Elves and Fairies - Dr Margaret A Murray

Elves and Fairies

Dr Margaret A Murray

by Ælf

THE only information I have on Dr Murray is what I have gleaned from her three books: The Witch Cult in Western Europe, The Horned God and The Divine King in England, all published by the Oxford University Press.

They are revolutionary, and deserve to be seen as seminal in arriving at an understanding of a time when paganism was a real part of Western European life. Instead the books gather dust on library shelves and the world ignores them.

The only copies of these books that I have ever seen were volumes that I borrowed from libraries in Pretoria some 30 years ago. I have found them nowhere else, and their message is wiped from the collective consciousness.

Psychiatrists and psychologists prefer to take the view that witches and witchcraft are a delusion characteristic of a disturbed mind.

The word “witch” is used to translate entirely unrelated phenomena occurring in other cultures, which further serves to muddy the waters.

At the same time a growing number of people believe that they have rediscovered the secrets of the witch-religion and gather to celebrate the seasons of the pagan calendar, demanding time off from work (especially in the United States) in the name of a “religion” that some of them call Wicca.

There is a movement (again especially in the United States) which takes the view that the witch trials in Massachusetts some three centuries ago – and the mediæval trials that preceded them by further centuries – were a phenomenon primarily involving prejudiced persecution by Bible-obsessed people with closed and warped minds, the prosecution of innocents who had done nothing worse than misbehave sexually through their attendance at gatherings not approved by the Church.^[1] (There are even those who deny the existence of coven meetings in this connection.)

A great many people – who ought to know better – revel in the delusion that there are minute magical creatures at the bottom of their gardens that they call fairies.

And the words elf, fairy, dwarf, witch and wizard are used in tales of fantasy – some, but by no means all of them, magnificently told – with meanings entirely divorced from the reality in which their use arose.

In these pages I will attempt to bring out something of the reality that Dr Murray uncovered, and contrast it with the foolish imaginings of the 20th and 21st centuries.

^[1] I currently have no information on the Massachusetts witch trials, but the phenomenon of the mediæval trials will be explored in these pages.