Margaret Alice Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was a British Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, folklorist, and first-wave feminist. She was the first woman appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom and spent nearly four decades building the Egyptology department at University College London. Her work on Egyptian language, excavation, and public education was substantial. Later she became widely known—and then widely criticised—for arguing that early modern “witches” were members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. That idea shaped mid-twentieth-century popular and neopagan thinking about witchcraft even as professional historians rejected it.
Murray was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) into a prosperous Anglo-Indian family. Her father, James Murray, managed paper mills and later served as president of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. Her mother, Margaret Carr, had come to India as a missionary and taught Indian women. Childhood was spent moving between India, England, and Germany. She received no formal schooling and later took pride in never having sat an examination before university. After training as a nurse in Calcutta during a cholera outbreak and working briefly as a social worker in England, she enrolled in 1894, at the age of thirty, in the newly founded Egyptology department at University College London. The department had been endowed by Amelia Edwards and was directed by Flinders Petrie. Murray quickly mastered hieroglyphs and Coptic, published her first paper in 1895 on the descent of property in early Egypt, and in 1898–99 was appointed junior lecturer—the first woman to hold such a post in British archaeology.
At UCL she became the department’s principal classroom teacher. Petrie spent most winters excavating in Egypt; Murray designed and delivered the two-year certificate course that prepared students for the field. She taught language, history, religion, and practical skills to generations of Egyptologists, among them Reginald Engelbach, Guy Brunton, Myrtle Broome, Winifred Brunton, and Gertrude Caton-Thompson. She also campaigned inside the college for women’s facilities, securing a women’s common room later named after her, and she marched with the Women’s Social and Political Union, including the 1907 “Mud March.” She never received a conventional undergraduate degree, yet UCL awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1927 and promoted her to assistant professor. She retired in 1935, long after the official retirement age, because the college kept reappointing her.
Fieldwork began in earnest in 1902–03 at Abydos, where she arrived as site nurse and left as a published excavator. There she recorded the Osireion, the underground temple associated with Seti I and Osiris. The following season she worked at Saqqara, copying inscriptions from Old Kingdom mastabas that Auguste Mariette had excavated decades earlier; the two-volume Saqqara Mastabas remains a standard reference. In 1908 she directed the public unwrapping of the mummy of Khnum-nakht at Manchester Museum—the first time a woman had performed that role before a large audience. She insisted the event be treated as science rather than spectacle. After the First World War closed Egypt to British excavators, she led her own campaigns: megalithic and Bronze Age sites in Malta (1921–27), talaiotic settlements on Menorca (1930–31), a small investigation at Petra in 1937, and assistance to Petrie at Tell el-Ajjul in Palestine. The Malta and Menorca reports are still cited by specialists.
Unable to dig in Egypt during the war, Murray turned to European folklore. In a 1917 paper and then in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) she argued that the people tried as witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belonged to an organised, pre-Christian fertility cult that worshipped a horned god (whom she identified with the Roman Dianus or Janus) and, originally, a mother goddess. Covens of thirteen, sabbaths, esbats, ritual sex, and animal disguise, she claimed, were survivals of this religion rather than products of torture, folklore, or judicial invention. The God of the Witches (1931) popularised the same thesis for a wider audience; The Divine King in England (1954) extended it to the idea of ritually slain sacred kings. She wrote the “Witchcraft” entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica that remained in print until 1969.
Historians of the witch trials rejected the theory almost from the start. Murray treated confessions extracted under torture as reliable ethnography, ignored chronology and regional variation, and selected only those details that fitted a Frazerian fertility-cult model. By the 1970s Norman Cohn, Keith Thomas, and others had shown that no such organised pan-European pagan church existed. The books nevertheless supplied a ready-made origin myth for Gerald Gardner and the emerging Wiccan movement; Murray even wrote an introduction to Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954). She is therefore often called the “grandmother of Wicca,” a title that sits uneasily beside her Egyptological reputation.
Murray published more than 150 items: grammars of Egyptian and Coptic, popular surveys such as Ancient Egyptian Legends (1913) and The Splendour That Was Egypt (1949), excavation reports, and late-life studies of religion and folklore. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955. Her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, appeared in 1963, a few months before she died at Welwyn, Hertfordshire, aged one hundred.
Her Egyptological work—classroom training, inscription copying, and the Malta and Saqqara publications—has worn better than the witchcraft books. She opened a professional path for women in a field that had been almost exclusively male, insisted that public enthusiasm for Egypt should rest on accurate scholarship, and kept a pioneering university department functioning for decades. The witch-cult hypothesis is now a cautionary example of how an energetic outsider can misread legal records when they are treated as anthropological fieldwork. Both sides of the career belong to the same restless, long-lived scholar who began as a late-entering student and finished as a centenarian still writing.