00:07:10.380Early Christians introduced some new details.
00:07:13.220Temples in Egypt had been dedicated to Isis, were transformed into churches.
00:07:17.500The statues of Isis carrying her child Horus were altered to become the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ child.
00:07:23.740Osiris' annual death and rebirth became the central Christian mystery, and Osiris was left to navigate the Nile below the surface.
00:07:31.780Around in between the temples of Abydos, where Murray found the Osirion, is a vast complex of cemeteries used in every period of early Egyptian history.
00:07:39.820and murray was at home among all these bones looking for humanity's shared spiritual history
00:07:48.360murray was a diffusionist who argued that all of civilization emerged from egypt much to the
00:07:53.520furied chagrin of racist contemporaries who went to great lengths to argue that white people must
00:07:58.220somehow have come and taught egyptians their science and governance neither stance was totally
00:08:03.120uncommon in her field at the time nor was it uncommon for white people studying egyptian
00:08:07.380history and culture to conveniently skip over the colonial violence they were implicit in
00:08:11.920and to take piecemeal from the graves they dug up to feed their pet theories, or for archaeologists
00:08:17.440to blatantly plunder the digs once they got the rights to study them, if they ever did.
00:08:22.040Murray and Petrie worked to take a dig away from a notorious Frenchman who was known to cart out
00:08:26.440pottery and human bones with zero documentation or academic rigor, let alone respect, and smash
00:08:32.600them about drunkenly at parties and sell the shards off to the highest bidder. Raised Christian1.00
00:08:37.440by her mother, Murray had been a Sunday school teacher, but she rejected religion and earned a
00:08:41.320reputation as a skeptic and a rationalist. She was critical of organized religion, and in her
00:08:46.420autobiography, she wrote a line that we hold dear to our hearts, a holy scrap from this scrappy and
00:08:52.480problematic ancestor. She declared that she believed in an unseen overruling power, which
00:08:58.880science calls nature and religion calls God. She was also a believer and a practitioner of magic,
00:09:05.400or at least she took delight in playing at it, which in our view is the best way to do it.
00:09:10.260In one case, she cursed a fellow academic, mixing up ingredients in a frying pan in the presence of
00:09:15.680two colleagues. Her goal wasn't to do any harm, but to have him removed from the path of her friend,
00:09:22.020and within weeks he was promoted out of her way. A perfect spell. Side note, sticking such a person's
00:09:28.600name into a container of water, say, and putting it in the freezer works well, too. She is also
00:09:33.880said to have created a wax image of Kaiser Wilhelm II and then melted it during the First World War.
00:09:39.260If you have been melting images of your own enemies or dictators to give you strength for
00:09:43.560your ongoing resistance, please know that your work exists in a long and loving lineage.
00:17:58.860The published critiques of her work from the Times sometimes smack of a teeth-clenched bent against women who entered male-dominated spaces.
00:18:07.240Women who were loved and successful and who advanced and from their new vantage point suggested something new.
00:18:13.480We also know there is a knee-jerk reaction still today in some spaces against anyone who suggests that disobedient women
00:18:19.660and people of marginalized genders, identities, and cultures in the earth and even animals
00:18:24.560might have had access to a sacredness that is outside the purview of a god the father
00:18:29.080and the men who choose each other to represent him.
00:18:32.700Murray may have been wrong about a lot of things.
00:18:35.480In particular, the idea that the witch's pre-Christian spirituality was a highly organized religion.
00:18:42.180I doubt being highly organized has ever been a major part of this practice.
00:18:45.500But we know for sure that another way of having spirituality existed
00:18:49.260before the centralization and dominance of the church.
00:18:52.140And we know that people find each other in oppressive times, in small, secret, loosely, if at all, connected groups to share ways of giving ourselves a little power.
00:19:02.860Even feminist historians of science couch their interest in Murray in cautious and apologetic terms.
00:19:09.540An issue that has cast a cloud over Margaret Murray's lasting reputation is the promulgation of her views on witchcraft, though these need to be considered in their historical context.
00:19:18.680Her basic thesis was that there was a pervasive witch cult in Europe that preserved the essential elements of a pre-Christian religion involving the worship of a horned god and originally practicing human sacrifice.
00:19:29.680This theory, propounded in a number of books and a long series of articles, as well as an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1929,
00:19:37.220was based on extremely literal interpretations of the witch trials of the early modern period, of folklore, and of some archaeological evidence.
00:19:45.000Though long discredited in Academy, her views were influential at the time, and as late as 1953, she became president of the Folklore Society.
00:19:54.400Subsequently, her views on witchcraft played a founding role in the formation of the modern Wiccan and neo-pagan movements,
00:20:00.260which has added to the discomfort of present-day female archaeologists, including myself, who would like to claim her as a worthy female ancestor,
00:20:07.740but do not wish to be associated with non-mainstream, not to say crackpot, theories of this kind.
00:20:13.160Many of us experience similar difficulties with the mother-goddess theory, equally rejected by mainstream archaeology and also supported by prominent female archaeologists such as Chiquetta Hawks and Marija Gimbutas.
00:20:24.640There is, of course, no justification for the abandonment of academic rigor, but it is not too difficult to understand why female archaeologists might prefer historical narratives that attribute power to women, whether as goddesses or witches, over the prevalent male-oriented accounts where women are largely invisible or figure only in domestic roles.
00:20:48.000A final point one might make is that different but equally unacceptable theories propounded by male archaeologists of the time are given a much more lenient treatment in the literature.
00:20:57.260Flinders Petri himself, a supporter of eugenics,
00:21:00.600believed that Egyptian civilization could not have been the product of African peoples,
00:21:04.540but was created by a race of intrusive white people,
00:21:07.700a view that is as clearly discredited as Murray's witch cult,
00:21:10.680and arguably more damaging, which is rarely considered to tarnish Petri's reputation.
00:21:16.480Murray gets dismissed with this snideness that just isn't applied to male authors