Written by In 1921, a fifty-eight-year-old British Egyptologist published a book that changed the history of witchcraft. Not because it was right, but because it arrived at exactly the right moment with exactly the right idea, in exactly the right voice.
The book was The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. The woman was Margaret Alice Murray. And the idea, that the accused witches of the early modern witch trials were not deluded, hysterical, or innocent victims but actual practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian religion that had survived underground for centuries, was, as subsequent scholarship would show in some detail, largely wrong.
And yet.