Murray extended her thesis in The God of the Witches (1931), reading it into wider English folklore and history, and its influence peaked in the 1950s when Gerald Gardner, presenting his new religion of Wicca as the survival of exactly the ancient cult Murray had described, secured her endorsement: she wrote the preface to his Witchcraft Today in 1954, lending her academic authority directly to his claim of unbroken continuity. For a generation, Murray's thesis and Gardner's new religion validated each other, each treated as evidence for the other's truth.
The scholarly verdict has since reversed completely. Historians beginning with Norman Cohn in 1975, and decisively confirmed by Ronald Hutton's 1999 study, showed that Murray had built her cult out of confessions extracted under torture or its threat, systematically setting aside the impossible material, flying, shapeshifting, demonic pacts, that appears in the very same documents alongside the material she kept. No specialist in the early modern trials defends the witch-cult hypothesis today; it survives only as history's clearest case of a discredited academic theory that nonetheless gave a new religion its founding myth, a role Wicca's own historians, led by Hutton, now openly acknowledge and have moved past.