Margaret Murray

Margaret Alice Murray , born with Calcutta the July 13rd 1863, died in 1963, was an anthropologist and British Egyptologist , famous for its study of the Folklore and the Sorcellerie.

Biography

After studies of Linguistic and Anthropology to the University College of London, it accompanies the archeologist William Petrie in her campaigns by excavation in Palestine and Egypt. On its return, it obtains a station of reader with University College. In 1921, it publishes its most famous work, The Witch Cult in Western Europe . Three years later, it becomes assisting professor of Egyptology, always in University College, station which it preserves until its retirement in 1935.

Work

The fame of Marguerite Murray was born from her work The Witch Cult in Western Europe . For it, descriptions of Sabbath carried out during the lawsuits of sorcery are retranscriptions of ritual of a worship organized, itself related to a pagan religion pre-Christian woman of the fertility, having survived everywhere in Europe. The book is the subject initially of rather unfavourable reports, then knows a great popularity: Margaret Murray is then seen entrusting the drafting of the article “Witchcraft” of the Encyclopedia Universalis. Its ideas are partly at the origin of the creation of the Wicca and the Néo-paganism.

However, its theory undergoes then reverses: one reproaches him surinterpréter his sources. She is also shown to handle her textual sources to draw aside any awkward element, like the consents of night flight to go to the Sabbath or the transformations into animals. Works like Europe' S Inner Demons ( demons of Europe ) of Norman Cohn (1973) or has Razor for has Goat Elliot Pink (1962) constitute systematic criticisms of works of Margaret Murray. Carlo Ginzburg, whose the night Battles (1980) seem to accredit the thesis of a religion related to the fertility, clarifies then its opposition to the theses of Murray in the Sabbath of the witches (1989): it reproaches him for confusing consents and facts as well as textual handling. He declares thus that “almost all the historians of sorcery are today of agreement to judge that the books of Margaret Murray (like made the first authors of reports are amateurish works, absurd and deprived of any scientific value” ( Sabbath of the witches , Gallimard, 1992, p. 16).

The partisans of the theories of Murray see in these criticisms a reserve to accept the modernism of the theses which it advanced, sometimes in a way awkward or prone to controversies like that relative to Jeanne d' Arc. They underline however that it was a real pionnière, and one of the first to invest a field where the women have since fact their evidence.

Principal works

The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) ( the Worship of the wizards in Western Europe )
The God off the Witches (1933) ( God of the witches )

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