Smith's highly unorthodox and heavily criticised hyperdiffusionist view that Egypt was the source of all global civilisation. The book received a mixed reception from the archaeological community.

Final years: 1953–1963

In 1953, Murray was appointed to the presidency of the Folklore Society following the resignation of former president Allan Gomme. The Society had initially approached John Mavrogordato for the post, but he had declined, with Murray accepting the nomination several months later. Murray remained president for two terms, until 1955. In her 1954 presidential address, "England as a Field for Folklore Research", she lamented what she saw as the English people's disinterest in their own folklore in favour of that from other nations. For the autumn 1961 issue of ''Folklore'', the society published a ''festschrift'' to Murray to commemorate her 98th birthday. The issue contained contributions from various scholars paying tribute to her – with papers dealing with archaeology, fairies, Near Eastern religious symbols, Greek folk songs – but notably not about witchcraft, potentially because no other folklorists were willing to defend her witch-cult theory.

In May 1957, Murray had championed the archaeologist T. C. Lethbridge's controversial claims that he had discovered three pre-Christian chalk hill figures on Wandlebury Hill in the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire. Privately she expressed concern about the reality of the figures. Lethbridge subsequently authored a book championing her witch-cult theory in which he sought the cult's origins in pre-Christian culture. In 1960, she donated her collection of papers – including correspondences with a wide range of individuals across the country – to the Folklore Society Archive, where it is now known as "the Murray Collection".

Crippled with arthritis, Murray had moved into a home in North Finchley, north London, where she was cared for by a retired couple who were trained nurses; from here she occasionally took taxis into central London to visit the UCL library.
Amid failing health, in 1962 Murray moved into the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, where she could receive 24-hour care; she lived here for the final 18 months of her life. To mark her hundredth birthday, on 13 July 1963 a group of her friends, former students, and doctors gathered for a party at nearby Ayot St. Lawrence. Two days later, her doctor drove her to UCL for a second birthday party, again attended by many of her friends, colleagues, and former students; it was the last time that she visited the university. In ''Man'', the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, it was noted that Murray was "the only Fellow of the Institute to each their centenarywithin living memory, if not in its whole history". That year she published two books; one was ''The Genesis of Religion'', in which she argued that humanity's first deities had been goddesses rather than male gods. The second was her autobiography, ''My First Hundred Years'', which received predominantly positive reviews. She died on 13 November 1963, and her body was cremated.

Murray's witch-cult hypotheses

The later folklorists Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood have suggested that Murray was best known for her witch-cult theory, with biographer Margaret S. Drower expressing the view that it was her work on this subject which "perhaps more than any other, made her known to the general public". It has been claimed that Murray's was the "first feminist study of the witch trials", as well as being the first to have actually "empowered the witches" by giving the (largely female) accused both free will and a voice distinct from that of their interrogators. The theory was faulty, in part because all of her academic training was in Egyptology, with no background knowledge in European history, but also because she exhibited a "tendency to generalize wildly on the basis of very slender evidence".

Oates and Wood, however, noted that Murray's interpretations of the evidence fit within wider perspectives on the past that existed at the time, stating that "Murray was far from isolated in her method of reading ancient ritual origins into later myths". In particular, her approach was influenced by the work of the anthropologist James Frazer, who had argued for the existence of a pervasive dying-and-resurrecting god myth, and she was also influenced by the interpretative approaches of E. O. James, Karl Pearson, Herbert Fleure, and Harold Peake.

Argument

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 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 claimed 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 argument, Murray claimed 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 claimed 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 claimed that they were 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 claimed that in some cases, these individuals had to sign a covenant or were baptised into the faith. At the same time, she claimed 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 claimed 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. The Esbats, Murray claimed, were nocturnal rites that began at midnight, and were "primarily for business, whereas the Sabbath was purely religious". At the former, magical rites were performed both for malevolent and benevolent ends. She asserted 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 then the Sabbath ended with feasting and dancing.

Deeming Ritual Witchcraft to be "a fertility cult", she asserted that many of its rites were designed to ensure fertility and rain-making. She claimed that there were four types of sacrifice performed by the witches: blood-sacrifice, in which the neophyte writes their name 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 a pre-Christian fertility-based religion 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 dwarfs, who continued to live on 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 claim which has been refuted by historians, especially in the case of Joan of Arc.

The 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 footnoted to a source, with lavish quotation". It was not a bestseller; 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 1969.

Murray followed ''The Witch-Cult in Western Europe'' with ''The God of the Witches'', published by the popular press Sampson Low in 1931; although similar in content, unlike her previous volume it was aimed at a mass market audience. The tone of the book also differed strongly from its predecessor, containing "emotionally inflated anguageand coloured with religious phraseology" and repeatedly referring to the witch-cult as "the Old Religion". In this book she also "cut out or toned down" many of the claims made in her previous volume which would have painted the cult in a bad light, such as those which discussed sex and the sacrifice of animals and children.

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, claiming 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 claimed that the Horned God was represented by Pan in Greece, Cernunnos in Gaul, and in various Scandinavian rock carvings. Claiming 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.

In 1954, she published ''The Divine King in England'', in which she greatly extended on the theory, taking influence from Frazer's ''The Golden Bough'', an anthropological book that made the claim that societies all over the world sacrificed their kings to the deities of nature. In her book, she claimed that this practice had continued into medieval England, and that, for instance, the death of William II was really a ritual sacrifice.
No academic took the book seriously, and it was ignored by many of her supporters.

Academic reception

Early support

Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favourable reception from many readers, including some significant scholars, albeit none who were experts in the witch trials. Historians of Early Modern Britain like George Norman Clark and Christopher Hill incorporated her theories into their work, although the latter subsequently distanced himself from the theory. For the 1961 reprint of ''The Witch-Cult in Western Europe'', the 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 Arno Runeberg in his 1947 book ''Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic'' as well as Pennethorne Hughes in his 1952 book ''Witches''. As a result, the Canadian historian Elliot Rose, writing in 1962, claimed 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".

Rose suggested that the reason that 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 obertGraves 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, the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson

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