witch-cult hypothesis

What if there really was a "witch-cult" religion in Europe similar to that hypothesized by multiple scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries? It could have any number of different origins, but for the purposes of having a starting point, I'm going to go back a very long time and say it has its...

The witch-cult hypothesis was a theory that the witch trials in Europe were at least partly an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian pagan religion. This theory is often credited to Margaret Murray, but while she did play a major role in popularizing it, it was actually proposed in the early...