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.
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.
[3] 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.
[6] The first modern scholar to advance the claim 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.
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.
[7] 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.
[8] 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.
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.
[9] 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.
[14] 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.
[18] Pursuing this interest, she published the paper "Egyptian Elements in the Grail Romance" in the journal Ancient Egypt, although few agreed with her conclusions and it was criticised by scholars like Jessie Weston for making unsubstantiated leaps with the evidence.
[48][49] Later historian Ronald Hutton commented that The Witch-Cult in Western Europe "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".
[52] Murray followed this book with The God of the Witches in 1931; although similar in content, it was aimed at a mass market audience and published by the popular press Sampson Low.
[53] Whereas the tone in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe had been "dry and academic, the second bubbles with enthusiasm", as her language becomes "emotionally inflated and coloured with religious phraseology"; in particular she refers repeatedly to the cult as "the Old Religion".
[54] In this work she "cut out or toned down" many of the claims of her previous book which would have painted the cult in a bad light, for instance regarding animal and child sacrifice, and also omitted any mention of sex.
Upon initial publication, Murray's thesis gained a favourable reception from many readers, including a number of significant scholars, albeit none of whom were experts in the witch trials.
[61][62] For the 1961 reprint of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Medieval historian Steven Runciman provided a foreword in which he accepted that some of Murray's "minor details may be open to criticism",[63] but in which he was otherwise supportive of her thesis.
When Miss Murray has broadened her study to all the lands where she can find the "cult"; when she has dealt with documents worthier the name of records than the chap-books and the formless reports that have to serve us for the British trials; when she has traced back witch-sabbath and questionary through the centuries of witch and heretic hunting that precede the British; when she has trusted herself to study the work of other students and fairly to weigh their conclusions against her own in the light of the further evidence they may adduce: then perhaps she may have modified her views.
[74] In his review of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe he asserted that she was not acquainted with the "careful general histories by modern scholars" and criticised her for assuming that the trial accounts accurately reflected the accused witches' genuine experiences of witchcraft, regardless of whether those confessions had been obtained through torture and coercion.
"[78] In his 1962 work A Razor for a Goat, Rose asserted that Murray's books on the witch-cult "contain an incredible number of minor errors of fact or of calculation and several inconsistencies of reasoning.
[81] Simpson noted that despite these critical reviews, within the field of British folkloristics Murray's theories were permitted "to pass unapproved but unchallenged, either out of politeness or because nobody was really interested enough to research the topic.
[85] At this time, a variety of scholars across Europe and North America began to publish in-depth studies of the archival records from the witch trials, leaving no doubt that those tried for witchcraft were not practitioners of a surviving pre-Christian religion.
Such critics of Murray included Alan Macfarlane, Erik Midelfort, William Monter, Robert Muchembled, Gerhard Schormann, Bente Alver and Bengt Ankarloo.
[92] She noted that the Murrayite theory was "based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments" and that the discipline of folkloristics had been damaged by its association with Murray, who had been appointed President of the Folklore Society.
In doing so, she identified a trend for them to contrast their own perceived methodologically sound and sceptical interpretations with Murray's "feminised belief" about the witch-cult, hence ignoring any theoretical considerations regarding the male-centric nature of their own perspectives.
[104] Simpson noted that the publication of the Murray thesis in the Encyclopædia Britannica made it accessible to "journalists, film-makers popular novelists and thriller writers", who adopted it "enthusiastically".
[111] Similarly, Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade commented that while Ginzburg's presentation of the benandanti "does not substantiate Murray's entire thesis", it did represent a "well-documented case of the processus through which a popular and archaic secret cult of fertility is transformed into a merely magical, or even black-magical practice under the pressure of the Inquisition.
[114] Echoing these views, in 1999 English historian Ronald Hutton stated that Ginzburg's ideas regarding shamanistic fertility cults were actually "pretty much the opposite" of what Murray had posited.
[117] By taking the example of two women condemned as witches in Milan in 1390, Sibillia Zanni and Pierina de' Bugatis, she states that, even though "we have no proof such a society ever existed, it is not inconceivable that a few inspired individuals might have decided to dramatize, once or repeatedly, the gatherings described in legends"[117] in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.