Witch-cult hypothesis

Based on Wikipedia: Witch-cult hypothesis

Here is one of history's most seductive lies: that the women burned as witches in Early Modern Europe were actually members of an ancient pagan religion, worshipping a Horned God of fertility in secret groves while Christianity spread across the continent like a conquering army. The idea is romantic. It transforms victims into martyrs, persecution into religious war, and chaos into conspiracy. It also happens to be completely false.

But the story of how this theory came to be believed—by scholars, feminists, folklorists, and eventually the founders of modern Wicca—is almost as fascinating as the myth itself.

The Appeal of the Hidden Religion

To understand why the witch-cult hypothesis captured so many imaginations, you first need to understand what the witch trials actually were. Between roughly 1450 and 1750, authorities across Europe executed tens of thousands of people—mostly women—for the supposed crime of witchcraft. This wasn't simply a matter of villagers turning on the local healer or the odd woman living alone at the edge of town. It was an organized campaign against what authorities believed to be a vast Satanic conspiracy.

According to the prosecutors, witches weren't just individual troublemakers casting curses on their neighbors' cattle. They were members of an organized counter-religion, meeting in secret at gatherings called sabbaths, flying through the night on broomsticks, and serving the Devil himself. This idea of a witch-cult—an actual organized conspiracy against Christendom—was central to the persecution. It appears most infamously in the Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting manual published in 1486 that became something like a bestseller of its era.

Then came the Enlightenment, and educated Europeans began to feel rather embarrassed about the whole affair. The consensus shifted: there had never been any witch-cult, of course. The executed had been innocent victims of superstition and hysteria. Case closed.

But this left an uncomfortable gap. If there was no witch-cult, what had people been confessing to? Why were the details of their confessions so consistent across different countries and centuries? Surely there must have been something behind it all.

The German Professors Who Started It All

In 1828, a German law professor named Karl Ernst Jarcke was editing the records of a seventeenth-century witch trial for publication in a legal journal. As he worked through the documents, he developed a theory that seemed to explain everything. What if, he proposed, the witches had been real—not as Satanists, but as practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian religion that had survived among the peasantry long after the official conversion to Christianity?

Jarcke's theory was elegant. The Church, he argued, had misidentified this pagan holdover as Devil worship. Over time, condemned and persecuted, the religion actually did degenerate into something darker. Eventually even the common people turned against it, resulting in the trials.

This was a politically convenient story. It exonerated the Church of outright villainy—they had merely been mistaken, and ultimately responding to popular demand—while still acknowledging that the whole business had been, in retrospect, rather unfortunate. Conservative intellectuals in early nineteenth-century Europe, already anxious about secret societies and revolutionary movements, found the idea of a hidden pagan cult perfectly plausible.

A few years later, in 1839, another German scholar named Franz Josef Mone elaborated on the theory with his own twist. The pagan religion, Mone claimed, wasn't Germanic at all. It had originated among slaves on the northern coast of the Black Sea who had encountered the Greek cults of Hecate and Dionysus—both associated with the moon, magic, and ecstatic rituals—and fused these with their own beliefs. This hybrid religion, worshipping a goat-like god and celebrating nocturnal orgies, eventually made its way into Europe through the slave trade.

There was just one problem with both theories, as the historian Norman Cohn would later point out: neither Jarcke nor Mone could produce a shred of evidence that any pre-Christian gods were still being worshipped in Early Modern Europe. Nor could they explain why there were no records of this supposed witch-cult during the thousand-year gap between Christianization and the witch trials. The religion had supposedly survived all that time in complete secrecy, leaving no trace whatsoever until suddenly appearing in the fifteenth century.

The French Romantic and the American Feminist

Academic theories have a way of escaping the academy, and the witch-cult hypothesis proved irresistible to writers with axes to grind.

Jules Michelet was a French historian who despised both the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy with considerable passion. In 1862, he published La Sorcière—"The Witch"—which transformed the witch-cult hypothesis into something approaching a revolutionary manifesto. In Michelet's telling, the witch-cult was a peasant religion of resistance against the twin oppressions of Church and crown. The witches themselves were heroic healers, mostly women, preserving ancient wisdom in the face of persecution. They worshipped Pan, the Greek god of nature and wild places, whom ignorant churchmen had mistaken for the Devil.

French literary critics greeted La Sorcière with what the historian Ronald Hutton describes as "silence"—they could see it wasn't really history. But the book found an audience among those who wanted to believe in it.

Three decades later, an American suffragist named Matilda Joslyn Gage took the hypothesis further still. In her 1893 book Woman, Church and State, she argued that prehistoric humanity had been matriarchal—ruled by women and devoted to the worship of a great Goddess. The witches of the Early Modern period, in Gage's view, were the last priestesses of this ancient religion, guardians of feminine spiritual power being systematically destroyed by patriarchal Christianity.

This was history as wish fulfillment. There is no archaeological or anthropological evidence for a universal prehistoric matriarchy or Goddess worship. But the idea proved enormously influential, echoing through feminist spirituality movements to this day.

The Curious Case of Margaret Murray

All of these earlier theorists were, in various ways, amateurs dabbling in a field outside their expertise. What the witch-cult hypothesis needed was an academic champion with proper credentials. It found one in the most unlikely of places: the Egyptology department at University College London.

Margaret Murray was a respected scholar who had spent years working with the famous archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie on Egyptian excavations. But when the First World War broke out in 1914, the work stopped. Students and staff left to join the war effort. Excavations in Egypt became impossible. Murray, stuck in London with time on her hands, began exploring other interests.

A stint as a volunteer nurse in France led to a recovery period in Glastonbury, the English town famous for its connections to King Arthur and the Holy Grail. Murray became fascinated by the folklore of the place and started down a path that would lead her far from Egyptian tombs.

In 1921, she published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The book presented the witch-cult hypothesis with the full apparatus of academic respectability: footnotes, primary sources, careful analysis. Murray argued that the witches had been practitioners of a pre-Christian fertility religion—she called it "the Dianic cult"—which had survived in Europe for centuries alongside Christianity. The Devil of the trial accounts, she claimed, was actually the witches' own god, a male deity often represented by a man in costume at their gatherings.

Murray's version of the witch-cult was highly organized. Witches belonged to covens of exactly thirteen members, each led by an officer and ultimately answerable to a "Grand Master." They celebrated festivals at predictable times of year—May Eve, November Eve, the solstices. Their gatherings, called sabbaths, were "joyous" religious celebrations, while smaller meetings called esbats handled administrative business.

The book was a success. Murray followed it with The God of the Witches in 1931, which focused on the male deity at the center of her hypothetical religion. She was even invited to write the entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopædia Britannica, which meant that for decades, anyone looking up the topic in the world's most authoritative reference work would encounter her theories presented as established fact.

The Problems with Murray's Theory

There was just one difficulty: almost none of it was true.

Murray had committed what might be called the cardinal sin of historical research. Rather than following the evidence wherever it led, she had started with a conclusion and selected only the evidence that supported it. The historian Norman Cohn, who spent years dismantling the witch-cult hypothesis, identified several fundamental flaws in her methodology.

First, Murray treated the confessions of accused witches as reliable testimony. But these confessions were typically extracted under torture, or at least the credible threat of torture. When someone is being questioned while strapped to a rack, or knows that the rack is waiting in the next room, they tend to say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear. The consistency of witch trial confessions across different countries doesn't indicate an actual consistent religion—it indicates that inquisitors across Europe were working from the same playbooks and asking the same leading questions.

Second, Murray cherry-picked her evidence ruthlessly. She focused on the small number of trial records that seemed to support her theory while ignoring the vast majority that contradicted it. She presented fragments of testimony stripped of their context, making the accused sound like sincere believers when the full record made clear they were terrified prisoners saying whatever might save their lives.

Third, and perhaps most damning, Murray couldn't explain where her witch-cult had been for a thousand years. If this religion had survived from pre-Christian times, where were the records of it during the early Middle Ages? Where were the heresy trials before the fifteenth century? The silence was total.

Professional historians of the witch trials never accepted Murray's theory. But it took until the 1960s and 1970s for scholars like Cohn and Elliot Rose to publish detailed rebuttals that reached a wider audience. By then, Murray's ideas had already escaped into popular culture and taken root in ways that would prove difficult to dislodge.

The Birth of Wicca

In the years after World War II, something peculiar happened in England. A retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner began claiming that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of witches—the very witch-cult that Murray had described.

Gardner published several books on the subject, starting with the novel High Magic's Aid in 1949 and the nonfiction Witchcraft Today in 1954. He described an organized religion with covens, a Horned God, a goddess figure, seasonal festivals, and many of the other elements Murray had attributed to the medieval witch-cult. The religion he called Wicca.

Whether Gardner genuinely believed he had discovered Murray's witch-cult, or whether he knowingly created a new religion while claiming ancient lineage, remains debated. What's clear is that Wicca's theology and practice drew heavily on Murray's books, as well as on ceremonial magic traditions, the writings of Aleister Crowley, and various other sources. The "ancient" rituals were actually quite modern compositions.

Wicca spread from England to the United States in the 1960s and flourished there, branching into numerous traditions and eventually becoming the foundation for much of contemporary Paganism. Today there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Wiccans and Wicca-influenced practitioners worldwide. Many no longer claim that their religion descends directly from the medieval witch-cult—contemporary Wiccans are generally aware that this was always more mythical than historical—but the debt to Murray's imagination remains visible in the religion's structure and symbolism.

What the Accused Actually Believed

If the witch-cult hypothesis is false, does that mean the accused witches believed nothing at all? Were the trials purely a matter of persecution imposed from above onto innocent victims?

The reality, as several historians have argued, is more complicated and more interesting than either Murray's organized cult or simple innocence.

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg spent years studying the records of the Inquisition in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. There he discovered something remarkable: a group called the benandanti, which translates roughly as "good walkers." These were people who believed they left their bodies at night to do spiritual battle against witches, fighting to protect their community's crops and welfare.

The benandanti weren't witches themselves—quite the opposite, they saw themselves as opponents of witchcraft. But their beliefs clearly drew on pre-Christian folk traditions about spiritual flight and nocturnal combat. When the Inquisition encountered them in the late sixteenth century, the inquisitors tried to fit the benandanti into their existing categories of heresy and witchcraft. Over several generations of trials, the benandanti's own understanding of what they were doing gradually shifted until they began describing themselves in terms the inquisitors expected.

Ginzburg's research suggests that folk beliefs about spiritual experiences—dreams of flight, visions of battles between good and evil spirits, encounters with the dead—existed throughout medieval and Early Modern Europe. These beliefs weren't a single organized religion, and they weren't worship of a Horned God. But they were something: fragments of older traditions, never fully Christianized, surviving in rural communities and occasionally bubbling up into the written record when their practitioners ran afoul of authorities.

The Hungarian historian Éva Pócs has made similar arguments about belief in fairies, spirits of the dead, and various forms of spiritual journey across European folk culture. These were real beliefs held by real people. But they weren't a witch-cult. They were the scattered, inconsistent, locally varying folk traditions that exist in any culture—the kind of thing that gets called "superstition" by educated elites and survives precisely because it's too diffuse and informal to be rooted out.

The Persistence of the Myth

Why has the witch-cult hypothesis proven so hard to kill? Margaret Murray died in 1963, and scholarly debunking began almost immediately afterward. Yet the idea of an ancient witch religion keeps reappearing in popular culture, in feminist spirituality, in novels and films and television series.

Part of the answer is simply that it's a good story. The image of wise women preserving ancient knowledge in the face of patriarchal persecution speaks to real injustices, even if the specific historical claim is false. The witch trials did happen. Women were disproportionately targeted. The accusers were often driven by misogyny, fear, and the desire to control female behavior. None of this requires the accused to have actually been members of a secret religion.

But there's something deeper at work too. The witch-cult hypothesis offers a kind of origin story for modern Paganism and feminist spirituality—a direct line connecting contemporary practice to an ancient tradition. Without that connection, Wicca and related movements are simply new religions invented in the twentieth century. With it, they become the revival of something immeasurably old and deep.

The truth, of course, is that there's nothing wrong with being a new religion. Christianity was new once. Islam was new once. Every tradition begins somewhere. But the appeal of ancient roots is powerful, and the witch-cult hypothesis offered exactly that appeal to people hungry for spiritual alternatives to mainstream religion.

The Literature of the Witch-Cult

Before the hypothesis was debunked, it inspired some remarkable works of fiction. The Scottish author John Buchan, better known for his spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, wrote a novel called Witch Wood in 1927 that drew directly on Murray's theories. Set in seventeenth-century Scotland, it depicts a secret coven of witches meeting in the forest, their rituals descending from pre-Christian times.

Robert Graves, the poet and classicist, incorporated the witch-cult hypothesis into his 1948 book The White Goddess, an eccentric work of mythography that traces a supposed prehistoric religion of goddess worship through European poetry and folklore. The White Goddess was enormously influential on later Paganism and goddess spirituality movements, despite being—like Murray's work—more imaginative reconstruction than historical scholarship.

Perhaps the most interesting literary engagement with these ideas came earlier, in 1926, with Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel Lolly Willowes. Warner's protagonist, a middle-aged spinster who escapes her stifling family to live alone in the countryside and eventually makes a pact with the Devil, is less about literal witch-cult membership than about female independence and the desire to escape social constraints. But the novel appeared at exactly the moment when Murray's ideas were gaining traction, and it can be read as a meditation on what the figure of the witch meant to women in the early twentieth century.

What Remains

The witch-cult hypothesis is dead as history. No serious scholar today believes that the accused witches of the Early Modern period were members of an organized pre-Christian religion. The evidence simply isn't there, and the evidence that Murray and others cited turns out, on closer examination, to support no such conclusion.

But something else remains. Folk beliefs in spiritual experiences, in encounters with supernatural beings, in healing magic and harmful magic—these are real features of human culture across time and place. The witch trials arose from a collision between these diffuse folk beliefs and the organized demonology of educated elites who insisted on seeing a vast conspiracy where there was only scattered tradition.

And something else remains too: the living religions that grew, in part, from the fertile ground of Murray's imagination. Wicca and contemporary Paganism may not be the ancient traditions their founders claimed, but they are real traditions now, practiced by real people seeking meaning and community and connection to the natural world. The myth of the witch-cult turned out to be generative, even if it wasn't true.

In the end, the witch-cult hypothesis tells us less about what medieval peasants actually believed than about what nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers wanted to believe about them. It's a story about modernity looking backward and seeing its own dreams reflected in the past. That's not history. But it is, in its own way, a kind of truth.