A classic of Craft history, though outdated by more recent research.

This book is one of the foundations of neopagan, new age-y feminism, but it is completely out of date (first published in 1931) and requires extensive suspension of disbelief. Murray herself seems to have sat too long in a room alone with The Golden Bough, another discredited anthropological examination of folklore.

Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe ten years before she published The God of the Witches, which was intended as a more popular presentation of her basic thesis that witches were underground adherents of a nature religion that originated in the Paleolithic.

I've had this book since college and upon giving it a recent skim, I decided to place it on the discard pile. I've given it two stars, not because I think it has anything worthwhile to say, but because it's fun in its loopy way and is probably of value to people who are interested in the development of matriarchy theories and neopaganism.

There is at least one authentic survival of a repressed religion, and that took place among the Iberian crypto-Jews. These were Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity and continued to practice Judaism in secret. ( )

A seminal book in the understanding of modern paganism. ( )

Well, er... This is entertaining enough as the potential basis for a fantasy novel, but as far as actual scholarship goes, it's pretty lacking. Murray's theory that there was some kind of unified pagan religion in Europe prior to the advent of Christianity is iffy enough, but when she posits that Joan of Arc and Thomas a Beckett were pagan sacrifices, things get pretty whacky. ( )