Margaret Murray

From this publication, she cut out or toned down what she saw as the more unpleasant aspects of the Witch-Cult, such as animal and child sacrifice, and her use of language became "emotionally inflated and coloured with religious phraseology." Read Less

In a 1994 academic paper, the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson noted that British folklorists remembered Murray with "embarrassment" and a "sense of paradox." Considering Murray's reputation to be "deservedly low" in academia, she argued that Murray's status as President of the Folklore Society had harmed the society's reputation and was a causal factor in the mistrustful attitude that many historians held toward folkloristics as an academic discipline.

One of her friends, the antiquarian Hilda Davidson, who knew Murray in her old age, described her as being "not at all assertive... never thrust her ideas on anyone. relation to her Witch-Cult theory, She behaved in fact rather like someone who was a fully convinced member of some unusual religious sect, or perhaps, of the Freemasons, but never on any account got into arguments about it in public."

Raised a devout Christian by her mother, Murray had initially become a Sunday School teacher in order to preach the faith. However, after entering the academic profession she rejected religion, gaining a reputation amongst other members of the Folklore Society as a noted sceptic and a rationalist. Despite her rejection of religion, she 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." She was also a believer and a practitioner of magic, performing curses against those whom she felt deserved it: as Ronald Hutton noted, "Once she carried out a ritual to blast a fellow academic whose promotion she believed to have been undeserved, by mixing up ingredients in a frying pan in the presence of two colleagues. Read Less