Review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches

Jewish date:  7 Tammuz 5772 (Parashath Ḥuqqath).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of Cyril of Alexandria (Roman Catholicism), Lailat al-Miraj (Islam), Feast Day of Andrea (Thelema), Feast Day of St. James Dean (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

Next in the series on Neopaganism, we look at two books by Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Murray "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology") and The God of the Witches (Murray The God of the Witches).  Murray was a respected Egyptologist.  However, due to travel restrictions she delved into European history as well in the second half of her life.  And what she came up with is, to say the least, unique.

ּThere are a number of facts of which most of us are at least vaguely aware upon which Murray builds:

• Magic has been practiced for thousands of years—and the magic discussed here is not stage magic, but the attempt to do what stage magicians only pretend they are doing.
• Europe has many legends about fairies.
• Christians at times have been worried (or paranoid) about witches that served Satan.
• Witches reportedly often had familiars, frequently in the form of animals.
• Witches reportedly were specially marked by the Devil.
• Witches reportedly sacrificed humans.
• Witches reportedly had regular gatherings (“sabbats”) where they worshipped the Devil, often naked and with the Black Mass and other outrageous rites.
• At times witches reportedly flew to sabbats.
• Christians have at times engaged in witch-hunts and even tortured, tried, and executed purported witches, often very cruelly.

There is more than one conceivable way to understand these facts, and Murray chose a truly unusual one:  that witches are real.  She did not go so far as to say openly in either book that magic actually works or that Satan really exists, but she interpreted witches as crypto-pagans who worshipped a horned god who was ritually impersonated by one of his followers.  To her, the witch-hunts were attempts by Christians to route out paganism among peasants.  Murray quotes copious examples on each of these facts to better give the reader some idea what was claimed and explains how even the most unlikely sounding of them could be true.  E.g., reported flying to sabbats may be due to use of a hallucinatory ointment and thus reflect subject experience and not objective reality.  Mixed in with this is the idea that fairies were a real race of people living in Britain.  Murray also claims that among these witch-pagans there was the institution of a “sacred king” who ruled a while and was then ritually executed (in person or in the form of a substitute victim), which she deals with at length in The God of the Witches.  She sees hints of the practice even among European royalty and gives a few examples.

Your humble blogger is not an expert on European history, but certain aspects of Murray’s treatment are difficult at best.  One of the most obvious is that much of the testimony she relies upon was obtained under torture or threat of torture—and most of us are aware that under such conditions humans are liable to lie to end or avoid pain.  Murray glosses over this by claiming many confessed freely, but one could easily suggest that such people were complete pain wimps.  There is also the problem that she is relying only on problematic testimony and legends.  To break it down:

• Murray never produces unambiguous physical evidence that fairies ever existed, even though the remains and artifacts of a whole extra species of human living in an area also populated by Homo sapiens would probably have long ago been noticed.  To compare:  there actually was a race of short near-humans, Homo floresiensis, also known as “hobbits”, which lived in Indonesia maybe as late as 12,000 years ago, and they left behind skeletons and tools.  (They also lived too early to be Murray’s fairies and were on the wrong side of Eurasia.)
• There is no independent evidence that Murray’s crypto-paganism ever existed.  Hidden religious practices have actually been documented.  For example, one of the targets of the Spanish Inquisition was crypto-Jews.  The practical problem with secrets in general is that they often get leaked.  This is especially true in religion, in which keeping secrets is problematic, as religions are very frequently not limited to single people.  If there were a lot of pagans running around in Europe then, why did no one write about them?  Why do we not have any leaked copies of someone’s Book of Shadows?  Why do we not have any of their ritual tools?  How did they manage to keep themselves out of history except for witch trial records?
• People confessed to being Satanists.  No one confessed to being a pagan.  The distinction between the two is nontrivial, and one does not need to be theologically sophisticated to understand it.  Why would the reports be so accurate in many aspects yet universally fail in this one?
• That witches purportedly meet at sabbats (= Shabbath, Sabbath) and in gatherings called “synagogues” smacks of anti-Semitism rather than a faithful representation of crypto-paganism.  What witches reportedly practice and believe is not even vaguely Jewish, and it makes no sense for pagans to use Jewish terminology for their own practices.
• The evidence for the existence in the Christian era in Europe of sacred kings and substitute victims for them consists purely of hints, bits of anomalous information which fit into her hypothesis.  At no point does she ever tell us anything which qualifies as anything near direct evidence, such as a servant’s testimony that King Henry II was secretly a pagan and he was determined that Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket would be his substitute victim.

Murray also does not deal with alternate explanations for the trial records.  For example, one could easily suggest that there have been mass delusions of Satanic witchcraft, much in the same way that in more recent years people have had mass delusions of alien abduction.  One could also easily suggest that there were moral panics, similar to more recent panics about Satanic abuse cults; people were falsely accused, and many confessed to the imagined crimes of others due to torture.  Both of these possibilities could also have worked together.

Does this mean that there were no crypto-pagans?  No.  Only that Murray is not giving a good argument for their existence.

What do actual Neopagans think about Murray’s hypothesis?  Your humble blogger has one book in his library, Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler (Adler), which is an academic study of Neopaganism by a Neopagan, and it includes a history of Murray’s hypothesis within the Neopagan community (Adler 47-56); to make a long story short, it was widely believed early on, but with improved scholarship, even those believing in underground survival of paganism came to believe that Murray was inaccurate.  Other material your humble blogger found accuse her of biased selection of source materials and summarize subsequent scholarship making better use of available materials and coming to different conclusions (Gibbons; Evans).

If Murray does a bad job, what is the significance of her work today?  First, whatever the quality of her work or the correctness of her conclusions, her works on witchcraft helped give rise to Neopaganism.  Everyone agrees her hypothesis was commonly believed early in the history of the modern witchcraft movement.  Thus she contributed to the illusion that Neopaganism has more of a history than it really does, and she gave everyone who hated Christians yet another reason to hate them.  Furthermore, ideas were taken over into Wicca:  the Horned God, ritual impersonation of gods, ritual sex, the sabbat, the esbat, ritual dancing, feasting, the working of magic, initiation, vows, and the whole sacred king business.  Murray went off the deep end in writing about witchcraft, but she nevertheless created something still influential today.

Bibliography:

• Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon:  Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. 1979. Revised and expanded ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Print.
• Evans, Dave. "So How Old Is Witchcraft Really? The Role of Margaret Murray in Stirring the Muddy Waters of Witchcraft History."  [http://web.archive.org/web/20080518071822/http://occultebooks.com/articles/DaveEvans/SohowoldisWitchcraftreally/tabid/109/Default.aspx].
• Gibbons, Jenny. "The Real Burning Times."  [http://web.archive.org/web/20060212114634/http://sacred-pathways.com/realburningtimes.html].
• Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. 2001.  [http://www.thewica.co.uk/godwitch.pdf].
• ---. "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology".  Oxford, 1921. 303, [1] p. Clarendon Press. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/wcwe/index.htm].

Anti-Semitism and Eastwick

Greetings.

Jewish date:  6 Tishri 5770.

Today’s holidays:  Ten Days of Repentance (Judaism), Thursday of the Twenty-Fifth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Greater Eleusinian Mysteries (Thelema).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Save Orphan Bears: End Cruel Den Hunts” and “Sierra Club:  Add Your Voice and Help Us Reach Our Goal by October 4th!”  Also:  “Video: Will Ferrell stands up for the real health care victims”.

Topic 1:  More anti-Semitism using Orwellian language documented:  “New Statesman: Propaganda for Terrorists”.  Commentary on anti-Semitism in the United Nations:  “the Goldstone UN Gaza Report”.

Topic 2:  Last night was the pilot episode of the new TV series Eastwick, based on John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick.  The vibes I got from the promo suggested it would be bad or at least go into territory better left unexplored on TV, but a check on Wikipedia suggested that one of the characters, at least in the original novel or movie versions thereof, might be the Devil.  Dreading what the result would be (especially since I have not read the novel or seen the movie versions), I watched it, hoping it would be irrelevant to my project and I could ignore it afterwards.  Unfortunately, it turned out relevant, and so you all have to suffer along with me.  (Where is another season of Kings or even Reaper when you need it?)

The show is set it the fictional New England town of Eastwick, which has the stereotypical Pilgrim heritage, including hints of past burning of witches.  Three women who live in this town, Roxanne Torcoletti, Joanna Frankel, and Kat Gardener, find mysterious coins which they throw into a fountain, wishing for better lives.  Soon afterwards, a rich, charismatic, and mysterious stranger with an aura of evil and the too-obvious name Darryl Van Horne arrives in town and starts acquiring real estate and businesses.  He hits on all three of the aforementioned women (unsurprisingly, with a name like that) and reveals to them that they have magic powers, which can be evoked by wishing, wittingly or unwittingly.  Roxanne, hired by Darryl to make a sculpture of him, has highly detailed predictive dreams.  Joanna learns she has hypnotic powers she can use to control people—and has to wrestle with the morality of using them.  Kat’s power seems to be calling down lightning to strike her good-for-nothing husband.  There are also allegations that Van Horne has been in Eastwick previously, with hints of an unnaturally long lifespan.  This episode comes off as working towards the paranoid Christian fantasy of witches making deals with the Devil, including having sexual intercourse with him—though this being just the pilot, nothing near this far has happened yet.

What I want to see, in order to prevent this series turning into a total theological train wreck:  above anything else, a justification for the behavior of the Christian Satan.  One possibility is that he is fantastically stupid; angels are far less powerful than deities, so Satan is arguably being an idiot for rebelling against God.  He is also arguably a highly stubborn idiot, since thousands (or billions) of years is a long time to be holding a grudge which one can never truly satisfy.  The best he can hope for is to carry on a petty vendetta until he finally gets squished like the (relative) bug he is.  However, an idiot Satan is an ineffective Satan, so this is unlikely to be invoked.  More workable would be to give Satan a different value system than God or even to be working for God in quality assurance.  Another plausible route would be to make Darryl something other than the Devil, though this route requires more creativity.

OK, on to other things I need to do today...

Aaron

Darwin, Ali, and Satan

Greetings.

Jewish date:  4 Tishri 5770.

Today’s holidays:  Ten Days of Repentance (Judaism), Tuesday of the Twenty-Fifth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Mabon (Wicca).

Worthy cause of the day:  Urge your Senators to Protect the EPA’s Ability to Curb Global Warming Pollution.

Topic 1:  “Who Cares About Darwin?”:  This article deals with a creationist tactic of claiming that Charles Darwin is a horrible person who is responsible for Hitler, the Nazis, the Holocaust, and anything else awful one can imagine.  I have already dealt with why this is completely unfounded this to some degree in my review of Expelled:  No Intelligence Allowed, largely that anti-Semitism, including violent anti-Semitism, existed long before Hitler and that Hitler fails completely to reference Darwin or evolution in Mein Kampf.  This article goes into other aspects of why this guilt by association fails:  that we do not believe in evolution because of the authority of Darwin, Darwin’s life is irrelevant to whether evolution in true, and how evolution works (really or allegedly) is a matter of physical fact and not moral prescription.

Topic 2:  “Store Honors Islamic Martyr”:  This article is a warning to make sure one is interpreting something correctly.  This article deals with a sign saying a store would be closed on September 11 to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Ali.  Someone mistook this for a celebration of one of the 9/11 terrorists.  However, Imam Ali was really Muḥammad’s son-in-law and cousin.

Topic 3:  “Why do I”:

This is yet another LOLcat picture featuring Basement Cat, and like all good religious humor, it is founded on something actually part of religion.  Basement Cat is the LOLcat equivalent of Christianity’s Satan, who in Matthew 4:1-11 attempts to tempt Jesus.  This picture reflects an interpretation of evil as something external to and separate from us.  While not the only explanation given for the origin of evil, it is one with an inherent danger when taken literally:  since ultimately Satan is the author of evil, not us, arguably it is Satan who is responsible.  “Satan made me do it” is thus an easy way of shirking moral responsibility.  Such a conclusion is a position neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament take; “Satan made me do it” is never used as a defense by anyone therein, and similar defenses (e.g., ’Adham blaming Ḥawwah and Ḥawwah blaming the Serpent) do not past muster either.

Somebody bug me to blog about what I believe to be the real origin of evil at some point when I have more time...

Aaron