Wikipedia:Today's featured article/July 13, 2016
Margaret Murray (13 July 1863 – 13 November 1963) was an Anglo-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, historian, and folklorist. The first female archaeology lecturer in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London (UCL) and served as President of the Folklore Society. Born in Calcutta, Murray moved to London and began studying Egyptology at UCL. The department head Flinders Petrie encouraged her research and soon appointed her Junior Professor. She established a reputation in Egyptology for her excavations of the Osireion temple and Saqqara cemetery. She taught at the British Museum and also the Manchester Museum, where she led the unwrapping of one of the mummies from the Tomb of the Two Brothers. A first-wave feminist, Murray joined the Women's Social and Political Union. During the First World War, she began promoting the hypothesis that the witch trials of Early Modern Christendom were an attempt to extinguish a surviving pre-Christian religion devoted to a Horned God. Although later academically discredited, the theory gained widespread attention and provided the basis for Wicca. (Full article...)