>>10744783Magic isn't colour coded new age shit, you pea-brained hack.
It's tapping into the deeply held cultural superstitions and beliefs of a person in order to manipulate them involuntarily or produce psychosomatic effects.
If a West African witch doctor puts a curse on a fellow tribesman, he does so by pointing a bone at them in a public place.
Thus everyone else sees the cursing, and that they have been cursed becomes common knowldge.
Because the persons around the cursed man, as well as the cursee himself believe fervently in the power of the witch doctor, he will be shunned as ritually unclean, and exiled from village society, wherein he will either exile himself, commit suicide, or die alone in his hut of neglect, shame and fear.
That is the best working explanation of how "real" magic works I've seen, and I'm largely paraphrasing Arthur C. Clarke's "world of strange powers." book.
It lso handily explains why most Westerners lives are so painfully unmagical - because, rather obviously, we do not usually hold such powerful and pervasive superstitious beliefs, and even if we claim to, certainly not so sincerely that we could literally worry ourselves to death,
Magic is 40% folk psychology, 30% knowing what plants will kill you and which ones will make you trip balls, and 30% appearing self-convinced.
I also lived across the road from a mad old Paki wiard who would have faith-healing sessions using Dhikr, and I've observed the psychosomatic effects he was able to induce in believers.
