Most people believe that magic–not in the sense of prestidigitation and illusionism, but in the sense of sorcery–involves such exotic things as immaterial beings, subtle substances, and other planes of existence. However, there are practitioners of magic who assert that invocations, spells, charms and the like all work, but they do so through purely psychological means; they say that they use alternate mental states coupled with objects, symbols, and sense impressions that have specific effects upon the unconscious mind, in order to plant an idea or produce a change in someone’s mind.
If this is true, I think it raises an interesting question, that being whether or not this could be called “magic” even if it is purely psychological. The idea of magic is so deeply associated with the spiritual, immaterial, and unexplainable, that such a mundane mechanism hardly seems deserving of the label. Nonetheless, I would argue that these methods would be deserving of the label “magic”.
Imagine a group of assassins–the Rellik–who kill people though means that the rest of society can’t identify. In reality they simply use special poisons, but people begin to come up with all sorts of ways in which the assassins might kill their victims, ascribing to them all sorts of strange abilities such as the ability to kill you through your shadow. Over time, these special techniques become so strongly associated with the name “Rellik” that it seems the name must refer to a group that makes use of those techniques, so that as the group recruits new members it has to go to great lengths to make them forget all their mistaken ideas about killing people through their shadows or whatever other nonsense they associate with the organization.
In the same way, if the psychological theory of magic is true, then magic began as a set of methods and procedures that had certain effects on people. Since people didn’t know how these things worked, they began thinking that they made use of exotic, immaterial substances and beings. Over time, these associations became so strong that people began to think “magic” refers to practices that make use of immaterial forces and beings, so that even if the methods were shown to work, as long as they didn’t work though exotic means most people would take it as meaning that magic doesn’t exist.
Anyways, though I would be for calling these things “magic” if they did indeed work as advertised by the psychological model of magic, it’s ultimately just a matter of preference. It’s just as valid to label them “magic” as it is to label them “not magic,” it just depends on what your definition of “magic” is.
Under the Spell of Words 