Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray – Life, Scholarship & Controversy

Explore the life and work of Margaret Alice Murray (1863–1963), a pioneering Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, folklorist and theorist whose “witch-cult” hypothesis deeply influenced the study of witchcraft and modern Paganism.

Introduction

Margaret Alice Murray (born 13 July 1863 – died 13 November 1963) was a British (Anglo-Indian) Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist. She was one of the first professional female archaeologists in Britain and the first woman appointed lecturer in archaeology at a British university. Over her long life, she published widely on Egyptology, folklore, and the history of witchcraft, and remains a polarizing figure: celebrated for her contributions to archaeology and outreach, critiqued for speculative interpretations later discredited by mainstream scholarship.

Early Life and Family

Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta, British India to an Anglo-Irish family. Her father, James Murray, managed paper mills and was active in commerce; her mother, Margaret (née Carr), was originally a missionary educator. She had at least one sister, Mary.

In her youth she moved between India and Britain (and at times Germany), receiving informal education and exposure to multiple cultural settings. Before embarking on her Egyptological career, Murray worked in social welfare and nursing.

At age 30 (in 1893–1894), she enrolled at University College London to study under famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, taking courses in hieroglyphs and preparing for a research career.

Academic Career & Major Work

UCL, Petrie, and Field Excavations

In 1898 Murray was appointed as a junior lecturer in Egyptology at UCL—making her the first woman lecturer in archaeology in the UK. Under Petrie’s mentorship, she contributed as copyist, illustrator, and collaborator on excavations.

In the 1902–1903 season, she joined Petrie’s excavations at Abydos, where she assisted in uncovering the Osireion (a temple associated with Osiris) and participated in field work, despite initial roles as nurse or assistant. She later worked at Saqqara, transcribing tomb inscriptions, publishing Saqqara Mastabas I (1905).

Her publications from early field work, e.g. The Osireion at Abydos, gained recognition within Egyptology circles.

Over time she advanced to assistant professor (by 1928) and served at UCL until about 1935, with annual reappointments after formal retirement age.

Folklore, Witch-Cult Theory & Popular Works

During World War I, when travel to Egypt became difficult, Murray turned her attention to folklore and witchcraft studies, developing what became known as the witch-cult hypothesis. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), she argued that many witch trials in early modern Europe targeted adherents of a surviving, organized pagan fertility religion devoted to a Horned God. She later published The God of the Witches (1931) for a broader audience, and The Divine King in England (1954) further expanding ritual-king theories.

Murray also engaged in field archaeology beyond Egypt: she led excavations on Malta and Menorca (1921–1931), exploring prehistoric sites and publishing Cambridge Excavations in Minorca. She also visited Petra (1937), conducting a small excavation and writing a guidebook for the site.

In folklore, she became active in the Folklore Society, later serving as President from 1953 to 1955. Her popular books—such as The Splendour That Was Egypt (1949)—helped bring Egyptology to a general audience.

Intellectual Context & Critiques

Murray’s career straddled scholarly archaeology and speculative interpretation. Her witch-cult hypothesis drew on comparative religion, anthropology, and folklore at a time when archaeology and anthropology often overlapped in their ambition to “read” ancient religion into medieval practices.

While her archaeological work was respected, historians and scholars of witchcraft have long criticized her method: selective use of trial records, overgeneralization, lack of contextual archival grounding, and reliance on thematic parallels rather than rigorous historical evidence. By the late 20th century, the dominant consensus rejected her core claims about a unified surviving pagan witch religion.

However, her theories had a powerful cultural impact: they influenced early modern Wicca (which adopted her Horned God and coven language) and shaped public imaginings of witchcraft.

Personality, Influence & Legacy

Murray was known as intellectually strong, socially committed, and dedicated to opening classical scholarship to the public. She was active in feminist causes, advocating for women’s rights at UCL (e.g. creating women’s common rooms) and participating in suffrage movements.

Her former students and colleagues remembered her as kind, witty, and rigorous. In her late years, she remained active in teaching adult classes and publishing until her centennial.

Although her reputation in witchcraft studies has declined, in archaeology & Egyptology she is still remembered as one of the few women who broke into a male-dominated discipline in the early 20th century. She is sometimes called the “Grand Old Woman of Egyptology.”

Selected Ideas & Quotes

Because Murray was a scholar rather than a popular aphorist, her most enduring “quotations” lie in her written propositions:

• Her assertion that “every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant” captured her commitment to scientific archaeology.

• From her My First Hundred Years (autobiography, 1963), she reflected on her career and her belief in an over-ruling power (calling it “Nature” in scientific terms).

• Her witch-cult hypothesis claims:

  “Ritual Witchcraft … a fertility-based faith … the Devil in trial accounts was the witches’ god …”

These lines reflect her determination to read continuity into religious and folkloric traditions.

Lessons from Margaret Murray

• Courage to cross boundaries. Murray combined Egyptology, folklore, anthropology, and religious history—reflecting interdisciplinary ambition, though also exposing her to methodological risks.

• Importance of evidence and restraint. Her speculative leaps remind scholars that analogical parallels must be buttressed by archival and contextual rigor.

• Public scholarship matters. She strove to make ancient cultures intelligible and accessible to broader audiences, not restricting herself to academic silos.

• Women’s perseverance in academia. As one of the earliest female archaeologists, she faced institutional and societal resistance yet persisted in building a career and mentoring others.

• Ideas have cultural resonance beyond their academic validity. Even when her witch theory was discredited, it left a living legacy in modern Pagan movements and popular imagination of witchcraft.

Conclusion

Margaret Alice Murray stands as a fascinating, complex figure in 20th-century scholarship: groundbreaking in Egyptology and teaching, energetic in public outreach, and controversial in her bold theorizing about the survival of pagan witch cults. Though many of her claims about witchcraft have been rejected by modern historians, her passion, pioneering role as a woman in archaeology, and her efforts to make ancient history accessible endure.

If you’d like, I can also prepare a chronology of her work, or point you to primary texts or modern critiques (e.g. by Norman Cohn) for deeper reading. Do you want me to send those?