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.
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:*
The persons aforesaid had to their dinners beef, bacon and roasted mutton; which mutton (as this witness’s said brother said) was of a wether of Christopher Swyers of Barley: which wether was brought in the night before into this witness’s mother’s house by the said James Device, this witness’s said brother: and in this witness’s sight killed and eaten. . And before their said parting away, they all appointed to meet at the said Preston’s wife’s house that day twelve-month; at which time the said Preston’s wife promised to make them a great feast.
After which they “went out of the said house in their own shapes and likenesses. And they all, as soon as they were out of doors, got on horseback, like foals, some of one colour, some of another.”(15)
The Devil, it will be noted, does not figure at all in this account; and one would never guess how large a part the demonic powers played in the trial as a whole. The key witness was a nine-year-old girl, Jennet Device, who gave evidence against her mother, her grandmother and her brother. Now according to young Jennet a spirit in the form of a brown dog called Ball approached her mother and asked what she wished him to do; and on her instructions killed three men by occult means. She had also listened to a black dog called Dandy having a similar conversation with her brother James; after which Dandy contrived the death of an old woman.(16)
The Somerset trials of 1664 are regarded by Murray as particularly illuminating. She quotes from the evidence of Elizabeth Styles:
*
In this and the following quotations I have modernized the spelling and replaced a few obsolete words by their modern equivalents. N.C.