I’m gonna use a specific case to comment on magic as a whole: baseball magic.

If you don’t know, that’s basically a catch-all term for the seemingly random things that many baseball players do, especially when they’re pitching or batting. Stuff like taking your hat off and putting it back on again, clearing out your previous footsteps from the pitcher’s mound to make it “fresh”, doing a very specific number of practice swings before stepping into the box - none of this stuff has any obvious impact on player performance, and yet we know from studying them that the rituals themselves do impact player performance in a big way. Players who perform better tend to have more rituals than ones who don’t, and if a player’s rituals are interrupted their performance is measurably worse.

It isn’t just baseball players either. Tennis players might bounce the ball a specific number of times before a serve, top-level Starcraft players have rituals like measuring the distance between their body and their keyboard or eating a piece of dark chocolate right at the start of a game. Some of these rituals may have a “logical” explanation behind them, but something funny about the practices as a whole is that both the logical and illogical ones seem to have the same effects.

Research into this stuff essentially shows that these behaviors are a coping mechanism. People do them more when the outcome of a competition is uncertain or important, they do them more when they have more to lose, etc. Players who do them report lower stress after performing then, lower stress is correlated to better focus and performance, etc. Now we start to see why these little rituals that don’t have an obvious impact on performance can actually have a very large impact on it by influencing a players’ mental state.

So I think that magic (and religion but let’s not get into it) is essentially that. Speaking an incantation might not literally make the rains come, but if you’re in a community whose life revolves around the rainy season there’s a tremendous utility to doing it anyway, or getting everyone together to dance until they come, or whatever your cultural practice is. Tarot cards won’t literally tell the future, but how you interpret them is a reflection of your own mental state and the thoughts you want to emphasize, and it may assuage your stress over the things you can’t control in your life, bringing genuine benefit anyway.

So is magic real? It’s real enough if you believe in it, now if only we could figure out a way to get the grifters out of the space.