Murray studied mainly English and Scottish sources including legal records of witch
trials, pamphlets, and the works of contemporary writers. However, her focus was only on
statements that suggested beliefs and rituals of an organized cult, omitting references to the
acts of singular witches. Her distortion of the evidence led Murray to argue that the records
revealed an ancient, pre-Christian religion, the Dianic cult, and that the similarities in the
beliefs and confessions of the accused witches are a key indication of the cult’s existence. 2
Murray’s views have since been discredited, and more careful analysis of the records has led
modern historians to reach the consensus that those accused of witchcraft were not, in the
most part, devil-worshippers or members of an ancient fertility religion, but simply ordinary
people who were believed by their neighbours to be witches. 3
Although such theories have now been widely disregarded, there is still disagreement
among historians as to the types of ‘ordinary’ people who were more vulnerable to
accusations of witchcraft, as well as the causes behind these accusations. As pointed out by
Brian Levack, the witches of early modern Europe did not conform to a single social profile,
even within smaller regions. 4 Yet historians have argued that people of a certain gender,
occupation, or age were more likely than others to be accused of witchcraft.
In his study of 700 witchcraft cases in Essex, Alan Macfarlane observed that a high
percentage of suspected witches were women, and studies of witchcraft across different
regions throughout Europe have also revealed similar statistics. 5 This female majority has led
2 Margaret A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 12-13; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘The Pursuit of Reality: Recent Research into the History of Witchcraft’ , The Historical Journal , 51. 4 (2008), pp. 1069-1088 3 Fudge, pp. 493-497 4 Brian P. Levack , ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America , Ed. Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1-10 5 Alan Macfarlane, 'Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex', in Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations , Ed. Mary Douglas (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 81-99
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