Witch-cult hypothesis - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Witch-cult is the term for a hypothetical pre-Christian, pagan religion of Europe that survived into at least the early modern period

Early modern period

In history, the early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions...

. As late as the 19th and early 20th centuries, some scholars had postulated that European witchcraft

European witchcraft

European Witchcraft is witchcraft and magic that is practised primarily in the locality of Europe.-Antiquity:Instances of persecution of witchcraft are documented from Classical Antiquity, paralleling evidence from the Ancient Near East and the Old Testament.In Ancient Greece, for example, Theoris,...

was part of a Satanic

Satanism

Satanism is a group of religions that is composed of a diverse number of ideological and philosophical beliefs and social phenomena. Their shared feature include symbolic association with, admiration for the character of, and even veneration of Satan or similar rebellious, promethean, and...

plot to overthrow Christianity; most of the evidence for this theory was compiled by studying the accounts of the persecutors in the witch trials in early modern Europe

Witch trials in Early Modern Europe

The Witch trials in the Early Modern period were a period of witch hunts between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when across Early Modern Europe, and to some extent in the European colonies in North America, there was a widespread hysteria that malevolent Satanic witches were operating as...

. From the late 19th century an opposing view arose, that witches were not Satanists, but adherents of a surviving underground pagan religion. In the 20th century, the theory gave rise to the neopagan

Neopaganism

Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...

religion of Gardnerianism, with its various offshoots and traditions summarized under the term Wicca

Wicca

Wicca , is a modern Pagan religious movement. Developing in England in the first half of the 20th century, Wicca was popularised in the 1950s and early 1960s by a Wiccan High Priest named Gerald Gardner, who at the time called it the "witch cult" and "witchcraft," and its adherents "the Wica."...

.

The theory was pioneered by Romanticist

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

and free-thinking authors such as Karl Ernst Jarcke

Karl Ernst Jarcke

Karl Ernst Jarcke was a German publisher and professor of criminal law, who took a conservative stance towards revolutionary movements in the early nineteenth century....

and Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet was a French historian. He was born in Paris to a family with Huguenot traditions.-Early life:His father was a master printer, not very prosperous, and Jules assisted him in the actual work of the press...

in the 19th century, but received its most prominent exposition with Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray

Margaret Alice Murray was a prominent British Egyptologist and anthropologist. Primarily known for her work in Egyptology, which was "the core of her academic career," she is also known for her propagation of the Witch-cult hypothesis, the theory that the witch trials in the Early Modern period of...

's 1921 book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, and her contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica

Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

. Scholars have criticised the theory and the general consensus is that the witch cult never existed and is entirely pseudohistorical

Pseudohistory

Pseudohistory is a pejorative term applied to a type of historical revisionism, often involving sensational claims whose acceptance would require rewriting a significant amount of commonly accepted history, and based on methods that depart from standard historiographical conventions.Cryptohistory...

, although vestigial pagan magical and spiritual practices were sometimes implicated in witchcraft, and contributed to witchcraft stereotypes.

Gerald Gardner

Gerald Gardner

Gerald Brousseau Gardner , who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and...

claimed that he had discovered the New Forest Coven

New Forest coven

The New Forest coven were a group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who allegedly met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s...

, a group still practising the religion (which he called Witchcraft) in his 1954 book, Witchcraft Today
Witchcraft Today
In the book Gardner also repeats the claim, which had originated with Matilda Joslyn Gage, that 9 million victims were killed in the European witch-hunts." Current scholarly estimates of the number of people executed for witchcraft during this time period vary between about 40,000 and 100,000.The...

, a claim which was endorsed by Murray. Similarly, Sybil Leek

Sybil Leek

Sybil Leek was an English witch, astrologer, psychic, and occult author. She wrote more than sixty books on occult and esoteric subjects...

, Robert Cochrane

Roy Bowers

Robert Cochrane , who was born as Roy Bowers, was an English Neopagan witch who founded the tradition known as Cochrane's Craft, which is seen by some to be a form of Wicca but is sometimes considered distinct from it due to Cochrane's opposition to both Gerald Gardner and Gardnerian Wicca.Born...

, Charles Cardell

Charles Cardell

Charles Cardell was an English Wiccan who propagated his own tradition of the Craft, which was distinct from that of Gerald Gardner. Cardell's tradition of Wicca was based around a form of the Horned God known as Atho, and worked with a coven that met in the grounds of his estate in Surrey. His...

, Rosaleen Norton

Rosaleen Norton

Rosaleen "Roie" Norton , who used the craft name of Thorn, was an Australian artist and occultist, in the latter capacity adhering to a form of pantheistic Neopagan Witchcraft or Wicca which was devoted to the god Pan...

and Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders (Wiccan)

Alex Sanders , born Orrell Alexander Carter, was an English occultist and High Priest in the Neopagan religion of Wicca, responsible for founding the tradition of Alexandrian Wicca during the 1960s. He was a figure who often appeared in tabloid newspapers...

also made claims to having been members of a family line of adherents to the witch-cult. Some contemporary Wiccans have since distanced themselves from the theory.

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

Christendom

Christendom, or the Christian world, has several meanings. In a cultural sense it refers to the worldwide community of Christians, adherents of Christianity...

. 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

Evil eye

The evil eye is a look that is believed by many cultures to be able to cause injury or bad luck for the person at whom it is directed for reasons of envy or dislike...

, 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
Malleus Maleficarum
The Malleus Maleficarum is an infamous treatise on witches, written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer, an Inquisitor of the Catholic Church, and was first published in Germany in 1487...

. 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

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

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 they were determined largely by the expectations of the interrogators, partly under torture, and free association on the part of the accused, and reflect only popular imagination of the times. Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for his Il formaggio e I vermi which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.- Biography :The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, he was born...

and Éva Pócs

Éva Pócs

Éva Pócs is associate professor in the Department of Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology at Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, Hungary, and president of the Folklore Section of the Hungarian Ethnographic Society. She is an author of several books dealing with supernatural beliefs and patterns of...

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
Benandanti
The Benandanti were an agrarian fertility cult in the Friuli district of Northern Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Between 1575 and 1675, the Benandanti were tried as heretics or witches under the Roman Inquisition, and their beliefs assimilated to Satanism...

, the "good walkers" who believed that they combat witches (streghe) by magical means. The benandanti were persecuted for heresy in the period of 1575 to 1675.

History of the theory

Pre-Murray

Witchcraft and witches were again popularized in 18th century Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, which was in part a counter-movement to the Enlightenment.

In 1749, the Italian Girolamo Tartarotti

Girolamo Tartarotti

Girolamo Tartarotti was an Italian author.He is notable for his Congresso notturno delle lammie and Apologia del Congresso notturno delle lammie in which he attacked belief in the existence of witches as depicted by the Church. Tartarotti rejected the idea of supernatural powers related to the...

made the claim that the religion persecuted in the witch-hunt was largely influenced by pagan traditions and iconography, though he did not claim that it was a pagan religion itself. He did this in his 1749 treatise De Congresso Notturno Delle Lammie (On the Nocturnal Meeting of Witches), expanded in 1751 as the book Apologia del Congresso Notturno Delle Lammie (Defense of the Nocturnal Meeting of Witches), which defended his argument in the light of criticism.

In 1828, the German Karl Ernst Jarcke

Karl Ernst Jarcke

Karl Ernst Jarcke was a German publisher and professor of criminal law, who took a conservative stance towards revolutionary movements in the early nineteenth century....

, a Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Berlin, was the first to claim that the religion persecuted in the witch hunt was not Satanic, but was in fact pagan in origin, but he only added it in a brief commentary to the records of a German witch trial that were being published in a professional journal. Jarcke's claim was that paganism had lingered on amongst the peasants after Christianisation, and that it had then been declared Satanism by the Church. He further theorised that the pagan religion evolved into Satanism, with the horned deity being considered to be Satan by its followers.

Jarcke's theories were taken up and adapted by another German, Franz-Josef Mone in 1839. Mone was a staunch Roman Catholic and also a Germanic romanticist

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, and disagreed that the pagan cult (which he believed had involved human sacrifice

Human sacrifice

Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings as part of a religious ritual . Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general. Human sacrifice has been practised in various cultures throughout history...

and nocturnal orgies) had been Germanic in origin, but must have been Hellenic instead, based upon the mystery cults

Greco-Roman mysteries

Mystery religions, sacred Mysteries or simply mysteries, were religious cults of the Greco-Roman world, participation in which was reserved to initiates....

that had been brought to Germany by Greek slaves.

In 1844 Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie and, more popularly, as one of the Brothers Grimm, as the editor of Grimm's Fairy...

, one of the Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...

, made the claim that "the early modern image of the witch was a conflation of pagan traditions with later mediaeval stereotypes of heresy"; however, he did not claim that the witch cult had actually been a pagan religion.

In 1862, French historian Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet

published La Sorcière
Satanism and Witchcraft
Satanism And Witchcraft is a book by Jules Michelet on the history of witchcraft, published, originally in French, in 1862. The first English translation was published in London in 1863. According to Michelet, medieval witchcraft was an act of popular rebellion against the oppression of feudalism...

(meaning The Sorceress), in which he adapted the theory further. Michelet, who was a liberal and who despised both the Roman Catholic Church

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

and absolute monarchies, claimed that the Witch Cult had been practised by the peasants in opposition to Roman Catholicism, which was practised by the upper classes. He claimed that the witches had been mostly women (he greatly admired the feminine gender, once claiming 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 worshipped the god Pan

Pan (mythology)

Pan , in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein , meaning "to pasture." He has the hindquarters, legs,...

, who had become equated with the Christian figure of the Devil over time. When Michelet's La Sorciere was first published in France, it was, according to historian Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton is an English historian who specializes in the study of Early Modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and contemporary Paganism. A reader in the subject at the University of Bristol, Hutton has published fourteen books and has appeared on British television and radio...

, "greeted with silence from French literary critics, apparently because they recognised that it was not really history".

In 1893, an American woman, Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Joslyn Gage

Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage was a suffragist, a Native American activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was "born with a hatred of oppression".-Early activities:...

, published Woman, Church and State, in which she claimed that in the prehistoric world, humanity had been matriarchal

Matriarchy

A matriarchy is a society in which females, especially mothers, have the central roles of political leadership and moral authority. It is also sometimes called a gynocratic or gynocentric society....

, worshipping 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

Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson FRS was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the disciplineof mathematical statistics....

, who was the professor of Applied Mathematics at University College London

University College London

University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...

and an amateur historian and anthropologist, expanded on Michelet's theory. Pearson agreed with the theory of a prehistoric matriarchal society, and concured with Gage that the witch-cult was a survival of it. Pearson theorised that during the Christian era, the religion became focused around a male deity, which was then equated with the Christian Devil. Pearson also made the claim that Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

had been 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
Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches is a book composed by the American folklorist Charles Leland that was published in 1899. It contains what he believed was the religious text of a group of pagan witches in Tuscany, Italy that documented their beliefs and rituals, although various historians and...

, which he claimed had been a sacred text for Italian witches. It made no mention of a horned god

Horned God

The Horned God is one of the two primary deities found in some European pagan religions. He is often given various names and epithets, and represents the male part of the religion's duotheistic theological system, the other part being the female Triple Goddess. In common Wiccan belief, he is...

, but did mention a male deity known as Lucifer

Lucifer

Traditionally, Lucifer is a name that in English generally refers to the devil or Satan before being cast from Heaven, although this is not the original meaning of the term. In Latin, from which the English word is derived, Lucifer means "light-bearer"...

, as well as a female deity, the goddess Diana

Diana (mythology)

In Roman mythology, Diana was the goddess of the hunt and moon and birthing, being associated with wild animals and woodland, and having the power to talk to and control animals. She was equated with the Greek goddess Artemis, though she had an independent origin in Italy...

. Leland's work would provide much of the inspiration for the neopagan witchcraft religion of Stregheria

Stregheria

Stregheria is a form of ethnic Italian form of Wicca originating in the United States, popularized by Raven Grimassi since the 1980s. Stregheria is sometimes referred to as La Vecchia Religione The word stregheria is an archaic Italian word for "witchcraft", the modern Italian word being...

Murray

In 1921 Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray

published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, in which she formulated a theory of a pan-European cult. However, she claimed that she had not previously read the studies of Michelet or Leland, but instead only started researching the topic after someone suggested it to her in Glastonbury

Glastonbury

Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset, England, situated at a dry point on the low lying Somerset Levels, south of Bristol. The town, which is in the Mendip district, had a population of 8,784 in the 2001 census...

, the legendary resting place of King Arthur

King Arthur

King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...

in southern England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. Prior to writing her book, she had written two articles on the theory in the 1917 and 1920 journals of the Folk-Lore Society, and further ones in the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Scottish Historical Review.

The historian Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton

, a later critic of Murray, said that her first book "rested upon a small amount of archival research, with extensive use of printed trial records in 19th century editions, plus early modern pamphlets and works of demonology", although he also noted that "the book was generally dry and clinical, and every assertion was meticulously footnoted to a source, with lavish quotation". He said that she mixed elements from various different accounts of the witch hunt, mostly from Scotland, and fitted them together to form a set of beliefs and practices which she asserted were practiced as an organised religion across western Europe.

According to The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, the witch-cult had been a pre-Christian, nature-based religion that the Christian authorities had labelled "witchcraft" and persecuted. She claimed that the religion had been based around sexual polarity as the key force behind nature, and they displayed this by having male and females practising together in their rituals. Murray claimed that the deity of the Witches could appear in both male, or female form, who had been seen as the Roman deities Diana

Diana (mythology)

and Dianus. For this reason she called it the Dianic cult. However, Murray noted that over the centuries, Diana's role in the faith had diminished, and Dianus, who was depicted as a horned god

Horned God

, became the main deity, explaining why in the accounts of the witch persecutions, worship of a goddess was not mentioned.

Murray claimed that these witches met in groups known as coven

Coven

A coven or covan is a name used to describe a gathering of witches or in some cases vampires. Due to the word's association with witches, a gathering of Wiccans, followers of the witchcraft-based neopagan religion of Wicca, is also described as a coven....

s, which were led by a High Priest

High priest

The term "high priest" usually refers either to an individual who holds the office of ruler-priest, or to one who is the head of a religious caste.-Ancient Egypt:...

, who dressed in animal skins, and which accounted for the witch-hunters' belief that the Devil himself appeared to the coven. She claimed that the coven met during esbat

Esbat

An esbat is a coven meeting other than one of the Sabbats within Wicca and other Wiccan-influenced forms of Neopaganism. Janet and Stewart Farrar describe esbats as an opportunity for a "love feast, healing work, psychic training and all."...

s to do business, and held sabbats that all local pagans attended, on the festivals of Candlemas, May Day

May Day

May Day on May 1 is an ancient northern hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday; it is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures....

, Lammas

Lammas

In some English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere, August 1 is Lammas Day , the festival of the wheat harvest, and is the first harvest festival of the year. On this day it was customary to bring to church a loaf made from the new crop...

and All Hallows. She cited both Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

and Gilles de Rais

Gilles de Rais

Gilles de Montmorency-Laval , Baron de Rais, was a Breton knight, a leader in the French army and a companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. He is best known as a prolific serial killer of children...

as members of the cult.

Many people at the time, such as folklorist Charlotte Gomme and Henry Balfour

Henry Balfour

Henry Balfour FRS was a British archaeologist, and first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum.He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Museums Association, the Folklore Society, the Royal Geographical Society. and a Fellow of the Royal Society-Works:*, Rivington, Percival & Co.,...

, were impressed by Murray's theories, though there were critics. She even wrote the entry on Witchcraft for the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

in 1929, an entry that lasted until 1968.

The Roman Catholic priest Montague Summers

Montague Summers

Augustus Montague Summers was an eccentric English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe...

, a contemporary of Murray's, had already proposed that witchcraft represented a real historical cult; he remarked of Murray's theory "that is a most ingenious suggestion, but a wholly untenable hypothesis", and continued to maintain, in his The History of Witchcraft and Demonology of 1926, that it had been entirely Satanic

Satanism

in origin. Summers' theories have been equally dismissed by modern historians. Similarly, English historian C. L'Estrange Ewen wrote in 1929 and 1933 that witchcraft was not paganism, but a semi-organised cult of Satanism, rival to Christianity, with hundreds of thousands of adherents across Europe committed to performing acts of evil. He believed this cult had grown out of Christianity, but had also been adopted by "heathen cults desiring more impressive supplications than old wives' charms"; while he was generally dismissive of Murray's theories he agreed that in certain times and places it could manifest as the kind of "joyous religion" she had described.

Murray followed her initial book with The God of the Witches in 1933, which was similar to her previous book but was more populist in tone. She added new research on the subject of the Horned God

Horned God

, which she claimed was a deity worshipped in the paleolithic

Paleolithic

The Paleolithic Age, Era or Period, is a prehistoric period of human history distinguished by the development of the most primitive stone tools discovered , and covers roughly 99% of human technological prehistory...

and depicted on rock paintings, and also by many ancient peoples, such as the Celts with their horned deity Cernunnos

Cernunnos

Cernunnos is the conventional name given in Celtic studies to depictions of the horned god of Celtic polytheism. The name itself is only attested once, on the 1st-century Pillar of the Boatmen, but depictions of a horned or antlered figure, often seated in a "lotus position" and often associated...

, and the Greeks with their Pan

Pan (mythology)

.

In 1938, in response to Murray's criticisms of his 1929 work, Ewen launched a vociferous attack on her scholarship, dismissing her theory as "vapid balderdash". Another contemporary critic, religious scholar Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...

, said that "neither the documents with which she chose to illustrate her hypothesis nor the method of her interpretation are convincing"

In 1954, she published The Divine King of England, in which she greatly extended on the theory, taking in an influence from Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer . It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes...

, an anthropological book that made the claim that societies all over the world sacrificed their kings to the deities of nature. In this book, she theorised that all the monarchs of England had followed this religion, and those that had died prematurely had been killed as a sacrifice. In the book she also made the claim that Thomas Becket

Thomas Becket

Thomas Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion...

, the murdered Archbishop of Canterbury, had been killed as a replacement for the king.

Historian Ronald Hutton

Ronald Hutton

criticised Murray's theory in both The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy and Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Hutton claimed that her theories "had the curious status of an orthodoxy which was believed by everybody except for those who happened to be experts in the subject". Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander concurred in their A New History of Witchcraft, stating "Murray's use of sources in general is appalling".

Post-Murray

During the 1930s and 1940s, Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...

organised a branch of the SS to undertake the largest survey of witch-hunt trial records in Europe ever taken, with the dual aim of using it as anti-Christian propaganda, to claim that the inquisition had been a repression of an indigenous Völkisch
Völkisch movement
The volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic"...

Celto-Germanic nature religion, and as evidence for reconstructing that religion. This prompted Stuart Clark to dub the Nazi regime "Europe's first and only 'pro-witch' government." One pamphlet, the 1935 The Christian Witch Craze, claimed that the witch-hunts were an attempt to exterminate "Aryan womanhood".

While Murray's theory had received some negative critical attention at the time of its first publication, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that her books became best sellers, and were to influence both popular and historical writers.

In the 1950s, several British occultists claimed they had found remnants of the surviving Witch Cult. The first of these was Gerald Gardner

Gerald Gardner

, who claimed to have discovered a coven of such witches - the New Forest Coven

New Forest coven

The New Forest coven were a group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who allegedly met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s...

, in 1939. Gardner said that he was concerned that the religion would die out, and so inititated more members into it through his Bricket Wood coven

Bricket Wood coven

The Bricket Wood coven, or Hertfordshire coven was a coven of Gardnerian Witches founded in the 1940s by Gerald Gardner. It was notable for being the first coven in the Gardnerian line, though having its supposed origins in the pre-Gardnerian New Forest coven...

. The tradition that he started became Gardnerian Wicca

Gardnerian Wicca

Gardnerian Wicca, or Gardnerian Witchcraft, is a mystery cult tradition or denomination in the neopagan religion of Wicca, whose members can trace initiatory descent from Gerald Gardner. The tradition is itself named after Gardner , a British civil servant and scholar of magic...

. The New Forest witch Sybil Leek

Sybil Leek

Sybil Leek was an English witch, astrologer, psychic, and occult author. She wrote more than sixty books on occult and esoteric subjects...

made a similar claim, stating that she followed the religion as many of her family had previously done, and a similar claim came from the Australian artist Rosaleen Norton

Rosaleen Norton

, whose family had been of Welsh

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

origin. Charles Cardell

Charles Cardell

also made the claim of a hereditary lineage of the witch-cult, and he posited that the horned deity of the witches was known as Atho. Other Britons soon made the claim that they were members of a long line of family Witches. Robert Cochrane

Roy Bowers

made such a claim, and ran a coven called the Clan of Tubal Cain; he inspired the founding of several movements, including the 1734 Tradition

1734 Tradition

The 1734 Tradition is a tradition of Traditional Witchcraft founded by the American Joseph Wilson, who developed it between 1964 and 1972 and founded the tradition in late 1973 and early 1974. It was largely based upon the teachings which he received from an English Traditional Witch namedRobert...

. Alex Sanders

Alex Sanders (Wiccan)

also made such a claim, and founded Alexandrian Wicca

Alexandrian Wicca

Alexandrian Wicca is a tradition of the Neopagan religion of Wicca, founded by Alex Sanders who, with his wife Maxine Sanders, established the tradition in the United Kingdom in the 1960s...

; however, Sanders turned out to be a Gardnerian initiate and had based Alexandrian ritual on Gardnerian Wicca. In 1974 E.W. Lidell made the claim that the occultist Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...

had been initiated into the witch-cult in 1899 or 1900, after being introduced to it through Allan Bennett, a Golden Dawn

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced theurgy and spiritual development...

friend of his. Lideel continued his claim by saying that the coven's High Priestess expelled Crowley for being "a dirty minded, evilly disposed, vicious little monster". No substantiating evidence has, however, been produced for this.

From the 1960s Carlo Ginzburg

Carlo Ginzburg

documented the beliefs of a number of early modern groups of sorcerers, seers and healers. He claimed they were rooted in pre-Christian paganism, and credited Murray with a "correct intuition" in identifying the remnants of a pre-Christian 'religion of Diana', and in believing that witch-trial testimonies did at times represent actual or perceived experiences. Ginzburg's findings are now corroborated by several other authors.

In the 1970s, with the long-standing criticisms of Murray's thesis by the small number of experts in the field having been ignored by more popular writers, there was a new wave of denunciations by scholars.

In 1985 Classical historian Georg Luck, in his Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds, theorised that the origins of the Witch-cult may have appeared in late antiquity as a faith primarily designed to worship the Horned God, stemming from the merging of Cernunnos

Cernunnos

, a horned god of the Celts, with the Greco-Roman Pan/Faunus

Faunus

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Faunus was the horned god of the forest, plains and fields; when he made cattle fertile he was called Inuus. He came to be equated in literature with the Greek god Pan....

, a combination of gods which he posits created a new deity, around which the remaining pagans, those refusing to convert to Christianity, rallied and that this deity provided the prototype for later Christian conceptions of the Devil

Devil

The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...

, and his worshippers were cast by the Church as witches.

The theory continues to be supported by some Occult

Occult

The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...

ic, New Age

New Age

The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...

and Neopagan authors, such as Nigel Jackson.

Early modern precedents

History of the theory

Pre-Murray

Murray

Post-Murray

See also