Margaret Murray
July 13th, 1863
Margaret Alice Murray FSA Scot FRAI (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was a prominent Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. She made history as the first woman appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, holding a position at University College London (UCL) from 1898 to 1935. In addition to her academic contributions, she served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955 and published extensively throughout her career.
Born into a wealthy middle-class English family in Calcutta, British India, Murray spent her childhood between India, Britain, and Germany. She initially trained as both a nurse and a social worker. In 1894, she moved to London and began her studies in Egyptology at UCL. It was during this time that she developed a close friendship with Flinders Petrie, the head of the department, who encouraged her early academic pursuits and appointed her as a junior lecturer in 1898. Murray's reputation in Egyptology grew significantly after her involvement in Petrie's excavations at Abydos in 1902–03, where she discovered the Osireion temple. The following season, she investigated the Saqqara cemetery, further establishing her credentials in the field.
To supplement her income from UCL, Murray also taught public classes and gave lectures at the British Museum and Manchester Museum. Notably, in 1908, she led the unwrapping of Khnum-nakht, one of the mummies from the Tomb of the Two Brothers—this marked the first time a woman publicly unwrapped a mummy. Recognizing the growing British fascination with Ancient Egypt, Murray wrote several accessible books on the subject to engage the general public.
In addition to her archaeological work, Murray was deeply involved in the first-wave feminist movement. She joined the Women's Social and Political Union and dedicated considerable time to improving women's status at UCL. When World War I prevented her from returning to Egypt, she shifted her research focus to the witch-cult hypothesis. This controversial theory posited that the witch trials of Early Modern Europe aimed to eradicate a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion that worshipped a Horned God. Although this theory has since been discredited, it gained significant traction and influenced the emerging Wicca movement.
From 1921 to 1931, Murray conducted excavations of prehistoric sites in Malta and Menorca, furthering her interest in folkloristics. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1927 and was appointed assistant professor in 1928, retiring from UCL in 1935. That same year, she traveled to Palestine to assist Petrie with excavations at Tall al-Ajjul and led a small excavation at Petra in Jordan in 1937.
Later in life, Murray took on the presidency of the Folklore Society and lectured at institutions such as the University of Cambridge and City Literary Institute, continuing to publish independently until her death. Her contributions to Egyptology earned her the affectionate title "The Grand Old Woman of Egyptology." However, many of her achievements were overshadowed by Petrie after her passing. In contrast, her work in folkloristics and witchcraft has faced significant criticism, with her methods deemed controversial. Despite this, her witch-cult theory has been influential in both religious and literary contexts, leading to her being referred to as the "Grandmother of Wicca."
Now, look. I’m not going to lie. This is all very interesting and Margaret is a very significant figure in the Egyptology and folklore world. And she was a remarkable woman. But she was a bit, well, bonkers.
Margaret’s support of the Witch-cult hypothesis was significant. The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory suggesting that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were efforts to suppress a pagan religion that had persisted since the Christianization of Europe. Proponents of this theory claim that the accused witches were actually adherents of this ancient religion. They argue that this so-called 'witch cult' centered around the worship of a Horned God of fertility and the underworld, whom Christian persecutors equated with the Devil, and that its followers participated in nocturnal rites during the witches' Sabbath.
Margaret’s work was one of the first to try and address the issue of witch trials through the narrative voice of the women who were accused, rather than just being viewed through the eyes of the men who accused them. But the problem with her theories were that they were entirely baseless and they were absolutely batshit crazy.
This didn’t stop them becoming very popular and spawning the whole ‘witch as Wicca’ craze of scantily clad ladies dancing around in the woods whilst chanting about horned gods and the like. She literally wrote the book on this stuff, contributing the Encyclopædia Britannica’s entry on witchcraft, full blown bananas rhetoric and all, until 1969 when everyone thought that maybe this needed a little more circumspect reflection.
Margaret had virtually no background in European history at all and her pseudohistorical theories had no basis in anything like approaching academic rigor. It’s all evil-eye, Malleus Maleficarum, Hammer House of Horror, The Wicker Man gibberish.
Margaret’s work had been interrupted by World War I and she joined as a volunteer nurse in the Volunteer Aid Detachment of the College Women's Union Society. She was initially stationed in Saint-Malo, France, but fell ill herself and was subsequently sent to recuperate in Glastonbury, Somerset. It was during this time that Murray developed a keen interest in Glastonbury Abbey and its folklore, particularly its connections to King Arthur and the legend of the Holy Grail, believed by some to have been brought there by Joseph of Arimathea.
Her fascination with these topics led Murray to publish the paper "Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance" in the journal Ancient Egypt. Although her conclusions were met with skepticism and criticism from scholars like Jessie Weston, Murray continued her exploration upon returning to London. She began delving into the study of witchcraft, marking her first foray into the subject with an article in the academic journal Folklore in 1917. This was followed by another article in 1920, and she further contributed to the discourse with subsequent writings in journals such as the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Scottish Historical Review.
Members of the ‘religion’ of witches, Margaret claimed, members joined the cult as children or adults through "admission ceremonies," agreeing to devote themselves to their deity. Applicants often had to sign a covenant or be baptized, though the religion was primarily passed down through hereditary lines. Murray described the cult as organized into covens of thirteen members, led by an officer often called the "Devil," who reported to a "Grand Master." Coven records were kept in a secret book, and members could be punished, even executed, for betrayal.
Murray characterized this witch-cult as "a joyous religion," celebrating major festivals on May Eve and November Eve, with additional observances on February 1, August 1, the solstices, and Easter. General meetings were known as Sabbaths, while private rituals were called Esbats, held at midnight primarily for business purposes. At Esbats, both benevolent and malevolent magical rites were performed. During Sabbaths, witches honored their deity, renewed vows, and reported on their magical activities. Ceremonies, including admissions and marriages, culminated in feasting and dancing.
Murray viewed Ritual Witchcraft as "a fertility cult," asserting that many rites aimed to ensure fertility and rain-making. She identified four types of sacrifices: blood sacrifices (neophytes writing their names in blood), animal sacrifices, the sacrifice of a non-Christian child for magical power, and the burning of a god for fertility. She interpreted accounts of shapeshifting as witches dressing in sacred animal forms and classified familiars into "divining familiars" for divination and "domestic familiars" for other magical practices.
And you’re probably thinking at this point “Well, ok. A little weird, maybe, but so what? It’s possible, right?”
No.
Margaret proposed that the folklore of fairies in Britain was rooted in a surviving race of dwarves who inhabited the island until the Early Modern period.
Dwarves.
Not Lord of the Rings, bearded Gimli dwarves who mine for gold, but little people with, presumably, curly shoes and funny pointy hats who did magic and ran around at the bottom of your garden.
Following Margaret Murray's death in 1963, her work faced increasing criticism, culminating in the definitive academic rejection of her witch-cult theory during the 1970s. Scholars such as Alan Macfarlane, Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled and Bengt Ankarloo conducted detailed studies of archival records from the witch trials across Europe and North America. Their research concluded decisively that those accused of witchcraft were not practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian religion.
In 1971, historian Keith Thomas highlighted that there was "very little evidence to suggest that the accused witches were either devil-worshippers or members of a pagan fertility cult," based on comprehensive archival analysis. He criticized Murray for selectively using sources to support her arguments, ignoring more systematic studies of trial accounts provided by others like Ewen.
Norman Cohn, in 1975, criticized Murray's historical knowledge as superficial and her methodological approach as non-existent, noting that her ideas were overly influenced by an exaggerated interpretation of the work of James Frazer. Similarly, Mircea Eliade described Murray's work in the same year as "hopelessly inadequate" and riddled with errors.
In 1996, feminist historian Diane Purkiss acknowledged Murray's thesis as "intrinsically improbable" and noted its lack of support within the modern academic community. However, Purkiss criticized male scholars like Thomas, Cohn, and Macfarlane for adopting what she perceived as an androcentric approach, contrasting their supposedly methodologically sound interpretations against Murray's more "feminized belief" about the witch-cult.
Murray handled her source material with "reckless abandon," taking "vivid details of alleged witch practices" from various sources across different times and places and claiming they represented the cult as a whole. Simpson noted that Murray selectively chose her evidence, often ignoring or rationalizing accounts of supernatural events in the trial records, which distorted her interpretations. For instance, she explained the appearance of the cloven-hoofed Devil at the witches' Sabbath as simply a man wearing special shoes and suggested that claims of witches flying on broomsticks were actually about hopping on broomsticks or using hallucinogenic salves.
Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, along with author Brooks Alexander, concurred with this criticism, stating that "Murray's use of sources, in general, is appalling." They argued that "today, scholars agree that Murray was not just wrong—she was completely and embarrassingly wrong on nearly all of her basic premises."
Murray was among the first women to significantly influence professional scholarship, with archaeologist Niall Finneran calling her "one of the greatest figures in post-war British archaeology." Following her death, she was referred to her as "the Grand Old Woman of Egyptology," while Hutton emphasized that Egyptology was "the core of her academic career." In 2014, Thornton recognized her as "one of Britain's most renowned Egyptologists."
Jacqueline Simpson wrote:
No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret Murray without embarrassment and a sense of paradox. She is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars, her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments. The fact that, in her old age and after three increasingly eccentric books, she was made President of the Folklore Society, must certainly have harmed the reputation of the Society and possibly the status of folkloristics in this country; it helps to explain the mistrust some historians still feel towards our discipline.
In his obituary for Murray in *Folklore*, James remarked that her death was "an event of significant interest and importance, not only for the Folk-Lore Society but also in the broader context of her wide-ranging influence across various fields and disciplines."
Her death became a little part of folklore itself. Which was nice.
In 1935, UCL introduced the Margaret Murray Prize, awarded to the student who is deemed to have ‘produced the best dissertation in Egyptology’.
It’s still presented to this day.