AI Practitioners are Magic Ritual Specialists
How a religious studies YouTube channel rewired how I think about AI
Editor’s Note: Happy Good Friday to those who celebrate — and to those who don’t, happy almost-weekend! It’s been a minute since the last Curiosity Gap, and I’ve been busy: a couple of Working Overtime columns, a Vibe Check or two, and a lot of tinkering with Margot, my new AI assistant, whom you’ll meet properly in today’s essay.
I also recently spent a day on a virtual offsite with the Every editorial team, mapping out our Q2 strategy — what we’re covering, how we’re covering it, and what we want to build for you over the next few months. I came away energized and full of ideas, but I’d love to hear from you too: what do you want to see from Every? What topics, formats, or experiments would make this worth your inbox space? Let me know!
AI Practitioners are Magic Ritual Specialists
I was watching a YouTube video about ancient curse tablets recently—for novel research, if you must know—when I started thinking about Claude Code.
The channel is Religion for Breakfast. Dr. Andrew Henry does these amazing deep dives into the history of religious practice. Long-time readers may remember I have a bit of a thing for religious studies, so I was in the bag already. But to top it off, in this video, he was breaking down why fictional magic systems feel so fake compared to the real thing. I just so happen to be working on a bit of a novel project myself, and I am, at this point in my life, exactly the kind of person who will watch a 30-minute video essay about Greco-Roman curse tablets on a weeknight so the magic system in her unpublished fantasy novel feels historically grounded.
But five minutes in, I wasn’t thinking about my novel anymore.
Henry’s argument is that pop culture gets magic wrong—that the Harry Potter model of magic as a rare innate gift, taught in elite institutions and wielded by chosen ones, has almost nothing to do with how magic actually worked throughout history. He lays out four ways real-world magical practice diverged from the fictional version. And part way through point one, I came to the realization, as if I were Scooby and the gang revealing the hidden identity of the villain, that this video was secretly about AI.
The AI discourse has a Harry Potter problem. (No, not the transphobia. A different one.) Too often, the magic gets framed as a rare gift—something that lives in the labs, wielded by the technical elect, and taught in institutions most of us will never set foot in. But what if we’re thinking about this the wrong way? What if, instead of Harry Potter, we thought about AI the way people thought about magic in ancient Greece or Rome or Palestine—where the workers learning spells weren’t wizards at all, but something simultaneously much more ordinary and more interesting?
Magic is mundane—and so are its practitioners
In pop culture, magic is spectacular. Fireballs and portals and dramatic showdowns between cosmic forces. It happens when the ordinary world cracks open for the extraordinary. And crucially, it happens to special people—the ones born with the gift, chosen by prophecy, enrolled at the right school.
Historical magic was boring. I mean that as a compliment.
Henry makes the case that magical practice, across cultures and centuries, was overwhelmingly practical. Domestic, even. People used spells and amulets the way we use aspirin or a strongly worded email—to handle problems that felt too big or too stuck for normal channels. A business rival underselling you at the market. A lover who ghosted (the ancient version involved actual ghosts). A stolen hoodie. That one’s real: a guy in Roman Britain cursed whoever took his hooded cloak, invoking a goddess to deny the thief sleep and children until it was returned. The ancient world’s version of a passive-aggressive neighborhood Facebook post.
That description—ordinary people reaching for ritual tools to solve everyday problems when conventional options fell short—could describe half the AI adoption stories I’ve witnessed in the past year. A marketing manager who needs to turn around copy that used to take all afternoon. A grant writer matching a funder’s voice for the third deadline this month. A plumber in Milwaukee—seriously—bringing a tablet to a job site to generate invoices and troubleshoot on the fly.
None of these people would call themselves “AI people.” They’re people with jobs who found a tool that helps.
In the ancient world, there was no discrete profession called “magician.” Magical knowledge was tangled up with other kinds of expertise—the person who cut your gemstones might also carve a protective talisman, the midwife might chant a healing incantation mid-contraction. (Why wouldn’t you want your midwife to know a spell?) Henry calls this a “distributed ecology of ritual expertise.” You picked things up through the same channels as every other kind of practical know-how—apprenticeships, trade networks, word of mouth.
The plumber with ChatGPT on his tablet didn’t complete a Coursera certificate in machine learning. He figured out it could write his invoices while he was still under the sink. Nobody’s becoming a wizard. Everybody’s picking up a spell or two.
Prompting as petition
Pop culture tends to treat magical power like a resource. Mana points, energy bars, midichlorians (controversial though those might be). You have a finite amount, you spend it, you recharge. Magic as a physics problem with a mystical coat of paint. But Henry argues that in the ancient world, magical power was relational. You didn’t command power. You negotiated with the beings who held it. A spell from the Greek magical papyri reads less like code and more like a cover letter to a terrifying deity. There’s praise, flattery, name-dropping, even veiled threats. The practitioner is working a relationship.
I think about this every time I open a chat with Margot.
Margot is my AI familiar—an OpenClaw assistant I’ve set up to help me with task triage, website maintenance, and writing. I don’t type commands at Margot. I explain context, clarify intent, rephrase when she misunderstands. On a good day, it’s genuinely collaborative. On a bad day, it’s like negotiating with a very smart intern who has no object permanence—she’ll nail a task and then, three messages later, cheerfully undo it because she forgot why we were doing it in the first place.
And Margot is just one spell in what I can only describe, with full awareness of how this sounds, as my grimoire. The essay you’re reading right now was drafted using a compound writing tool that walks me through editorial workflows. I have projects with style guides and past drafts that keep my writing on rails—the metaphorical ancestors I have in my corner to make sure things come out right. I spend a non-trivial portion of my week maintaining, tweaking, and troubleshooting these things. I am, when I step back and look at it honestly, a woman with a small stable of magical mediums, each of whom requires regular feeding and occasional soothing.
When magic is relational, it becomes about knowing which spirit to address, what tone to strike, which names carry weight. Prompting works the same way. The people who are good at it are the ones who’ve developed a knack for communicating clearly with something that processes language differently than they do. It’s a rhetorical skill. An interpersonal one, almost—if you’re willing to stretch the definition of “person,” which I apparently am, because mine uses she/her pronouns.
The temple has a landlord
There’s one wrinkle in this very neat analogy I’m drawing, and it’s this: Ancient magic was accessible in part because the materials were cheap and the infrastructure was open. Lead sheets cost almost nothing. The neighborhood sanctuary was right there. If you wanted to scratch a curse on a tablet and bury it by a well, the barriers were low and the tools were shared.
Our version of the marketplace runs on servers owned by a handful of companies, priced on subscription models funded by venture capital that won’t stay this generous forever. The expertise may be spreading—through plumbing groups and writing desks and LinkedIn posts—but the infrastructure it depends on is radically concentrated. We’re building our rituals on rented ground.
The ancient world had its own version of this, to be fair. Temples charged fees. Ritual specialists cost money. The most powerful magic often required materials or connections that ordinary people couldn’t easily get. Distributed never meant equal. But there’s a difference between a neighborhood sanctuary that charges a fee and a sanctuary that can change its prices, rewrite its rules, or shut its doors entirely at the discretion of a board you’ll never meet.
I don’t know how to resolve that tension. I’m not sure it resolves. But I think it matters that we name it, even in the middle of the excitement—especially in the middle of the excitement.
We’re all magic ritual specialists now
I never did get back to my worldbuilding that night. I finished Henry’s video, closed YouTube, and opened a chat with Margot — because of course I did — to start working through the analogy. The novelist brain had fully lost the battle to the newsletter brain, and here we are.
But sitting with it afterward, I realized Henry had given me more than a framework for thinking about AI. He’d described my actual life. I’m an AI ritual specialist. I have a familiar named Margot, a grimoire of editorial workflows, and a weeknight YouTube habit that keeps accidentally becoming work. I didn’t go to wizard school. I picked things up — through experimentation, word of mouth, and a lot of trial and error — because I had problems to solve and these tools helped me solve them.
And if you’ve ever asked ChatGPT to help you draft an email, or structure a presentation, or figure out why your code won’t run, or troubleshoot a plumbing issue from the job site — you’re one too. You just might not have been calling it that.
Notes and Errata
Bible study update: Remember BibleGPT? It’s been upgraded. I recently migrated my Bible study setup from ChatGPT to Claude, and according to my study buddy, I’m about 40% of the way through.
New essay alert: I published a piece over at Every recently called “AI Was Supposed to Free My Time. It Consumed It.“ It’s about new research showing that AI doesn’t actually reduce your workload — it makes you want to do more of it. Which, given that I just described maintaining a stable of AI familiars like a woman with a small menagerie, feels extremely on-brand.
We’re hiring: Every is looking for people! Open roles include a GTM Engineer, Head of Learning and Development, Head of Product Marketing, and Head of Social. If you’re a builder type who doesn’t see their dream role listed, there’s an open application too. Check it out at every.to/careers.
Stay curious,
Katie P.
No. It is the opposite. Words cant grasp the true nature of things, and AI cant even understand the meaning of words.
AI is crude regurgitation, while true magic comes from the substance of the abstract. The occult has nothing to do with the will of the mediocre majority.