Editing Margaret Murray (section)

==Murray's witch-cult hypotheses==
{{further|Witch-cult hypothesis}}
The later folklorists Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood have suggested that Murray was best known for her witch-cult theory,{{sfn|Oates|Wood|1998|p=7}} 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".{{sfn|Drower|2004|p=119}} It has been claimed that Murray's was the "first feminist study of the witch trials",{{sfn|Winick|2015|p=567}} 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.{{sfn|Winick|2015|p=569}} The theory was faulty, in part because all of her academic training was in Egyptology, with no background knowledge in European history,{{sfn|Noble|2005|p=12}} but also because she exhibited a "tendency to generalize wildly on the basis of very slender evidence".{{sfn|Oates|Wood|1998|p=13}} 

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".{{sfn|Oates|Wood|1998|p=7}} 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-rising god|dying-and-resurrecting god myth]],{{sfnm|1a1=Oates|1a2=Wood|1y=1998|1p=16|2a1=Drower|2y=2004|2p=119}} and she was also influenced by the interpretative approaches of E. O. James, [[Karl Pearson]], [[Herbert Fleure]], and [[Harold Peake]].{{sfn|Oates|Wood|1998|pp=16–18}}

===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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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}}

===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.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=199}} Historians of Early Modern Britain like [[George Norman Clark]] and [[Christopher Hill (historian)|Christopher Hill]] incorporated her theories into their work, although the latter subsequently distanced himself from the theory.{{sfn|Thomas|1971|p=515}} 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",{{sfn|Runciman|1962|p=5}} but in which he was otherwise supportive of her thesis.{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=108}} 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''.{{sfn|Oates|Wood|1998|pp=28–29}} 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".{{sfn|Rose|1962|p=14}}

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.{{sfn|Rose|1962|p=15}} 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|[Robert] Graves]] would be familiar with".{{sfn|Rose|1962|p=15}} 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.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=199}} 

Related to this, the 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. "How refreshing", noted the historian [[Hilda Ellis Davidson]], "and exciting her first book was {{em|at that period}}. A new approach, and such a surprising one."{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=90}}

====Early criticism====
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|quote = Surely, discussion of what confessedly is so unripe is premature. When Miss Murray has broadened her study to all the lands where she can find the "cult"; when she has dealt with documents worthier the name of records than the chapbooks and the formless reports that have to serve us for the British trials; when she has traced back witch-sabbath and questionary through the centuries of witch and heretic hunting that precede the British; when she has trusted herself to study the work of other students and fairly to weigh their conclusions against her own in the light of the further evidence they may adduce: then perhaps she may have modified her views. Whether she changes or confirms them, she will then have earned the right to a hearing.
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Murray's theories never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials,{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=198}} and from her early publications onward many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her "factual errors and methodological failings".{{sfn|Eliade|1975|p=152}} Indeed, the majority of scholarly reviews of her work produced during the 1920s and 1930s were largely critical.{{sfn|Sheppard|2013|p=169}} George L. Burr reviewed both of her initial books on the witch-cult for the ''[[American Historical Review]]''.{{sfnm|1a1=Burr|1y=1922|1pp=780–783|2a1=Burr|2y=1935|2pp=491–492}} He stated 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.{{sfn|Burr|1922|p=781}} 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.{{sfn|Burr|1922|p=782}} W. R. Halliday was highly critical in his review for ''Folklore'',{{sfnm|1a1=Halliday|1y=1922|2a1=Hutton|2y=1999|2p=198}} as was E. M. Loeb in his review for ''[[American Anthropologist]]''.{{sfn|Loeb|1922|pp=476–478}}

Soon after, one of the foremost specialists of the trial records, L'Estrange Ewen, brought out a series of books which rejected Murray's interpretation.{{sfnm|1a1=Oates|1a2=Wood|1y=1998|1p=28|2a1=Hutton|2y=1999|2p=198}}
Rose suggested 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".{{sfn|Rose|1962|p=56}} 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 argues that there is no evidence for the existence of the witch-cult anywhere in the intervening period. He further criticises Murray 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. He also challenges Murray's claim that the majority of Britons in the Middle Ages remained pagan as "a view grounded on ignorance alone".{{sfn|Rose|1962|pp=56–61}}

Murray did not respond directly to the criticisms of her work, but reacted 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 out of their own Christian prejudices to non-Christian religion.{{sfnm|1a1=Thomas|1y=1971|1p=516|2a1=Simpson|2y=1994|2p=90|3a1=Oates|3a2=Wood|3y=1998|3p=28|4a1=Hutton|4y=1999|4p=198|5a1=Noble|5y=2005|5p=5}}
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".{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=94}} As evidence, she noted that no substantial research articles on the subject of witchcraft were published in ''Folklore'' between Murray's in 1917 and [[Rossell Hope Robbins]]'s in 1963. She 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, thus evidencing her claim that Murray's theories were widely ignored by scholars of folkloristics.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=94}}

====Academic rejection====
Murray's work was increasingly criticised following her death in 1963, with the definitive academic rejection of the Murrayite witch-cult theory occurring during the 1970s.{{sfnm|1a1=Hutton|1y=1999|1p=362|2a1=Russell|2a2=Alexander|2y=2007|2p=154}} During these decades, a variety of scholars across Europe and North America – such as [[Alan Macfarlane]], Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled, Gerhard Schormann, Bente Alver and Bengt Ankarloo – published 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.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=362}}
In 1971, the English historian [[Keith Thomas (historian)|Keith Thomas]] stated that on the basis of this research, there was "very little evidence to suggest that the accused witches were either devil-worshippers or members of a pagan fertility cult".{{sfn|Thomas|1971|p=514}} He stated that Murray's 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.{{sfn|Thomas|1971|p=515}}

In 1975, the historian [[Norman Cohn]] commented that Murray's "knowledge of European history, even of English history, was superficial and her grasp of [[historical method]] was non-existent",{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=109}} adding that her ideas were "firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould".{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=109}} That same year, the historian of religion [[Mircea Eliade]] described Murray's work as "hopelessly inadequate", containing "numberless and appalling errors".{{sfn|Eliade|1975|pp=152–153}} In 1996, the feminist historian [[Diane Purkiss]] stated that although Murray's thesis was "intrinsically improbable" and commanded "little or no allegiance within the modern academy", she felt that male scholars like Thomas, Cohn, and Macfarlane had unfairly adopted an androcentric approach by which they contrasted their own, male and methodologically sound interpretation against Murray's "feminised belief" about the witch-cult.{{sfn|Purkiss|1996|pp=62–63}}

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|quote = That this "old religion" persisted secretly, without leaving any evidence, is, of course, possible, just as it is possible that below the surface of the moon lie extensive deposits of [[Stilton cheese]]. Anything is possible. But it is nonsense to assert the existence of something for which no evidence exists. The Murrayites ask us to swallow a most peculiar sandwich: a large piece of the wrong evidence between two thick slices of no evidence at all.
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Hutton stated that Murray had treated her source material with "reckless abandon",{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=198}} 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.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=196}} 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 rationalised claims 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' claims to have flown through the air on broomsticks were actually based on their practice of either hopping along on broomsticks or smearing hallucinogenic salves onto themselves.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|pp=90–91}} Concurring with this assessment, the historian [[Jeffrey Burton Russell]], writing with the independent author Brooks Alexander, stated that "Murray's use of sources, in general, is appalling".{{sfn|Russell|Alexander|2007|p=154}} The pair went on to claim 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".{{sfn|Russell|Alexander|2007|p=154}}

The Italian historian [[Carlo Ginzburg]] has been cited as being willing to give "some slight support" to Murray's theory.{{sfn|Simpson|1994|p=95}} Ginzburg stated that although her thesis had been "formulated in a wholly uncritical way" and contained "serious defects", it did contain "a kernel of truth".{{sfn|Ginzburg|1983|p=xix}} He stated his opinion that she was right in claiming that European witchcraft had "roots in an ancient fertility cult", something that he argued was vindicated by his work researching the {{lang|it|[[benandanti]]}}, an agrarian visionary tradition recorded in the [[Friuli]] district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries.{{sfn|Ginzburg|1983|p=xiii}} Several historians and folklorists have pointed out that Ginzburg's arguments are very different to Murray's: whereas Murray argued for the existence of a pre-Christian witches' cult whose members physically met during the witches' Sabbaths, Ginzburg argued that some of the European visionary traditions that were conflated with witchcraft in the Early Modern period had their origins in pre-Christian fertility religions.{{sfnm|1a1=Cohn|1y=1975|1p=223|2a1=Hutton|2y=1999|2p=378|3a1=Wood|3y=2001|3pp=46–47}} Moreover, other historians have expressed criticism of Ginzburg's interpretation of the {{lang|it|benandanti}}; Cohn stated that there was "nothing whatsoever" in the source material to justify the idea that the {{lang|it|benandanti}} were the "survival of an age-old fertility cult".{{sfn|Cohn|1975|p=223}} Echoing these views, Hutton commented that Ginzburg's claim that the {{lang|it|benandanti}}'s visionary traditions were a survival from pre-Christian practices was an idea resting on "imperfect material and conceptual foundations".{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=278}} He added that Ginzburg's "assumption" that "what was being dreamed about in the sixteenth century had in fact been acted out in religious ceremonies" dating to "pagan times", was entirely "an inference of his own" and not one supported by the documentary evidence.{{sfn|Hutton|1999|p=277}}