Kinber, 1963) Murray, The Genesis of Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963) see also ‘Murray’s Unlikely History’. Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921 reprinted 1952, paperback 1962) Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Sampson Low, 1933) Murray, The Divine King in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1954) Murray, My First Hundred Years (London: W. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Despite this, both writers have been influential in the development of modern popular religion and lifestyle movements. Researchers have again become interested in witches’ assemblies, although there are still widely expressed reservations about the way Murray and Summers fused popular motifs and historical material to produce their respective benign or satanic cults. The very different conclusions reached by Murray and Summers shared the assumption that the language of accusation could be matched to a real phenomenon, rooted in the past, but still affecting the present. At the time there was widespread interest in occultism, and the modern disciplines of anthropology and psychology were emerging. In contrast, Montague Summers (1880–1948), a convert to Catholicism, claimed that genuine satanic cults had existed in previous centuries, and that witches did indeed practise satanic rites. She put forward the idea that what Christianity demonised as witchcraft was a medieval survival of an ancient Palaeolithic/Neolithic religion based on the agricultural cycle. Margaret Murray (1863–1963), an Egyptologist and member of the Folklore Society, applied James Frazer’s ideas on the universality of fertility cults at the primitive stage of cultural development to re-create an ancient religion. In the first half of the twentieth century, two writers challenged the view that witchcraft had never been a ‘real’ cult.
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