Egyptologist First

Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta in 1863 to British parents and trained in Egyptology at University College London under Flinders Petrie, becoming his close collaborator, excavating with him in Egypt from 1902 and eventually teaching there herself for more than forty years, the first woman in Britain to hold a university lectureship in archaeology. Her Egyptological output was substantial and remains cited: she trained a generation of British excavators, published on Egyptian material culture and religion, and later excavated at sites in Malta and Palestine well into her seventies.

It was alongside this career, not instead of it, that Murray developed the interest that would make her famous outside her own field. Drawing on the trial records of the early modern European witch persecutions, she proposed in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) that the accused had not been the delusion or invention of their persecutors but genuine members of an organized, surviving pre-Christian fertility religion, meeting in covens of thirteen under a priest who impersonated a Horned God. The theory was taken seriously enough, in the decades after publication, that Murray was invited to write the Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on witchcraft, a platform that circulated her reading of the trials as settled fact for a general readership for decades.