Talk:Margaret Murray

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[edit] Problems

EXTREMELY POV article (unexplained dismissal of Cohn and Hutton, attribution of Murray's lack of popularity to an academic "Church Ethos"). I would appreciate if someone who is better-versed in Murray's life and academic contributions than I could possibly do a thorough rewrite. -Saligos

Have completly rewritten article and added much more detail. I have never read any criticism's of Cohn's work its been a standard text for thirty years. - Machenphile

The article as it now stands still has problems with editorializing and original research (along with some incidental formatting issues). I hope to do a rewrite myself fairly soon. Jkelly 18:36, 13 October 2005 (UTC) form


This is a phenomenally biased article. The statement "No historian or scholar has ever challenged Cohn's conclusions." is false on its face, as Jani-Farrell Roberts has challenged Cohn's conclusions, both in print and on the internet, and HER challenging of Cohn has never been challenged or refuted.

[edit] Jani-Farrell Roberts - A Comment

She alleges that Cohn misquotes Murray, but I've painstakingly checked Cohn's extracts against the Murray book and they are completely as given. Her second allegation is that even if these sections were omitted, Murray dealt with them, but there is, for example, no reference in Murray's book to witches flying out to sea to sink a ship by pulling it down. How did she deal with things she didn't even mention?

--TonyinJersey 12:16, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Is it a copyedit?

I included a external link http://www.hermetics.org/pdf/witchcult.pdf in which the book The Witchcult in Western Europe can be found in PDF format. This has been deleted by user:205.188.116.199 as copy edit. First is a link, and secondly the book was published more than 50 years ago. Is it still a copyedit to link an external web page?

--Francisco Valverde 21:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Balance

This article could stand to use quite a bit more balance, particularly in favor of Murray's views and her side of things. SouthernComfort 03:14, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Look through the history. It has swung both ways. Jkelly 05:48, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
Well, certainly it would be best if the article were as close to NPOV as possible - that is to say, in the middle, rather than gravitating to either side. This is what we should strive for with any article. SouthernComfort 19:13, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] PDF link

I put back the external link that was deleted a few weeks ago. No one has answered my question. It is an external link and the book was published more than 50 years ago so I find it lawfull to put back this link. Apart of that I agree that the other links should be kept. --Francisco Valverde 16:58, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

  • ¡¡¡But it is just a link....!!!! ¡¡I am not copy editing anything!!--Francisco Valverde 18:15, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
  • OK... I have consulted the web page [1] and there are no copyright infringements. So I see no reason for this being deleted. Apart from that, the link was deleted without consulting or consensus. User 152.163.100.133 (not registered) states that: Since this book was later republished, there may be copyright issues. No, there aren't any. --Francisco Valverde 18:26, 2 April 2006 (UTC)
No, there is literally no problem in adding a link to the full text and it should definitely remain. Furthermore the anon(s) keep adding links to personal websites from Fortunecity and Angelfire, violating WP:V. This is inappropriate behavior on their part. SouthernComfort 08:02, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Question:

I have read that Margaret Murray made some excavations in the island of Minorca, in relation with the talayotic culture. I would like to know if anyone has any information about this? I would like to, in future, contribute to this article and any help from you would be helpful... --Francisco Valverde 15:00, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I only know what she mentions in her autobiography -- the people she was with, the locations (Trapucó and Sa Torreta), and a little about the taula megaliths. What sort of information were you looking for? If you want detailed archaeological info, she published a three-volume account of the excavations, Cambridge Excavations in Minorca, which might be available either as second-hand books or reprints. Gesso 13:10, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the bibliographic reference, that´s great! The information I was looking for, is for the moment, general. If anyone else could tell me more, it would be nice. --Francisco Valverde 16:39, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Misplaced expression in “Criticism of Murray’s theories”

The term “Inquisitors” is misplaced. The Inquisition was primarily interested in heresy not witchcraft. During the Witch-hunts most people was killed in Protestant countries. This was at least partly because the risk of being innocently convicted was smaller if you where charged by the Inquisition than if you where charged by a secular court. The Inquisition granted every charged person a defendant. Torture was rare and never literary bloody. Furthermore, you could not be sentenced on confession alone but it could mean a milder punishment. (Some people confess things they could not have done just because they want attention. Such people are known as “mad confessors”.) Consequently, half of the people charged by the Inquisition where found not guilty. Death was not the only punishment ether. Imprisonment was common as well as variations on pillory and Catholic improvement. Unfortunately, the Inquisition has an awful reputation in Protestant countries mainly due to contemporary anti-Catholic propaganda.

2007-03-28 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.

[edit] This article has become a typical worthless wikipedia free-for-all

First there was a version attacking Cohn and Hutton - now there is a version that just repeats Cohn and Hutton uncritically. The "discussion" page is even worse! The typical wikipedia editor seems to think that POV means "anything I disagree with" and non-POV means "anything I agree with". Forget about this childishness and just read Carlo Ginzburg. Durruti36 21:22, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


[edit] WikiProject France?

Does anyone know why this article was tagged for WikiProject France? I've removed the banner for now. Gesso 10:31, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Medieval church's hegemony

I have removed the following unattributed (weasel-worded) assertion, pending better explanation:

Murray proposed an effective underground resistance movement to the medieval Church, but some note this seems unlikely, as its political hegemony was so profound. The Church worldview was so established as to leave virtually no room for another set of ideas, so its principles were completely taken for granted. Evidence from the medieval period shows the smallest heretical sects were found and crushed. That Murray's proposed secret Europe-wide cult could survive unnoticed until the mid-fifteenth century seems improbable.

Now this just doesn't make sense, because there were indeed rival religious ideas. The Waldenses were a famous example, and they managed to survive to the present day. They were even accused of being witches by the Catholic church. There were a whole range of other dissenting groups (see English Dissenters), and some of these had ideals that sound remarkably similar to those suggested of the witch cult by Jules Michelet. The Ranters, for instance, were associated with nudity, rejected scripture, and held the pantheistic belief that God was in every creature.

There were dissenting ideas popping up all the time! How about the "Old Religion", for instance, which was a problem in England throughout the early modern era. This was Catholicism, of course, not what is commonly meant by the "Old Religion" nowadays, but it was not "crushed". And beliefs in fairies and familiars persisted through the early modern age as well, as documented by Emma Wilby. These were ideas that the English church felt were threatening. The list goes on.  Fuzzypeg  talk  04:36, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] One-sided argument

Have any of the people editing this page actually read Murray? There's a hell of a lot here that sounds like it's on the scholarly moral high ground, but it's completely misrepresenting her, ignoring the findings of modern witchcraft historians and basically erecting straw doll arguments just to knock them over. One example is the following paragraph:

Perhaps most doubtfully, Murray decided that the evidence given in witchhunt trials, evidence often given under torture or threat of torture, was accurate, because its consistency seemed to her to be evidence of the coherent belief system she proposed. In all probability, however, Inquisitors asked leading questions until they got the answers they wanted, so that they could execute or condemn the accused. The coherent system she found was partially that of the Satanic witchcraft defined in books like Malleus Maleficarum, which insisted that witches conducted human sacrifice and sexual orgies, accusations with which Murray partially agreed. In English trials she particularly favoured using accounts from those trials conducted by Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, where the evidence given was extracted by dubious means and was very distorted.

Now: (1) Murray does allow for the fact that torture could have influenced some testimonies, but (2) she correctly points out that torture was not used throughout England and Scotland for much of the period she covers and there were many entirely voluntary confessions. (3) She correctly notes that there are elements repeated over wide areas which are unlikely to have been suggested by interrogators; Ginzburg confirms this. Yes she was too credulous, and accepted too many details from these trials as genuine, but other, well respected, historians have taken similar lines of questioning to her and found them to bear fruit. The way that paragraph is worded, it sounds like she didn't even consider the possibility that coersion would alter testimony; which she did. Totally misleading.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to reword this paragraph so it makes some sense. It seems a bit unfair, having to take a bogus criticism and mould it into something that could hold water. My hint to whoever wrote it: expand your reading a little beyond Hutton and Cohn. You might be very surprised.  Fuzzypeg  talk  09:42, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Garrr! Now Ginzburg's being heinously misrepresented. I give up. I'm going to bed, I'll continue editing later.  Fuzzypeg  talk  10:16, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Righto. I've made some fairly major changes to the article. It's still not perfect, but at least now it isn't grossly misrepresenting the evidence and selectively citing only those sources that agree with its claims (the very accusations that have been levelled against Murray). Hopefully we can move beyond uncritically repeated gossip and get to the stage where we're actually presenting an informed and balanced view based on the evidence. Sorry if I've created a bit of work — there are {{fact}} and {{who}} tags scattered about, and I'm sure there will be some people who feel the article is now too much in Murray's favour. I've added all this info because it was necessary in establishing the errors of what was there before; there may be a desire to cut some of this material down, but I'd recommend first building some of the opposing arguments up. There's a really interesting conflict of views here between Hutton and Cohn on the one side, and, well, most academic witchcraft historians on the other. Hutton currently has a huge popular following, and it would be useful to our readers to flesh this debate out. Cheers,  Fuzzypeg  talk  23:29, 10 February 2008 (UTC)