Few discredited theories have built as much as Murray's. Her second book, The God of the Witches of 1933, dropped the scholarly hedges and offered the horned god as the oldest deity of Europe, and it was this popular Murrayism that Gerald Gardner encountered; when he announced in the 1950s that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of the old religion, he was claiming to have found exactly what Murray described, and she supplied a foreword to his Witchcraft Today. Wicca's covens, its god and goddess, its festival calendar built on the witch dates of the trial records, all descend from her reconstruction, so that the thesis, false as history, became true as prophecy: it described a witch religion that did not exist and thereby helped call one into being.
Modern pagan scholarship has absorbed this without collapse. Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon in 1999 gave Wicca a documented history as a creative twentieth century religion drawing on cunning craft, ceremonial magic, Romantic poetry and Murray, and most practitioners now accept that account, holding that a religion's value does not depend on a forged pedigree. The atlas records the witch cult thesis with both faces showing: as a debunked historical claim about early modern Europe, and as one of the most generative wrong ideas in the modern history of religion, ancestor of a living tradition and a permanent caution about how much a confident footnote can build.