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Witchcraft Past and Present
by profession and an Egyptologist by passion. Her book, The Witch-Cult
in Western Europe, published in 1921, stated that the victims of the
witch-hunts were practising an ancient religion: paganism. She believed
that a supreme deity had been worshipped and that he had taken the
place in pagan ritual of what Murray called ‘The Mother Goddess’.
Murray, who claimed that Joan of Arc had been a member of this pre-
Christian religion, was dismissed as a crank. But her book was read by
many, including plantation-owner Gerald Gardner who became
interested in magic when he was working in Malaya. He retired to
London in 1936 and moved to the New Forest in Hampshire in 1938
where he joined the Rosicurians, a secret society formed in the 15th
century to study the occult. In 1939 he claimed that a witch whom he
called ‘Old Dorothy’ initiated him into a local coven.
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