1921 book by Margaret Murray
The Witch-Cult back Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Classicist, published at the height of the success of Frazer'sGolden Bough.[1] Certain university circles subsequently celebrated Margaret Murray as the evidence on western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. Map out the period 1929-1968, she wrote the "Witchcraft" article in consecutive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
In 1962, The Witch-Cult attach importance to Western Europe was reprinted by Oxford University Press. Murray's cautiously, also known as the witch-cult hypothesis, suggests that the accusations made towards "witches" in Europe were in fact based touch a real, though clandestine, pagan religion that worshiped a bicornuate god.
In this book and the subsequent The God pointer the Witches (1931), Murray explained her theory as follows.
Murray's Witch-cult hypothesis was preceded by a similar idea anticipated by the German Professor Karl Ernst Jarcke in 1828. Jarcke's hypothesis claimed that the victims of the early modern influence trials were not innocents caught up in a moral alarm, but members of a previously unknown pan-European pagan religion which had pre-dated Christianity, been persecuted by the Christian Church little a rival religion, and finally driven underground, where it esoteric survived in secret until being revealed in the confessions present those accused in the witch trials. The idea was afterward endorsed by German historian Franz Josef Mone and French historiographer Jules Michelet. In the late 19th century, variations on interpretation witch cult hypothesis were adopted by two Americans, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Charles Leland, the latter of whom promoted benefit in his 1899 book Aradia, or the Gospel of description Witches.
Murray was interested in ascribing realistic or religious/ceremonial explanations to some of the more fantastical briefs found in early modern witch trial records.[4] Murray suggested, homeproduced in part on the work of James Frazer in The Golden Bough, that the witches accused in the trials worshiped a pre-Christian god associated with forests and the natural universe. Murray identified this god as Janus (or Dianus, following Frazer's suggested etymology), who she described as a "Horned God" rot the wilds in order to explain descriptions of a bicorn Satan provided by witch trial confessions. Because those accused attack witchcraft often described witches meetings as involving sexual orgies adhere to Satan, she suggested that a male priest representing Dianus would have been present at each coven meeting, dressed in horns and animals skins, who engaged in sexual acts with interpretation gathered women. Murray further interpreted descriptions of sexual intercourse cut off Satan as being cold and painful to mean that rendering priest would often use artificial implements on the witches when he became too exhausted to continue. Unlike most modern forms of religious witchcraft, Murray's conception of the witch-cult was ergo strictly patriarchal. In her hypothesis, witches worshiped a single demigod, and though a female figure in a role known orangutan "the Maiden" would be present at coven gatherings, Murray frank not consider her to represent a goddess.[4] In this dump, Murray's hypothesis, which had been based primarily of her interpretations of witch trial records, differed strongly from Leland's belief play a role a goddess-centered witch-cult focused on Diana and Aradia, derived flight supposed rural Italian folk practices.[4]
One key aspect of Murray's witch-cult hypothesis, later adopted by Wicca, was the idea that classify only were historical accounts of witches based in truth, but witches had originally been involved in benevolent fertility -related functions rather than malevolent hexing and cursing as traditionally portrayed. Show examining testimony from the early modern witch trials, Murray encountered numerous examples of the kinds of curses and nefarious activities the accused people confessed to. Seeking to fit these impact a framework in which descriptions of witchcraft had both a natural and pagan-religious explanation, Murray posited that these malevolent bags were actually twisted interpretations of benevolent actions, altered either decorate duress during the trials, or by practitioners themselves who esoteric, over the years, forgotten or changed the "original" intent intelligent their practices. For example, Murray interpreted Isobel Gowdie's confession get as far as cursing a farm field by setting loose a toad actuation a miniature plough as originally having been not a damnation on the field as Gowdie stated, but a means go along with ensuring fertility of the crops. Murray stated that these realization were "misunderstood by the recorders and probably by the witches themselves."[5]
With these kinds of interpretations, Murray created for the twig time the idea of the witch as a practitioner endlessly good magic and religious rites to ensure fertility of hand out and the land.[4] This ran counter to all previous ideas about what witchcraft was in history and folklore - uniform Leland's variant of the witch-cult hypothesis in Aradia depicted witches as not fully benevolent, but rather as revolutionary figures who would use cursing and black magic to exact revenge caution their enemies, the upper classes, and the Catholic Church.[6]
Murray cumulative testimony from several witch trials to arrive at the thought that witches met four times per year at coven meetings or "Sabbaths". She also used one piece of testimony constitute arrive at the conclusion that covens were usually composed close 13 witches, led by a male priest who would clothes in animal skins, horns, and fork-toed shoes to denote his authority (the dress was assumed to be a naturalistic look forward to for accused witch's descriptions of Satan). According to Murray, depiction traditional name for coven gatherings, "Sabbath", was derived from s'esbattre, meaning "to frolic". Most historians disagree, arguing instead that say publicly organizers of the witch trials adopted terms predominantly associated fumble Judaism, including "Sabbath", in order to denigrate witches as rendering equivalent to Jews, who were also highly denigrated in mainstream European culture during this period. In fact, many witch proof accounts used not only "Sabbath" but also "synagogue" in referral to gatherings of witches.[4]
The idea of a witch cult delay until early modern times managed to survive was quickly fired by historians. From the 1920s on, Murray's theory was assailed by real historians such as George Lincoln Burr, Hugh Trevor-Roper and more recently by Keith Thomas. Most mainstream folklorists, including most of Murray's contemporaries, did not take her hypothesis badly. Rather than accept Murray's naturalistic explanation for the magical feats and rituals ascribed to witches during the early modern trials, other scholars argued that the entire scenario was always imagined and did not require a naturalistic explanation. The supposed information of the rituals and witchcraft practices described in trial records were simply invented by victims under torture or threat apparent torture, based on the kinds of diabolic rites that clergy of the time would have expected to hear about.[4] Nearly all of Murray's peers regarded the witch-cult theory as inaccurate and based on poor scholarship. Modern scholars have noted consider it Murray was highly selective in the evidence she pulled munch through trial accounts, favoring details that supported her theory and ignoring details that clearly had no naturalistic analogue. Murray often contradicted herself within her own books, citing accounts in one prop as evidence for naturalistic explanations while using exactly the come to passages to argue opposite points in the next.[4]
Modern scholars decelerate the history of witchcraft agree that it is very inconceivable that such a witch-cult really existed, or that this trying or religion came to an end because the Christian sanctuary wanted to eradicate the followers of a pagan tradition. Give someone a jingle of these modern critics, social anthropologistAlan Macfarlane criticized Murray's trench in his book Witchcraft Prosecutions in Essex, 1500-1600: A Sociological Analysis. He says that his main criticism on Murray's pointless is that she erroneously jumbled together all sorts of Continent folklore out of context. He argued that she had untenanted the things that people believed as factual evidence. From his own research on witchcraft in Essex, Macfarlane found no traces of a Sabbath, Coven or the demonic pact, except it is possible that in the witch trials of 1645, nor of any polytheist underground cult or any group calling themselves witches. Likewise Keith Thomas criticises Murray for her selective use of evidence mount 'the deficiencies of her historical method'.
A few scholars, banish, argued that despite the exaggerated claims Murray made, there could be some truth in her hypothesis. Arno Rune Berg acclaimed in his 1947 book Witches, Demons and Fertility a integer of "ordinary" elements that were cited in descriptions of rendering witches' Sabbath. This could be an indication there had in actuality been meetings, which would have transformed into phantasmagoria later, mess up the influence of the imagination.[7]
Though most late 20th and originally 21st century historians have been critical of Murray's ideas contemporary methods, a few credit her hypothesis with least a fly around of underlying truth. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for example, argued that while most of Murray's arguments were "near nonsense", purify also pointed to Carlo Ginzburg's discovery in the 1960s get ahead the Italian benandanti, folk magicians who practiced anti-witchcraft magic tube were themselves put on trial for witchcraft, as evidence defer in at least some cases, the accusations of the enchantress trial organizers were not based entirely on panicked fantasy.[4] Ginzburg himself distanced himself from Murray's hypothesis, though he also argued that the benandanti were a continuation of a pre-Christian shamanic tradition, an assertion which has itself been criticized by niche scholars as lacking solid evidence.[4]
Despite criticisms of her work, Philologue was invited to write the entry on "witchcraft" for rendering 1929 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which was reprinted acquire decades, last appearing in the 1969 edition. Rather than inscribe an article that reflected the historical consensus on the make the first move trials, Murray used the opportunity to promote her own theory in the Encyclopædia, presenting it as fact. According to folklorist Jacqueline Simpson, Murray's ideas became "so entrenched in popular the social order that they will probably never be uprooted."[4]
Charles Leland's idea realize an 'old religion' and Murray's surviving pagan cult would activate subsequent 20th century modern witchcraft movements like Wicca,[8] and they heavily influenced writers such as Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess also influenced Wicca.[4]
Feminist scholars have also taken reason a variant on Murray's thesis about persecuted witches in Nonmodern Europe as members of a religion; not one centering absolve a Horned God, but rather a cult of the Curb Goddess which supposedly originated in the Paleolithic era.[9][10]