Europe's inner demons

The organization of the Dianic cult was based on the local coven, which always consisted of thirteen members — twelve ordinary members, male and female, and one officer. The members of a coven were obliged to attend the weekly meetings, which Dr Murray calls “esbats”, as well as the larger assemblies, or sabbats proper. Discipline was strict: failure to attend a meeting, or to carry out the instructions given there, was punished with such a beating that sometimes the culprit died. The resulting structure was remarkably tough: throughout the Middle Ages the Dianic cult was the dominant religion, Christianity little more than a veneer. It was only with the coming of the Reformation that Christianity achieved enough hold over the population to launch an open attack on its rival — the result being the great witch-hunt.

Margaret Murray was not by profession a historian but an Egyptologist, archaeologist and folklorist. Her knowledge of European history, even of English history, was superficial and her grasp of historical method was non-existent In the special field of witchcraft studies, she seems never to have read any of the modern histories of the persecution; and even if she had, she would not have assimilated them. By the time she turned her attention to these matters she was nearly sixty, and her ideas were firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould. For the rest of her days (and she lived to 100) she clung to those ideas with a tenacity which no criticism, however well informed or well argued, could ever shake.

There has been no lack of such criticism. George Lincoln Burr, Cecil L’Estrange Ewen, Professor Rossell Hope Robbins, Mr Elliot Rose, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, Mr Keith Thomas are amongst those who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, have either weighed the theory and found it wanting, or else have dismissed it as unworthy of consideration. But other scholars have taken a different view and have maintained that beneath its manifest exaggerations, the theory contains a core of truth. The reason is given by Arno Runeberg in his book Witches, demons and fertility magic

(1947). He points out that some of the accounts of witches’ assemblies quoted by Murray have no fantastic features but are perfectly plausible. The witches go to and from the sabbat not by flying but on foot or on horseback; the “Devil” has nothing supernatural about him but sits at the head of the table like an ordinary man; the meal is quite unremarkable; the participants even specify who supplied the food and drink. Runeberg concludes: “That such drinking-bouts should be only hallucinations… is indeed curious. Neither is it probable that the persecutors by leading questions would have caused people to tell such stories.”⁽¹³⁾ According to this view these commonplace happenings, themselves perhaps neither very frequent nor very widespread, represent the reality around which fantasies clustered, gradually building up the whole phantasmagoria of the witches’ sabbat as we find it in other and better known accounts. It would be a powerful argument if the accounts quoted by Murray were really as sober as they appear to be — but are they? The only way to find out is to examine her sources in their original contexts — a tiresome task, but one which is long overdue.

The relevant passages in the Witch-Cult carry references to some fifteen primary sources, mostly English or Scottish pamphlets describing notorious trials. Now, of all these sources only one is free from manifestly fantastic and impossible features — and even in that one the Devil, though “a bonny young lad with a blue bonnet”, has the conventional requirements of a cold body and cold semen, and gladly mates with a witch aged eighty.⁽¹⁴⁾

To appreciate the true import of the other sources one has only to compare, in half a dozen instances, what Murray quotes with what she passes over in silence.

The activities of the Lancashire witches who were tried in 1612 are represented by the following excerpts from a contemporary pamphlet:^*