Double Double Toil and Trouble

We’re wrapping up Spooky Season after four weeks of brilliant, fascinating guests, and this final conversation feels like the perfect way to end the series.

This week's guest on Wait — What Do You Do Again?, is Dr. Mikki Brock. Mikki teaches and speaks widely on topics including demonology, witchcraft, and British history, and her research centers on questions of religious belief, gender, and identity in early modern Scotland.

Calvinist Scotland was a world where witch trials weren’t about cauldrons or curses, but about structure and control.

When crops failed or babies died, there had to be a reason. And if a reason wasn't found, someone had to be at fault. In a world obsessed with divine order, chaos needed a culprit. Often, it was a woman who was the accused wrongdoer. Labeled "unnatural" for defying expectation, she was someone who lived a little too far outside of the lines; she was a little too ambitious, too independent.

When I asked how those ideas crossed the ocean from Scotland and England to Salem, ultimately leading to the witch trials, I laughed at something she said. One of the early settlers’ biggest complaints was that their kids just weren’t as devout as they were; they didn’t have the fervor for the mission the original settlers had. Kids today! Turns out, generational kvetching is older than America.

All joking aside, what was going on in Salem, and earlier, in Scotland, wasn’t random hysteria. It was the social order cracking under pressure. Economic stress, political change, religious tension, and fear of the unknown all collided, and communities tried to make sense of it the only way they knew how: by holding someone accountable. In this case, a witch. And don't forget Satan, the ultimate unseen force, who always shows up in these situations, recruiting others to perform his will. It was a way to explain why life felt uncertain, to reassert control, to restore the idea of stability in a world that kept shifting all around them.

It’s not hard to hear those echoes in our lives today.

“It really does create this us-versus-them binary, that sense of being persecuted persists. Even now, people use language that turns disagreement into moral war, where your enemy isn’t just wrong, they’re evil. And once you decide someone’s in league with the devil, you can dehumanize them completely.”

We keep reenacting the same play. The Inquisition, the witch trials, McCarthyism, Satanic panic, the online pile-ons. It's fear, dressed up as virtue.

The ever-elusive, ever-changing "they" were and are never the actual problem. It’s our inability to face systemic challenges and the unknown that turns us into something far scarier.

✨ If you’re open to it…let’s do a little magic :)

Get two pieces of paper.

On one, draw a small circle on paper and inside it, write the people, habits, goals, and beliefs you want to keep close. Fold it three times toward you and tuck it somewhere you can revisit it.

On the other piece of paper, write what no longer serves you and you wish to release - fear, comparison, habits, judgements. Fold it three times away from you and burn it.