Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology [Paperback]

Margaret Alice Murray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2003

This is an intensive study of the witch cult in Great Britain. The author uses French and Flemish sources to obtain a clearer understanding of the ritual and beliefs, as the witch cult appears to be the same throughout western Europe. The sources from which the information used within are the judicial records and contemporary chroniclers. In the case of the chroniclers, the author studied their facts, not their opinions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Kessinger Publishing, LLC (March 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0766144550
• ISBN-13: 978-0766144552
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,819,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Laborious, January 17, 2005

By 

J. W. Kennedy "in statu uiae et meriti" (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Paperback)

This book is of interest mainly because HP Lovecraft put it on the bookshelves of occult scholars in his stories (alongside the "Necronomicon," Frazer's "Golden Bough," and the "Unausprechlichen Kulten" of Von Juntz.) Readers will realize early on that this book was an inspiration to Lovecraft. Undoubtedly this is where he got the idea for the international Cthulhu cult in "Call of Cthulhu," and he probably turned to it often as a reference to give an air of authenticity to witchcraft rituals and 17th-century pastiches in his stories.
However, even to the obsessive fan hellbent on tracking down HPL's sources, this book has limited appeal. Unlike the "Golden Bough," "Witch Cult" does not have a strong thesis and doesn't seem to have any purpose beyond presenting fragments of court records from witch trials and grouping them together in chapters based on their thematic content. Many of Ms. Murray's sources are French, and she presents them in French, without any translation. You get the feeling that you just missed something potentially interesting, in some spots probably someting salacious or naughty, unless you can read French. I can't, so I wound up frustrated a lot.
The rest of Ms. Murray's sources are in "English," but they were written in the glorious days of the 1600s, before standardized spelling, and apparently before grammar had been invented. One example that pops into my mind: "quohome" as a way to spell "whom." If you have trouble reading the King James Bible, if Shakespeare leaves you shrugging your shoulders in pure bafflement, then avoid this book like the plague. You won't comprehend 50 percent of it.
For some reason Ms. Murray could not paraphrase, translate, or modernize her source material like Sir Frazer did; she presents it always "as is" in the original language and leaves the reader to puzzle out the meaning. Thankfully she assails us with numerous examples for each point. If one piece of evidence will do, then 25 pieces all saying the same thing, will do even better! So after you've slogged through all of them, you kinda can get the gist.
Much of the information presented here (the part of it that can be deciphered, anyway) is really quite fascinating despite Murray's attempt to make it bland and boring, and if you have a serious interest in the subject of Witchcraft and its history, this book is worth having. All of the information in it can be found elsewhere, but not all in one place.
I'm also taking away a star for the physical presentation of this particular volume from Kessinger Publishing. It looks like it was made on the cheap, at Kinko's. The cover is generic, and the pages are obviously scanned from an old edition and printed on sheets that are too big for it, leaving the text floating awkwardly on the page, and making the book too big, floppy, and ungainly. Plus it was too expensive. Dover can print this kind of thing (and even cut the pages to the right size) and sell it for about half the price. Why are Kessinger editions so costly?

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A caveat for the credulous, January 5, 2008

By 

R. Landrum (SC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Hardcover)

Readers should be warned: this book, and the "Murray thesis" itself, have been thoroughly discredited for a generation. This book is most useful as a demonstration of the power of dishonest scholarship and the willingness of people to believe a collection of lies. Murray, an Egyptologist, has been shown to have misquoted, misused and abused the sixteen sources that make up the basis for this study. Her methods have been discredited, her deliberate ignorance of contradictory evidence has been illuminated, and her refusal to consider that the confessions of convicted witches were gained through torture and were scripted before the fact mark her as a dangerous and unprincipled scholar. In Witch Cult, Murray founded a myth of an earth-based cult, surviving alongside the official Church, sustained in the covens of witches who worshiped at the "sabbat." This picture, conjured from the scripted confessions of witches, had and has a powerful appeal to Wiccan and other neo-pagan groups, who gained through it a historical provenance that simply does not exist. So powerful was its appeal that Murray rode this book to a sort of scholarly noteriety, gaining print-space for a few years in the Encyclopedia Britannica as cutting-edge witch scholarship. It wasn't long, though, before real historians began a re-examination of Murray and her sources. One cannot now find a serious scholar who still accepts the Murray thesis, nor can anyone who has seen the archival records accept that the poor individuals who died a very painful death for the crime of witchcraft be guilty of adherence to an alternative religion. I have no problem with neopaganism or any of the other harmless groups who claim to have magical powers or some deep connection with earth-based wisdom. I do, however, deeply resent wiccan or other adherents of "witchcraft" who claim a relationship to the thousands of innocent people who died in the European Witch craze. It is simply wrong to call them as witness to and ancestors of a purely modern irrationality. Buy this book as a study of the present, as a text in the long litany of deeply-felt and deeply-flawed ideas, but do not buy it as a serious study. It is wrong, it is misguided, it is dangerous.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Please don't tell me anyone actually takes this seriously!, November 8, 2005

By 

Kate Blake "Look, Ma! It's One a Them There C... (Madison, AL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Witch Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Paperback)

One of the groundbreaking works in the study of witchcraft, Margaret Murray's _The Witch-Cult in Western Europe_ argues that accounts of the witch trials of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain provide evidence of a pre-Christian fertility cult persisting underground through the millennium of Christian domination, a cult wrongly persecuted by Christian authorities as Satanic. At the center of this cult was the worship of a god, and the cult itself Murray describes as worshipping "in well-defined rites; the organization . . . highly developed; and the ritual . . . analogous to many other ancient rituals" (p. 12). It is from the contemporary accounts of the witch trials that Murray extracts her picture of the rites and practices of the witch-cult, a cult apparently engaging in, among other things, worship of the Devil, the working of nefarious magic, child and animal sacrifice, and sexual orgies.

Is it possible that these activities were not what they seemed on the surface to be, but were instead the survivals of a more ancient religion? You would expect that if this were the case, two things would be in evidence: One, that Murray would draw her conclusion based on the similarity of the witches' activities to exant descriptions of the pre-Christian religion of the British Isles, and two, that reports of this cultic activity would surface with regularity before the time of the great witch-craze. Inconveniently, though, neither holds true. Murray herself admits at the outset, "Of the ancient religion of pre-Christian Britain there are few written records, but it is contrary to all expectation that a cult should die out and leave no trace immediately on the introduction of a new religion" (p.19). Thus, though she has almost nothing with which to compare the activities of the witches she examines, she a priori assumes that what she finds must be the relics of the ancient religion. At times she does happen to be correct in her assumption: Some of the activities attributed to the witches, such as the taking of familiars or flight through the air, we can certainly believe to be the lingering memory of pre-Christian superstition, but these are just those aspects of the witches' alleged doings which are the most clearly pure nonsense. We may, then, indeed say that indeed the old religion did survive, but only as folkloric superstition attached to the witches, who served as those scapegoats for a world in chaos (more about this later).

The second expectation, that the cult would reveal itself with some regularity before the panic of the early modern period, is not in evidence either. There are absolutely no reports of this cult's activities before 1484, the year that Pope Innocent VIII promulgated a Bull decrying the reports of those who sought to "have intercourse with demons . . . [to] suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women, the increase of animals, the corn of the ground, the grapes of the vineyard and the fruit of the trees" (p. 24). Murray claims that this bull is "only one of many ordinances against the practices of an earlier cult" (p.24), yet if this is so, she neglects to provide these previous ordinances, for among the eighteen cited instances of crackdowns, not one names any practice specific to the witch-cult Murray scries. Rather, these ordinances speak generally against "heathenism" and "offerings to devils," which, while indicative of the impious nature of the population, hardly provide proof positive of an organized thorn in the side of the Church. In fact, what is most striking about the examples Murray provides is that none of them connect the "heathen" with any kind of fertility cult at all, and certainly not with the blasting of fertility with which Innocent was concerned.

As a matter of fact, the cult which Murray labors to discover has, if anything, a distinctly anti-Christian--and therefore very recent--character. Excerpts of the accounts are generously provided, and over and over they speak of renouncing Christ, renouncing baptism and heaven, and substituting the Devil for God. And it _is_ the Christian Devil the accused speak of worshipping--Murray explains this as the result of the eyewitness' inability to comprehend that the witches were speaking of their God, and thus substituted "Devil" whenever they reported what had been said, but this is purely conjecture on Murray's part, and if anything, the testimonies reported indicate the witches themselves truly believed it was the Christian Devil they worshipped, and not some pre-Christian god. For example, Elizabeth Sawyer, an Edmonton witch, said that the Devil "asked of me to whom I prayed, and I answered him to Jesus Christ, and he charged me then to pray no more to Jesus Christ, but to him the Devil" (p. 30).

Further proof of the cult's more recent origins is found in one of the three "rites of admission," an "explicit denial and rejection of a previous religion" (p. 74); and one of the ceremonies Murray includes as practiced by the witches was indeed a Black Mass. Why would a cult with pre-Christian origins be so concerned with subverting Christianity, instead of practicing its own ceremonies? (Incidentally, Gerald Gardner, coming a little later than Murray, and claiming to have been initiated into a coven of British witches supposedly carrying on the ancient traditions of a pre-Christian fertility cult, contradicts all this testimony, saying that the witches he knew had never practiced the renunciation of Christ, nor the Black Mass, nor child sacrifice.)

Did the cult, in fact, engage in any demonstrably "pagan" activities at all? At first glance one might answer yes; many of the witches reported that the Devil often appeared in animal guise, which Murray takes as evidence of the cult's continuing practice of pre-Christian shamanism. But if the cult were indeed a fertility cult, it must be asked why the Devil appeared in guises not linked to those of the traditional British fertility gods. Cerunnon, for example, the "horned god" of Celtic Britain, was identified with the stag, and yet the Devil rarely appeared in his likeness, preferring instead to appear more frequently as a dog. Once again, we can certainly believe that the suspicion that the Devil appeared in animal form was the result of the lingering memory of pre-Christian mythology, but that an organized shamanism was actually being practiced doesn't ring true.

In fact, the more evidence Murray provides about the doings of the cult, the more difficult it becomes to believe it to have been what she claims. Take the evidence of the "witches' mark" and the supernumerary nipples. Witches were said to be identifiable by a mark somewhere on their body; that the majority of accused witches (those that Murray selected as evidence, anyway) possessed this mysterious "mark" she takes as proof of a members' mark tattooed on the body. The witches, however, not only attributed the origin of their marks to the Devil's having bit them (how does one get tattooed and mistake it for biting?), but were discovered to have the mark in highly variable spots, such as the thigh, the shoulder, the hand, etc. That this mark apparently turned up in any old place is much more suggestive of their having been merely birthmarks, which any given accused was almost certain to possess if the accusers only looked hard enough.

As for the supernumerary nipples, this bit of evidence is so ludicrous one wonders how Murray even relates it with a straight face. Witches were said to possess extra nipples by which they suckled their familiars (demons in animal form which did the witches' bidding). Murray includes many outrageous accounts of the discovery of these nipples, and what's noticeable about the alleged deformity is that they were most frequently said to have been discovered in the witch's "privie parts." This accusation, besides being highly unlikely, is clearly the result of the expectation of those involved that the witches were sexually unnatural (which also explains the obsession with the sexual activity of the witches with the Devil).

But what about those orgies? Don't they provide proof of a pre-Christian "Great Rite," even if in degenerate form? Not necessarily. To understand this, we must understand the circumstances of the time. A look at the years in which the witch hunts took place (about 1556-1704, with a handful before that period) shows that 97% of them occured after the inauguration of the Reformation--a time when the longstanding order of society was being challenged and threatened. The formerly monolithic Catholic Church no longer kept the peace: doctrines, dogmas, ancient truth were all being questioned. And it was, in fact, in those countries in which the Church had lost the most power in which the hunts were fiercest. Thus, society was in turmoil, unsure of itself, its sense of order upturned--and it sought a scapegoat, some group to identify as causing this disruption.

In countries such as Britain, this group was the witches, who were accused of engaging in specifically subversive activities. In accusing the witches of denying Christ and worshipping the Devil, in accusing them of engaging in lewd dances, in accusing them of participating in sexual orgies, in accusing them of conducting a Black Mass, what we see is clear: The inquisitors feared an inversion of order, of the normal, of the holy. It was not a pre-Christian fertility rite they detected, but a violation of societal taboos, looked for out of their own uncertainty about the state of society.

It must, however, be asked: What was the witch-cult, if not a primitive cult? The question assumes such a cult even existed at all, for in all of the evidence presented by Murray, there is very little that a rational person can believe to have taken place at all. But why would so many men... Read more ›