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Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography pp 69–89Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Reality of Witch Cults Reasserted: Fertility and Satanism

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Abstract

In the first half of the twentieth century, two writers challenged the view that witchcraft had never been a ‘real’ cult. Margaret Murray (1863–1963), an Egyptologist and member of the Folklore Society, applied James Frazer’s ideas on the universality of fertility cults at the primitive stage of cultural development to re-create an ancient religion. She put forward the idea that what Christianity demonised as witchcraft was a medieval survival of an ancient Palaeolithic/Neolithic religion based on the agricultural cycle. In contrast, Montague Summers (1880–1948), a convert to Catholicism, claimed that genuine satanic cults had existed in previous centuries, and that witches did indeed practise satanic rites. At the time there was widespread interest in occultism, and the modern disciplines of anthropology and psychology were emerging. The very different conclusions reached by Murray and Summers shared the assumption that the language of accusation could be matched to a real phenomenon, rooted in the past, but still affecting the present. Researchers have again become interested in witches’ assemblies, although there are still widely expressed reservations about the way Murray and Summers fused popular motifs and historical material to produce their respective benign or satanic cults. Despite this, both writers have been influential in the development of modern popular religion and lifestyle movements.

There is room, there always will be, for studies of witchcraft, of haunting, of the occult. We only ask that these books should be written seriously … The amateur and alas there are all too many of them who invade the occult are awaking forces of which they have no conception.

Montague Summers, The Galanty Show, p. 164.

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Notes

  1. Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921; reprinted 1952, paperback 1962); Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Sampson Low, 1933); Murray, The Divine King in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1954); Murray, My First Hundred Years (London: W. Kinber, 1963); Murray, The Genesis of Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); see also ‘Murray’s Unlikely History’, <www.wicca.timerift.net/murray.html>; <www.Sacred-texts.com/pag/wcwe>; <www.Sacred-texts.com/pag/gow>.

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Authors
  1. Juliette Wood
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Exeter, UK

    Jonathan Barry (Lecturer in History) (Lecturer in History)

  2. University of Hertfordshire, UK

    Owen Davies

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© 2007 Juliette Wood

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Wood, J. (2007). The Reality of Witch Cults Reasserted: Fertility and Satanism. In: Barry, J., Davies, O. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Witchcraft Historiography. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593480_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593480_5

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-1176-6

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