SOME of Dr Margaret Murray's most notable contributions to learning have been in the fields of Egyptology, Near Eastern and Mediterranean archaeology, ethnology, folklore, and witchcraft; it is therefore appropriate that this study in her honour should be related to almost all of these fields of enquiry. It is based to some extent on parts of lectures delivered to the Folk-Lore Society in 1951, and to Section H of the British Association at Bristol in 1955 bodies with which Dr Margaret Murray has had a long and distinguished association. This essay is concerned primarily with the ceremonial 'killing' of objects at funerals, but it is well to start by considering briefly the killing of human beings and animals to accompany the dead. There can be no doubt that in most of these instances the reason
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L. V. Grinsell (1961) studied this question.