So during my PhD, I did a lot of research on witchcraft. How do people talk about witches across societies? And

there are a lot of patterns. I found that these narratives very frequently feature a couple things.

They feature morally outrageous behavior or moral abhorrence, often sexual deviance or cannibalism or

defiling corpses, and then existential threat. So it's not only like

you cause my illness with your spells and your evil eye, but also that at night you conspire

with other witches and graveyards and you eat babies. And so I studied these across contexts.

I read a lot of ethnographies, and I did a comparative project.

And then I see QAnon emerge, and it looks exactly like the witchy narratives that I am spending so much time studying.

And then while working on this book, I read a lot about messias and how messias emerge.

And I saw that there was this really interesting interplay between the Messiah and

the Kabbal, the prophet and the witch, where they co-evolve, where the narrative comes to

create this demonized witch, and then the Messiah presents themselves as exceptional in

precisely the way necessary to vanquish that witch.

And not only are they promising to vanquish the witch,

but they're promising very often a backwards-looking paradise.

So we need a restoration that is golden.

We need to remove the colonizers,

but in a way that also brings back the ancestors.

And so I think sometimes we can be very quick to emphasize how much the modern political moment and its symbology

is a reflection of contemporary dynamics

and ignore the ways in which it actually echoes a story,

a mythology that you see worldwide. The museum

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