I am doing a presentation tomorrow about witches for a Folklore Colloquium. In honor of the Halloween season, I am going to post a portion of my presentation here today, and a continuation of the material tomorrow, if any of you are interested in more on the topic.
This portion of the essay is based largely on the article by Jacqueline Simpson, "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?" (Folklore 105 (1994): 89-96). If you have access, the article is on JSTOR, as is the 1917 article by Murray I refer to in the paper below.
Jacqueline Simpson’s article is a good review of the impact of Margaret Murray (trained as an Egyptologist and archaeologist) on the study of Witchcraft. Murray wrote only one substantial article for the Folklore Society (a 1917 article on "Organisations of Witches in Great Britain"). But she became most identified in the public mind with witchcraft study as she wrote the 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica article on "Witchcraft" and set out her own interpretation of the topic as if it were the universally accepted one. It was not, even then, and has become more problematic as time has passed. The article remained in reprinted and reissued volumes up until 1969, and it had substantial impact on popular culture (including films as well as the neopagan movement). The claims she made that can be only lightly supported (and seem to be problematic at that) include the idea that a witch’s coven should have 13 members (this is based on a single statement at a Scottish trial, and when she tried to massage other sources to indicate that it was more widespread, other scholars have denounced her claims as arbitrary at best, misleading misinterpretation at worst).
She was a rationalist, and set out to strip the accounts of witches of their magical, paranormal, and supernatural import. Ironically, the member of the Folklore Society who seems to have been most accepting of her claims was Gerald Gardner, the founder of the modern Wiccan movement in the 1950s, who used her descriptions of rituals, festivals, and the organization of witches as a blueprint for the modern Wiccan religious movement.
She was originally trained as an Egyptologist, and here it is important to note that her first publication on Witchcraft (a 1917 article in the journalFolklore) came out during World War I, during which work in Egypt was problematic. The 1921 book that followed, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, would have also been based largely on work done during the war and its aftermath. Her work was based on original documents, she asserts (which would have meant the trial accounts and the writings of witch-finders), and not on secondary sources. Although in scholarly contexts her book was not particularly well-received, it did inject seemingly scholarly content into the long-simmering discussion about what witches were. This was split between two camps – they were either satan-worshippers, who were able to fly, work magic, etc., -- or they were the ones who were the victims of church-inspired (or at least whipped up) paranoia, totally innocent of the charges and confessions that were elicited through torture, and selected out for church or unrelated reasons – perhaps economic, perhaps political. Murray’s suggestion was that witches were actually members of a surviving pagan movement struggling to maintain their religion in the setting of intensifyingly Christian Europe. This new view provided a rational way to discuss witchcraft. And there was a sense of relief in the scholarly community that there was a new way of looking at things.
However, in order to reach this conclusion, Murray’s approach was to ignore the most pervasive element of witchcraft from the very sources she was using, which was the presence of "Operative Magic" or the things that witches did – causing milk to sour, crops to fail, raising storms, causing illness and even death of humans and animals. Instead of trying to look for recurring folklore memes in these stories (along with the devil worship and flying, etc.), as a modern folklorist would do, she attempts to explain them by reducing them to realistic activities – witches were perhaps imitating the activities of animals (they didn’t transform into animals, but they put on masks and hopped about as rabbits, or the appearance of Satan at a Sabbath was a leader putting on a mask). Even the terms used she selectively explains away. She suggests that the term "Sabbath" itself was from s’esbattre (to frolic) – it is much more clearly, in spite of her dismissal of this etymology, a hostile misapplication of the Jewish term. The proof of this is in the sixteenth century use of the term "synagogue" for a gathering of devils and witches, something she herself cites, while ignoring the implications of the terminology.
We are not going to consider how Murray’s academically-discredited discussion of witchcraft has been supplanted in modern neo-pagan practice (including the transition from Murray’s firmly patriarchal interpretation of what she claims were witch practices to the very goddess-centered approach of modern Wiccans). Instead we are going to look at the approach of those who believed in witches to protecting themselves from the evil activities they were subject to: illness and death of animals and children and even adults, failing of crops, and so forth. How could you protect yourself from a witch?