Margaret Murray

The teaching

Taught from her own books, above all The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931).

Two kinds of witchcraft

Murray begins by dividing the subject in two. Operative witchcraft is every charm and spell, whether worked by a professed witch or a professed Christian, for good or ill, for killing or curing. It is found in every nation and religion, part of the common heritage of the human race, and so of no use for the study of any one cult. Ritual witchcraft, which she names the Dianic cult, is something else: the beliefs and ritual of the people called witches in the later Middle Ages. Her claim is that this was a religion, with its god, its rites and its organisation, which underlay Christianity, kept chiefly by the less educated and in the thinly settled country, and which ran back to pre-Christian times as the old religion of Western Europe.

The god of the witches

The god of this religion, she holds, was incarnate in a man, a woman or an animal, and the animal form came first: the god was often said to wear the skin or horns of a beast. There was also a god with two faces, like the Janus or Dianus of Italy. In The God of the Witches she traces the horned god from the masked figures painted in the caves of the Old Stone Age to the trials.

The Devil of the trial records, by her reading, was a human being, generally a man and sometimes a woman, the chief of a district. At the great assemblies he appeared disguised beyond recognition; at the small meetings, and when he visited a member or sought a convert, he came in the ordinary dress of the day, known by a gesture, a password or a token. The officers under him were also called devils or spirits.

Admission and the assemblies

A new member, in her account, was brought in by an introduction, renounced the former faith, made vows and a covenant, sometimes for a term of years and sometimes for life, was baptised into the religion and marked. The great assemblies, the sabbaths, were held on four days: May Eve and November Eve, Candlemas in February and Lammas at the start of August. These dates, she argues, belong to a herding people and follow the breeding seasons of the flocks; the solstices, Beltane and Yule, and Easter were added later, and the equinoxes were never kept in Britain.

Besides the sabbaths there were the esbats, a word she took from a French trial of 1567: local meetings, usually weekly, for business, for magic done for a client or against an enemy, and for simple enjoyment. Both ended in feasting and dancing, and her chapters on the rites describe the homage paid to the god, the ring dances, the music, the feast, the sacrament and the rites of fertility.

The covens

The word coven, she says, comes from convene and means a band set apart for the rites and the magic: in short, a kind of priesthood. It was made up of men and women of one district, bound to attend the weekly meeting, and ruled by an officer under the Grand Master, whom the recorders called the Devil. She holds that the persistence of the number thirteen in the covens, twelve members and their leader, is one of the details that torture and leading questions cannot explain away. The officer arranged the meetings, sent the notices, kept the record of work done and presented new members.

The fairies and the divine victim

Two further claims carry the thesis furthest. The fairies of the stories, she suggests, were the memory of a dwarf race that once lived in Europe, and their cult survived as witchcraft until less than three hundred years ago; the Devil was often called a fairy man and consorted with the Queen of Elfhame. And the god, or his voluntary substitute, was killed as a sacrifice for the people at the end of a set term, often seven years. She reads Joan of Arc in this light, as one whom the common people of France took for the god incarnate, and in The Divine King in England she extends the sacrifice to kings such as William Rufus, killed by an arrow in the New Forest.

What the records show

Her method was to set the confessions from many trials side by side and read their agreements as the outline of one religion. Read whole, the same records show accused people, mostly poor women, answering under pressure the questions their judges put to them; Joan of Arc's own answers at her trial are those of a devout Christian. The witch religion Murray described is a thesis about the past, and the trial records do not bear it out.