The letter of a condemned burgomaster (to his daughter) still survives. He wrote:

Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through fear of the torture which was threatened beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he never so good, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes, though he were an earl. . . .,

Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers will be beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden. . . . Dear child, pay this man a dollar . . . . I have taken several days to write this: my hands are both lame. I am in a sad plight. . . .

Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more. July 24, 1628. (Klaits, 130)

Klaits mentions a witch hunt in the German village of Ellwangen in 1611, in which the torture of one unpopular 70-year-old woman led to the torture and execution of over 400 people. A contemporary observer of the Ellwangen “trials” wrote:

“I do not see where this case will lead and what effect it will have, for this evil has so taken over, and like the plague has affected so many, that if the magistrates continue their office, in a few years the city will be in miserable ruins.” (Klaits, p. 144)

There may have been genuine witches who were prosecuted during this chaotic time, but the relatively abundant historical evidence available to researchers implies that the overwhelming majority of those executed for witchcraft were innocent people caught up in a tragic hysteria.

Margot Adler, an author known for her sympathy with Neopaganism and highly regarded in Neopagan circles, has written one of the most comprehensive histories of modern Neopaganism. In her book Drawing Down the Moon, she tells how during the first decades of the modern “witchcraft” movement (1950s-1970s) a “myth of Wicca” took form. This myth was sparked by the 1921 thesis of Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who maintained that the Pagans of pre-Christian Europe survived into the Middle Ages in great numbers. According to her, the Catholic Church in collaboration with secular authority intentionally and systematically sought out and slaughtered millions of those still holding to the “old religion.” In her view, only a few survived the witch-hunts to provide an unbroken link from the founders of modern Neopaganism-Witchcraft to their earliest Stone Age predecessors. Ms. Adler admits that most leaders of the modern Neopagan movement acknowledge there is no historical basis for this myth. (See Drawing Down the Moon, pages 86-87.)

Jeffrey B. Russell offers this observation regarding the Murray thesis:

This scenario . . . is not permitted by the evidence, which Murray misused in violation of the simplest rules of criticism. All historians are agreed on this (see pp. 41-42).

Historian Joseph Klaits also leaves no doubt regarding the lack of an historical basis for the Murray thesis:

Murray’s bold theses have been effectively criticized many times over the years, most recently by Norman Cohn, who shows with great thoroughness that her opinions rest on a tangled tissue of highly selective quotations, mistranslated passages, and out-and-out fabrications. Although the popular reputation of Murray’s works remains remarkably strong, no serious student of the subject accepts her evidence.(Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts, pp. 10-11)