Europe's inner demons

The impact of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe has been extraordinary. For some forty years (1929-68) the article on “Witchcraft” in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica

was by Margaret Murray and simply summarized the book’s argument, as though it — were a matter of established fact. By 1962 a scholar was moved to comment with dismay: “The Murrayites seem to hold… an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels. There is, amongst educated people, a very widespread impression that Professor Margaret Murray has discovered the true answer to the problem of the history of European witchcraft and has proved her theory.”⁽¹¹⁾ Since that was written the Murrayite cause has received formidable reinforcements. The Oxford University Press, the original publishers of the Witch-Cult

, re-issued it in 1962 as a paperback, which has been frequently reprinted since and is still selling well. In a foreword to this new edition the eminent medievalist Sir Steven Runciman praises the thoroughness of the author’s scholarship and makes it plain that he fully accepts her basic theory. Some leading historians of seventeenth-century England have shown themselves equally trusting. Even amongst scholars specializing in the history of witchcraft the book has exercised and — as we shall see— continues to exercise considerable influence. It has also inspired a whole library of new works, which have disseminated the doctrine amongst more or less serious readers. It is significant that in Britain even that respectable series, Pelican Books, having published an anti-Murravite work on witchcraft by Professor Geoffrey Parrinder in 1958, replaced it in by the Murrayite work of the late Pennethorne Hughes. More dramatically, the Witch-Cult and its progeny have stimulated the extraordinary proliferation of “witches’ covens” in Western Europe and the United States during the past decade, culminating in the foundation of the Witches International Craft Association, with headquarters in New York. In 1970 the association, under the leadership of Dr Leo Martello and his “high priestess” Witch Hazel, held “the world’s first public Witch-In for Halloween” in Central Park. Even Margaret Murray, one imagines, would have been surprised by the development of the Witches’ Liberation Movement, with its plans for a Witches’ Day Parade, a Witches News Service, a Witches’ Lecture Bureau and a Witches’ Anti-Defamation League.⁽¹²⁾

The argument presented in the Witch-Cult and elaborated in its successor The God of the Witches

(1933) can be summarized as follows:

Down to the seventeenth century a religion which was far older than Christianity persisted throughout Western Europe, with followers in every social stratum from kings to peasants. It centred on the worship of a two-faced, horned god, known to the Romans as Dianus or Janus. This “Dianic cult” was a religion of the type so abundantly described in The Golden Bough. The horned god represented the cycle of the crops and the seasons, and was thought of as periodically dying and returning to life. In society he was represented by selected human beings. At national level these included such celebrated personages as William Rufus, Thomas à Becket, Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, whose dramatic deaths were really ritual sacrifices carried out to ensure the resurrection of the god and the renewal of the earth. At village level the god was represented by the horned personage who presided over the witches assemblies. Hostile observers, such as inquisitors, naturally took this personage to be, or at least to represent, the Devil; so that to them witchcraft seemed a form of Satan-worship. In reality, the witches were simply worshipping the pre-Christian deity Dianus; and if they appeared to kiss their master’s behind, that was because he wore a mask which, like the god himself, had two faces.

The preservation of the Dianic cult was largely the work of an aboriginal race, which had been driven into hiding by successive waves of invaders. These refugees were of small stature — which was the reality behind stories of “the little people”, or fairies. Shy and elusive, they nevertheless had sufficient contact with the ordinary population to transmit the essentials of their religion. The witches were their disciples and intellectual heirs.