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.
