As an avid HP Lovecraft fan, I am pretty sure that the book you are thinking of is The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, by Margaret Murray. (It was a huge influence on HPL, along with Fraser, not surprisingly since he loved the whole "ancient religions surviving in secret" thing.)
(Didn't Wittgenstein write notes on Fraser? I should read those. I wonder what interested him.)
--- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This is an old notion, goes back the work of a
> scholar
> whose name I forget, Mary Something, wrote back in
> the
> teens and twenties of the last century, who thought
> that the witch hunt was an attempt to stamp an an
> actual surviving religion.
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