You might be interested in reading through the recent Magic & Witchcraft AMA! In conjunction with the discussion in this thread, it lays out the distinctions between magic and witchcraft, and talks about how public attitudes evolved over the Middle Ages and early modern era.

There was no organized "cult" of magic to speak of--just a lot of popular practices like selling love potions or performing rituals to protect an army, whose practitioners may or may not have seen themselves as working "magic." Witchcraft (maleficium) in the later Middle Ages and early modern era came to mean specifically consorting with the devil for the purposes of inflicting harm, and there is zero evidence of significant involvement in that. (Hence the phrase "witch hunt" refers to looking for crimes and criminals that don't exist.)

Intriguingly, England's 1735 Witchcraft Act permitted witchcraft itself, but made faking witchcraft and sorcery a crime instead. The government wanted to emphasize that witchcraft and magic were a bunch of superstitious baloney, so anyone claiming to use sorcery to find treasure or predict the future (and charging money to do so) must be defrauding their clients. Shockingly, people did not tend to defend themselves against fraud by demonstrating actual magic powers.