From the 1960s onward, historians specializing in the early modern witch trials, most influentially Norman Cohn and later Ronald Hutton, subjected Murray's methodology to sustained critical examination and found it did not hold up. Confessions extracted under torture or the threat of it, historians pointed out, cannot be read as reliable first-person testimony to actual belief or practice, and Murray had also been shown to have selectively quoted and, in some cases, misrepresented her source documents to fit the organized coven structure she wanted to find. No independent evidence, historians concluded, supports the existence of a continuous, organized pre-Christian witch religion surviving into the early modern period as Murray described it, and the thesis is now considered discredited within academic history.
Despite this scholarly rejection, the witch-cult thesis had already done its historical work by the time it was overturned: it had supplied Gerald Gardner and the early Wiccan movement with a founding narrative, that Wicca was the survival of an ancient pagan religion rather than a modern new religious movement, that shaped how Wicca presented and understood itself for decades.
Modern Wiccan and pagan scholarship, following Hutton's work in particular, generally now treats the Murray thesis as historically false while recognizing its enormous formative influence on Wicca as it actually developed in the twentieth century, a distinction between the truth of a founding story and its real historical importance that scholars of new religious movements encounter repeatedly.