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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter IV: History of Witchcraft

The Murray Thesis: Margaret Murray and the Witch-Cult Theory

The Murray thesis explained: Margaret Murray's claim that witches were a pagan fertility cult, its influence on Wicca and why historians reject it.

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The Murray thesis is the theory, set out by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), that the people tried as witches in early modern Europe were members of an organised pre-Christian fertility religion that had survived in secret, worshipping a horned god. The idea shaped popular understanding of witchcraft for half a century and gave modern Wicca its founding story, but historians since the 1960s have rejected it as unsupported by the trial evidence.

Margaret Murray: Egyptologist and Folklorist§

Margaret Alice Murray was born in Calcutta in 1863 and studied Egyptology under Flinders Petrie at University College London, where she later taught for several decades. She excavated in Egypt and Palestine, catalogued museum collections, and was among the first women to hold an academic post in archaeology in Britain. Her famous unwrapping of the Manchester mummies known as the Two Brothers in 1908 was an early example of a team-based scientific examination of ancient remains.

During the First World War, when fieldwork in Egypt was impossible, Murray began to read the published records of British witch trials. She approached them as an anthropologist influenced by James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which had presented much of European folk custom as the remains of ancient fertility ritual. In 1917 she published an article in the journal Folk-Lore proposing that witches had been organised in groups, and four years later Oxford's Clarendon Press published her full argument.

Murray remained active into extreme old age. She served as president of the Folklore Society in the 1950s and published her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, in 1963, the year she died.

The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and Its Claims§

Murray's central claim was that behind the confessions extracted in witch trials lay the real practices of a religion she called the "Dianic cult", after the Roman goddess Diana mentioned in older church texts. She separated "operative witchcraft", the ordinary spells and charms found in every society, from "ritual witchcraft", the organised religion she believed she had uncovered. Its main features, as she reconstructed them, were:

  • A horned god. The "Devil" of the confessions was, she argued, either the god himself as conceived by his worshippers or a human priest disguised in a mask, skins or horns.
  • Covens of thirteen. Witches were organised in local groups of twelve members and a leader, a number she derived from a handful of Scottish trials, especially the 1662 confessions of Isobel Gowdie.
  • Seasonal sabbats. Great meetings were held on the old quarter days: Candlemas (2 February), May Eve, Lammas (1 August) and Hallowe'en, with smaller weekly meetings called "esbats".
  • Fertility rites. Dances, feasts and sexual rituals at the sabbats were survivals of rites meant to ensure the fertility of crops, animals and people.

Murray took the confessions literally where they described ordinary human activity and explained away the impossible elements, such as flying, shape-changing or the Devil's cold body, as misunderstanding, drug-induced visions or ritual disguise. In The God of the Witches (1931) she extended the argument back to the Palaeolithic, presenting an antlered figure painted in the cave of Les Trois-Frères as an early image of the same deity, and forward to famous historical figures. In The Divine King in England (1954) she proposed that several English kings and other prominent figures, William Rufus among them, had died as willing sacrificial victims of the cult, a claim that even her sympathisers found hard to accept.

How the Witch-Cult Theory Became Orthodoxy§

Murray's ideas had predecessors. The French historian Jules Michelet had portrayed the medieval witch as a priestess of a rebellious peasant nature religion in La Sorcière (1862), and the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland had published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), purporting to record the secret religion of Tuscan witches. Murray gave the theme a scholarly apparatus, footnotes and a confident tone.

Her standing as an academic, and the lack of detailed archival work on the trials at the time, helped her views spread. She wrote the article on witchcraft for the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1929, and versions of it remained in that reference work for several decades, so that many readers met her theory as established fact. Writers of fiction and popular history, from John Buchan to Dennis Wheatley, drew on the image of an underground witch religion. Critics existed from the start, including the legal historian C. L'Estrange Ewen, who worked directly from English court records, but their objections reached a smaller audience.

From Murray to Gardner: The Thesis and Modern Wicca§

The most lasting effect of the Murray thesis was on modern Paganism. Gerald Gardner claimed in the 1950s to have been initiated in 1939 into a surviving coven in the New Forest, and he presented it as a remnant of exactly the religion Murray had described. Murray wrote the introduction to Gardner's Witchcraft Today (1954), lending her name to his account. Wicca took over her horned god, her covens, her sabbats on the quarter days (soon expanded into the eight-festival Wheel of the Year) and the term "esbat", as described in Wicca and Gerald Gardner.

The idea of the witches' god as an ancient and wrongly demonised deity also shaped the modern figure of the Horned God. Early Wiccans such as Doreen Valiente accepted the survival story at first and later, as historical criticism mounted, came to see the religion as a revival or new creation rather than an unbroken inheritance. In feminist spirituality of the 1970s, Murray's thesis merged with the idea of the "Burning Times", in which the witch-hunts were seen as the deliberate destruction of a women's religion.

Why Historians Rejected the Murray Thesis§

Detailed criticism began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, when historians returned to the trial records. Elliot Rose's A Razor for a Goat (1962) dismissed the theory with some wit. Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Alan Macfarlane's study of Essex witchcraft showed that English accusations arose from quarrels between neighbours, not from the activities of organised groups. Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons (1975) traced the image of the witches' sabbath to older stereotypes once applied to heretics and Jews, and examined Murray's use of evidence in detail.

Cohn and others showed several basic problems:

  • Selective quotation. Murray quoted the plausible parts of confessions and silently left out the fantastic parts of the same passages, such as flights through the air or meetings with fairies.
  • Unrepresentative sources. Her model rested heavily on a few Scottish and English cases and on continental demonological treatises, which reflected the beliefs of judges and theologians rather than of the accused.
  • Coerced testimony. Many of the confessions she used were obtained under torture, sleep deprivation or leading questions, and repeat the interrogators' expectations.
  • Absence of independent evidence. No contemporary source outside the trials describes such a religion, and the accused were overwhelmingly ordinary Christians.

Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999) set the thesis within the longer history of modern Paganism, showing how Murray's ideas met a cultural need for a native nature religion. Jacqueline Simpson's 1994 article in Folklore, "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?", examined how the theory gained acceptance despite its weaknesses. Today the thesis is treated as a chapter in the history of scholarship rather than of witchcraft itself.

Folk Survivals After Murray: A More Cautious Debate§

Rejecting Murray did not end all questions about popular beliefs behind the trials. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg found, in the records of the Friulian benandanti (The Night Battles, 1966), people who described going out in spirit at night to fight witches for the fertility of the crops. Inquisitors gradually reinterpreted their testimony as diabolical witchcraft. In Ecstasies (1989) Ginzburg argued that some elements of the sabbath stereotype drew on very old, widely spread traditions of spirit journeys. Emma Wilby has explored links between the familiar spirits of British trials and fairy beliefs of cunning folk, discussed in the witch's familiar.

These scholars do not revive Murray's organised cult. They argue instead that the trial records sometimes preserve fragments of visionary folk belief, distorted through the lens of learned demonology. For the wider context see the history of witchcraft and the European witch trials.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Murray thesis in simple terms?§

It is the theory that the people executed as witches in early modern Europe belonged to a real, organised pagan religion that had survived from pre-Christian times, worshipping a horned god at seasonal sabbats. Margaret Murray proposed it in 1921.

Did Margaret Murray influence Wicca?§

Yes. Gerald Gardner presented his New Forest coven as a survival of Murray's witch-cult, and Murray wrote the introduction to his Witchcraft Today (1954). Wicca adopted her horned god, covens, sabbats and the word "esbat".

Why do historians reject the Murray thesis?§

Because the trial records do not support it. Murray omitted the impossible parts of confessions she quoted, relied on coerced testimony and learned treatises, and offered no independent evidence of a pagan religion. Most accused witches were ordinary Christians caught up in local conflicts and legal panics.

Is there any truth in the idea of pagan survivals in witchcraft?§

Some historians, such as Carlo Ginzburg and Emma Wilby, argue that folk beliefs about spirit journeys, fairies and familiars lie behind parts of the trial evidence. This is very different from Murray's claim of an organised underground religion, and it remains debated.

Sources and further reading§