Margaret Murray

1.1. Childhood and Upbringing

Margaret Murray was born on 13 July 1863 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, then a major military city and the capital of British India. Her family was wealthy and middle-class English. Her parents were James Murray, a businessman and manager of the Serampore paper mills, who was thrice elected President of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, and Margaret (née Carr), who moved to India from Britain in 1857 to work as a missionary, preaching Christianity and educating Indian women. Margaret lived in Calcutta with her parents, an older sister named Mary, and her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. The Murray family held conservative Victorian values.

Although much 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, some from the Sudra caste, and through childhood holidays to Mussoorie. She developed sympathy for the living conditions of the Indian population, particularly women, influenced by her mother's background. The historian Amara Thornton has suggested that Murray's Indian childhood continued to influence her throughout her life, leading to a hybrid transnational identity that was both British and Indian. During her childhood, Murray never received a formal education, and in later life, she expressed pride in having never had to sit an exam before entering university.

In 1870, Margaret and her sister Mary were sent to Britain, living 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 Margaret would later reject, he awakened her interest in archaeology by 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, settling in Sydenham, South London, where they frequently visited The Crystal Palace.

In 1880, Margaret returned to Calcutta for seven years. She trained and worked as a nurse at the Calcutta General Hospital, run by the Sisters of the Anglican Sisterhood of Clower, and was involved in the hospital's efforts to deal with a cholera outbreak. She was reportedly the first noblewoman to undergo a trial period working at the hospital. In 1881, at age 18, Murray began volunteering for the OED, submitting 300 entries from William L'Isle's edition of Aelfric's Saxon Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament. She continued as a volunteer until 1888, submitting a total of 5,000 entries. In 1886, Murray had to abandon her nursing career due to her short stature, measuring only 4 ft 10 in, which was considered too short for nursing qualifications.

In 1887, she returned to England, moving to Rugby, Warwickshire, where her widowed uncle John had moved. Here, she worked as a social worker, assisting local underprivileged people. When her father retired and moved to England, she lived with him in his house in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, until his death in 1891. In 1893, she traveled to Madras, Tamil Nadu, to visit her sister Mary, who had moved there with her new husband.

1.2. Entry into Academia

In 1893, Murray received her first introduction to Egyptology when her elder sister, Mary, saw an advertisement in The Times newspaper for classes in Egyptian hieroglyphs taught by Flinders Petrie, who would become Murray's future mentor. Mary, unable to attend herself due to her marriage and children, insisted that Murray take these classes, which set her on the path of her future Egyptological career.

Encouraged by her mother and sister, Murray decided to enroll at the newly opened department of Egyptology at University College London (UCL) in Bloomsbury, Central London. At the time of Murray's enrollment in January 1894, at age 30, Egyptology was not a formally trained degree, with the exception of the University of Oxford. The UCL department had been founded in 1892 by an endowment from Amelia Edwards, one of the co-founders of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), and was run by the pioneering archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie. It was based in the Edwards Library of UCL's South Cloisters. Murray's class was largely composed of other women and older men. There, she took courses in the Ancient Egyptian and Coptic languages, taught by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Walter Ewing Crum respectively. She also took linguistics courses, which led her to study Egyptian hieroglyphs. UCL was the first university in England to grant degrees to women, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, which did not accept female students, a fact that somewhat positioned Murray as a pioneer for women's suffrage.

Murray soon got to know Petrie, impressing him with her enthusiasm and intelligence. Her proficiency in German, acquired during her time in Bonn, proved invaluable as she could read and translate German books and journals for Petrie. She became his copyist and illustrator, producing accurate drawings for the published report on his excavations at Qift, titled Koptos. This skill, honed through wood carving classes around 1887, enabled her to accurately transcribe hieroglyphs, Latin, Greek, and Coptic texts from limited and often rough source materials, including expensive photos or paper impressions made by pressing wet filter paper and drying it, which were brought by Petrie from excavation sites. In turn, Petrie 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, whom she referred to 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.

2.1. Academic Career at UCL

Margaret Murray's career at UCL was marked by steady progression and significant contributions to the institution and the field of Egyptology. In 1898, she was appointed junior lecturer, becoming the first female archaeology lecturer in the United Kingdom. Her dedication to the Egyptology department was particularly evident during Flinders Petrie's absences for excavations in Egypt, when she largely took on the responsibility of running the department. She was instrumental in designing a comprehensive curriculum that prepared students for fieldwork, incorporating subjects like anthropology, anatomy, geology, mineralogy, and languages.

She was promoted to assistant lecturer in 1909, lecturer in 1921, and then to senior lecturer and research lecturer in 1922. In 1910, she was largely responsible for introducing a formal certificate in Egyptian archaeology. 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 same year, Murray was tasked with guiding Mary of Teck, the Queen consort, around the Egyptology department during her visit to UCL.

Murray was a strong advocate for women in 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. She became a close friend of fellow female lecturer Winifred Smith, and together they campaigned to improve the status and recognition of women in the university. Murray expressed frustration at female staff who were afraid of upsetting or offending the male university establishment with their demands. She also sat on the UCL Refectory Committee for many years, ensuring students had access to nutritious yet affordable lunches.

Although she reached the legal retirement age in 1927, Murray was reappointed on an annual basis until 1935, a testament to her popularity as a lecturer. She retired from UCL in 1935, expressing that she was glad to leave for reasons she did not make clear. After Petrie retired from UCL in 1933 and moved to Jerusalem, Murray took over as editor of the Ancient Egypt journal, renaming it Ancient Egypt and the East to reflect its broader research interest in ancient societies interacting with Egypt. The journal ceased publication in 1935, possibly due to Murray's retirement.

In recognition of her contributions, UCL introduced the Margaret Murray Prize in 1935, awarded to the student who produces the best dissertation in Egyptology; this prize continues to be presented annually. In 1969, UCL named another common room in her honor, though it was converted into an office in 1989. UCL also holds two busts of Murray, one in the Petrie Museum and another in the library of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. The latter was commissioned by her student Violet MacDermot and created by artist Stephen Rickard. A watercolor painting of Murray by Winifred Brunton is also part of UCL's Art Collection.

2.2. Fieldwork and Excavations

Margaret Murray's archaeological expeditions were crucial in establishing her reputation as a formidable scholar. Her first experience in field archaeology came during the 1902-03 season when she traveled to Egypt to join Flinders Petrie's excavations at Abydos. Petrie and his wife, Hilda Petrie, had been excavating the site since 1899. Murray initially joined as a site nurse, but Petrie taught her excavation techniques, and she was given a senior position.

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

During the 1903-04 field season, Murray returned to Egypt and, at Petrie's instruction, began investigations at the Saqqara cemetery near Cairo, which dated from the Old Kingdom. Lacking legal permission to excavate, she spent her time transcribing inscriptions from ten tombs that had been excavated in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette. She published her findings in 1905 as Saqqara Mastabas I, though translations of the inscriptions were not published until 1937 as Saqqara Mastabas II. Both The Osireion at Abydos and Saqqara Mastabas I proved highly influential in the Egyptological community, with Petrie acknowledging Murray's significant contribution to his own career.

From 1921 to 1927, Murray led archaeological excavations on Malta, assisted by Edith Guest and Gertrude Caton Thompson. She excavated Bronze Age megalithic monuments at Santa Sofia, Santa Maria tal-Bakkari, Għar Dalam, and Borġ in-Nadur, all of which were threatened by the construction of a new aerodrome. Her work was funded by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund. Her resulting three-volume excavation report became an important publication in Maltese archaeology.

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, which resulted in the publication of Cambridge Excavations in Minorca.

In the summer of 1925, she led a team of volunteers to excavate Homestead Moat in Whomerle Wood near Stevenage, Hertfordshire; however, she never published an excavation report, and her motives for this work remain unclear.

In 1935, Murray spent time in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, where she aided the Petries in their excavation at Tall al-Ajjul, a Bronze Age mound south of Gaza. During this trip, she also visited Petra in neighboring Jordan. Intrigued by the site, she returned in March and April 1937 to carry out a small excavation in several cave dwellings. She subsequently wrote both an excavation report and a guidebook on Petra.

2.3. Scholarly Contributions and Public Engagement

Margaret Murray was a prolific scholar and dedicated advocate for public education, striving to make the complex world of ancient history and archaeology accessible to a broad audience. Her publications in Egyptology were influential, and her efforts to popularize the field helped to shape public interest.

She authored several key academic works, including The Osireion at Abydos (1904), Saqqara Mastabas I (1905), and Saqqara Mastabas II (1937). She also contributed significantly to museum collections, cataloguing Egyptian artifacts for institutions such as the Dublin National Museum, the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, for which she was elected a Fellow. She also catalogued Flinders Petrie's finds housed at the Manchester Museum and regularly lectured there during the 1906-07 school year.

One of Murray's most notable public engagements occurred in May 1908 at the Manchester Museum, where she and John Cameron led the public unwrapping of the mummy of Khnum-nakht, one of the two mummies recovered from the Tomb of two Brothers. This event marked the first time a woman had publicly unwrapped a mummy and was attended by over 500 onlookers, attracting considerable press attention. This was considered the first interdisciplinary study of mummies and became a breakthrough, pioneering the way for future scientific techniques in mummy unwrapping. Murray emphasized the scholarly importance of the unwrapping for understanding the Middle Kingdom and its burial practices, criticizing those who viewed 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.

Dedicated to infusing Egyptomania with solid scholarship, Murray authored a series of books aimed at a general audience. These included Elementary Egyptian Grammar (1905), Elementary Coptic (Sahidic) Grammar (1911), and Ancient Egyptian Legends (1913) 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. She 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 1949, she published Ancient Egyptian Religious Poetry, her second work for "The Wisdom of the East" series, and The Splendour That Was Egypt, which collated many of her UCL lectures. The latter adopted a diffusionist perspective, arguing that Egypt influenced Greco-Roman society and, consequently, modern Western society. This was seen as a compromise between Petrie's belief that other societies influenced the emergence of Egyptian civilization and Grafton Elliot Smith's highly unorthodox and heavily criticized hyperdiffusionist view that Egypt was the source of all global civilization. The book received a mixed reception from the archaeological community.

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. Together, they co-authored various papers on Egyptology aimed at an anthropological audience, many of which dealt with subjects that Egyptological journals would not publish, such as the "Sa" sign for the uterus, and were thus 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. As Petrie was often away excavating in Egypt, Murray largely operated as de facto editor. She also published many research articles in the journal and authored numerous book reviews, particularly of German-language publications that Petrie could not read.

In 1932, Murray returned to Malta to aid in the cataloguing of the Bronze Age pottery collection held in the Malta Museum, resulting in the publication of Corpus of the Bronze Age Pottery of Malta. From 1934 to 1940, she aided the cataloguing of Egyptian antiquities at Girton College, Cambridge, and also gave lectures in Egyptology at the university until 1942. After returning to London post-World War II, she continued her involvement with UCL and utilized the Institute of Archaeology's library. She visited the British Museum library most days and twice a week 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.

4.1. Development and Core Arguments

Margaret Murray's interest in folklore, particularly after recuperating in Glastonbury during World War I, led her to develop a profound interest in the witch trials of Early Modern Europe. She was drawn to local folklore, especially tales of the Holy Grail and its connection to Joseph of Arimathea, and began to explore ideas linking these to Egyptian elements. This research path eventually led her to the history of witchcraft in Europe, which she saw as a continuation of her interest in ancient religions. Some suspected that this was her way of escaping the shadow of Petrie's great name and deciding to enter a very different field. Responding to this, Murray said, "Ancient religion has always been a subject I loved very much, and folklore or witchcraft is on the same path."

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. She argued 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 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 from Henry Balfour.

In this work, Murray stated that she had restricted her research to Great Britain, though she also referenced sources from France, Flanders, and New England. She distinguished between "Operative Witchcraft," referring to the performance of charms and spells for any purpose, and "Ritual Witchcraft," which she defined as "the ancient religion of Western Europe," a fertility-based faith she also termed "the Dianic cult." She claimed that this cult had "very probably" once been devoted to the worship of both a male deity and a "Mother Goddess," and was dominated by women, but that "at the time when the cult is recorded the worship of the male deity appears to have superseded that of the female" and was taken over by men. Murray asserted 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." She asserted that applicants had to agree to join of their own free will and devote themselves to the service of their deity. In some cases, these individuals had to sign a covenant or were baptized into the faith. She also claimed that the religion was largely passed down through hereditary lines. Murray described the religion as being divided into covens containing thirteen members, led by a coven officer often termed the "Devil" in the trial accounts, who was accountable to a "Grand Master." According to Murray, the records of the coven were kept in a secret book, and the coven disciplined its members, even executing those deemed traitors.

Describing this witch-cult as "a joyous religion," she claimed that its two primary festivals were on May Eve and November Eve, with other dates of religious observation including 1 February, 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 for both 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 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 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 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 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.

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe was generally "dry and clinical," with every assertion meticulously footnoted and lavishly quoted. It was not a bestseller, selling only 2,020 copies in its first thirty years. 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 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. She used this opportunity to propagate her own witch-cult theory, failing to mention alternate theories proposed by other academics. Her entry remained in the encyclopedia until 1969, becoming readily accessible to the public and significantly impacting the widespread acceptance of her ideas. It received a particularly enthusiastic reception from occultists such as Dion Fortune, Lewis Spence, Ralph Shirley, and J. W. Brodie Innes, perhaps because its claims regarding an ancient secret society resonated with similar claims common among various occult groups.

Murray reiterated her witch-cult theory in her 1933 book, The God of the Witches, which was aimed at a wider, non-academic audience and published by the popular press Sampson Low. The tone of this book 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." In this book, she also "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. 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, 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, drawing influence from James Frazer's The Golden Bough, an anthropological book that claimed 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 this book seriously, and it was largely ignored by many of her supporters.

4.2. Academic Reception and Criticism

Margaret Murray's witch-cult theory, though widely known, faced significant and ultimately overwhelming academic criticism, particularly from experts in the history of witch trials. While it initially garnered some support, its methodological flaws and factual inaccuracies led to its eventual rejection by mainstream scholarship.

Murray's theory has been described as the "first feminist study of the witch trials" and the first to have "empowered the witches" by giving the accused (largely female) both free will and a voice distinct from that of their interrogators. However, it was flawed, partly because her academic training was in Egyptology, with no background knowledge in European history. Critics noted her "tendency to generalize wildly on the basis of very slender evidence." Despite this, her interpretations fit within wider perspectives on the past prevalent at the time, particularly influenced by James Frazer's work on a pervasive dying-and-rising god myth, and by the interpretative approaches of E. O. James, Karl Pearson, Herbert Fleure, and Harold Peake.

Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favorable reception from many readers, including some significant scholars, though none 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 Hill later 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 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 theory gained such support partly because of her "imposing credentials" as a UCL staff member, which lent her theory greater legitimacy. He further suggested that the Murrayite view was attractive as it confirmed "the general picture of pre-Christian Europe a reader of Frazer or [Robert] Graves would be familiar with." Similarly, historian Ronald Hutton suggested that the theory's popularity stemmed from its appeal to "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 most Britons remained pagan long after Christianization, and the idea that folk customs represented pagan survivals. It also seemed more plausible than the previously dominant rationalist idea that witch trials resulted from mass delusion. Folklorist Jacqueline Simpson suggested that part of the Murrayite theory's appeal was that it appeared to offer a "sensible, demystifying, liberating approach to a longstanding but sterile argument" between rationalists who denied the existence of witches and those who insisted on a real Satanic conspiracy.

Despite this initial interest, Murray's theories never received support from experts in the Early Modern witch trials. From her early publications onward, many of her ideas were challenged by those who highlighted her "factual errors and methodological failings." Indeed, the majority of scholarly reviews of her work during the 1920s and 1930s were largely critical. George L. Burr reviewed both of her initial books on the witch-cult for the American Historical Review. He stated that she was not acquainted with "careful general histories by modern scholars" and criticized her for assuming that trial accounts accurately reflected the accused witches' genuine experiences of witchcraft, regardless of whether those confessions had been obtained through torture and coercion. He also charged her with selectively using evidence to serve her interpretation, for instance, by omitting any supernatural or miraculous events that appear in the trial accounts. W. R. Halliday was highly critical in his review for Folklore, as was E. M. Loeb in his review for American Anthropologist. Soon after, L'Estrange Ewen, a foremost specialist of the trial records, published a series of books rejecting Murray's interpretation.

Elliot 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." Highlighting a gap of about a thousand years between the Christianization of Britain and the start of the witch trials there, he argued that there was no evidence for the existence of the witch-cult anywhere in the intervening period. He further criticized 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 challenged Murray's claim that the majority of Britons in the Middle Ages remained pagan as "a view grounded on ignorance alone."

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 toward non-Christian religions. Murray, often considered a rational person, ignored and downplayed negative reactions regarding her book. 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." 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.

The definitive academic rejection of the Murrayite witch-cult theory occurred during the 1970s, following her death in 1963. 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. In 1971, the English 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." 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.

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," adding that her ideas were "firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould." That same year, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade described Murray's work as "hopelessly inadequate," containing "numberless and appalling errors." 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.

Hutton stated that Murray had treated her source material with "reckless abandon," 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. Simpson outlined how Murray had selected her use of evidence very specifically, particularly by ignoring and/or rationalizing any accounts of supernatural or miraculous events in the trial records, thereby distorting the events that she was describing. Thus, Simpson pointed out, Murray rationalized 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. 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." 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."

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has been cited as being willing to give "some slight support" to Murray's theory. 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." 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 benandanti^Italian, an agrarian visionary tradition recorded in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries. Several historians and folklorists have pointed out that Ginzburg's arguments are very different from 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. Moreover, other historians have expressed criticism of Ginzburg's interpretation of the benandanti^Italian; Cohn stated that there was "nothing whatsoever" in the source material to justify the idea that the benandanti^Italian were the "survival of an age-old fertility cult." Echoing these views, Hutton commented that Ginzburg's claim that the benandanti^Italian's visionary traditions were a survival from pre-Christian practices was an idea resting on "imperfect material and conceptual foundations." 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. Catherine Noble stated that "Murray caused considerable damage to the study of witchcraft."

4.3. Influence on Literature and Popular Culture

Despite its academic rejection, Margaret Murray's witch-cult hypothesis exerted a significant and lasting influence on literature and popular culture, shaping perceptions of historical witchcraft and pagan traditions. Her ideas, particularly through her Encyclopædia Britannica entry, became widely accessible and enthusiastically adopted by various creators.

Simpson noted that the publication of the Murray thesis in the Encyclopædia Britannica made it accessible to "journalists, film-makers popular novelists and thriller writers," who adopted it "enthusiastically." Her work influenced the writings of Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves. Murray's ideas shaped the depiction of paganism in the work of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff. Her ideas about religion can also be discerned in the fictions of another British historical novelist, Henry Treece. The American horror author H. P. Lovecraft was also influenced by Murray, citing The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in his writings about the fictional cult of Cthulhu. Another horror writer, Dennis Wheatley, incorporated Murray's ideas about witchcraft into his novel The Devil Rides Out and cited Murray's work in his non-fiction book on the occult, The Devil and all his Works.

The author Sylvia Townsend Warner cited Murray's work on the witch-cult as an influence on her 1926 novel Lolly Willowes. Warner sent a copy of her book to Murray in appreciation, and the two met for lunch shortly after. There was nevertheless some difference in their depictions of the witch-cult; whereas Murray had depicted an organized pre-Christian cult, Warner depicted a vague family tradition that was explicitly Satanic. In 1927, Warner lectured on the subject of witchcraft, exhibiting a strong influence from Murray's work. Analyzing the relationship between Murray and Warner, the English literature scholar Mimi Winick characterized both as being "engaged in imagining new possibilities for women in modernity." The fantasy novel Lammas Night is also based on the idea of the role of the royal family, drawing on similar themes of ancient traditions.

7.1. Legacy in Academia

Ronald Hutton noted that Murray was one of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship," and the archaeologist Niall Finneran described her as "one of the greatest characters of post-war British archaeology." Upon her death, Glyn Daniel referred to her as "the Grand Old Woman of Egyptology," with Hutton noting that Egyptology represented "the core of her academic career." In 2014, Amara Thornton referred to her as "one of Britain's most famous Egyptologists."

However, according to archaeologist Ruth Whitehouse, Murray's contributions to archaeology and Egyptology were often overlooked as her work was overshadowed by that of Flinders Petrie, to the extent that she was often thought of primarily as one of Petrie's assistants rather than as a scholar in her own right. By her retirement, she had come to be highly regarded within the discipline. However, Whitehouse noted that Murray's reputation declined following her death, which Whitehouse attributed to the widespread academic rejection of her witch-cult theory and the general erasure of women archaeologists from the discipline's male-dominated history.

In his obituary for Murray in Folklore, E. O. James noted that her death was "an event of unusual interest and importance in the annals of the Folk-Lore Society in particular as well as in the wider sphere in which her influence was felt in so many directions and disciplines." However, later academic folklorists, such as Jacqueline Simpson and Juliette Wood, have cited Murray and her witch-cult theory as an embarrassment to their field and to the Folklore Society specifically. Simpson suggested that Murray's position as President of the Society was a causal factor in the mistrustful attitude that many historians held toward folkloristics as an academic discipline, as they erroneously came to believe that all folklorists endorsed Murray's ideas. Similarly, Catherine Noble stated that "Murray caused considerable damage to the study of witchcraft."

In 1935, UCL introduced the Margaret Murray Prize, awarded to the student who is deemed to have produced the best dissertation in Egyptology; this prize continues to be presented annually into the 21st century. In 1969, UCL named one of their common rooms in her honor, but it was converted into an office in 1989. In June 1983, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother visited the room and was gifted a copy of Murray's My First Hundred Years. UCL also holds two busts of Murray, one kept in the Petrie Museum and the other in the library of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. This sculpture was commissioned by one of her students, Violet MacDermot, and produced by the artist Stephen Rickard. UCL also possesses a watercolor painting of Murray by Winifred Brunton; formerly exhibited in the Petrie Gallery, it was later placed into the Art Collection stores.

In 2013, on the 150th anniversary of Murray's birth and the 50th of her death, the UCL Institute of Archaeology's Ruth Whitehouse described Murray as "a remarkable woman" whose life was "well worth celebrating, both in the archaeological world at large and especially in UCL." The historian of archaeology Rosalind M. Janssen titled her study of Egyptology at UCL The First Hundred Years "as a tribute" to Murray. Murray's friend Margaret Stefana Drower authored a short biography of her, which was included as a chapter in the 2004 edited volume on Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists. In 2013, Lexington Books published The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman's Work in Archaeology, a biography of Murray authored by Kathleen L. Sheppard, then an assistant professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology; the book was based upon Sheppard's doctoral dissertation produced at the University of Oklahoma. Although characterizing it as being "written in a clear and engaging manner," one reviewer noted that Sheppard's book focuses on Murray the "scientist" and as such neglects to discuss Murray's involvement in magical practices and her relationship with Wicca.

7.2. Influence on Wicca and Modern Paganism

Margaret Murray's witch-cult theories, despite their academic discrediting, provided a foundational narrative for the development of Wicca and other contemporary Pagan movements, earning her the title "Grandmother of Wicca."

The Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White stated that it was Murray's theory which "formed the historical narrative around which Wicca built itself," for on its emergence in England during the 1940s and 1950s, Wicca claimed to be the survival of this witch-cult. Wicca's theological structure, revolving around a Horned God and Mother Goddess, was adopted from Murray's ideas about the ancient witch-cult. Wiccan groups were named covens and their meetings termed esbats, both words that Murray had popularized. As with Murray's witch-cult, Wicca's practitioners entered via an initiation ceremony. Murray's claims that witches wrote down their spells in a book may have been an influence on Wicca's Book of Shadows. Wicca's early system of seasonal festivities were also based on Murray's framework.

Noting that there is no evidence of Wicca existing before the publication of Murray's books, Ralph Merrifield commented that for those in 20th century Britain who wished to form their own witches' covens, "Murray may have seemed the ideal fairy godmother, and her theory became the pumpkin coach that could transport them into the realm of fantasy for which they longed." The historian Philip Heselton suggested that the New Forest coven - the oldest alleged Wiccan group - was founded circa 1935 by esotericists aware of Murray's theory and who may have believed themselves to be reincarnated witch-cult members. It was Gerald Gardner, who claimed to be an initiate of the New Forest coven, who established the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca and popularized the religion. According to Simpson, Gardner was the only member of the Folklore Society to "wholeheartedly" accept Murray's witch-cult hypothesis. The duo knew each other, with Murray writing the foreword to Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today, although in that foreword she did not explicitly specify whether she believed Gardner's claim that he had discovered a survival of her witch-cult. In 2005, Catherine Noble suggested that "Murray's name might be all but forgotten today if it were not for Gerald Gardner."

Murray's witch-cult theories were likely also a core influence on the non-Gardnerian Wiccan traditions that were established in Britain and Australia between 1930 and 1970 by figures like Bob Clay-Egerton, Robert Cochrane, Charles Cardell, and Rosaleen Norton. The prominent Wiccan Doreen Valiente eagerly searched for what she believed were other surviving remnants of the Murrayite witch-cult around Britain. Valiente remained committed to a belief in Murray's witch-cult even after its academic rejection, and she described Murray as "a remarkable woman." In San Francisco during the late 1960s, Murray's writings were among the sources used by Aidan A. Kelly in the creation of his Wiccan tradition, the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. In Los Angeles during the early 1970s, they were used by Zsuzsanna Budapest when she was establishing her feminist-oriented tradition of Dianic Wicca. The Murrayite witch-cult theory also provided the basis for the ideas espoused in Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, a 1978 book written by the American gay liberation activist Arthur Evans.

Members of the Wiccan community gradually became aware of academia's rejection of the witch-cult theory. Accordingly, belief in its literal truth declined during the 1980s and 1990s, with many Wiccans instead coming to view it as a myth that conveyed metaphorical or symbolic truths. Others insisted that the historical origins of the religion did not matter and that instead Wicca was legitimated by the spiritual experiences it gave to its participants. In response, Hutton authored The Triumph of the Moon, a historical study exploring Wicca's early development; on publication in 1999, the book exerted a strong impact on the British Pagan community, further eroding belief in the Murrayite theory among Wiccans. Conversely, other practitioners clung on to the theory, treating it as an important article of faith and rejecting post-Murrayite scholarship on European witchcraft. Several prominent practitioners continued to insist that Wicca was a religion with origins stretching back to the Palaeolithic, but others rejected the validity of historical scholarship and emphasized intuition and emotion as the arbiter of truth. A few "counter-revisionist" Wiccans - among them Donald H. Frew, Jani Farrell-Roberts, and Ben Whitmore - published critiques in which they attacked post-Murrayite scholarship on matters of detail, but none defended Murray's original hypothesis completely.