Hi, Mogg,
Yes, I've asked Egyptologists at UCL and I'm told that
Murray is still regarded as good in that field, for
her time.
She got very many things wrong -- sometimes because
she had a very literalistic mind, always wanting
rational explanations, howener farfetched. E.g., if a
source spoke of someone seeing the devil's cloven
hoof, she'd say 'Aha! That was a coven-leader wearing
a funny-shaped overshoe, for people to identify him
by'. She completely failed to realise that
similarities in confessions were due to interrogators
asking everyone similar questions and going on and on
till they got the answers they wanted (she knew about
torture, but not about the psychological erffect of
sleep-deprivation and brainwashing. No blame to her --
this was 1922, and nobody knew). She had a totally
non-historical approach; she thought one could leap
from prehistoric cave-paintings to classical Greece to
late medieval France and Britain and find a unchanging
unity of ritual, calendars, organization. Myself, I
suspect that was because in Ancient Egypt religious
concepts and rituals really did stay the same for
centuries on end, and It was on Egyptian archaeology
that she was trained.
Was there witchcraft before gardner? All depends what
you mean by witchcraft. In the broadest sense, i.e.
magical practices aimed at harming people, animals or
objects, yes, this has been believed in by European
and Near Eastern cultures as far back as we can trace
(and no doubt in Asia and Africa too). And if a
culture believes such things are possible, some people
will try to do them.
If by 'witchcraft' you mean rituals aimed at promoting
good crops, healthy animals,, and plenty of kids, yes,
that too goes back as far as records stretch.
If you mean 'High Magic', ie. circles and pentacles
and sigils and such, I think the history leads back
from Gardner via late 19th C intellectuals in France
and England (Golden Dawn, Rosicrucians, etc) to
Renaissance and late medieval intellectuals (Dee,
Paracelsus) and thence to Arab and Jewish cultures.
But this isn't my field. Others on this list know gfar
more.
Jacqueline
--- Mogg Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear all
>
> '...incredulity concerning [witchcraft's]
> organisation and the far
> reaching claims made in Dr Murray's later books is
> certainly justified.
> Nevertheless the pendulum may have swung too far . .
> .
> there is abundant archeological evidence for the
> long life of
> many ritual practices, and there are a number of
> recent folk customs
> that can reasonably be interpreted as survivals of
> fertility rites. '
> - Ralph Merrifield, AOM&R
>
> Ie the rejection of MM's thesis is perhaps
> misinterpreted as saying that
> there
> was no witchcraft before gardner's wicca. When I
> thought it was the theory
> about
> the organisation of covens that she got so wrong??
>
> MM's reputation as a Egyptologist is still, AFAIK,
> pretty much intact.
> She made a number of discoveries of enormous
> significance -
> A pioneer amongst women academics - without whom
> many highly significant
> practices of the ancient egyptians would have been
> lost forever.
> So not sure you should cringe -
> Her interest in british folklore was probably
> something she picked up
> from her teacher 'flinders petrie - so its perhaps
> of its time when scholars
> were all looking for parallels with the Osiris
> 'fertility' cult -
> which is probably what she thought had somehow
> survived in europe??
> I wonder if she gets more flak for her failures than
> her male colleagues??
>
>
> 'love and do what you will'
>
> mogg
>
> Ps: when forced to retire at 75 she walked out of
> ucl never to return
> - so no orderly handover to her female successor -
> the most cringemaking thing she did was to trash all
> of Petrie's field notes
> for
> the excavation of Ombos - quite a disastor for
> prehistorians but not
> untypical of scholars of that generation.
>
>
>
>
>
> : ) .....................................: )
> Mandrake.uk.net
> Publishers
> PO Box 250, Oxford, OX1 1AP
> +44 1865 243671
> homepage: <http://www.mandrake.uk.net>
> Blogs =
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>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of jacqueline
> simpson
> Sent: 16 January 2006 16:20
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Folklore
>
>
> Hi, Caroline,
> Yes, I did indeed write on Murray, in "Folklore"
> 1994,
> article called 'Margaret Murray: Who believed her,
> and
> why'. A pretty scathing analysis. The background was
> that some two or three years before then we'd
> planned
> a conference on 'Women Folklorists of 19th C
> Britain',
> and l'd said 'I'll do MM -- It's time we stopped
> cringing in shame every time she's mentioned, and
> had
> another look at her work.' I had fully expected my
> paper would be along the lines of, 'Well, we can now
> see that her witchcraft theories are nonsense, but
> in
> view of the evidence available in her time, she can
> be
> praised for this, or that, or the other ....' The
> usual situation when dealing with writers three
> generations back. Instead, once I reread her I was
> totally shocked by the abysmally low standards of
> her
> research, the illogic of her arguments, and the
> mishandling (even suppression) of material.
> So my conference paper was pretty sharp. I also
> realised that (perhals because of the FLS's
> embarrassment at ever having had MM as president),
> no
> British folklorist had done any work on witchcraft
> since the 1950s, whereas the social historians were
> getting deep into the subject. So when I became
> Presidemt myself, I devoted one of my Presidential
> Lectures to a survey of present state of knowledge
> on
> the topic (folk traditional beliefs about witches I
> mean, not the Gardnerian system and its offshoots).
> I
> am still interested, but others are more expert ---
> e..g. James Sharpe for England, Christina Larner for
> Scotland.
>
> Jacqueline
>
>
>
>
>
> --- Caroline Tully <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > >>If you're interested in the ways that
> Neo-paganism
> > has drawn on folklore
> > materials, have you read Hutton's "Triumph of the
> > Moon" yet? It's more
> > recent than his "Stations of the Sun" and has a
> > whole section on this topic,
> > plus much else that is of top-grade interest. For
> > folklore in itself, of
> > course, the reading list would be huge, even for
> > Britain alone.
> > Jacqueline<<
> >
> >
> > Hi Jaqueline, yes I have read "Triumph of the
> > Moon"and in fact I really love
> > it - I rather love Hutton - I'm a terrible groupie
> > like that. I do need to
> > read it again, although I have re-read parts of
> it.
> > I recall though, that it
> > was while reading a chapter, the last chapter I
> > think, in "Stations of the
> > Sun" however that I got interested in the
> > possibility of academics looking
> > at the use of folklore by Neo-Pagans, such as
> Gerald
> > Gardner, who I know was
> > a member of the Folklore Society.
> >
> > I've read your work as well, I'm sure... Didn't
> you
> > write on Margaret
> > Murray? I see in the current Pomegranate journal
> > that Catherine Noble has
> > written on Murray, but I was sure I'd read
> something
> > not long ago on Murray
> > by you. Hmmm. .:shrug:.
> >
> >
> > ~Caroline.
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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