Moving to London, in 1894 she began studying Egyptology at UCL, developing a friendship with department head Flinders Petrie, who encouraged her early academic publications and appointed her junior lecturer in 1898.

Unable to return to Egypt due to the First World War, she focused her research on the witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to a Horned God.

[12] In 1881, at age 18, Margaret heard about James Murray (no relation) and his "general appeal to English speakers around the world to read their local books and send him words and quotations" for entry into the OED.

Reflecting upon this in her later autobiography, Murray notes it was her sister's insistence on attending these classes, largely spurred on by her own inability to do so, which set her down the path of her future Egyptological career.

[44] In 1907, Petrie excavated the Tomb of the Two Brothers, a Middle Kingdom burial of two Egyptian priests, Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht, and it was decided that Murray would carry out the public unwrapping of the latter's mummified body.

[45] Murray was particularly keen to emphasise the importance that the unwrapping would have for the scholarly understanding of the Middle Kingdom and its burial practices, and lashed out against members of the public who saw it as immoral; she declared that "every vestige of ancient remains must be carefully studied and recorded without sentimentality and without fear of the outcry of the ignorant".

[47] Murray was dedicated to public education, hoping to infuse Egyptomania with solid scholarship about Ancient Egypt, and to this end authored a series of books aimed at a general audience.

[58] Pursuing this interest, she published the paper "Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance" in the journal Ancient Egypt, although few agreed with her conclusions and it was criticised for making unsubstantiated leaps with the evidence by the likes of Jessie Weston.

[70] During the excavations, she had taken an interest in the island's folklore, resulting in the 1932 publication of her book Maltese Folktales, much of which was a translation of earlier stories collected by Manuel Magri and her friend Liza Galea.

[87] During the Second World War, Murray evaded the Blitz of London by moving to Cambridge, where she volunteered for a group (probably the Army Bureau of Current Affairs or The British Way and Purpose) who educated military personnel to prepare them for post-war life.

[88] Based in the city, she embarked on research into the town's Early Modern history, examining documents stored in local parish churches, Downing College, and Ely Cathedral; she never published her findings.

[89] On most days, she visited the British Museum in order to consult their library, and twice a week she taught adult education classes on Ancient Egyptian history and religion at the City Literary Institute; upon her retirement from this position she nominated her former pupil, Veronica Seton-Williams, to replace her.

The issue contained contributions from various scholars paying tribute to her – with papers dealing with archaeology, fairies, Near Eastern religious symbols, Greek folk songs – but notably not about witchcraft, potentially because no other folklorists were willing to defend her witch-cult theory.

[104] The later folklorists Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood have suggested that Murray was best known for her witch-cult theory,[105] with biographer Margaret S. Drower expressing the view that it was her work on this subject which "perhaps more than any other, made her known to the general public".

[133] The later historian Ronald Hutton commented that The Witch-Cult in Western Europe "rested upon a small amount of archival research, with extensive use of printed trial records in 19th-century editions, plus early modern pamphlets and works of demonology".

[134] Murray followed The Witch-Cult in Western Europe with The God of the Witches, published by the popular press Sampson Low in 1931; although similar in content, unlike her previous volume it was aimed at a mass market audience.

[154] He stated that she was not acquainted with the "careful general histories by modern scholars" and criticised her for assuming that the trial accounts accurately reflected the accused witches' genuine experiences of witchcraft, regardless of whether those confessions had been obtained through torture and coercion.

[163] During these decades, a variety of scholars across Europe and North America – such as Alan Macfarlane, Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled, Gerhard Schormann, Bente Alver and Bengt Ankarloo – published in-depth studies of the archival records from the witch trials, leaving no doubt that those tried for witchcraft were not practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian religion.

[174] He stated his opinion that she was right in claiming that European witchcraft had "roots in an ancient fertility cult", something that he argued was vindicated by his work researching the benandanti, an agrarian visionary tradition recorded in the Friuli district of Northeastern Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries.

[182] Davidson, who also knew Murray through the Society, noted that at their meetings "she would sit near the front, a bent and seemingly guileless old lady dozing peacefully, and then in the middle of a discussion would suddenly intervene with a relevant and penetrating comment which showed that she had missed not one word of the argument".

[184] One of Murray's friends in the Society, E. O. James, described her as a "mine of information and a perpetual inspiration ever ready to impart her vast and varied stores of specialised knowledge without reserve, or, be it said, much if any regard for the generally accepted opinions and conclusions of the experts!

[75] Raised a devout Christian by her mother, Murray had initially become a Sunday School teacher to preach the faith, but after entering the academic profession she rejected religion, gaining a reputation among other members of the Folklore Society as a noted sceptic and a rationalist.

[193] Ruth Whitehouse argues that, given Murray's lack of mention of such incidents in her autobiography and generally rational approach, a "spirit of mischief" as opposed to "a real belief in the efficacy of the spells" may have motivated her practice of magic.

[194] Hutton noted that Murray was one of the earliest women to "make a serious impact upon the world of professional scholarship",[187] and the archaeologist Niall Finneran described her as "one of the greatest characters of post-war British archaeology".

She is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars, her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments.

In his obituary for Murray in Folklore, James noted that her death was "an event of unusual interest and importance in the annals of the Folk-Lore Society in particular as well as in the wider sphere in which her influence was felt in so many directions and disciplines".

[182] The historian Philip Heselton suggested that the New Forest coven – the oldest alleged Wiccan group – was founded circa 1935 by esotericists aware of Murray's theory and who may have believed themselves to be reincarnated witch-cult members.

In response, Hutton authored The Triumph of the Moon, a historical study exploring Wicca's early development; on publication in 1999 the book exerted a strong impact on the British Pagan community, further eroding belief in the Murrayite theory among Wiccans.

[230] Several prominent practitioners continued to insist that Wicca was a religion with origins stretching back to the Palaeolithic, but others rejected the validity of historical scholarship and emphasised intuition and emotion as the arbiter of truth.

[231] A few "counter-revisionist" Wiccans – among them Donald H. Frew, Jani Farrell-Roberts, and Ben Whitmore – published critiques in which they attacked post-Murrayite scholarship on matters of detail, but none defended Murray's original hypothesis completely.