Witch-cult hypothesis

In the early modern period, between about 1400 and 1775, about 100.000 people werre persecuted for witchcraft, in Europe and British America. Between 40.000 and 60.000 were executed. The witch-cult hypothesis is a theory that says that these people were praticising a pagan religion that had survived the Christianization in Europe. This theory has since been proved to be false. People who follow the theory argue that the supposed 'witch cult' revolved around worshiping a Horned God of fertility and the underworld. Christian persecutors identified this with the Devil. The followers of the held nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.

Francisco de Goya's Witches' Sabbath (1789), which depicts the Devil flanked by Satanic witches. The witch-cult hypothesis states that such stories are based upon a real-life pagan cult that revered a horned god.

Two German scholars, Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone, first wrote about the theory, in the early nineteenth century. French historian Jules Michelet, American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and American folklorist Charles Leland later adopted it in that century. The hypothesis became most famous when it was adopted by British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921). She later wrote about it in books such as The God of the Witches (1931) and her contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica. Although the "Murrayite theory" proved popular among parts of academia and the general public in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was never accepted by specialists in the witch trials, who publicly disproved it through in-depth research during the 1960s and 1970s.

Contemporary experts in European witchcraft beliefs view the 'pagan witch cult' theory as pseudohistorical. There is now an academic consensus that those accused and executed as witches were not followers of any witch religion, pagan or otherwise. Critics highlight several flaws with the theory. It rested on highly selective use of evidence from the trials, thereby heavily misrepresenting the events and the actions of both the accused and their accusers. It also mistakenly assumed that claims made by accused witches were truthful, and not distorted by coercion and torture. Further, despite claims the 'witch cult' was a pre-Christian survival, there is no evidence of such a 'pagan witch cult' throughout the Middle Ages.

The witch-cult hypothesis has influenced literature. It was adapted into fiction in works by John Buchan, Robert Graves, and others. It greatly influenced Wicca, a new religious movement of modern Paganism that emerged in mid-twentieth-century Britain and claimed to be a survival of the 'pagan witch cult'. Since the 1960s, Carlo Ginzburg and other scholars have argued that surviving elements of pre-Christian religion in European folk culture influenced Early Modern stereotypes of witchcraft, but scholars still debate how this may relate, if at all, to the Murrayite witch-cult hypothesis.