Question of the Day: Wiccan History

I was reading through your website, especially the 'Myth and History' section, and was wondering if there were any particular books from which you were getting your information. The things I've read directly contradict the things you are saying and I'd like to do as much research as possible to come to the most correct conclusion I can.

I'm going to have to make a guess about the things you are reading, so pardon me if I am incorrect here, although this is the usual scenario in which I see this question.

When looking for expert information, you should go to people who are focused on that specific topic. So when you want to learn about Wicca, going to a Wiccan makes perfect sense...way more sense than one of those books on Wicca written by a conservative Christian, for example. In that same vein, when you're looking for history, you should look toward historians. Just because you've been practicing a religion does not mean you know it's history. This is the case whether you're talking Wicca, Christianity, or something else.

When Wiccan authors talk about history, they generally have little or no familiarity with the materials they claim to be drawing from. A lot of the "witchcraft is ancient religion" comes directly from the works of Margaret Murray. Murray herself was barely familiar with witch-trial records (which is what she claimed to be working from), and the people who quote her generally have no experience at all with such evidence: they just presume it's right because someone published it.

When someone makes a claim about Wicca being ancient, ask yourself how they could possibly even know the facts they are providing. Cavemen left us no writing, yet a variety of Wiccan writers (copying Murray) have stated that witchcraft is the world's oldest religion, dating back 25,000 years. How can we possibly know what people that long ago believed? We can, at best, make some general guesses. If Wicca has been practiced in secret for centuries, how do we know that? No historian has ever pointed out a historical religion that looks anything like Wicca. The usual argument I get is "Well, that's because it was secret." OK, but if it was so secret no historian knows about it, how does some Wiccan author have so much evidence about it? And do they actually offer any evidence, or do they just say "this is how it is"?

If you're interested in Wiccan history, Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon is pretty much required reading. Not only is he a professor of history, he's also an initiated Wiccan. He spends considerable time giving examples of the leaps of logic made by Murray and others and provides numerous opposing pieces of evidence or arguments.

The absurdity of the Murray thesis is discussed in many, many books by historians. Here are some suggestions:

• Baroja, Julio Caro. The World of the Witches, trans. O.N.V. Glendinning. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1961; reprint, University of Chicago Press, 1971.(Baroja wrote that claims of pagan cults and Horned Gods are totally in opposition to any and all serious, factual investigation, and he accused the supporters of such claims of using arbitrary archaeological fabrications. He acknowledged, however, that the theory was still highly accredited in the English-speaking world.)
• Burr, G. L. "Review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology," The American Historical Review, Vol. 27, No. 4. July, 1922, pp. 780-783. (Burr credits Murray's popularity to "the lack in English of any thorough history of witchcraft." He also states: "To her every confession is true, all the accused guilty, and whether convicted or acquitted. She does not trouble her judgment by hearing even what they say for themselves. Mary Osgood, for example, whose confession she repeatedly quotes, not only retracted it all and was eventually discharged, but handed in (she and her Andover neighbors) a vivid description of the pressure and persuasion by which the confession was extorted.")
• ----------------. "Review of The God of the Witches," The American Historical Review, Vol. 40, No. 3. April, 1935, pp. 491-492.
• Cohn, Norman. Europe's Inner Demons. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia Vol. 19. Chicago, London, Toronto, Geneva, Sydney, Tokyo, Manila Seoul, Johannesburg: Helen Hemingway Benton, 1974. (The 1974 edition contains updated info on Witchcraft as well as flat out admitting that it's previous article ont he subject (written by Murray) has been discredited and was, in their words, "highly imaginative.")
• Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• ----------------. "Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft," Folklore, Vol. 111, No.1. April, 2000, pp. 103-117.
• Loeb, E. M. "Review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology," American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 24, No. 4. October - December, 1922, pp. 476-478. (Loeb described Murray's approach as "novel," fueled by "a naïve desire for originality combined with an over-facile intuition" resulting in "the most fantastic lack of discrimination in her evaluation of the validity of the court testimony given at the witch trials" and finally "a bewildering mass of false inferences". )
• Larner, Christina. Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief. Basil Blackwell, 1984. ("We have now reached a stage when it is possible to ignore altogether the once-influential view of Murray.")
• Macfarlane, Alan. "Review of The God of the Witches," Man, Vol. 6, No. 3. September, 1971, p. 506.
• Monter, William. "European Witchcraft: A Moment of Synthesis?" The Historical Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1. March, 1988, pp. 183-185. (Monter lists laying the ghost of Murray to rest as one of the accomplishments of witchcraft historians.)
• Parrinder, Geoffrey. Witchcraft: European and African. 1958; reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1963.
• Simpson, Jacqueline. "Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?" Folklore, Vol. 105, Issue 1/2. 1994, pp. 89-96.
• ----------------. "Scholarship and Margaret Murray: A Response to Donald Frew," Ethnologies, Vol. 22, No. 2. 2000, pp. 1-5 (originally pp. 281-288).
• Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. (This book gives the most thorough breakdown of the problems of the Murray thesis that I am familiar with.)
• Wood, Juliette. "Margaret Murray and the Rise of Wicca," The Pomegranate, Vol. 15. Winter, 2001, pp. 45-52.

The scholarship on historical witchcraft, paganism and Wicca can perhaps be best summed up in the following quotes from Hutton and Simpson, both written in response to a non-academic Wiccan named Donald Frew who published an article in 1998 stating the Murray thesis still couldn't be ruled out:

at the opening of the 1970s, the thesis was rapidly revealed as possessing no sustainable basis...More recent research has apparently buried it beyond retrieval, and it must be emphasized how extensive that research has been. Between 1980 and 1995 fifteen international academic conferences were held to discuss the witch trials and their context, and the papers presented there, and generally published in the proceedings, represented only a part of the work carried out in the subject during the past two decades. That united hundreds of scholars, covering between them every European state....None have [sic] found any basis for characterising early modern witchcraft as paganism.

Donald Frew has apparently read not a single one of these works. As a result, his declaration that the hypothesis that witchcraft was a survival of paganism "can't be ruled out" is made without an attempt to engage even with the relevant body of secondary sources, let alone primary records.(Ronald Hutton, "Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft," Folklore, Vol. 111, No.1. April, 2000, p. 110)


Particularly over the past twenty-five years, there have been very numerous books, articles, and conferences in Britain, Europe, and America. Presenting the research of a multitde of scholars, none of whom uncovered any evidence to support her theory, while finding a great deal incompatible with it….Anyone who hopes to reclaim Murray's reputation as a historian, let alone argue that 'the hypothesis that Witchcraft was a survival of paganism…can't yet be ruled out', can only begin to do so by confronting squarely the issues which this huge body of scholarly work has raised. (Jaqueline Simpson, "Scholarship and Margaret Murray: A Response to Donald Frew" Ethnologies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2000), pp. 4-5.)