Dear Friends
well yes - point taken -
although where you say 'She completely failed to realise that
similarities in confessions were due to interrogators
asking everyone similar questions.'
I thought that even given the truth of this - there is a residual
core of belief that cannot be explained away as planted by the
interrogators?
I'm no expert on this - just asking and passing on the impression i get from
listening to the discussions of contemporary sabbatic and cunning
practioners?
It's still this question of religious organisation (or lack of it)
that seems the really doubtful part of the MM thesis -
ie the collective rites, and as you say 'circles and pentacles
and sigils and such'. This may be, as you say, part of a 'high magick
tradition' -
but there again i'm told that witches and cunning men were quite literate
and often owned this kind of book too - so how do you separate the different
threads??
As to Academics and practitioner perspectives - 'advanced' adepts often
garner more information from a good academic book that those of their peers
(mainly because there can be distortion of the material so as not to offend
some putative public taste). Trouble is, many of the pre 1980s academic
books also have fatal flaws - such as the way some academics just leave out
a lot of magical material - assuming it to be of no real interest to anyone.
(Merifield talks of how archaologists tend to ignore later ritual deposits
that are not part of the dig's main time frame - there are loads of other
horror stories we can all tell from the literature) EG: I read a fairly
recent book on kali that didn't even bother to put in details of the
timing - - something no practitioner would do. Why would you want to know -
unless you want to do the rite yourself - but here again perhaps the
practical stuff has its own philosophy?? I recon we need each other -
someone whose actually done or visualised the ritual may actual see
something that the purely academic researcher may not.
So IMO, respect for all styles of research.
'love and do what you will'
mogg
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 =
> http://mogg-morgan.blogspot.com
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> <http://www.mandrake.uk.net/books.htm>
>
>
>
> -----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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