God of the Witches

god of the witches (1931) margaret murray

Margaret Murray wrote three books which are required reading for the proper study of witchcraft : The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921); The God of the Witches (1931); The Divine King in England (1954).

In times past I have become familiar with all three of them : first of all in conjunction with the standard anthropological texts focussing on witchcraft; and, much later, while preparing an essay on the emergence of Gardnerian Wica [so spelt] in the mid-20th century.

In the past few days I have once again taken up The God of the Witches as part of my personal enquiry into the essential nature of Wicca and possibilities for its extension beyond the information so freely available in the public domain.

As an aside, I recall my first attendance at a Pagan Federation district convention. Ronald Hutton was the principal speaker. It was there, from him, I first became aware of academic objections to Murray’s thesis. It now seems to me that the generality of these objections have their origins in that portion of 18th century opinion which came to categorise ‘any belief in witchcraft’ as a falsehood deserving to be punished by the strictures of the 1735 Witchcraft Act.

It may also be the case that Murray, unwittingly, compounded the situation when she wrote her ‘Introduction’ to Gerald B. Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954).

As once again I make my way through her 1931 essay, I become aware that her technique, her method of presentation, is no longer fashionable. Her studies had led her to the conclusion that Pagan beliefs and practices – those of the Old Religion, as she has it – were never so completely eradicated or superseded by those of the Christian hierarchy as was once asserted to be the case. What did happen was that ‘the Church’ condemned any such manifestations as the machinations of its enemy the Devil and all his works. Hence the accusations and executions which are part of the historical record.

Rather than argue her corner, as a later generation of students has been taught to do, Murray simply sets out page after page of examples to back up her point. I am reminded of similar procedures by writers and speakers on country customs, their history, their variants, and their survival. She presents statements and restatements on the theme of : this is what people said or are alleged to have said; this is what people did or are alleged to have done. Much of what Murray offers us, I find quite convincing.

I do take issue with her on some of the conclusions she draws from preliterate illustrations. It is all very well to look at a display of figurines in a museum cabinet and accept that these are indeed miniatures of named gods and goddesses, because there is literary evidence to back up these attributions. But there comes a point when to extrapolate too far backwards in time leads us into an area of unprovable hypotheses tinged with wishful thinking.

To include an illustration of the Trois Freres ‘Masked Man with Stag’s Antlers’ among paragraphs concerned with the Horned God is going too far and her use of the ‘Masked Dancer’ (with musical bow) from the Fourneau de Diable is plain wrong. But then Murray is but one of a number of scholars misled by a figure wrenched out of context. I doubt any of them had actually seen prints showing the crowded state of the depictions on that particular wall. Look at any space where flyers have been posted one on top of the other, and you will see a modern example of a paleolithic practice.

For all that, Murray’s writing remains a valuable indicator of a particular ethos of the preWar days of the 1920s and 1930s. It is a part of the cultural atmosphere of a Southern England so very different from the present; part of the surroundings which nurtured the embryonic (was it really embryonic?) Craft of the Wise which eventually blossomed into the full flower of the Wicca.

© francis cameron, oxford, 9 july 2009