The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. According to its proponents, accused witches were actually followers of this alleged religion. They argue that the witch cult revolved around worshiping a Horned God of fertility and the underworld, whom Christian persecutors identified with the Devil, and whose followers held nocturnal rites at the witches' Sabbath.
The theory was pioneered by two German scholars, Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone, in the early nineteenth century, and was adopted by French historian Jules Michelet, American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and American folklorist Charles Leland later that century. The hypothesis received its most prominent exposition when it was adopted by British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), before further expounding 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 sectors of academia and the general public in the early and mid-twentieth century, it was never accepted by scholars of 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 statements made by accused witches were truthful, and not distorted by coercion and torture. Further, despite theories that 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, being 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 represented itself as 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.
Early modern precedents
The witch-hunt of the 16th and 17th centuries was an organized effort by authorities in many countries to destroy a supposed conspiracy of witches thought to pose a deadly threat to Christendom. According to these authorities, witches were numerous, and in conscious alliance with Satan, forming a sort of Satanic counter-religion. Witch-hunts in this sense must be separated from the belief in witches, the evil eye, and other such phenomena, which are common features of folk belief worldwide. The belief that witches are not just individual villains but conspirators organized in a powerful but well-hidden cult is a distinguishing feature of the early modern witch-hunt.
This idea of an organized witch-cult originates in the second half of the 15th century, notoriously expounded in the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum. In the following two centuries, witch trials usually included the charge of membership in a demonic conspiracy, gathering in sabbaths, and similar. It was only with the beginning Age of Enlightenment in the early 18th century, that the idea of an organized witch-cult was abandoned.
Early Modern testimonies of accused witches "confirming" the existence of a witch cult are considered doubtful. Norman Cohn has argued that such testimonies were often given under torture, and that their details were determined mainly by the expectations of the interrogators and by free association on the part of the accused, reflecting only the popular imagination of the times. Carlo Ginzburg and Éva Pócs hold that some of these testimonies can still give insights into the belief systems of the accused. Ginzburg discovered records of a group calling themselves benandanti, the "good walkers" who believed that they combatted witches (streghe) by magical means. The benandanti were persecuted for heresy in the period of 1575 to 1675.
The early theory Jarcke and Mone
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the common belief among educated sectors of the European populace was that there had never been any genuine cult of witches and that all those persecuted and executed as such had been innocent of the alleged crimes. At this time, two figures independently raised the prospect that the witch trials had been influenced by stereotypes and folk customs that had pre-Christian origins. In his 1749 work Del Congresso Notturno delle Lamie (On the Nocturnal Meeting of Witches), the Italian cleric Girolamo Tartarotti wrote that the stereotype of the witch in Early Modern Europe was influenced by pre-Christian folk beliefs. Similar ideas were echoed by the German folklorist Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology), first published in 1835. Here, he wrote that the witch stereotype reflected a blending of pre-Christian folk traditions with the later Medieval views of heresy. Both Tartarotti and Grimm would subsequently be erroneously cited as having stated that the witches had been members of a surviving pre-Christian cult.
The first modern scholar to advance the idea that the witch trials had been designed to wipe out an anti-Christian sect was the German Karl Ernst Jarcke, a professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin. In 1828 he edited the records of a seventeenth-century German witch trial for publication in a legal journal, and included the theory in his own comments. Jarcke suggested that witchcraft had been a pre-Christian religion that survived Christianisation among the rural population, but that after being condemned as Satanism by the Church, it eventually degenerated into genuine Devil-worship and malevolence. At that point, the wider population came to reject it, resulting in the trials. This theory exonerated the Christian Church of blame by asserting that they had been acting on the wishes of the population, while at the same time not accepting the literal intervention of the Devil in human affairs which liberal rationalists disbelieved. In 1832, Felix Mendelssohn adopted similar ideas when composing his orchestral piece, Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, in which a group of pagan villagers pretend to be witches in order to scare away Christians intent on disrupting their Walpurgis Night festivities.
Jarcke's theories were adopted and altered by the German historian Franz Josef Mone in 1839. While serving as director of archives at Baden, he published his ideas in a paper in which he asserted that the pre-Christian religion which degenerated into Satanic witchcraft was not Germanic in origin, but had instead been practised by slaves who had come in contact with the Greek cults of Hecate and Dionysus on the north coast of the Black Sea. According to Mone, these slaves adopted these cults and fused them with their own pagan faiths to form witchcraft, a religion that venerated a goat-like god, celebrated nocturnal orgies and practised poisoning and malevolent magic. This horrified the free-born population both in the pagan period and the Christian era, eventually resulting in the witch trials. However, as English historian Norman Cohn asserted in 1975, "neither of [Jarcke or Mone's] theories are convincing", with neither being able to show any evidence of pre-Christian gods being worshipped in Early Modern Germany or being able to explain why there were no accounts of this witch-cult in between the Christianization and the trials themselves. Both Jarcke and Mone were politically conservative, and their depiction of the threatening witch-cult would have had parallels with the widespread conservative fear of secret societies as bringers of revolution and irreligion in early nineteenth-century Europe.
Michelet, Gage, and Leland
In 1862, French historian Jules Michelet published La Sorcière (The Witch), in which he adapted the theory further. Michelet, a liberal who despised both the Roman Catholic Church and absolute monarchies, wrote that the Witch Cult had been practiced by the peasants in opposition to Roman Catholicism, which was practiced by the upper classes. He wrote that the witches had been mostly women (he greatly admired the feminine sex, once stating that it was the superior of the two), and that they had been great healers, whose knowledge was the basis of much of modern medicine. He believed that they worshiped the god Pan, who had become equated with the Christian figure of the Devil over time. When Michelet's La Sorcière was first published in France, it was, according to historian Ronald Hutton, "greeted with silence from French literary critics, apparently because they recognized that it was not really history".
In 1893, an American suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, published Woman, Church and State, in which she wrote that in the prehistoric world, humanity had been matriarchal, worshiping a great Goddess, and that the witches of the witch cult had been pagan priestesses preserving this religion.
In 1897, the English scholar Karl Pearson, who was the professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London and an amateur historian and anthropologist, expanded on Michelet's theory. Pearson agreed with the theory of a prehistoric matriarchal society, and concurred with Gage that the witch-cult was a survival of it. Pearson theorized that during the Christian era, the religion began to emphasise the male deity, which was then equated with the Christian Devil. Pearson also wrote that Joan of Arc had been one of the last few priestesses of the religion. He was, however, unlike Michelet or Gage, opposed to the group and to Goddess worship in general, believing that it was primitive and savage.
Charles Leland was an American folklorist and occultist who travelled around Europe in the latter 19th century and was a supporter of Michelet's theories. In 1899 he published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which he presented as having been a sacred text for Italian witches. It made no mention of a horned god, but did mention a male deity known as Lucifer, as well as a female deity, the goddess Diana. Leland's work would provide much of the inspiration for the neopagan witchcraft religion of Stregheria.
Impact of Margaret Murray