Good luck tracing the history of witches. While the idea of witches is exceptionally old—Horace’s Satires, already embracing the negative stereotype circa 35 b.c., describes witches with wigs and false teeth howling over dead animals—the day-to-day business of being a witch has continuously evolved, which complicates attempts to reconstruct a tidy family tree. The history of witchcraft has also long suffered from unreliable narrators. The Salem witch trials loom outsize in the American imagination, yet no official court records exist, and the accounts of the trials that did survive are, per the historian Stacy Schiff, “maddeningly inconsistent.”

From November 2015: How Satan came to Salem

More recent historians haven’t fared much better: The Wicca faith grew out of the writings of Gerald Gardner, a former customs officer whose 1954 book, Witchcraft Today, recounted his experience in a coven whose tenets were allegedly passed down from the Middle Ages. But scholars later concluded that they were at least in part Gardner’s invention.

And then, no culture can claim a monopoly on witches. “There is little doubt that in every inhabited continent of the world, the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by non-physical and uncanny (‘magical’) means,” writes the historian Ronald Hutton, who has studied attitudes toward witches in more than 300 communities, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa and Greenland. The belief in witchcraft is so widespread and so enduring that one historian speculates it’s innate to being human.

In the U.S., mainstream interest in witches has occasionally waned but mostly waxed, usually in tandem with the rise of feminism and the plummeting of trust in establishment ideas. In the 19th century, as transcendentalism and the women’s-suffrage movement took hold, witches enjoyed the beginnings of a rebranding—from wicked devil-worshippers to intuitive wisewomen. Woodstock and second-wave feminism were a boon for witches, whose popularity spiked again following the Anita Hill hearings in the ’90s, and again after Donald Trump’s election and alongside the #MeToo movement.

The latest witch renaissance coincides with a growing fascination with astrology, crystals, and tarot, which, like magic, practitioners consider ways to tap into unseen, unconventional sources of power—and which can be especially appealing for people who feel disenfranchised or who have grown weary of trying to enact change by working within the system. (Modern witchcraft has drawn more women than men, as well as many people of color and queer or transgender individuals; a “witch” can be any gender.) “The more frustrated people get, they do often turn to witchcraft, because they’re like, ‘Well, the usual channels are just not working, so let’s see what else is out there,’ ” Grossman told me. “Whenever there are events that really shake the foundations of society”—the American Civil War, turmoil in prerevolutionary Russia, the rise of Weimar Germany, England’s postwar reconstruction—“people absolutely turn towards the occult.” Trump must contend not only with the #Resistance but with the #MagicResistance, which shares guides to hexing corporations, spells to protect reproductive rights, and opportunities to join the 4,900 members of the #BindTrump Facebook group in casting spells to curb the president’s power.