An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Murray, Margaret Alice

One of the world’s most famous and original writers on witchcraft, Margaret Alice Murray, was born in Calcutta on 13th July 1863. She lived to be over 100 years old and published a lively auto-biography, My First Hundred Years (William Kimber, London, 1963)—a remarkable literary feat in itself.

I only met Margaret Murray once; but I remember her as a very little old lady, bright-eyed and alert, and with a mischievous sense of humour.

She claims in her autobiography that her life had no adventures. However, she disguised herself as a visiting artist when she went to the Cotswolds to investigate the mysterious ’witchcraft murder’ at Meon Hill. (See COTSWOLDS, WITCHCRAFT IN THE.) She braved a storm of adverse criticism when her first book about witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, was published in 1921. She studied anthropology in the early days, when this was considered a subject ’not quite nice’ for ladies to take up. She was a pioneer Suffragette. She worked on archaeological excavations in Egypt; and on one occasion there, she underwent a magical ceremony to preserve her from rabies, after being bitten by a dog that might have been mad. One wonders what Miss Murray would have counted as adventures!

Margaret Murray was a shrewd and critical scholar, and by no means credulous. Her main career was in Egyptology, and her interest in witchcraft was really a side-line; though, curiously enough, it is for the latter that she became best known.

She was not, however, as popularly supposed, the first person to advance the idea that witchcraft is the Old Religion, or to call it “the Dianic cult”. Both these ideas had been advanced previously by Charles Godfrey Leland. (See LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY.)

In her autobiography, Miss Murray tells us rather frustratingly little about her researches into witchcraft, except to reveal that the idea of witchcraft being really a secret religion was suggested to her by another person. She started to investigate for herself, working from the contemporary records of witches and witchcraft; and when she realised that the so-called ’Devil’ who appeared at the witches’ Sabbats was actually a man in a ritual disguise, she tells us that she was “startled, almost alarmed” by the way in which the recorded details she had been reading fell into place and made sense.

Later, in 1933, she published a second book on witchcraft, The God of the Witches. The book was almost ignored when it first appeared; but after the Second World War, when interest in witchcraft had reawakened, it was republished and became a best seller. Miss Murray followed it in 1954, with her third and perhaps most controversial book on this subject, The Divine King in England (Faber and Faber, London).

In this book, she advanced the idea that many early English sovereigns had died by ritual murder; and that the concepts of royalty and kingship were inextricably bound up with the human sacrifice of the Sacred King, demanded by primitive religion.

Although sceptical of the highly-coloured stories of occult happenings connected with Egyptian relics, Margaret Murray was interested in the phenomena of telepathy and apparitions. She advanced a theory that ghosts were really a kind of photographic image, somehow recorded upon the atmosphere of a place, and becoming visible under certain circumstances.

In her autobiography, she also records her firm faith in the human soul and its survival of bodily death, and her belief in reincarnation.

During her long career, Margaret Alice Murray received many academic honours. She was Assistant Professor of Egyptology at University College, London, from 1924 to her retirement in 1935; and from 1953 to 1955 she was President of the Folk-Lore Society. She never married, though her photographs show her to have been most attractive in her youth, and still very good-looking at the age of 50. She was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable women of her generation.