Editing Margaret Murray (section)

===Argument===
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|quote = The extreme negative and positive reactions to ''The Witch-Cult in Western Europe'', as well as its legacy in religion and literature, register as responses to its fantastical form and content and especially to its implication of an alternate, woman-centered history of Western religion. At least one contemporary review turns Murray's suggestion of continuity between the premodern witches and contemporary women back on her in an ad hominem attack.
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|source = Mimi Winick, 2015.{{sfn|Winick|2015|p=570}}
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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]].{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=6}} 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".{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=11–12}} 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and a "Mother Goddess" but that "at the time when the cult is recorded the worship of the male deity appears to have superseded that of the female".{{sfnm|1a1=Murray|1y=1962|1p=13|2a1=Doyle White|2y=2016|2p=16}} In her argument, Murray claimed that the figure referred to as the Devil in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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=28–31}}

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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=71, 79, 82}} At the same time, she claimed that the religion was largely passed down hereditary lines.{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=225}} Murray described the religion as being divided into [[coven]]s containing thirteen members,{{sfnm|1a1=Murray|1y=1962|1pp=190–191|2a1=Doyle White|2y=2016|2p=16}} led by a coven officer who was often termed the "Devil" in the trial accounts, but who was accountable to a "Grand Master".{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=186}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=194–200}}

Describing this witch-cult as "a joyous religion",{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=15}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=12–13, 109}} 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.{{sfnm|1a1=Murray|1y=1962|1p=97|2a1=Doyle White|2y=2016|2p=16}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=111-112}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=124}}

[[File:Nuremberg chronicles - Devil and Woman on Horseback (CLXXXIXv).jpg|thumb|left|upright|The Devil on horseback. ''[[Nuremberg Chronicle]]'' (1493).]]
Deeming Ritual Witchcraft to be "a fertility cult", she asserted that many of its rites were designed to ensure fertility and rain-making.{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=169}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=152–162}}
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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=30–32}} She asserted that accounts of [[familiar]]s 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=205–208}}

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".{{sfn|Murray|1962|p=19}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=14, 238}} 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,{{sfn|Murray|1962|pp=270–279}} a claim which has been refuted by historians, especially in the case of Joan of Arc.{{sfn|Noble|2005|p=14}}

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".{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=195}} It was not a bestseller; in its first thirty years, only 2,020 copies were sold.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=199}} 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.{{sfnm|1a1=Simpson|1y=1994|1p=89|2a1=Sheppard|2y=2013|2p=169|3a1=Doyle White|3y=2016|3p=16}}

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.{{sfnm|1a1=Hutton|1y=1999|1p=196|2a1=Doyle White|2y=2016|2p=16}} The tone of the book also differed strongly from its predecessor, containing "emotionally inflated [language] and coloured with religious phraseology" and repeatedly referring to the witch-cult as "the Old Religion".{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=93}} 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.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=93}}

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]].{{sfnm|1a1=Murray|1y=1952|1p=13|2a1=Doyle White|2y=2016|2p=87}}
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 [[Amun|Amon]] in Egypt and the [[Minotaur]] of [[Minoan Crete]].{{sfn|Murray|1952|pp=24–27}} Within continental Europe, she claimed that the Horned God was represented by [[Pan (mythology)|Pan]] in Greece, [[Cernunnos]] in Gaul, and in various Scandinavian rock carvings.{{sfn|Murray|1952|pp=28–29}} 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.{{sfn|Murray|1952|pp=32–37, 43–44}}

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 of England|William II]] was really a ritual sacrifice.{{sfnm|1a1=Hutton|1y=1999|1p=272|2a1=Sheppard|2y=2013|2p=170}}
No academic took the book seriously, and it was ignored by many of her supporters.{{sfnm|1a1=Hutton|1y=1999|1p=272|2a1=Noble|2y=2005|2p=12}}