Margaret Murray

Others, however, used it as a means to found a new spiritual movement.

In 1921, British archaeologist Margaret Murray penned a book called The Witch Cult in Western Europe, in which she argued that witchcraft had not been an obscure occult but a dominant religious force.

Though Murray's theories have been widely discredited since the book's publishing, her work sparked a fascination with witches that had been dormant for 300 years, eventually helping spawn the Wicca religion.

The religion, which is named after an Anglo-Saxon term for craft of the wise, circles back to ancient practices that use herbs and other natural elements to promote healing, harmony, love, and wisdom, all following the tenet of harm none.

Others, however, used it as a means to found a new spiritual movement.

In 1921, British archaeologist Margaret Murray penned a book called The Witch Cult in Western Europe, in which she argued that witchcraft had not been an obscure occult but a dominant religious force.

Though Murray's theories have been widely discredited since the book's publishing, her work sparked a fascination with witches that had been dormant for 300 years, eventually helping spawn the Wicca religion.

The religion, which is named after an Anglo-Saxon term for craft of the wise, circles back to ancient practices that use herbs and other natural elements to promote healing, harmony, love, and wisdom, all following the tenet of harm none.

But i-if it is, even if it isn't, Wheatley is working with some ideas here, uh, that he could have taken from several other sources either.

And all of this reminds me of, it, it's a little bit like the, the witch cult stuff, Margaret Murray stuff, the idea that there was this ancient, uh, religion that, and when the Christians started showing up everywhere around Europe, they had to stamp out their religion, and they had to take the same dates and give them different festivals.

That's a really common idea across, uh, especially at this time.

He's writing early 20th century.

Uh, even though Margaret Murray was quite discredited by this point, her ideas were still incredibly well known and, and popular, uh, amongst non-academic people.

So he could be just doing a twist on that one as well to tie it to Atlantis.

But that, that gave me a chuckle.

The structure of graded initiation fits comfortably within the world of Freemasonry and other oath-bound societies.

The idea of an organized surviving witch religion is already present in the work of Margaret Murray.

Charles Godfrey Leland had published a goddess-centered witch religion in Aradia or the Gospel of the Witches in eighteen ninety-nine.

And Aleister Crowley becomes impossible to ignore once Gardner's own notebooks are examined because Gardner not only knew his work but met him personally, entered the orbit of the Ordo Templi Orientis, received OTO authorization, and copied substantial amounts of Crowley's writings while his own witchcraft system was still developing.

The consequences become crucial once later writers begin reversing the demonological interpretation because the same material that Christian authorities described as satanic conspiracy could then be reimagined as evidence of pagan survival.

The devil could become a horned god, the Sabbath could become an old seasonal gathering, ritual nudity could be read as fertility worship, and the coven could be turned into the surviving organizational unit of a persecuted faith.

That reinterpretation would eventually become central to Margaret Murray.

But the sources themselves do not hand us Gardnerian Wicca several centuries early.

He claimed that he had discovered the remnants of a pre-Christian witchcraft-based religion surviving in England.

He got these ideas from the English historian Margaret Murray, one of the main champions of this so-called witch cult survival theory.

She was the person who provided the academic foundation for Gardner's own beliefs.

Decades before Gardner's own interest in witchcraft, Murray published articles arguing that a pagan religion that she called the Witch Cult survived in Western Europe.

all manner of ceremonial magical rituals.

She argued that these groups were the target of the witch trials and witch hunts of the medieval and early modern periods.

In fact, later in life, Margaret Murray herself wrote the intro of one of Gardner's most popular books, Witchcraft Today, summarizing his argument that the various groups of witches throughout England still practice the same rites as the so-called witches of the Middle Ages, and that the rites are a true survival and not a mere revival copied out of books.

Now, Murray's theories did not hold up to historical scrutiny, and by the 1970s, historians such as Keith Thomas, the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic, discredited her theory as overly selective of its evidence.

Those claims did not emerge in isolation.

Gardner lived in an intellectual environment shaped by occultism, ceremonial magic, folklore studies, romantic ideas about pagan survival, and particularly the influential witch cult theories associated with Margaret Murray, who had argued that the victims of the European witch trials included members of a surviving organized pagan fertility religion.

Murray's historical reconstruction would eventually be rejected by the overwhelming majority of professional historians.

Yet for several decades, her ideas exercised enormous influence over how educated readers, folklorists, occultists, and eventually modern witches imagined the relationship between the witch trials and pre-Christian religion.