Witch-cult hypothesis
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 supposed '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 specialists in 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 claims made by accused witches were truthful, and not distorted by coercion and torture. Further, despite claims 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 claimed to be 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.
The early theory[edit]
Jarcke and Mone[edit]
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.[3] 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.[3] In his 1749 work Del Congresso Notturno delle Lamie (On the Nocturnal Meeting of Witches), the Italian cleric Girolamo Tartarotti claimed that the stereotype of the witch in Early Modern Europe was influenced by pre-Christian folk beliefs.[4] Similar ideas were echoed by the German folklorist Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology), first published in 1835. Here, he claimed that the witch stereotype reflected a blending of pre-Christian folk traditions with the later Medieval views of heresy.[4] Both Tartarotti and Grimm would subsequently be erroneously cited as claiming that the witches had been members of a surviving pre-Christian cult.[5]
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. 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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[5]
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.[8] 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.[9] 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.[10]