Witch-cult hypothesis

The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian, pagan religion that had survived the Christianisation of Europe. According to its proponents, this witch-cult revolved around the worship of a Horned God of fertility whom the Christian persecutors referred to as the Devil, and whose members participated in nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath in which they venerated this deity.

The theory was pioneered by German scholars Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone in the early nineteenth century, before being adopted by the French historian Jules Michelet, American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and American folklorist Charles Leland later in that century. The hypothesis received its most prominent exposition when adopted by the British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), before further expounding it in books like The God of the Witches (1931) and in her contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Although the "Murrayite theory" proved popular among sectors of academia and the general public in the early and mid twentieth century, it was never accepted by specialists in the Early Modern witch trials, who publicly discredited it through in-depth research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s.

Specialists in Europe's Early Modern witchcraft beliefs view the pagan witch-cult theory as pseudohistorical; there is an academic consensus among experts that those accused and executed as witches during the period were not members of any witch religion, whether pre-Christian or Satanic in nature. Critics highlight that the theory rested on a highly selective use of the evidence from the trials, thereby heavily misrepresenting the events and the actions of both the accused and their accusers. Further, they point out that it relied on the erroneous assumption that the claims made by accused witches were truthful and not distorted by coercion and torture. They also note that despite claims that the witch-cult was a pre-Christian survival, there is no evidence of such a pagan witch-cult throughout the intervening Middle Ages.

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