Last summer, after a talking with my partner about the growing number of our friends who self-identified as witches, I came up with an idea which would later become my BuzzFeed article on how witchcraft became a brand. I was interested in the new, digital, mostly female, very much millennial incarnation of witchcraft, and I wanted to interview some of the influencers (witchfluencers?) driving the movement.

As an outsider (at that point) to the world of magic, my first thought was that it would be hard for me to talk to witches about spells, potions, and magical altars when I simply didn’t believe that any of those things worked. But I quickly realized that evaluating the internal logic of belief systems is far more interesting, and productive, than trying to assess their external truth. An anthropologist can explain the centrality of shamanistic rituals to the life of an Amazon tribe without judging whether it’s possible to talk to animal spirits; a description of the former can be edifying, while the latter is unknowable in an objective sense, particularly for someone who is not immersed in the tribal worldview. By the same token, an expert on the history of Christianity might well be agnostic about the existence of God, or even atheist, without changing the quality of their scholarship.

With that mindset, I started to conduct my interviews. I talked to witches in the US and Canada, who explained to me their various practices and the way they thought about magic and the world. Meanwhile I read Alex Mar’s fantastic Witches Of America, a non-fiction book in which the author undertakes a journey across the country to spend time with covens and other magical practitioners, and finds it to be just as much a voyage of inner discovery as it is a geographical route.

One of the key threads that linked the accounts I read and had described to me was an attempt to regain agency: in the face of a world which sends us countless trials and tribulations, witchcraft was a framework — by no means the only one — through which to transform negative energy into positive by creating routines, rituals, and physical talismans that would add a new layer of meaning to the fabric of everyday life. The external effects may have been hard to quantify, but the subjective benefits were clear; and while a degree of skepticism remained, my interest had definitely been piqued.

I wanted to know more about magic, so I started to learn. And one name that came up again and again in the process was one Aleister Crowley.