Margaret Murray and the Euhemeristic Theory in British Folklore in the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

Drawing on George W. Stocking’s ideas of presentism and historicism as distinct methods in the historiography of the behavioral sciences, I attempt to pose a question of whether the use of the euhemeristic method was indeed limited to the Victorian era as it is commonly held in today’s scholarship. I examine the key works on witchcraft by the famous British Egyptologist and archaeologist Margaret Murray, including The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches, as well as various critical reactions to them published in the journal Folk-Lore and elsewhere, to argue that debates over the euhemeristic theory in fact did not stop with the end of the Victorian era; on the contrary, euhemerism continued to be discussed and was considered as a working approach up to the 1950s.