That's an excellent question! There's probably multiple answers I could give here since the occult is largely misunderstood in general. But I'll go with Tituba, who was the enslaved person at the center of the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s. I've often heard people talk about her as some kind of witch or voodoo practitioner, when in reality, we simply don't know much about her. It's likely that everything she was accused of was made up (due to people's "othering" of her). And she agreed to the charges, inventing her own stories of the devil, in order to save her own life. If she did participate in anything "occult," it was likely only fortune-telling games that she played with the children that she cared for. -LK