154 Kathleen L. Sheppard Dr. Margaret Murray

154 book reviews Kathleen L. Sheppard The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology, Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, and Plymouth: Lexington Books 2013. xxiii + 265 pp. isbn 978-0-7391-7417-3. Dr. Margaret Murray (1863–1963) was a pioneering and important figure in the history of archaeology. Born to a British colonial family in Bengal, in 1894 she began her studies at University College London’s (ucl) newly founded Egyptol- ogy department, where her talents allowed her to become a favoured student of department head Flinders Petrie. In 1898 she was appointed junior lecturer, and proceeded to remain a member of staff at ucl until 1935, becoming a highly respected expert on the archaeology and language of ancient Egypt. During her career she also undertook excavations into the prehistoric monuments of Malta and Minorca, served for two years as president of the Folklore Society, and became a vocal feminist, fighting for women’s rights both at ucl and throughout wider British society. For scholars devoted to the study of Western esotericism however, Murray’s great significance emerged in 1915, when she began to take a keen interest in the witchcraft beliefs of Early Modern Europe. Unable to return to Egypt due to the First World War, she began to explore both the folklore and history of witchcraft, coming to believe that the individuals persecuted in the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were actually adherents of a pre-Christian fertility religion devoted to the veneration of a horned god. Although this theory was not unique (it had previously appeared in various forms throughout European scholarship), she became its most famous proponent, most notably through her books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), The God of the Witches (1931), and The Divine King in England (1954), as well as through her entry on “witchcraft” which appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1929 to 1969. Although experts on the witch trials were immediately sceptical of her ideas, which would be completely discredited and rejected by further research in the latter part of that century, Murray’s Witch-Cult theory constituted a key influence on the burgeoning religion of Wicca during the mid-twentieth century, as individuals like Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente began to pro- fess a contemporary Pagan, occult new religious movement that they claimed was the survival of the Witch-Cult. Whether she believed them or not remains unclear, but Murray was clearly interested in such claims, agreeing to author an introduction to Gardner’s seminal 1954 work Witchcraft Today. Although the basic overview of Murray’s life and career has been known for half a century, in thanks largely to an autobiography that she published at the age of 100, this new book constitutes by far the most in-depth examination © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/15700593-01501015 book reviews 155 of this fascinating scholar yet published. It has been authored by historian of science Kathleen Sheppard, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and is based largely on her doctoral thesis, which was concluded at the University of Oklahoma in 2010. Sheppard’s book focuses on Murray the Egyptologist, which is understandable given that this was the field to which she devoted most of her life, however as a result, Murray’s witchcraft endeavours are relegated largely to a single chapter, aptly titled “The Witch-Cult Hypothesis and Other Adventures on the Lunatic Fringe, 1911–1935”. Sheppard acknowledges that Murray’s research into witchcraft has ‘been addressed in more depth by others’ (p. xviii), namely the historian Norman Cohn and the folklorists Jacqueline Simpson, Caroline Oates, and Juliette Wood. As a result, she does not embark on any new research into this area herself, instead being content largely to summarise such earlier work. Although she certainly provides a fair and balanced overview of Murray’s contributions to this field, and acknowledges that it constitutes a major part of her career and legacy (pp. 166, 177–178), I felt it unfortunate that certain important points were omitted or dealt with in a very cursory manner. For instance, Sheppard fails to specify that the Witch-Cult hypothesis was not the creation of Murray but that it actually had its origins with a number of scholars operating in continen- tal Europe, such as Karl Ernst Jarcke, Franz Joseph Mone, and Charles Leland. Similarly, scant information is included on the legacy and reception of Mur- ray’s theory; Sheppard fails to mention that she was in contact with maverick archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge, who would later go on to publish his own books on the theory. Just as problematic is that she leaves very little space to a discus- sion of Murray’s relationship with Gardner and the influence that she exerted on the emergence of the Wiccan movement, something which is arguably the most significant part of her legacy. Whether it was intentional or not, the overall impression given is that Sheppard is not particularly interested in this particular aspect of Murray’s life. Just as serious perhaps is Sheppard’s virtual neglect of the claims that Mur- ray herself practised magic. Sheppard briefly comments that ‘It is not truly clear if Murray believed in the power of witches and witchcraft’, before going on to note that it was ‘rumored that Murray performed a divination or ritual in her time’ (p. 174). In doing so however she fails to acknowledge the existence of some fairly compelling evidence that Murray was indeed involved in such prac- tices; in his entry on her in the Dictionary of National Biography, archaeologist Max Mallowan recorded that Murray was known to have performed curses on those whom she felt had wronged her, and in his history of the early Wiccan movement in Britain, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999), the historian Ronald Hutton notes the existence of a letter in the Oxford Uni- Aries – Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016) 143–159.

Load more