In 1921, the Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing that the men and women tried and executed for witchcraft across early modern Europe had not been practicing an imaginary crime invented by their persecutors, but were in fact adherents of an organized, surviving pre-Christian fertility religion, centered on a horned god and structured around covens of thirteen members meeting at regular seasonal festivals. Murray drew her evidence primarily from the confessions recorded in witch trial documents, reading their descriptions of sabbats, familiars and pacts with the devil as garbled but genuine accounts of real pagan ritual practice, reinterpreted through a Christian persecutor's hostile lens.
The thesis gained wide acceptance in the following decades, helped considerably by Murray's own academic standing and by her invitation to write the entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where her interpretation appeared for many years as though it were established scholarly consensus rather than one contested theory among others. Murray developed the argument further in a 1933 sequel, The God of the Witches, aimed at a more general readership and further popularizing the witch-cult idea beyond academic circles.
The theory's influence extended well beyond the study of history: it directly shaped how Gerald Gardner and other early figures in the development of modern Wicca understood and presented their own emerging religious movement in the decades that followed.