Margaret Murray

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see also Criticism of the Murray thesis

Image:MargaretMurray.gif Margaret Alice Murray (1863-1963) was a prominent British anthropologist and Egyptologist. She was well known in academic circles for scholarly contributions to Egyptology and the study of folklore which led to the theory of a pan-European, pre-Christian pagan religion that revolved around the Horned God. Her ideas are acknowledged to have significantly influenced the emergence of Wicca and reconstructionist neopagan religions.

Contents

Biography

Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta, India on July 13 1863. She attended the University College of London and was a student of linguistics and anthropology. She was also a pioneer campaigner for women's rights. Margaret Murray accompanied the renowned Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, on several archaeological excavations in Egypt and Palestine during the late 1890s. Her work and association with Petrie helped secure employment at University College as a junior lecturer. Murray's best known and most controversial text, "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe," was published in 1921. She was consequently named Assistant Professor of Egyptology at the University College of London in 1924, a post she held until her retirement in 1935. In 1926, she became a fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute. Murray became President of the Folklore Society in 1953. Ten years later and having reached 100 years of age, Margaret Murray published her final work, an autobiography entitled "My First Hundred Years" (1963). She died later that same year of natural causes.

Murray's Witchcraft theories

Murray's "Witch Cult in Western Europe" 1921, written during a period she was unable to do field work in Egypt, laid out the essential elements of her thesis that a standardised underground pagan resistance to the Christian Church existed across Europe. The pagans organized in covens of thirteen worshippers, dedicated to a male god. Murray maintained that pagan beliefs and religion dating from the neolithic through the medieval period, secretly practised human sacrifice until exposed by the witchhunt craze starting c. 1450. Despite the bloody nature of the cult Murray described, it was also attractive for its views on the importance of freedom for women, its open sexuality and its resistance to Church oppression. Murray's ideas may be attributed to the popularity of the conservative concept of a romanticised rural Deep England in reaction to modernism and the horrors of the First World War.

Later writings

Murray's later books were written for a more popular audience and in a style that was far more imaginative and entertaining than standard academic works. "The God of the Witches", 1931 expanded on her claims that the witch cult had worshiped a Horned God whose origins went back to prehistory. Murray decided that the witches' admissions in trial that they worshiped Satan proved they actually did worship such a god. Thus, according to Murray, reports of Satan actually represented pagan gatherings with their priest wearing a horned helmet to represent their Horned God. It is not surprising then that Murray's supposed Witch Cult did not focus on a Goddess, unlike modern Wicca. Murray also discussed the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, [[Thomas � Becket]], claiming to show that he too was a pagan: "The death of Thomas � Becket presents many features which are explicable only by the theory that he also was the substitute for a Divine King" (Murray 171).

Murray now became more and more emotional in her defence of her ideas, claiming that anyone who opposed her did so out of religious prejudice. In "The Divine King in England", 1954 she expanded on her earlier claims there was a secret conspiracy of pagans amongst the English nobility, the same English nobility who provided the leading members of the Church. The suspicious death of William Rufus, King of England, was a ritual sacrificial killing of a sacred king carried out by Henry I, a man so pious he later founded one of the biggest Abbeys in England. This secret conspiracy, according to her, had killed many early English sovereigns, through to James I in the early seventeenth century. Saint Joan of Arc - whose Catholic piety and orthodoxy are attested in numerous documents (such as the letter she dictated threatening to lead a crusade against the Hussites), and who was executed by the English for what even the tribunal members later admitted were political reasons - was rewritten as a pagan martyr by Murray. Her portrait of messianic (self-) sacrifices of these figures make for entertaining speculation, but they have not been taken seriously as history even by her staunchest supporters, though they have been used in novels.

Influences on modern academics

A considerable patchwork of surviving Pagan ideas can be seen throughout European history, and Murray's work did much to alert attention to this previously concealed history of European religion. Isolated individuals or groups certainly did practice customs and rituals that were not part of ordinary Christian dogma, as signs of such beliefs can be seen in Church architecture and local legends. However, such practitioners typically saw themselves as Christian. It is also difficult to clearly define what constitutes a "pagan" belief, since folklore about spirits, fairies etc, continued to exist in Christian cultures.

There have been some academics who, while admitting that Murray exaggerated and falsified evidence, have been influenced by her ideas. Most important of these was Carlo Ginzburg, who discovered in Inquisition records hereditary groups of magicians, called benandanti in early modern Italy, whom he believed showed signs of being the descendants of ancient fertility religions. These groups actually saw themselves as the enemies of witches. For Ginzburg they were folkloric memories of Indo-European shamanism. However, the most important elements of Murray's thesis remain rejected. There was no universal pagan cult throughout Christian Europe. There are possible survivals in local elements of Pagan traditions within medieval life, and some Pagan deities may have been transformed into Christian saints or or seen as fairies and other similar beings.

Legacy

Much like modern popular books on conspiracy theories Murray's sensational works were to become popular bestsellers from the 1940s onwards and were generally believed to be true. Indeed, Murray's influence is still massive in popular thought, though, as noted above, academics have since cited major flaws in Murray's works which call her conclusions into question.

Jacqueline Simpson blames contemporary historians for doing little to refute Murray's ideas at the time they were written. It has been claimed that in the thirties her books led to the founding of Murrayite covens (small circles of witches), one of which probably taught Gerald Gardner in the 1940s. Gardner went on from this introduction to become one of the founders of Wicca, an influential stem for contemporary neopaganism. The affectionate phrase "the Old Religion", used by Pagans to describe an ancestral Pagan religion, derives from Murrayite theory, although many increasingly recognise that "the Old Religions" (plural) would be more accurate. Other Wiccan terms and concepts like coven, esbat, the Wiccan calendar Wheel of the Year, and the Horned God are clearly influenced by or derived directly from Murray's works. Murray's inaccurate ideas are also partially responsible for influencing believers in an ancient European matriarchy and an exaggerated version of the witchhunts which some feminists and neopagans believe in (see also Burning Times). Her ideas also inspired other writers, varying from horror authors like H. P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley to Robert Graves.

Despite the historical inaccuracy of her ideas, Murray's legacy is impressive. There may not have been a secret underground pagan cult in the middle ages, but there is an open neopagan religion in the modern world, which is a tribute to her inspirational and imaginative writing.

References

  • Cohn, Norman, Europe's Inner Demons, London: Pimlico, 1973.
  • Ewen, Cecil L'Estrange Ewen. Some Witchcraft Criticism, 1938.
  • Hutton, Ronald. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1991.
  • Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Kitteredge, G. L. Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1951. pp. 275, 421, 565,
  • Russell, J. B. A History of Witchcraft, Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans, Thames and Hudson, 1995 reprint.
  • Simpson, Jacqueline. "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?", Folklore 105, 1994, pp. 89�96.
  • Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971 and 1997, pp. 514�517.


External Links

Bibliography

  • Saqqara Mastabas (1904)
  • Elementary Egyptian Grammar (1905)
  • Elementary Coptic Grammar (1911)
  • The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921)
  • Excavations in Malta, vol. 1-3 (1923, 1925, 1929)
  • Egyptian Sculpture (1930)
  • Egyptian Temples (1931)
  • Cambridge Excavations in Minorca, vol. 1-3 (1932, 1934, 1938)
  • God of the Witches (1933)
  • Petra, the rock city of Edom (1939)
  • A Street in Petra (1940)
  • The Splendour That Was Egypt (1949)
  • The Divine King in England (1954)
  • The Genesis of Religion (1963)
  • My First Hundred Years (1963)


References

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