95 Facts About Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray was president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely.

Margaret Murray became closely involved in the first-wave feminist movement, joining the Women's Social and Political Union and devoting much time to improving women's status at UCL.

Margaret Murray was born on 13 July 1863 in Calcutta, then a major military city and the capital of British India.

Margaret Murray lived in the city with her parents James and Margaret Murray, an older sister named Mary, and her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother.

James Margaret Murray, born in India of Anglo-Irish descent, was a businessman and manager of the Serampore paper mills who was thrice elected President of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce.

Margaret Murray had moved to India from Britain in 1857 to work as a missionary, preaching Christianity and educating Indian women.

Margaret Murray continued with this work after marrying James and giving birth to her two daughters.

In 1880, they returned to Calcutta, where Margaret Murray remained for the next seven years.

Margaret Murray became a nurse at the Calcutta General Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of the Anglican Sisterhood of Clower, and there was involved with the hospital's attempts to deal with a cholera outbreak.

In 1881, at age 18, Margaret heard about James Murray and his "general appeal to English speakers around the world to read their local books and send him words and quotations" for entry into the OED.

Margaret Murray had a routine of taking a book onto the roof in the cool early-morning air.

Margaret Murray began with William L'Isle's edition of Aelfric's Saxon Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament, from which she submitted 300 entries to Murray.

Margaret Murray continued as a volunteer until 1888, submitting a total of 5,000 entries.

Margaret Murray took up employment as a social worker dealing with local underprivileged people.

Later in 1893, Margaret Murray received her first introduction to Egyptology when her elder sister, Mary, alerted her to an advertisement in The Times for classes in Egyptian hieroglyphs taught by Flinders Petrie, Margaret Murray's future mentor.

Margaret Murray began her studies at UCL at age 30 in January 1894, as part of a class composed largely of other women and older men.

Margaret Murray took courses in the Ancient Egyptian and Coptic languages which were taught by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Walter Ewing Crum respectively.

Margaret Murray soon got to know Petrie, becoming his copyist and illustrator and producing the drawings for the published report on his excavations at Qift, Koptos.

Margaret Murray supplemented her UCL salary by teaching evening classes in Egyptology at the British Museum.

Margaret Murray published her site report as The Osireion at Abydos in 1904; in the report, she examined the inscriptions that had been discovered at the site to discern the purpose and use of the building.

Margaret Murray did not have legal permission to excavate the site, and instead spent her time transcribing the inscriptions from ten of the tombs that had been excavated in the 1860s by Auguste Mariette.

Margaret Murray published her findings in 1905 as Saqqara Mastabas I, although would not publish translations of the inscriptions until 1937 as Saqqara Mastabas II.

Margaret Murray concealed the militancy of her actions in order to retain the image of respectability within academia.

Margaret Murray pushed the professional boundaries for women throughout her own career, and mentored other women in archaeology and throughout academia.

At UCL, she became a friend of fellow female lecturer Winifred Smith, and together they campaigned to improve the status and recognition of women in the university, with Margaret Murray becoming particularly annoyed at female staff who were afraid of upsetting or offending the male university establishment with their demands.

Margaret Murray took on an unofficial administrative role within the Egyptology Department, and was largely responsible for introduction of a formal certificate in Egyptian archaeology in 1910.

Various museums around the United Kingdom invited Margaret Murray to advise them on their Egyptological collections, resulting in her cataloguing the Egyptian artefacts owned by the Dublin National Museum, the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, being elected a Fellow of the latter in thanks.

In 1907, Petrie excavated the Tomb of the Two Brothers, a Middle Kingdom burial of two Egyptian priests, Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht, and it was decided that Margaret Murray would carry out the public unwrapping of the latter's mummified body.

Margaret Murray was particularly keen to emphasise the importance that the unwrapping would have for the scholarly understanding of the Middle Kingdom and its burial practices, and lashed out against members of the public who saw it as immoral; she declared that "every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant".

Margaret Murray subsequently published a book about her analysis of the two bodies, The Tomb of the Two Brothers, which remained a key publication on Middle Kingdom mummification practices into the 21st century.

Margaret Murray was dedicated to public education, hoping to infuse Egyptomania with solid scholarship about Ancient Egypt, and to this end authored a series of books aimed at a general audience.

Margaret Murray was particularly pleased with the increased public interest in Egyptology that followed Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922.

From at least 1911 until his death in 1940, Margaret Murray was a close friend of the anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman of the London School of Economics, and together they co-authored a variety of papers on Egyptology that were aimed at an anthropological audience.

Margaret Murray published many research articles in the journal and authored many of its book reviews, particularly of the German-language publications which Petrie could not read.

Margaret Murray followed this up with papers on the subject in the journals Man and the Scottish Historical Review.

Margaret Murray articulated these views more fully in her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, published by Oxford University Press after receiving a positive peer review by Henry Balfour, and which received both criticism and support on publication.

Margaret Murray used the opportunity to propagate her own witch-cult theory, failing to mention the alternate theories proposed by other academics.

Margaret Murray joined the Folklore Society in February 1927, and was elected to the society's council a month later, although she stood down in 1929.

Margaret Murray reiterated her witch-cult theory in her 1933 book, The God of the Witches, which was aimed at a wider, non-academic audience.

At UCL, Margaret Murray was promoted to lecturer in 1921 and to senior lecturer in 1922.

Margaret Murray's resulting three-volume excavation report came to be seen as an important publication within the field of Maltese archaeology.

In 1932 Margaret Murray returned to Malta to aid in the cataloguing of the Bronze Age pottery collection held in Malta Museum, resulting in another publication, Corpus of the Bronze Age Pottery of Malta.

Margaret Murray continued to publish works on Egyptology for a general audience, such as Egyptian Sculpture and Egyptian Temples, which received largely positive reviews.

That year, Margaret Murray was tasked with guiding Mary of Teck, the Queen consort, around the Egyptology department during the latter's visit to UCL.

The pressures of teaching had eased by this point, allowing Margaret Murray to spend more time travelling internationally; in 1920 she returned to Egypt and in 1929 visited South Africa, where she attended the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose theme was the prehistory of southern Africa.

In 1933, Petrie had retired from UCL and moved to Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine with his wife; Margaret Murray therefore took over as editor of the Ancient Egypt journal, renaming it Ancient Egypt and the East to reflect its increasing research interest in the ancient societies that surrounded and interacted with Egypt.

Margaret Murray then spent some time in Jerusalem, where she aided the Petries in their excavation at Tall al-Ajjul, a Bronze Age mound south of Gaza.

Back in England, from 1934 to 1940, Margaret Murray aided the cataloguing of Egyptian antiquities at Girton College, Cambridge, and gave lectures in Egyptology at the university until 1942.

In 1953, Margaret Murray was appointed to the presidency of the Folklore Society following the resignation of former president Allan Gomme.

The Society initially approached John Mavrogordato for the post, but he had declined, with Margaret Murray accepting the nomination several months later.

In May 1957, Murray had championed the archaeologist T C Lethbridge's controversial claims that he had discovered three pre-Christian chalk hill figures on Wandlebury Hill in the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire.

Crippled with arthritis, Margaret Murray had moved into a home in North Finchley, north London, where she was cared for by a retired couple who were trained nurses; from here she occasionally took taxis into central London to visit the UCL library.

Amid failing health, in 1962 Margaret Murray moved into the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, where she could receive 24-hour care; she lived here for the final 18 months of her life.

In Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, it was noted that Margaret Murray was "the only Fellow of the Institute to [reach their centenary] within living memory, if not in its whole history".

Margaret Murray died on 13 November 1963, and her body was cremated.

Margaret Murray claimed that at the witches' meetings, the god would be personified, usually by a man or at times by a woman or an animal; when a human personified this entity, Murray claimed that they were usually dressed plainly, though they appeared in full costume for the witches' Sabbaths.

Margaret Murray claimed that in some cases, these individuals had to sign a covenant or were baptised into the faith.

Margaret Murray described the religion as being divided into covens containing thirteen members, led by a coven officer who was often termed the "Devil" in the trial accounts, but who was accountable to a "Grand Master".

Margaret Murray asserted that the "General Meeting of all members of the religion" were known as Sabbaths, while the more private ritual meetings were known as Esbats.

The Esbats, Margaret Murray claimed, were nocturnal rites that began at midnight, and were "primarily for business, whereas the Sabbath was purely religious".

Margaret Murray asserted the Sabbath ceremonies involved the witches paying homage to the deity, renewing their "vows of fidelity and obedience" to him, and providing him with accounts of all the magical actions that they had conducted since the previous Sabbath.

Margaret Murray claimed that there were four types of sacrifice performed by the witches: blood-sacrifice, in which the neophyte writes their name in blood; the sacrifice of animals; the sacrifice of a non-Christian child to procure magical powers; and the sacrifice of the witches' god by fire to ensure fertility.

Margaret Murray interpreted accounts of witches shapeshifting into various animals as being representative of a rite in which the witches dressed as specific animals which they took to be sacred.

Margaret Murray asserted that accounts of familiars were based on the witches' use of animals, which she divided into "divining familiars" used in divination and "domestic familiars" used in other magic rites.

Margaret Murray asserted that a pre-Christian fertility-based religion had survived the Christianization process in Britain, although that it came to be "practised only in certain places and among certain classes of the community".

Margaret Murray believed that folkloric stories of fairies in Britain were based on a surviving race of dwarfs, who continued to live on the island up until the Early Modern period.

Margaret Murray asserted that this race followed the same pagan religion as the witches, thus explaining the folkloric connection between the two.

Margaret Murray noted that the book's tone was generally "dry and clinical, and every assertion was meticulously footnoted to a source, with lavish quotation".

Margaret Murray followed The Witch-Cult in Western Europe with The God of the Witches, published by the popular press Sampson Low in 1931; although similar in content, unlike her previous volume it was aimed at a mass market audience.

Margaret Murray further asserted that in the Bronze Age, the worship of the deity could be found throughout Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa, claiming that the depiction of various horned figures from these societies proved that.

Margaret Murray's theories were recapitulated by Arno Runeberg in his 1947 book Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic as well as Pennethorne Hughes in his 1952 book Witches.

Margaret Murray further suggested that the Murrayite view was attractive to many as it confirmed "the general picture of pre-Christian Europe a reader of Frazer or [Robert] Graves would be familiar with".

Margaret Murray stated that she was not acquainted with the "careful general histories by modern scholars" and criticised her for assuming that the trial accounts accurately reflected the accused witches' genuine experiences of witchcraft, regardless of whether those confessions had been obtained through torture and coercion.

Margaret Murray charged her with selectively using the evidence to serve her interpretation, for instance by omitting any supernatural or miraculous events that appear in the trial accounts.

Margaret Murray accepted that her case "could, perhaps, still be proved by somebody else, though I very much doubt it".

Margaret Murray further criticises Murray for treating pre-Christian Britain as a socially and culturally monolithic entity, whereas in reality, it contained a diverse array of societies and religious beliefs.

Simpson noted that despite these critical reviews, within the field of British folkloristics, Margaret Murray's theories were permitted "to pass unapproved but unchallenged, either out of politeness or because nobody was really interested enough to research the topic".

Margaret Murray highlighted that when regional studies of British folklore were published in this period by folklorists like Theo Brown, Ruth Tongue, or Enid Porter, none adopted the Murrayite framework for interpreting witchcraft beliefs, thus evidencing her claim that Murray's theories were widely ignored by scholars of folkloristics.

Margaret Murray stated that Murray's conclusions were "almost totally groundless" because she ignored the systematic study of the trial accounts provided by Ewen and instead used sources very selectively to argue her point.

Margaret Murray stated his opinion that she was right in claiming that European witchcraft had "roots in an ancient fertility cult", something that he argued was vindicated by his work researching the, an agrarian visionary tradition recorded in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The later folklorist Juliette Wood noted that many members of the Folklore Society "remember her fondly", adding that Margaret Murray had been "especially keen to encourage younger researchers, even those who disagreed with her ideas".

Margaret Murray never married, instead devoting her life to her work, and for this reason, Hutton drew comparisons between her and two other prominent female British scholars of the period, Jane Harrison and Jessie Weston.

Margaret Murray considered travel to be one of her favourite activities, although due to restraints on her time and finances she was unable to do this regularly; her salary remained small and the revenue from her books was meagre.

Margaret Murray was openly critical of organised religion, although continued to maintain a personal belief in a God of some sort, relating in her autobiography that she believed in "an unseen over-ruling Power", "which science calls Nature and religion calls God".

Margaret Murray was a believer and a practitioner of magic, performing curses against those she felt deserved it; in one case she cursed a fellow academic, Jaroslav Cerny, when she felt that his promotion to the position of Professor of Egyptology over her friend Walter Bryan Emery was unworthy.

Margaret Murray's curse entailed mixing up ingredients in a frying pan, and was undertaken in the presence of two colleagues.

Hutton noted that Margaret Murray was one of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship", and the archaeologist Niall Finneran described her as "one of the greatest characters of post-war British archaeology".

Margaret Murray is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars, her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments.

Simpson suggested that Margaret Murray's position as President of the Society was a causal factor in the mistrustful attitude that many historians held toward folkloristics as an academic discipline, as they erroneously came to believe that all folklorists endorsed Margaret Murray's ideas.

Similarly, Catherine Noble stated that "Margaret Murray caused considerable damage to the study of witchcraft".

In 1935, UCL introduced the Margaret Murray Prize, awarded to the student who is deemed to have produced the best dissertation in Egyptology; it continued to be presented annually into the 21st century.

UCL hold two busts of Margaret Murray, one kept in the Petrie Museum and the other in the library of the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

UCL possess a watercolour painting of Margaret Murray by Winifred Brunton; formerly exhibited in the Petrie Gallery, it was later placed into the Art Collection stores.

The duo knew each other, with Margaret Murray writing the foreword to Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today, although in that foreword she did not explicitly specify whether she believed Gardner's claim that he had discovered a survival of her witch-cult.

Margaret Murray's ideas shaped the depiction of paganism in the work of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff.