I developed a fascination with witchcraft and magic when I was a little kid. Although the Harry Potter series wouldn’t come along for another generation, there were other works of fiction that certainly captured my imagination. I remember in second grade deciding that I was going figure out if witchcraft was real or not, and if it was, I was determined to learn how to do it. So I consulted what I thought was the authority on everything, the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
I was excited to find out that witches and warlocks really existed, although I was beginning to discover they weren’t as sanitized and innocuous as the ones portrayed on Bewitched and in Saturday morning cartoons. But one detail from that article scared the heck out of me—there was a historical reference about witches of earlier centuries selling their souls to the devil. Whoa, I thought, this was serious business.
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