Abstract: A comparison of two essays on witchcraft written a year apart for divergent audiences, this note exemplifies Graves’s sensitivity to his audience as well as demonstrating his serious regard for the beliefs and activities of people calling themselves witches.

Keyword: witchcraft, authorship, Margaret Murray

__

In his 1964 essay, ‘Witches in 1964,’ published in The Virginia Quarterly Review [The Review] and its1965 revision in the Weekend Telegraph [Telegraph], Robert Graves advances a coherent and largely stable interpretation of witchcraft as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The relationship between the two texts is best understood not as one of ideological re-visioning, but of editorial adaptation: the argument remains consistent while its scale, presentation, and authorial tone shift to suit different readerships and publishing contexts.[1]

Both essays open with a framing device drawn from contemporary newspaper headlines and reflect public anxieties surrounding witchcraft. In The Review, the atmosphere of public anxiety bordering on hysteria treated analytically. Graves frames modern witch-panic as a social and psychological phenomenon, distancing it from a literal belief in diabolism and situating it within patterns of moral panic and media exaggeration.[2] The tone is reflective and interpretive, encouraging the reader to step back from sensationalism. The Telegraph employs the same opening strategy but heightens its immediacy, adopting an informal, journalistic tone designed to capture the attention of a popular audience quickly. The shift is presentational rather than conceptual, reflecting the conventions of a weekend supplement rather than a quarterly review.

In both essays, Graves anchors his authority in the scholarship of Margaret Murray. In the earlier essay, Murray’s work is used to define witchcraft as a throwback to an older, organized, pre-Christian cult and correct the misunderstanding that witches are participants in a satanic conspiracy.[3] Graves treats Murray not as a marginal theorist but as a corrective to centuries of mainstream distortion. The follow-up article makes this framework more explicit for a general audience, identifying Murray’s principal books and summarizing her central thesis with greater clarity.[4] In neither text does Graves retreat from Murray as his primary interpretive foundation.

Graves is careful to present a sturdy boundary against diabolical interpretations. In The Review, he explicitly rejects Black Mass narratives and the demonological tradition associated with Montague Summers, arguing that such accounts belong to hostile theological polemic rather than to the historical witch-cult itself.[5] The Telegraph article gives equal force to this position, while placing additional emphasis on witchcraft as a system concerned with ritual knowledge, discipline, and personal liberation. The anti-diabolical stance is thus stable across both publications.

In The Quarterly, Graves gives more attention to the transmission and origins. He develops a comparative argument drawing on etymology, folklore, and cross-cultural survivals, constructing a broad historical scaffolding for the persistence of witch traditions.[6] For the Telegraph, he is more concise. References to Saracen cultural ‘grafts’ and Aniza symbolism — ideas circulating through the work of Idries Shah — appear in abbreviated form.[7] Despite the different audiences Graves does not alter his argument, but alters his presentation for the audience.

Graves’s ethnographic description of modern covens also remains consistent. For The Review, he describes ritual structure, ecstasy, discipline, and internal schisms, depicting covens as functioning social entities rather than romantic or theatrical curiosities.[8]⁸ For the Telegraph, photographs with captions and a ritual calendar supplement the article, introducing a form of visual ethnography. This addition increases immediacy and accessibility but leaves intact the underlying analysis.

The figure of Gerald Gardner is treated similarly in both essays. In The Review, Graves portrays Gardner as the principal architect of the modern revival of witchcraft, while noting the movement’s vulnerability to hostile publicity and internal instability.[9] The Telegraph version preserves this assessment but sharpens Graves’s critique of popular attitudes, explicitly warning against tendencies toward trivialization, ‘fun and games,’ and theosophical dilution. His judgment is clarified rather than intensified.

The most significant difference between the two essays appears in their conclusions. The Review offers Graves’s fullest and most forceful summation, insisting that witchcraft, if it is to be taken seriously, must move beyond novelty and entertainment toward discipline, historical responsibility, and intellectual rigor.[10] The Telegraph emphasizes Graves’s rebuke of those who approach witchcraft as ‘fun and games’. It also includes a contemporary reference absent from The Virginia Quarterly Review concerning psychotherapy and the possible curative use of a discipline based on modern witchcraft. The two essays are philosophically consistent — they each assert that the topic of witchcraft demands sobriety, discipline, and wisdom — and they demonstrate Graves’s rhetorical agility as well as his commitment to his beliefs. The Telegraph should be read as a journalistic distillation of The Review: a compressed, visually enriched presentation that reinforces the intellectual commitments authorities, and interpretive boundaries of the academic essay, while it assumes a form that would be more available to a different, and presumably wider, audience.

Steven Stroud is an independent researcher who focuses on mid-twentieth-century witchcraft and folklore. He can be reached at StevenMStroud@icloud.com.

NOTES