I view the woman pictured above as the true mother of the modern witchcraft movement. Her name is Margaret Murray, a British athropologist of the 20th century. It was her theories of a pan-European Witch-Cult that gave birth to the revival of witchcraft in England. She was the one who inspired people to form 20th century covens and attempt to reconstruct the theoretical witch religion. Although today her hypothesis has been disputed and discredited, it laid the foundations for Wicca as it developed from the 1930s onward. Margaret was born in 1863 and gained prominence as an Egyptologist. She was also an ardent feminist, actively involved in the Suffragette movement. During a period in which she was unable to do field work in Egypt, she began to investigate the witch trials of early modern Europe. She published her thesis, Witch Cult in Western Europe , in 1921. In this she presented the ground breaking idea that the witch trials represented the persecution of a rival pagan religio...