The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. A Study in Anthropology. By Margaret Alice Murray. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921.)
There is no task for the historian so difficult as really to re-think the thoughts of the past, especially when these thoughts assume a form which modern knowledge discredits. Few, indeed, are the historians capable of such a task, and among these few we certainly place Miss Murray. It is true that her book is a monument of compressed information, sound scholarship, and solid learning. It is more than this. She never loses herself in details, nor forgets in following out its ramifications the main object of her work. There is nothing of the kind, so far as we know, in English on the study of the ideas of the distant past; and the work has been so thoroughly carried out that it is not likely to be superseded. It is, indeed, pleasant to meet with a piece of work so comprehensive in scope, and so rich and varied in its treatment of the subject of witch-cult in western Europe and notably in England.
As Mr. Lea in his account of the persecution of the Albigenses was able to show that the anti-social views of this sect warranted the authorities in putting it down, so Miss Murray demonstrates that the dangers arising from the witch-cult constituted just as grave a menace to the framework of society. This is, indeed, the most novel feature in her deeply illuminating book. Under 'operative witchcraft' she classes charms and spells, and rightly has little to say about it. She concentrates all her attention on ritual witchcraft, which she calls the Dianic cult. We all know that Mithraism constituted a serious rival to Christianity, and we all are aware that the church took over the birthday of Mithra as the birthday of Jesus Christ. The old persisted in the new, and this lesson Miss Murray enforces in unexpected ways. Mingled with the Christianity of the middle ages much of the old paganism remained. The witch-cult persisted, and with its persistence rites for rain-making and for causing or blasting fertility survived. Inevitably Dianists sought to encourage fertility among themselves, and to restrain it among their enemies. The church denounced the witches for their share in the destruction of fertility. In 1488 Innocent VIII held that witches 'blight the marriage bed, destroy the births of women and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, the grass and herbs of the field'.[1] To a Dutchman like Adrian VI it was inevitable that he should denounce witches 'as a Sect deviating from the Catholic Faith, denying their Baptism, and showing Contempt of the Ecclesiastical Sacraments, treading Crosses under their Feet, and, taking the Devil for their Lord, destroyed the Fruits of the Earth by their Enchantments, Sorceries, and Superstitions'. The evidence the author produces, and above all her masterly interpretation of it, go far to justify the decrees of both popes.
Miss Murray is successful in showing that the Dianist cult owned adherents from Italy to New England during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. She laments that the cases in the New World have not been published in full, but the material for the Salem Witches case has been carefully collected by Mr. G. L. Burr in 1914, and, indeed, this
- ↑ Summis desiderantes (Wikisource contributor note)
