page_title: Witch-cult hypothesis
section_title: Michelet, Gage, and Leland
hierarchical_section_title: Witch-cult hypothesis / The early theory / Michelet, Gage, and Leland
caption_attribution_description: Title page from Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
context_page_description: The witch-cult hypothesis is a discredited theory that proposes that the witch trials of the Early Modern period were an attempt to suppress a pre-Christian, pagan religion that had survived the Christianisation of Europe. According to its proponents, the witch cult revolved around the worship of a Horned God of fertility, the underworld, the hunt and the hunted, whose Christian persecutors referred to him as the Devil, and whose followers participated in 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 the French historian Jules Michelet, the American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the American folklorist Charles Leland later in that century. The hypothesis received its most prominent exposition when it was adopted by a British Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, who presented her version of it in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, before further expounding it in books such as The God of the Witches and in her contribution to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
context_section_description: In 1862, French historian Jules Michelet published La Sorcière (The Witch), in which he adapted the theory further. Michelet, who was a liberal and who despised both the Roman Catholic Church and absolute monarchies, claimed that the Witch Cult had been practiced by the peasants in opposition to Roman Catholicism, which was practiced by the upper classes. He claimed that the witches had been mostly women (he greatly admired the feminine gender, once claiming that it was the superior of the two), and that they had been great healers, whose knowledge was the basis of much of modern medicine. He believed that they worshiped the god Pan, who had become equated with the Christian figure of the Devil over time.  When Michelet's La Sorcière was first published in France, it was, according to historian Ronald Hutton, "greeted with silence from French literary critics, apparently because they recognized that it was not really history".
  In 1893, an American suffragist, Matilda Joslyn Gage, published Woman, Church and State, in which she claimed that in the prehistoric world, humanity had been matriarchal, worshiping a great Goddess, and that the witches of the witch cult had been pagan priestesses preserving this religion.
  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. Pearson agreed with the theory of a prehistoric matriarchal society, and concurred with Gage that the witch-cult was a survival of it. Pearson theorized that during the Christian era, the religion began to emphasise the male deity, which was then equated with the Christian Devil. Pearson also made the claim that Joan of Arc had been one of the last few priestesses of the religion. He was, however, unlike Michelet or Gage, opposed to the group and to Goddess worship in general, believing that it was primitive and savage.
  Charles Leland was an American folklorist and occultist who travelled around Europe in the latter 19th century and was a supporter of Michelet's theories. In 1899 he published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which he claimed had been a sacred text for Italian witches. It made no mention of a horned god, but did mention a male deity known as Lucifer, as well as a female deity, the goddess Diana. Leland's work would provide much of the inspiration for the neopagan witchcraft religion of Stregheria.
caption: 1899 cover of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
exif: {}