Googling “only idiots believe in magic” on July 16, 2018, one of the first hits is a conversation on uk.answers.yahoo.com. At some time in the year 2012, the following request was posted on this online forum: “There is a lot of fake websites that teach you fake magic. I know people who practice real light and dark magic. It's real but I’m afraid to ask them to teach me. They follow the moon's phases for rituals, sacrifices, spells. Im just wondering is there a real website that teaches you real magic like I just described.” Ten people took the time to respond to this query but for our present purposes we will confine ourselves to just the first three, each of whom offered a very different argument. The first replied: “There is real magic, but it derives its power from Satan, not God … The Bible is very clear magic is real, and those who deny it deny it because they themselves are spiritually dead … They deny anything supernatural because they deny God.” The second: “The ‘real’ part has been distilled out of magic over the centuries into the various branches of what we now call science. The real part of alchemy for example has been distilled out into chemistry. The real part of witchcraft (greek: pharmacea, mainly the herbology side of witchcraft) has been distilled out into pharmacology. The real part of astrology has been distilled out into astronomy.” The third: “It's all f*cking fake, dude. Only idiots believe in magic. Why do I say that? Uhhhh, because there's no evidence the spells, potions or any of that bullshit works. It doesn't work. You could cast a sh*t ton of spells on me and do you know what will happen? Wowfuckingnothing.”

If we were not all intuitively familiar with such response to the notion of “magic,” we might wonder why no one is answering the actual question itself. Why is it that not even one interlocutor recommends ritual scripts that do, in fact, teach “real magic” and that are available for free on the internet (see, for instance, www.magicalrecipesonline.com) or can be purchased via online markets such as amazon.com (see there, for instance, the recent bestseller Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig)?