November 13, 1963

Margaret Murray, (July 13, 1863 to November 13, 1963) was a British scholar and archaeologist; she is most famous today for her books on the history of witchcraft. According to her Who's Who article, she both attended the University College of London as a student and later was a Fellow at that illustrious institution.

In between she taught at Oxford, and--

"excavated in Egypt, 1902–04;
excavated a Neolithic Temple in Malta, 1921–23;
excavated an early mediæval site in Hertfordshire, 1925;
excavated megalithic remains in Minorca, 1930–31;
excavated Nabatean remains at Petra, 1937;
excavated Bronze-age site at Tell Ajjul, South Palestine....."

And she wrote about it all, which does not mean this next list is complete--it is not.

Egyptian Antiquities, (1902)
Osireion at Abydos, (1904)
Scarabs in the Dublin Museum, (1904).
The astrological character of the Egyptian magical wands, (1906).
St. Menas of Alexandria, (1907)
Index of names and titles of the old kingdom (1908)
Priesthoods of women in Egypt, (1908)
Egyptian antiquities, (1910)
The Tomb of Two Brothers, (1910)
Note upon an early Egyptian standard, (1911)
Royal Marriages and Matrilineal Descent, (1915)
Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance, (1916)
Ancient Egyptian Legends, (1920)
Witch Cult in Western Europe, (1921)
The witch-cult in Palaeolithic times, (1922)
Knots (1922)
Excavations in Malta, (1923)
Egyptian poems (Rendered into English verse from the originals) (1926)
The dying god, (1926)
Elementary Coptic Grammar, (1927)
Egyptian objects found in Malta, (1928)
Witchcraft and its suppression : a study of fanaticism and delusion attending the survival into modern times of a pre-Christian cult, (1928?)
Egyptian sculpture, (1930)
Queen Meryt-Amon, (1930)
Egyptian Temples, 1931
Maltese Folk-tales, (1932)
(with D. Pilcher) Coptic Reading-Book, (1933)
The God of the witches, (1933)
China and Egypt, (1933)
Female fertility figures, (1934)
Ritual masking, (1934)
Coptic painted pottery, (1935)
Petra, The Rock of Edom, (1939)
My First Hundred Years, (1963)

It is not surprising Murray mentions cats in her writing. Egypt was her first love. In her book Egyptian Temples (1931) she points to a minor mystery:

Bast was [an Egyptian goddess identified with] the cat; by the Greeks ...[Bast] was identified with Artemis, though the reason for the identification is obscure, for Artemis originated in a bear, not [something feline.]

In this book Murray maintains the first Egyptians valued the cat, not so much for its abilities as a ratter, but because the cat killed snakes. This could be, but a major angle in her research, that witchcraft was a undercurrent in history from paleolithic times, is certainly not the case. Margaret Murray, flawed like all scholars, still lights a path.