Margaret Murray

Early life

Youth: 1863–1893

Margaret Murray was born on 13 July 1863 in Calcutta, then a major military city and the capital of British India. She lived in the city with her parents James and Margaret Murray, an older sister named Mary, and her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother. James Murray, born in India of Anglo-Irish descent, was a businessman and manager of the Serampore paper mills who was thrice elected President of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. Margaret (née Carr) had moved to India from Britain in 1857 to work as a missionary, preaching Christianity and educating Indian women. She continued with this work after marrying James and giving birth to her two daughters.

Although most of their lives were spent in the European area of Calcutta, which was walled off from the Indian sectors of the city, Murray encountered members of Indian society through her family's employment of ten Indian servants and through childhood holidays to Mussoorie. The historian Amara Thornton has suggested that Murray's Indian childhood exerted an influence over her throughout her life, expressing the view that Murray could be seen as having a hybrid transnational identity that was both British and Indian. During her childhood, Murray received no formal education, and in later life expressed pride that she had never had to sit an exam before entering university.

In 1870, Margaret and her sister Mary were sent to Britain, moving in with their uncle John, a vicar, and his wife Harriet at their home in Lambourn, Berkshire. Although John provided them with a strongly Christian education and a belief in the inferiority of women, both of which she would reject, he awakened Murray's interest in archaeology through taking her to see local monuments. In 1873, the girls' mother arrived in Europe and took them with her to Bonn in Germany, where they both became fluent in German. In 1875 they returned to Calcutta, staying there until 1877. They then moved with their parents back to England, where they settled in Sydenham, London. There, they spent much time visiting The Crystal Palace, while their father worked at his firm's London office.

In 1880, they returned to Calcutta, where Margaret remained for the next seven years. She became a nurse at the Calcutta General Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of the Anglican Sisterhood of Clower, and there was involved with the hospital's attempts to deal with a cholera outbreak.

In 1887, she returned to England, moving to Rugby, Warwickshire, where her uncle John, now widowed, had moved. She took up employment as a social worker dealing with local underprivileged people. When her father retired to England, she moved into his house in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire, living with him until his death in 1891. In 1893 she travelled to Madras, Tamil Nadu, where her sister had moved to with her new husband.

Early years at University College London: 1894–1905

Encouraged by her mother and sister, Murray decided to enrol at the newly opened department of Egyptology at University College London (UCL). At the time of Murray's enrolment, Egyptology was not a formally trained degree, with the exception of the University of Oxford, which offered Middle Egyptian amongst a trio of "Oriental languages". Having been founded by an endowment from Amelia Edwards, one of the co-founders of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF), the department was run by the pioneering early archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, and based in the Edwards Library of UCL's South Cloisters. Murray began her studies at UCL at age 30 in January 1894, as part of a class composed largely of other women and older men. She took courses in the Ancient Egyptian and Coptic languages which were taught by Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Walter Ewing Crum respectively.

Murray soon got to know Petrie, becoming his copyist and illustrator and producing the drawings for the published report on his excavations at Qift, Koptos. In turn, he aided and encouraged her to write her first research paper, "The Descent of Property in the Early Periods of Egyptian History", which was published in the Proceedings of the Society for Biblical Archaeology in 1895. Becoming Petrie's de facto though unofficial assistant, Murray began to give some of the linguistic lessons in Griffith's absence. In 1898 she was appointed to the position of junior lecturer, responsible for teaching the linguistic courses at the Egyptology department; this made her the first female lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom. In this capacity, she spent two days a week at UCL, devoting the other days to caring for her ailing mother. As time went on, she came to teach courses on Ancient Egyptian history, religion, and language.

Among Murray's students – to whom she referred as "the Gang" – were several who went on to produce noted contributions to Egyptology, including Reginald Engelbach, Georgina Aitken, Guy Brunton, and Myrtle Broome. She supplemented her UCL salary by teaching evening classes in Egyptology at the British Museum.

At this point, Murray had no experience in field archaeology, and so during the 1902–1903 field season, she travelled to Egypt to join Petrie's excavations at Abydos. Petrie and his wife, Hilda Petrie, had been excavating at the site since 1899, having taken over the archaeological investigation from French Coptic scholar Émile Amélineau. Murray at first joined as site nurse, but was subsequently taught how to excavate by Petrie and given a senior position.

Feminism, the First World War, and folklore: 1905–1920

On returning to London, Murray took an active role in the feminist movement, volunteering and financially donating to the cause and taking part in feminist demonstrations, protests, and marches. Joining the Women's Social and Political Union, she was present at large marches like the Mud March of 1907 and the Women's Coronation Procession of June 1911. She concealed the militancy of her actions in order to retain the image of respectability within academia. Murray also pushed the professional boundaries for women throughout her own career, and mentored other women in archaeology and throughout academia. As women could not use the men's common room, she successfully campaigned for UCL to open a common room for women, and later ensured that a larger, better-equipped room was converted for the purpose; it was later renamed the Margaret Murray Room. At UCL, she became a friend of fellow female lecturer Winifred Smith, and together they campaigned to improve the status and recognition of women in the university, with Murray becoming particularly annoyed at female staff who were afraid of upsetting or offending the male university establishment with their demands. Feeling that students should get nutritious yet affordable lunches, for many years she sat on the UCL Refectory Committee. She took on an unofficial administrative role within the Egyptology Department, and was largely responsible for introduction of a formal certificate in Egyptian archaeology in 1910.

Various museums around the United Kingdom invited Murray to advise them on their Egyptological collections, resulting in her cataloguing the Egyptian artefacts owned by the Dublin National Museum, the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh, and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, being elected a Fellow of the latter in thanks.

Petrie had established connections with the Egyptological wing of Manchester Museum in Manchester, and it was there that many of his finds had been housed. Murray thus often travelled to the museum to catalogue these artefacts, and during the 1906–07 school year regularly lectured there.

In 1907, Petrie excavated the Tomb of the Two Brothers, a Middle Kingdom burial of two Egyptian priests, Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht, and it was decided that Murray would carry out the public unwrapping of the latter's mummified body. Taking place at the museum in May 1908, it represented the first time that a woman had led a public mummy unwrapping and was attended by over 500 onlookers, attracting press attention. Murray was particularly keen to emphasise the importance that the unwrapping would have for the scholarly understanding of the Middle Kingdom and its burial practices, and lashed out against members of the public who saw it as immoral; she declared that "every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant". She subsequently published a book about her analysis of the two bodies, The Tomb of the Two Brothers, which remained a key publication on Middle Kingdom mummification practices into the 21st century.

Later life

Witch-cult, Malta, and Menorca: 1921–1935

Murray's interest in folklore led her to develop an interest in the witch trials of Early Modern Europe. In 1917, she published a paper in Folklore, the journal of the Folklore Society, in which she first articulated her version of the witch-cult theory, arguing that the witches persecuted in European history were actually followers of "a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any cult in the end". She followed this up with papers on the subject in the journals Man and the Scottish Historical Review. She articulated these views more fully in her 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, published by Oxford University Press after receiving a positive peer review by Henry Balfour, and which received both criticism and support on publication. Many reviews in academic journals were critical, with historians claiming that she had distorted and misinterpreted the contemporary records that she was using, but the book was nevertheless influential.

As a result of her work in this area, she was invited to provide the entry on "witchcraft" for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1929. She used the opportunity to propagate her own witch-cult theory, failing to mention the alternate theories proposed by other academics. Her entry would be included in the encyclopedia until 1969, becoming readily accessible to the public, and it was for this reason that her ideas on the subject had such a significant impact. It received a particularly enthusiastic reception by occultists such as Dion Fortune, Lewis Spence, Ralph Shirley, and J. W. Brodie Innes, perhaps because its claims regarding an ancient secret society chimed with similar claims common among various occult groups. Murray joined the Folklore Society in February 1927, and was elected to the society's council a month later, although she stood down in 1929. Murray reiterated her witch-cult theory in her 1933 book, The God of the Witches, which was aimed at a wider, non-academic audience. In this book, she cut out or toned down what she saw as the more unpleasant aspects of the witch-cult, such as animal and child sacrifice, and began describing the religion in more positive terms as "the Old Religion".

At UCL, Murray was promoted to lecturer in 1921 and to senior lecturer in 1922. From 1921 to 1927, she led archaeological excavations on Malta, assisted by Edith Guest and Gertrude Caton Thompson. She excavated the Bronze Age megalithic monuments of Santa Sofia, Santa Maria tal-Bakkari, Għar Dalam, and Borġ in-Nadur, all of which were threatened by the construction of a new aerodrome. In this she was funded by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund. Her resulting three-volume excavation report came to be seen as an important publication within the field of Maltese archaeology. During the excavations, she had taken an interest in the island's folklore, resulting in the 1932 publication of her book Maltese Folktales, much of which was a translation of earlier stories collected by Manuel Magri and her friend Liza Galea. In 1932 Murray returned to Malta to aid in the cataloguing of the Bronze Age pottery collection held in Malta Museum, resulting in another publication, Corpus of the Bronze Age Pottery of Malta.

Petra, Cambridge, and London: 1935–1953

During Murray's 1935 trip to Palestine, she visited Petra in neighbouring Jordan. Intrigued by the site, in March and April 1937 she returned in order to carry out a small excavation in several cave dwellings at the site, subsequently writing both an excavation report and a guidebook on Petra. Back in England, from 1934 to 1940, Murray aided the cataloguing of Egyptian antiquities at Girton College, Cambridge, and also gave lectures in Egyptology at the university until 1942. Her interest in folklore more broadly continued and she wrote the introduction to Lincolnshire Folklore by Ethel Rudkin, in which she discussed how superior women were as folklorists to men.

During the Second World War, Murray evaded the Blitz of London by moving to Cambridge, where she volunteered for a group (probably the Army Bureau of Current Affairs or The British Way and Purpose) who educated military personnel to prepare them for post-war life. Based in the city, she embarked on research into the town's Early Modern history, examining documents stored in local parish churches, Downing College, and Ely Cathedral; she never published her findings. In 1945, she briefly became involved in the "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" murder case.

After the war ended she returned to London, settling into a bedsit room in Endsleigh Street, which was close to University College London (UCL) and the Institute of Archaeology (then an independent institution, now part of UCL); she continued her involvement with the former and made use of the latter's library. On most days, she visited the British Museum in order to consult their library, and twice a week she taught adult education classes on Ancient Egyptian history and religion at the City Literary Institute; upon her retirement from this position she nominated her former pupil, Veronica Seton-Williams, to replace her.

Murray's interest in popularising Egyptology among the wider public continued; in 1949 she published Ancient Egyptian Religious Poetry, her second work for John Murray's "The Wisdom of the East" series. That year she also published The Splendour That Was Egypt, in which she collated many of her UCL lectures. The book adopted a diffusionist perspective that argued that Egypt influenced Greco-Roman society and thus modern Western society. This was seen as a compromise between Petrie's belief that other societies influenced the emergence of Egyptian civilisation and Grafton Elliot Smith's highly unorthodox and heavily criticised hyperdiffusionist view that Egypt was the source of all global civilisation. The book received a mixed reception from the archaeological community.

Final years: 1953–1963

In 1953, Murray was appointed to the presidency of the Folklore Society following the resignation of former president Allan Gomme. The Society had initially approached John Mavrogordato for the post, but he had declined, with Murray accepting the nomination several months later. Murray remained president for two terms, until 1955. In her 1954 presidential address, "England as a Field for Folklore Research", she lamented what she saw as the English people's disinterest in their own folklore in favour of that from other nations. For the autumn 1961 issue of Folklore, the society published a festschrift to Murray to commemorate her 98th birthday. The issue contained contributions from various scholars paying tribute to her – with papers dealing with archaeology, fairies, Near Eastern religious symbols, Greek folk songs – but notably not about witchcraft, potentially because no other folklorists were willing to defend her witch-cult theory.

In May 1957, Murray had championed the archaeologist T. C. Lethbridge's controversial claims that he had discovered three pre-Christian chalk hill figures on Wandlebury Hill in the Gog Magog Hills, Cambridgeshire. Privately she expressed concern about the reality of the figures. Lethbridge subsequently authored a book championing her witch-cult theory in which he sought the cult's origins in pre-Christian culture. In 1960, she donated her collection of papers – including correspondences with a wide range of individuals across the country – to the Folklore Society Archive, where it is now known as "the Murray Collection".

Crippled with arthritis, Murray had moved into a home in North Finchley, north London, where she was cared for by a retired couple who were trained nurses; from here she occasionally took taxis into central London to visit the UCL library.

Amid failing health, in 1962 Murray moved into the Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital, Welwyn, Hertfordshire, where she could receive 24-hour care; she lived here for the final 18 months of her life. To mark her hundredth birthday, on 13 July 1963 a group of her friends, former students, and doctors gathered for a party at nearby Ayot St. Lawrence. Two days later, her doctor drove her to UCL for a second birthday party, again attended by many of her friends, colleagues, and former students; it was the last time that she visited the university. In Man, the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, it was noted that Murray was "the only Fellow of the Institute to [reach their centenary] within living memory, if not in its whole history". That year she published two books; one was The Genesis of Religion, in which she argued that humanity's first deities had been goddesses rather than male gods. The second was her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, which received predominantly positive reviews. She died on 13 November 1963, and her body was cremated.

Murray's witch-cult hypotheses

The later folklorists Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood have suggested that Murray was best known for her witch-cult theory, with biographer Margaret S. Drower expressing the view that it was her work on this subject which "perhaps more than any other, made her known to the general public". It has been claimed that Murray's was the "first feminist study of the witch trials", as well as being the first to have actually "empowered the witches" by giving the (largely female) accused both free will and a voice distinct from that of their interrogators. The theory was faulty, in part because all of her academic training was in Egyptology, with no background knowledge in European history, but also because she exhibited a "tendency to generalize wildly on the basis of very slender evidence".

Oates and Wood, however, noted that Murray's interpretations of the evidence fit within wider perspectives on the past that existed at the time, stating that "Murray was far from isolated in her method of reading ancient ritual origins into later myths". In particular, her approach was influenced by the work of the anthropologist James Frazer, who had argued for the existence of a pervasive dying-and-resurrecting god myth, and she was also influenced by the interpretative approaches of E. O. James, Karl Pearson, Herbert Fleure, and Harold Peake.

Argument

In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Murray stated that she had restricted her research to Great Britain, although made some recourse to sources from France, Flanders, and New England. She drew a division between what she termed "Operative Witchcraft", which referred to the performance of spells with any purpose, and "Ritual Witchcraft", by which she meant "the ancient religion of Western Europe", a fertility-based faith that she also termed "the Dianic cult". She claimed that the cult had "very probably" once been devoted to the worship of both a male deity and a "Mother Goddess" but that "at the time when the cult is recorded the worship of the male deity appears to have superseded that of the female". In her argument, Murray claimed that the figure referred to as the Devil in the trial accounts was the witches' god, "manifest and incarnate", to whom the witches offered their prayers. She claimed that at the witches' meetings, the god would be personified, usually by a man or at times by a woman or an animal; when a human personified this entity, Murray claimed that they were usually dressed plainly, though they appeared in full costume for the witches' Sabbaths.

Members joined the cult either as children or adults through what Murray called "admission ceremonies"; Murray asserted that applicants had to agree to join of their own free will, and agree to devote themselves to the service of their deity. She also claimed that in some cases, these individuals had to sign a covenant or were baptised into the faith. At the same time, she claimed that the religion was largely passed down hereditary lines. Murray described the religion as being divided into covens containing thirteen members, led by a coven officer who was often termed the "Devil" in the trial accounts, but who was accountable to a "Grand Master". According to Murray, the records of the coven were kept in a secret book, with the coven also disciplining its members, to the extent of executing those deemed traitors.

Describing this witch-cult as "a joyous religion", she claimed that the two primary festivals that it celebrated were on May Eve and November Eve, although that other dates of religious observation were 1 February and 1 August, the winter and summer solstices, and Easter. She asserted that the "General Meeting of all members of the religion" were known as Sabbaths, while the more private ritual meetings were known as Esbats. The Esbats, Murray claimed, were nocturnal rites that began at midnight, and were "primarily for business, whereas the Sabbath was purely religious". At the former, magical rites were performed both for malevolent and benevolent ends. She asserted the Sabbath ceremonies involved the witches paying homage to the deity, renewing their "vows of fidelity and obedience" to him, and providing him with accounts of all the magical actions that they had conducted since the previous Sabbath. Once this business had been concluded, admissions to the cult or marriages were conducted, ceremonies and fertility rites took place, and then the Sabbath ended with feasting and dancing.

Academic reception

Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favourable reception from many readers, including some significant scholars, albeit none who were experts in the witch trials. Historians of Early Modern Britain like George Norman Clark and Christopher Hill incorporated her theories into their work, although they subsequently distanced themselves from the theory. For the 1961 reprint of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, the Medieval historian Steven Runciman provided a foreword in which he accepted that some of Murray's "minor details may be open to criticism", but in which he was otherwise supportive of her thesis. Her theories were recapitulated by Arno Runeberg in his 1947 book Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic as well as Pennethorne Hughes in his 1952 book Witches. As a result, the Canadian historian Elliot Rose, writing in 1962, claimed that the Murrayite interpretations of the witch trials "seem to hold, at the time of writing, an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels", being widely accepted among "educated people".

Rose suggested that the reason that Murray's theory gained such support was partly because of her "imposing credentials" as a member of staff at UCL, a position that lent her theory greater legitimacy in the eyes of many readers. He further suggested that the Murrayite view was attractive to many as it confirmed "the general picture of pre-Christian Europe a reader of Frazer or [Robert] Graves would be familiar with". Similarly, Hutton suggested that the cause of the Murrayite theory's popularity was because it "appealed to so many of the emotional impulses of the age", including "the notion of the English countryside as a timeless place full of ancient secrets", the literary popularity of Pan, the widespread belief that the majority of British had remained pagan long after the process of Christianisation, and the idea that folk customs represented pagan survivals. At the same time, Hutton suggested, it seemed more plausible to many than the previously dominant rationalist idea that the witch trials were the result of mass delusion.

Related to this, the folklorist Jacqueline Simpson suggested that part of the Murrayite theory's appeal was that it appeared to give a "sensible, demystifying, liberating approach to a longstanding but sterile argument" between the rationalists who denied that there had been any witches and those, like Montague Summers, who insisted that there had been a real Satanic conspiracy against Christendom in the Early Modern period replete with witches with supernatural powers. "How refreshing", noted the historian Hilda Ellis Davidson, "and exciting her first book was at that period. A new approach, and such a surprising one."

Personal life

On researching the history of UCL's Egyptology department, the historian Rosalind M. Janssen stated that Murray was "remembered with gratitude and immense affection by all her former students. A wise and witty teacher, two generations of Egyptologists have forever been in her debt." Alongside teaching them, Murray was known to socialise with her UCL students outside of class hours.

Archaeologist Ralph Merrifield, who knew Murray through the Folklore Society, described her as a "diminutive and kindly scholar, who radiated intelligence and strength of character into extreme old age". Davidson, who also knew Murray through the Society, noted that at their meetings "she would sit near the front, a bent and seemingly guileless old lady dozing peacefully, and then in the middle of a discussion would suddenly intervene with a relevant and penetrating comment which showed that she had missed not one word of the argument". The later folklorist Juliette Wood noted that many members of the Folklore Society "remember her fondly", adding that Murray had been "especially keen to encourage younger researchers, even those who disagreed with her ideas".

One of Murray's friends in the Society, E. O. James, described her as a "mine of information and a perpetual inspiration ever ready to impart her vast and varied stores of specialised knowledge without reserve, or, be it said, much if any regard for the generally accepted opinions and conclusions of the experts!" Davidson described her as being "not at all assertive [...] [she] never thrust her ideas on anyone. [In relation to her witch-cult theory,] she behaved in fact rather like someone who was a fully convinced member of some unusual religious sect, or perhaps, of the Freemasons, but never on any account got into arguments about it in public." The archaeologist Glyn Daniel observed that Murray remained mentally alert into her old age, commenting that "her vigour and forthrightness and ruthless energy never deserted her".

Murray never married, instead devoting her life to her work, and for this reason, Hutton drew comparisons between her and two other prominent female British scholars of the period, Jane Harrison and Jessie Weston. Murray's biographer Kathleen L. Sheppard stated that she was deeply committed to public outreach, particularly when it came to Egyptology, and that as such she "wanted to change the means by which the public obtained knowledge about Egypt's history: she wished to throw open the doors to the scientific laboratory and invite the public in". She considered travel to be one of her favourite activities, although due to restraints on her time and finances she was unable to do this regularly; her salary remained small and the revenue from her books was meagre.

Legacy

In academia

Hutton noted that Murray was one of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship", and the archaeologist Niall Finneran described her as "one of the greatest characters of post-war British archaeology". Upon her death, Daniel referred to her as "the Grand Old Woman of Egyptology", with Hutton noting that Egyptology represented "the core of her academic career". In 2014, Thornton referred to her as "one of Britain's most famous Egyptologists".

However, according to the archaeologist Ruth Whitehouse, Murray's contributions to archaeology and Egyptology were often overlooked as her work was overshadowed by that of Petrie, to the extent that she was often thought of primarily as one of Petrie's assistants rather than as a scholar in her own right. By her retirement she had come to be highly regarded within the discipline, although, according to Whitehouse, Murray's reputation declined following her death, something that Whitehouse attributed to the rejection of her witch-cult theory and the general erasure of women archaeologists from the discipline's male-dominated history.

In his obituary for Murray in Folklore, James noted that her death was "an event of unusual interest and importance in the annals of the Folk-Lore Society in particular as well as in the wider sphere in which her influence was felt in so many directions and

disciplines". However, later academic folklorists, such as Simpson and Wood, have cited Murray and her witch-cult theory as an embarrassment to their field, and to the Folklore Society specifically. Simpson suggested that Murray's position as President of the Society was a causal factor in the mistrustful attitude that many historians held toward folkloristics as an academic discipline, as they erroneously came to believe that all folklorists endorsed Murray's ideas. Similarly, Catherine Noble stated that "Murray caused considerable damage to the study of witchcraft".

In 1935, UCL introduced the Margaret Murray Prize, awarded to the student who is deemed to have produced the best dissertation in Egyptology; it continued to be presented annually into the 21st century. In 1969, UCL named one of their common rooms in her honour, but it was converted into an office in 1989.

In June 1983, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother visited the room and there was gifted a copy of Murray's My First Hundred Years. UCL also hold two busts of Murray, one kept in the Petrie Museum and the other in the library of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. This sculpture was commissioned by one of her students, Violet MacDermot, and produced by the artist Stephen Rickard. UCL also possess a watercolour painting of Murray by Winifred Brunton; formerly exhibited in the Petrie Gallery, it was later placed into the Art Collection stores.

In Wicca

Murray's witch-cult theories provided the blueprint for the contemporary Pagan religion of Wicca, with Murray being referred to as the "Grandmother of Wicca". The Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White stated that it was the theory which "formed the historical narrative around which Wicca built itself", for on its emergence in England during the 1940s and 1950s, Wicca claimed to be the survival of this witch-cult. Wicca's theological structure, revolving around a Horned God and Mother Goddess, was adopted from Murray's ideas about the ancient witch-cult, and Wiccan groups were named covens and their meetings termed esbats, both words that Murray had popularised. As with Murray's witch-cult, Wicca's practitioners entered via an initiation ceremony; Murray's claims that witches wrote down their spells in a book may have been an influence on Wicca's Book of Shadows. Wicca's early system of seasonal festivities were also based on Murray's framework.

Noting that there is no evidence of Wicca existing before the publication of Murray's books, Merrifield commented that for those in 20th century Britain who wished to form their own witches' covens, "Murray may have seemed the ideal fairy godmother, and her theory became the pumpkin coach that could transport them into the realm of fantasy for which they longed". The historian Philip Heselton suggested that the New Forest coven – the oldest alleged Wiccan group – was founded circa 1935 by esotericists aware of Murray's theory and who may have believed themselves to be reincarnated witch-cult members. It was Gerald Gardner, who claimed to be an initiate of the New Forest coven, who established the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca and popularised the religion; according to Simpson, Gardner was the only member of the Folklore Society to "wholeheartedly" accept Murray's witch-cult hypothesis. The duo knew each other, with Murray writing the foreword to Gardner's 1954 book Witchcraft Today, although in that foreword she did not explicitly specify whether she believed Gardner's claim that he had discovered a survival of her witch-cult. In 2005, Noble suggested that "Murray's name might be all but forgotten today if it were not for Gerald Gardner".

Murray's witch-cult theories were likely also a core influence on the non-Gardnerian Wiccan traditions that were established in Britain and Australia between 1930 and 1970 by the likes of Bob Clay-Egerton, Robert Cochrane, Charles Cardell, and Rosaleen Norton.

The prominent Wiccan Doreen Valiente eagerly searched for what she believed were other surviving remnants of the Murrayite witch-cult around Britain. Valiente remained committed to a belief in Murray's witch-cult after its academic rejection, and she described Murray as "a remarkable woman".

In literature

Simpson noted that the publication of the Murray thesis in the Encyclopædia Britannica made it accessible to "journalists, film-makers, popular novelists, and thriller writers", who adopted it "enthusiastically". It influenced the work of Aldous Huxley and Robert Graves. Murray's ideas shaped the depiction of paganism in the work of historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff. Murray's ideas about religion can also be discerned in the fictions of another British historical novelist, Henry Treece. It was also an influence on the American horror author H. P. Lovecraft, who cited The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in his writings about the fictional cult of Cthulhu. Another horror writer, Dennis Wheatley, incorporated Murray's ideas about witchcraft into his novel The Devil Rides Out and cited Murray's work in his non-fiction book on the occult, The Devil and all his Works.

The author Sylvia Townsend Warner cited Murray's work on the witch-cult as an influence on her 1926 novel Lolly Willowes, and sent a copy of her book to Murray in appreciation, with the two meeting for lunch shortly after. There was nevertheless some difference in their depictions of the witch-cult; whereas Murray had depicted an organised pre-Christian cult, Warner depicted a vague family tradition that was explicitly Satanic.

In 1927, Warner lectured on the subject of witchcraft, exhibiting a strong influence from Murray's work. Analysing the relationship between Murray and Warner, the English literature scholar Mimi Winick characterised both as being "engaged in imagining new possibilities for women in modernity".

The fantasy novel Lammas Night is based on the same idea of the role of the royal family.