The Witch-Cult in Western Europe  The Witch-Cult in Western Europe is a 1921 anthropological book by Margaret Murray, published at the height of success of "The Golden Bough" by anthropologist James George Frazer. For the book, certain university circles celebrated Margaret Murray as the expert on western witchcraft, though her theories were widely discredited. For the period 1929-1968, she wrote the "Witchcraft" article in the successive editions of the "Encyclopædia Britannica". In 1962, "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe" was reprinted by Oxford University Press. Her theory, also known as the "witch-cult hypothesis," suggests that the accusations made towards "witches" in Europe were in fact based on a real existing pagan religion that worshiped a horned god. Murray's theory, as she explained in this book and the subsequent "The God of the Witches" (1931), consists of the following elements:   Murray's Witch-cult hypothesis was preceded by a similar idea proposed by the German Professor Karl Ernst Jarcke in 1828. Jarcke's hypothesis claimed that the victims of the early modern witch trials were not innocents caught up in a moral panic, but members of a previously unknown pan-European pagan religion which had pre-dated Christianity, been persecuted by the Christian Church as a rival religion, and finally driven underground, where it had survived in secret until being revealed in the confessions of those accused in the witch trials. The idea was later endorsed by German historian Franz Josef Mone and French historian Jules Michelet. In the late 19th century, variations on the witch cult hypothesis were adopted by two Americans, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Charles Leland, the latter of whom promoted it in his 1899 book "Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches". Murray was interested in ascribing naturalistic or religious/ceremonial explanations to some of the more fantastical descriptions found in early modern witch trial records. Murray suggested, based in part on the work of James Frazer in "The Golden Bough", that the witches accused in the trials worshiped a pre-Christian god associated with forests and the natural world. Murray identified this god as Janus (or Dianus, following Frazer's suggested etymology), who she described as a "Horned God" of the wilds in order to explain descriptions of a horned Satan provided by witch trial confessions. Because those accused of witchcraft often described witches meetings as involving sexual orgies with Satan, she suggested that a male priest representing Dianus would have been present at each coven meeting, dressed in horns and animals skins, who engaged in sexual acts with the gathered women.