Read Online Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler - Free Book Online

Few do so today, which in itself is a lesson in the flexibility of the revival. Many scholars refuted the literal accuracy of the myth and then wrongly dismissed the modern Craft itself as a fraud. One cannot really understand the revival of Witchcraft today without first becoming familiar with some of the sources that formed the Wiccan Myth and gave birth to the revival. These sources include the matriarchal theorists, such as J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels; the British folklorists; Margaret Murray’s theory of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages; and the books of the revival, in particular Gerald Gardner’s writings in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Murrayite Controversy
    While modern Wicca has very little to do with the witchcraft of the Middle Ages or the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the revival was strongly influenced by Margaret Murray’s writings.
    Although there have been many different approaches to the study of medieval European witchcraft, until about eighty years ago there were two main opposing theories, humorously called by the historian Elliot Rose the “Bluff” school and the “Anti-Sadducee” school. 7 The former, reflecting the rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluded that witchcraft was a delusion invented by the Inquisition. Rationalist scholars said that “supernatural elements” in reports of the trials—accounts of flying through the air and transformations into animals—made them totally suspect. In addition, the use of torture to obtain these accounts rendered them useless as evidence. Opposing scholars, such as Montague Summers, believed in the reality of Satan and accepted all trial reports as accurate and literal.
    In 1921 Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe . Murray was foremost an Egyptologist and secondarily a folklorist and anthropologist. After reexamining the trial documents of the Inquisition, she argued that witchcraft could be traced to “pre-Christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe” centered on a deity which was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal. One of its forms was the two-faced horned god known to the Romans as Janus or Dianus. Murray wrote that the feminine form of the name—Diana—was found throughout Western Europe as the leader of the witches. Because of this, Murray called the religion the Dianic Cult, although she wrote that the god rarely appeared in female form and a male deity had apparently superseded a female one. This “organized religion” was, according to Murray, primarily a fertility cult, in the tradition described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough . It was a cult of the god who dies and is reborn, and whose birth and death are reflected in the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of crops. According to Murray, this cult had originated with an aboriginal British race of small people who were the reality behind the fairy faith. The cult had participants in all classes from the peasantry to the nobility. The two main festivals of the cult, on May Eve and November Eve, were described as “pre-agricultural,” having more to do with the fertility of animals than of crops.
    Murray wrote that witches practiced a joyous religion. They met at the eight great festivals (sabbats) and at more general meetings (esbats) in covens of thirteen. They feasted and danced and had shamanistic visions. She argued, in fact, that the trial reports of accused witches describing themselves as flying through the air and changing their shape into animals were “ritual and not actual,” a “clear account of the witch herself and her companions believing in the change of form caused by the magical object in exactly the same way that the shamans believe in their own transformation by similar means.” Murray also argued that the coven, the sabbat, and all other aspects of the accusations made against witches