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had a reality behind them. The Inquisition had simply turned the god of the witches into their devil and substituted evil for good. 8
    Murray’s later books, The God of the Witches (1933) and The Divine King in England (1954), were even more controversial, particularly the latter. In that book she argued that the idea of the sacred king was a reality in Britain and that many English kings had been ritually murdered; she contended that most of Britain’s royalty had been members of the Dianic Cult. Most scholars dismissed this book as the work of a crackpot who had the audacity to publish at the age of ninety. (Murray was a remarkable woman who lived to be a hundred. She published her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, in 1963, the same year she died. 9 )
    Murray’s theories were well regarded for some time. In the last forty-five years, however, they have been discredited. The arguments against her were many: that she took as true stories that may have been fabricated under torture; that, while she gave good evidence for Pagan survivals in Britain, she did not give evidence that an organized Pagan religion survived, or that this religion was universal, or that covens or sabbats existed before they appeared in trial reports.
    The primary value of Murray’s work was her understanding of the persistence of Pagan folk customs in Britain and her realization that Witchcraft could not be examined in isolation from the comparative history of religions or from the study of anthropology and folklore. But most scholars today dismiss most of her work.
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    Studies of European witchcraft, particularly of what has come to be called the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are so vast that to summarize scholarship after Murray would be impossible in a book of this nature. Also, the scholarly landscape has changed completely since Drawing Down the Moon was first published.

Norman Cohn: Witchcraft as Delusion
    The late historian Norman Cohn was the author of Europe’s Inner Demons (1975). Cohn argued that the stereotype of the witch comes from a specific fantasy that originated in antiquity. This fantasy—that there exists in the midst of the larger society a small clandestine society engaged in antihuman practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality, and orgiastic sex—was an age-old tradition. It was first used by the Romans to characterize Christians, and later by the Christians to characterize Jews as well as heretical Christian sects such as the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Manichaeans, the Montanists, and groups such as the Knights Templar.
    Cohn doubted that a sect of witches ever existed; therefore his book is the history of a “fantasy.” He argued that folklorists Jacob Grimm and Girolamo Tartarotti—long considered the originators of the view that witchcraft is a pre-Christian religion—merely drew attention to the persistence of pre-Christian folk beliefs that later contributed to the stereotype of the witch. Karl Jarcke in 1828 first stated that witchcraft was the former Pagan religion of Germany, surviving among the common people. Ten years later Franz Joseph Mone described German Witchcraft as an underground esoteric cult. Cohn believed neither theory was convincing; neither Jarcke nor Mone could show that the worship of ancient gods was “practised by organized, clandestine groups in the Middle Ages.” Cohn’s next victim was the historian Jules Michelet, whose famous book on witchcraft, La Sorcière, appeared in 1862. He characterized Michelet as an “aging romantic radical with neither time nor desire for detailed research.” He argued against Michelet’s view that witchcraft was a protest by medieval serfs against an oppressive social order and that those serfs came together in secret to perform ancient Pagan dances and satires of their oppressors. Such a view, wrote Cohn, was prompted by “a passionate