Wicca and the Cthulhu Mythos largely spring from one source: Margaret Murray’s 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. This is not meant as any offense to Wiccans or other neopagans, but instead of two diverging cases stemming from one source, and the power that a scholar’s writings might have, whether intended or not.
Margaret Murray and the Witch-Cult
Margaret Murray was born in Calcutta on July 13, 1863. An odd coincidence, her family included Phillips’, as did Lovecraft’s, but I do not know if there was any relation. She grew up in England near the White Horse, the Dragon Mount, and other points of both antiquarian and folkloric interest, likely influencing the course her life took (Murray 1963: 11 – 29, 62, 207).
Rather than train to study Britain, Murray went to study with the pioneering Egyptologist, Professor Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie of University College, London. Murray excavated with Petrie’s team in the early years of the 20th century, and published several books on those excavations as well as the grammar of Egyptian and Coptic (Murray 1963: 207 – 208). In 1920, during her times with the Copts, Murray was the subject of a cleansing ritual against rabies after being bitten by a dog (Murray 1963: 143 – 147). But other than a few years working with Petrie in Egypt (and then work in Palestine and Jordan in the 1930s, including at the world-famous site of Petra), Murray was often stuck teaching Petrie’s students while he was out of country (Drower 2004: 115, 128 – 129). She was also active in promoting the importance of anthropology to the training of imperial administrators and colonists overseas (Murray 1963: 96 – 97).
But probably her most influential work concerns Europe. Her work interrupted by the Great War (including a brief stint as a nurse), Murray turned her attention more to European prehistory and folklore. In 1915 she took vacation to Glastonbury where she saw Egyptian elements in the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail (Murray 1963: 104). She excavated in Malta and Minorca in the 1920s and early 1930s, with a focus on megalithic sites, as well as excavation of a medieval site in England. The medieval excavation in Whomerle Wood was never published, leaving notes only in a local volunteer society, but at least one Murray biographer wonders if Murray’s new interest in medieval witch cases may have been behind the excavation (Drower 2004: 123 – 124). On Malta, she also investigated local folklore of spirits, buried treasure, and other topics, and became a member of the Folk-lore Society during this time, eventually becoming its president in 1953 (Murray 1963: 131 – 132, 207 – 208).
This turn to legends and the hidden spirit world manifested most prominently in her research and belief that medieval witch accusations and trial documents were not made up out of whole cloth, but instead were proof that medieval and early modern inquisitors had uncovered and worked to exterminate an ancient religion, one involving not the Devil, but a man costumed as a pre-Christian god. She condemned archaeological treatment of religion due to its Judeo-Christian bias, arguing that religion has evolved into different forms or methods to understand and influence the unknown spiritual power of the universe. She particularly notes that Goddess preceded God as women produce children and food, the basic stuff of life (Murray 1963: 196 – 198).
Murray’s view of archaeology and the occult was much closer to the conventional view, that they are intertwined, than is typically found amongst members of the profession. In the thirteen chapters of her autobiography, one concerns the methods and nature of archaeology, the other, an exploration of the occult. In the occult chapter, she states. “I find that all good archaeologists are expected to have had at least one occult experience either personal or of somebody that he knows.” Many of these tales, Murray notes, fall apart upon examination, especially those of Egyptian curses. Nevertheless, she advocated study of telepathy and ghosts, suggesting that ghosts were not disembodied spirits so much as some kind of light record of old events that manifested in moist or humid air such as Scotland or India (and come to think of it, the American South) (Murray 1963: 175 – 183).
Murray presented her Old Religion findings in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921. These ideas met mixed to negative criticism, and her second book on the topic, The God of the Witches in 1933, was ignored until after WWII. With the renewed recognition, Murray published The Divine King in England in 1954. This same year, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today
, arguably the text that founds an open Wiccan paganism in Britain, cementing the idea of a prehistoric surviving pagan Old Religion into the popular consciousness. Margaret Murray wrote the forward to Witchcraft Today, and is considered the “godmother” of the witches. Margot Adler (1986: 549), author of the classic Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America
, points to Murray as the real beginning of the Wicca revival, and supports at least some of the elder scholar’s findings.The nature and extent of the religion was modified as Murray continued to write. At its core, Murray described the witch-cult as a pre-agricultural, pre-Indo-European religion. Memories of some of the people of pre-IE Europe are carried down, according to Murray, as stories of fairies and elves who faded into obscurity and extinction (with perhaps the exception of groups like the Lapps or Basques) as agriculturalists moved in. This concept of fairy folklore as a reflection of migrations and of a lost Neolithic or older people was not invented by Murray, and was more popular in the later Victorian era. The Old Religion was then adopted by later invaders, transforming it into Diana worship, prompting Murray to call the religion Dianic regardless of the period in question. As “described,” according to Murray, in the later witch-trials, it was a matriarchal society, but later she viewed it as a duality, incorporating a horned male deity that can be traced to Paleolithic cave paintings. The modern stereotype of witches organized into covens of 13 is largely due to Murray. They had holy days on May Eve, Halloween, Candlemas, Beltane, Yule, and Lammas, as well as weekly ceremonies Murray coined as “esbats.” Following the medieval horror story testimonies, Murray believed that the cult sacrificed and cannibalized their own children, an element of the Old Religion which was minimized in Murray’s later writings and has not been very popular in the decades since (Waugh 1994: 4 – 5). In her later works, Murray’s witch-cult begins to resemble conspiracy theory as much as anthropology, with the British royals and other famous figures in European history as part of the cult, and many of their deaths secretly ritual murders, the killing of the king so important to both Murray’s work and Frazier’s The Golden Bough (Adler 1986: 47 – 48).
The concept of a Dianic witch-cult was not invented by Murray. Notions of pagan survivals had sporadically appeared in the nineteenth-century investigations of European folklore. Murray drew on these concepts, including Jules Michelet’s La Sorciere, and anthropologist Karl Pearson’s claim that Joan of Arc was part of a Goddess cult, a claim that appears in Murray’s God of the Witches (Hutton 1999: 31 – 33). Probably the most direct ancestor of Murray’s ideas would be Charles Leland’s work at the turn of the century. Leland was something of a cultural, intellectual, and political rebel. In addition to studying Native American and Roma (gypsy) folklore, Leland claimed that he was given a book by a surviving member of a hereditary witch family in Italy, whose practices had descended from the Etruscans. He published this as Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches in 1899 (Adler 1986: 56 – 57). While Murray’s work has been heavily criticized as misunderstanding the nature and context of the witch-trial testimonies, some pagan survival does seem to have occurred, such as the benandanti of Italy studied by Carlo Ginzburg in The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries
. Ginzburg also trial and other historical documents, but to general scholarly acceptance, to chronicle a secret society that fought anti-Christian witches with their own magic and sabbat-like meetings. But these folk religions are not considered synonymous in scale nor specifics with Murray’s witch-cult.And perhaps most importantly for our current discussion, ideas of witchcraft and prehistoric races surviving in fairy lore in the British Isles was a theme in the fiction of Arthur Machen. A theme very much enjoyed by the creator of the Cthulhu Cult.
Lovecraft and the Witch-Cult
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was largely an auto-didact. In his avocation of astronomy, and his passion for the Classics and Roman history, this self-learning was largely sufficient. But when it came to anthropology (especially race), prehistory, and non-Classical or English history, topics of great interest to Lovecraft and prominent in his fiction, his self-learning often fell flat. He often relied on texts from his youth, texts already outdated at times by decades. This pattern contributed to a tendency to pick and choose knowledge based on how much it conformed to Lovecraft’s preconceived notions (at the same time that Lovecraft strenuously argued for rational materialist atheism in the face of others preconceived notions). Or as in the case of the witch-cult, how much it tickled his fancy for the weird and mysterious. Lovecraft became obsessed with the witch-cult. As Donald Waugh (1994: 4) has argued, Murray’s book inspired Lovecraft in understanding myth as residue of history, and in supporting the worldview Lovecraft had already developed.
Conflicting reports, including Lovecraft’s letters, suggest he read Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in either 1923 or 1924, but 1923 seems more likely based on internal evidence from his commonplace book and the story “The Festival.” Murray’s witch-cult informs that story of a hidden ancestral occult sect. And the witch-cult combined with stereotypes and outright slurs against the Yezidi of Iraq as Satanists, forms the core of “The Horror at Red Hook.” These stories demonstrate Lovecraft’s fondness for the idea, a fondness he also demonstrated in private letters. In 1930, Lovecraft wrote two multi-page essay-letters to Robert E. Howard, expounding upon the cult at length. Unlike Theosophy, which HPL utilized as a source for his fiction but chalked up as soft-headed myth, he presents the witch-cult as historical and anthropological fact. Published in Selected Letters, a few snippets give the general flavor.
“ … the fact, now widely emphasized by by anthropologists, that the traditional features of witch-practice and Sabbat-orgies were by no means mythical … Something actual was going on under the surface”
“scholars now recognise that all through history a secret cult of degenerate orgiastic nature-worshippers, furtively recruited from the peasantry and sometimes from decadent characters of more select origin, has existed throughout northwestern Europe … It has no inclusive name recognised by its own adherents, but is customarily called simply “witch-cult” by modern anthropologists. Evidences of its persistent existence and unvarying practices are revealed by multitudes of trials, legends, and historic incidents; and by piecing these together we have today a very fair idea of its nature and workings.”
There is far, far more in this letter, describing Lovecraft’s mix of racial and cultural history in Europe, viewing the witch-cult as the religion of “prehistoric Mongoloids” and then infiltrating the Romans. The cult was nearly exterminated by Christianity, which was shocked by its erotic elements, but after the Black Death it was revived by those despairing of the world. The cult is blended at this time with Satan, and becomes a more open force in late medieval Europe, resulting in a backlash of both vigilantism (which HPL compares to the Ku Klux Klan active at its peak in the US at that time) and the more organized witch hunting that finally wipes the cult out (HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 178 – 181, Letter 428). In an earlier letter, Lovecraft dwells obsessively on the racial components of this faulty history, with more of an emphasis in the racial-cultural history of Europe in response to Howard’s tales of fantasized prehistory (HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, July 20, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 161 – 163, Letter 419).
Donald Waugh goes into greater detail of some of the specifics of Lovecraft's writings in relation to the witch-cult. But I think it most be emphasized how crucial Murray's book is to the creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, and Lovecraft's sea change in, as Waugh puts it, perspective. Even more striking is that this appears to be the one bit of non-mainstream knowledge Lovecraft really went for. His racism was disputed by some anthropological authorities and was somewhat outdated, but it wasn't that hard in the 1920s to find experts to back up scientific racism (see Stephen J. Gould's The Mismeasure of Man for an excellent overview of scientific racism). And Lovecraft did hold out some support for trans-Pacific contacts with the Americas, and perhaps a sunken continent (he was also famously an early adopter of the then-discredited theory of continental drift). None of these would put Lovecraft out on a limb intellectually as would his acceptance of Murray's ideas and their importance as a framework for prehistory. And none would have such a direct impact on his stories, starting with "The Festival" and "The Horror at Red Hook."
The Witch-Cult and the Cthulhu Mythos
In these early tales, Lovecraft has difficulty making the witch-cult cosmic. “The Festival” has dream-like and cosmic aspects to it, most famously the byakhee. But “Red Hook” is a straight Manichaean tale of good vs. evil, Satanists vs. the wholesome. And it’s pretty terrible. But when he figured out how to marry the witch-cult to the cosmic, Lovecraft not only wrote his most famous work, he created the basic outline of his Mythos, and as argued by Jason Colavito and others, invented the idea of the ancient astronaut. The witch-cult is the direct inspiration for the Cthulhu Cult.
In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Professor Angell’s notes assure us that the the Cthulhu cult is not the witch-cult.
“Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members.”But HPL protests too much. The evidence is plain in his “Commonplace Book,” a scratch book Lovecraft used to jot down ideas for later use in fiction. Amongst the 1923 entries are the following.
101 Hideous secret society—widespread—horrible rites in caverns under familiar scenes—one’s own neighbour may belong. [x]Items 101 is arguably “The Festival,” and perhaps “Red Hook. But items 109, 110, and 111 are clearly early hints of “The Call of Cthulhu.” No one is possessed in “Cthulhu” but a swamp wizard seems a likely prototype for Old Castro. The voodoo scene is moved from Alabama to Louisiana. And there is no mistaking the antediluvian-cyclopean ruins in the Pacific as anything other than R’lyeh. And it is the center of a world-wide “witch cult.” We should not be surprised that Lovecraft would mix voodoo in with the witch cult. Donald Waugh has explored some of Lovecraft’s ideas about the witch-cult, which he identified (more than Murray) with obsolete notions of a squat-dark-skinned race in European prehistory. Lovecraft differentiates between cults in “The Call of Cthulhu,” but the ideas about voodoo and witch cults were blending together in his mind.
109 Ancient negro voodoo wizard in cabin in swamp—possesses white man.
110 Antediluvian—Cyclopean ruins on lonely Pacific island. Centre of earthwide subterranean witch cult.
111 Ancient ruin in Alabama swamp—voodoo.
Another source for the voodoo-witchcraft connection in Lovecraft’s mind may have been the Salem witch trials. They appear numerous times in Lovecraft’s stories, and are the direct inspiration for Arkham. Arkham is basically Salem with Brown University thrown into it. In his antiquarian ramblings, HPL fixated on Salem, visiting several times, and seeking out the farmhouse and grave of the condemned Rebecca Nurse. He also visited the grave of Nathaniel Mather, who went to the grave feeling guilt over the events of 1692. Lovecraft blamed the witch-panic on Tituba, an enslaved West Indian woman central to early parts of the panic in Salem (HPL letter to Frank Belknap Long and Alfred Galpin, May 1, 1923, Published in Lovecraft 1965: 221, Letter 127; HPL letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930, Published in Lovecraft 1971: 176, Letter 428; HPL letter to Robert H. Barlow, March 19, 1934. Published in Lovecraft 1976a: 392 – 393, Letter 692).
While he chalks up much of the Salem panic to false accusations, he tells R. E. Howard that it sits atop the reality of the witch-cult. Lovecraft even followed in the footsteps of Charles Leland. After he had written “The Dunwich Horror,” Lovecraft was contacted by a woman claiming to be the descendant of Mary Easty, sister of Rebecca Nurse and another one of the women hanged at Salem. She hinted that there were indeed family secrets, and that her family was both derived from the murderous Borgias of Italy, and knew other witches in Marblehead. Yet she asks HPL if he knew more of secret witch-lore in New England, and whether Dunwich and Arkham were real places. The possibility of learning these secrets (shades of Aradia) thrilled Lovecraft, but we learn no more of this beyond a few letters (HPL letter to Clark Ashton Smith, March 22, 1929, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 327, Letter 350; HPL letter to Clark Ashton Smith, April 14, 1929, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 328, Letter 351; HPL letter to Robert H. Barlow, March 19, 1934. Published in Lovecraft 1976a: 392 – 393, Letter 692).
The Cthulhu Cult is a hidden ancient religion, surviving on the fringes of civilized society, and only detectable through diligent scholarly study. Just like Murray’s discovery of the witch cult through tying together scraps of archaeology and history with her study of witch trial testimonies. The two are not identical, but they clearly are close kin. This concept of a hidden occult undergirding to everyday reality becomes one of the most important hallmarks of the Cthulhu Mythos, alongside the cosmic horror powered by both Lovecraft’s emotional outlook and his interests in science. Cthulhu Mythos stories involve hidden occulted religions and knowledge only detectable to diligent scholars, but the joke is on everyone as the “god” of the cult turns out to be humanity’s insignificance and doom.
The success of marrying the witch-cult to the cosmic in “Cthulhu” continues in virtually all that follows. Murray’s book is specifically name-dropped in “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Hints of the cult show up in later fiction, but never cleaving so closely to Murray’s hidden religion as the Cthulhu Cult. Witches or similar folk, part of dark and terrible magical lineages, appear in “Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and perhaps “The Thing on the Doorstep.” There are hints of this connection for “Dunwich” again in the Commonplace book, this time from 1925
130 N.E. region call’d “Witches’ Hollow”—along course of a river. Rumours of witches’ sabbaths and Indian powwows on a broad mound rising out of the level where some old hemlocks and beeches formed a dark grove or daemon-temple. Legends hard to account for. Holmes—Guardian Angel.Arguably the most direct appearance of the cult was not on the printed page, but in Lovecraft’s dreams. On Halloween Night 1927, Lovecraft had an intensely immersive and detailed dream in which he was a Roman military commander leading troops against an ancient and evil cult of the Miri Nigri, the squat dark people of Lovecraft’s take on the cult (HPL letter to Frank Belknap Long, December, 1927, Published in Lovecraft 1968: 202 – 203, Letter 308). This cult took human sacrifices on the traditional pagan holy nights, and strikes terror into the local citizenry. If this sounds something like Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead
134 Witches’ Hollow novel? Man hired as teacher in private school misses road on first trip—encounters dark hollow with unnaturally swollen trees and small cottage (light in window?). Reaches school and hears that boys are forbidden to visit hollow. One boy is strange—teacher sees him visit hollow—odd doings—mysterious disappearance or hideous fate.
/The 13th Warrior
, don’t be surprised. The dream was discussed in HPL’s letters, which had been published a few years before Crichton wrote his story. It was incorporated in Frank Belknap Long’s “The Horror from the Hills” nearly verbatim. And Crichton cites Al Azif (the Necronomicon) in the faux bibliography of Eaters.Murray’s ideas, part of a larger cultural meme of ancient survivals, secret societies, and pagan dreams and nightmares, birthed both a real religion of a healthy life of balance, and a pseudomythology of cosmic dread, both of which have thrived.
Works Cited
Adler, Margot
1986 Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America
. Revised and Expanded Edition. Beacon Press, Boston.Drower, Margaret S.
2004 Margaret Alice Murray, 1863 – 1963. In Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists
, edited by Getzel M. Cohen and Martha Sharp Joukowsky, pp. 109 – 141.Hutton, Ronald
1999 Modern Pagan Witchcraft. In Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century (v. 5)
, pp. 1 – 79, edited by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. In the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, series editors Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
1926 The Call of Cthulhu. Reprinted in H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction, Complete and Unabridged, pp. 355 – 379. Barnes & Noble, New York.
1965 Selected Letters: 1911 – 1924. Volume I. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin
1971 Selected Letters: 1929-1931. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei
. Volume III. Edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin1976a Selected Letters: 1932-1934
". Volume IV. Edited by August Derleth and James Turner. Arkham House, Sauk City, WisconsinMurray, Margaret
1963 My first hundred years
". William Kimber, London.Waugh, Robert H.
1994 Dr. Margaret Murray and H. P. Lovecraft: The Witch-Cult in New England. Lovecraft Studies 31: 2 – 10
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