The other major theorist to shape Gardnerian practice was Margaret Murray. Although Hutton reviews Murray’s influences, she stands above them all as the scholar who most thoroughly and influentially articulated the theory now associated with her: not only that substantial aspects of European paganism survived the introduction of Christianity and centuries of inadequate catechism, but that the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries were a major effort to suppress this surviving pagan religion. Her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe lays out the model, and Murray includes distinctly Frazerian elements about ritual kings who were sacrificed or self-sacrificed (though now with the added element that these corn kings were allegedly syncretized with the Horned God, an aspect that reflects Pan, as a motif popular with literary figures associated with Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn).

Her terser but equally influential version of the theory was in the entry for “Witchcraft” that she wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which published it from 1929 to 1968.¹ For generations, if you heard about Salem and wanted to get more information about witches, you would go to the library and find the Encyclopedia Britannica, (or if you were fancy, the installment plan-financed set on your own bookshelf), reach for the “W” volume, and a few paragraphs in go, “Wow, real witches, amazing!” Murray’s theory has thus been extremely influential. Whenever a Wiccan refers to their religion as “the Old Religion” or a feminist refers to “the Burning Times”, they are alluding to Murray’s theory.

Murray had a big influence on Gardner (and wrote the foreword to his short book Witchcraft Today). Gardner claimed he did not invent Wicca but had been inducted into a coven with centuries of historical continuity, and while this claim was implausible it reflects Murray’s emphasis on an underground witch cult. Among the places Gardner describes this liturgy was his novel, High Magic’s Aid, which he would circulate to potential initiates to gauge their reaction to the rituals described therein.² “The witch religion portrayed [there],” Hutton writes, “is that of Margaret Murray’s God of the Witches, in virtually every detail, including its dedication to a single male deity of fertility, whose name is given here (again taken from Murray) as Janicot”. The practitioner implementing the ideas of the theorist is classic performativity: there was no pagan witch religion in early modern Europe, but Murray’s claim that there had been was among the most important raw material from which Gardner created an actual pagan witch religion in mid-20th century Britain.

Through all this, there is the question of how so many 20th century scholars got it so wrong — especially given that in the 19th century, both scholars and popular culture understood that witch hunts were moral panics and mass hysteria.³ Black-Scholes-Merton may not have been a perfect description of options prices, but it got much closer to the truth than the idea of pagan survivalism, which is almost completely wrong. Hutton repeatedly notes the importance of relevant expertise, and how often the proponents of pagan survivalism lacked it. Many folklorists influenced by Frazer were simply amateurs, but Murray had legitimate scholarly expertise: she was a respected Egyptologist. This background left her equipped to see a pagan society saturated with magic, but led to a false positive when applying that gaze to Christian medieval and early modern Europe. Nonetheless, in the mid-20th century, Murray’s ideas became accepted in British academia and were integrated into K-12 history textbooks.

However, Hutton notes that such acceptance was mostly from people who did not actively research the witch trials. In contrast, witch trials were an active research area in the United States, and so American scholars remained skeptical even as the Murray thesis became taken for granted in the UK. And while it might be tempting to congratulate America for our pragmatic empiricism, Hutton notes that there was also a subtext of Americans favoring the “persecution of innocents” model for witches because it had become a popular metaphor for the Second Red Scare, as in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. American scholars of the 1950s and 1960s may have gotten the history of witch accusations in the 16th and 17th centuries right because they saw it as metaphor for the history of the 1930s through 1950s … which the Venona cables show they got wrong.

Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.

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1. Fortunately cranks writing the encyclopedia is an issue safely in the past.
2. “Check out my fantasy novel (that describes the counter-cultural religion with transgressive rites that I actually practice and wish to induct you into)” is a more elaborate version of using plausibly deniable indirect speech to broach a taboo proposition.
3. Volume 2 of Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds contains a lengthy section on the early modern witch hunts that captures the 21st century scholarly consensus that witch hunts were the result of a moral panic and opportunistic expression of grudges as abetted by poor legal process. Mackay’s history differs from the current scholarly consensus only in failing to understand that witch trials were most aggressive in weak states, especially those whose establishment of religion was sufficiently tenuous as to be threatened by popular sentiment that the prince exercised insufficient brutality in defending the populace against hostis humanis generis.