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 19th-century by German scholars Karl Ernst Jarcke and Franz Josef Mone.
The witch-cult hypothesis was discredited by comprehensive studies conducted in the 60s and 70s. But what if those studies demonstrated the opposite? What if the theory was actually true? Would it affect anything?