Part of the Magic is the Mystery

"What makes it magic? ... Magic can't be defined, can it? Or it loses what makes it magic. ... Part of the magic is the mystery, don't you think?"
—Megan Hart, "This Is What I Want" (2007)

22 (and counting) Definitions of Magic

Here are twenty-two (and counting) thought-provoking definitions of magic, curated by The Conjurer:

http://magicandconjuring.blogspot.com/search?q=%22what+is+magic%3F%22

Fiction / Magic

Vladimir Nabokov's word for fiction was magic, and he called the library "that citadel of illusion" (New York Times).

Magic and Literature are the Same Thing

"Oddly, alchemy seems to work with texts in just the same way as it is meant to work with matter . . . Titles, plots, all of the elements which for us make a text what it is give way to an alchemical process perhaps best described as an aura. . . . [M]agic and literature are the same thing. Enchanting, the text is, quite literally enchanted."
—Amy Wygant, The Meanings of Magic (2006)

Magic and Erudition

Magic and erudition in alliance
Opened the door to every mystery.
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Simple Faith in a Word

"I speak of magic advisedly, for in a great deal of what has been said and written there is more of simple faith in a word or a vague idea than of real plan."
—Norman Thomas, "The Essential Condition of Economic Planning"

Magic as the Essence of All the Arts

"Some speak of magic aspiring to be art, but it is really art that aspires to be magic. Magic is the highest art, pure art, art's ultimate accomplishment."
—Lee Siegel, Net of Magic

Magic Need Not Be Spoken

"I did not speak of magic; it need not be spoken to occur."
—Gregory G. Bolich, 12 Magic Wands

Love and Magic

"Love is magic, Giordano Bruno said; magic is love. The magician and the lover are both venatores animarum, hunters of souls; by emblems and by arts, the magician draws down into his heart the powers of heaven, that is the star-persons through whom the whole of nature and the spirits of men and women are ordered, and have their meaning. He ranges these powers within him and asks: teach me to bind, with bonds like love's, the things of this world and the hearts of others. And they do, they can. And thus we become like gods."
—John Crowley, Daemonomania

(Photo by Love Not Fear)

Don't You Believe?

"Magic," she said. "Don't you believe in magic?"

He inhaled tobacco smoke, and breathed it out in mystic calm.

"No," he said.

"But you think it works."

He said nothing.

-- John Crowley, Love & Sleep

[Woodcut of astrologer by Jorg Breu.]

Magic: A Hard Word to Say Out Loud

"'Magic is sort of a hard word to say out loud, I think."
"Yes?"
"It is if you mean it. A little shaming to say. Like 'sex.'"
"Like sex?" She laughed.
"I mean it's a thing you want to keep at a distance. Even though it means a great deal to you, even because it does. It's just agreed on, under the rules of politeness. It won't be seriously discussed."
"You sound like you think it works," she said.
He leaned toward her and began to speak a little more urgently. "Magic comes in more than one kind," he said. "There's illusion, like you said; Houdini. And wonder-working, wave a hand, get what you want—that kind is restricted to stories. But there are other kinds, that were really practiced. For centuries. It doesn't seem likely that people would have gone to so much trouble for so long if what they did didn't work at all."
—John Crowley, Love and Sleep

Words Were Originally Magic

Photo by pheezy.

Magic, Science, and Religion

"He began to think that even though magic, and science, and religion did not all mean the same thing, they all meant in the same way." —John Crowley, The Solitudes

The Whole History of Magic

"If we wish to sum up the whole history of magic in a sentence, we may say that men first regarded magic as natural, then as marvelous, then as impossible and absurd." —"Magic: Its Origins and Relations to Science," Studies in History, Economics and Public Law (1905)

Don't miss Stuart Cumberland's ruminations on "Where has the Mystery Gone in Magic and Mentalism?" (thanks, Gordon).

Magic Everywhere

Martha Brockenbrough's daughter complained that "There' s no magic in this land. It's all in the fairytale land. This isn't FAIR! I want MAGIC!" Martha contemplates how magic is to be found every single place one looks.

The Word Magic

"The word magic still exists and will exist as long as man is a human being; for if evolution is a fact there will always be effects whose causes are not yet discovered." —Eduard Herrmann, "Thought Reading and Thought Transference"

Magic via Imagination

"The first step into magic is the human imagination. The world of the mind and the world of matter are both real, but in different ways. In fact, if one is more important than the other, it's probably the world of the imagination, where the world of human artefacts, well, all of it, actually originates. The basic paradigm of science tends to rule out consciousness, imagination, because they're not repeatable in empirical laboratory conditions. So it struck me that perhaps through magic there might be a different way to interact with the mind. This might in fact have been what magicians were talking about all along." —Alan Moore, via Phantasmaphile

One Word: That's Magic

Professional magician John W. LeBlanc notes that there are “untold numbers of anecdotes told by professional performers who found that just changing one, single word made an enormous difference in the response of the audience to a performance piece. One word. That’s magic.”

As in the fables of old, “It’s in the words that the magic is—‘Abracadabra,’ ‘Open Sesame,’ and the rest—but the magic words in one story aren’t magical in the next. It seems . . . that the real magic is to understand which words work, and when, and for what” (John Barth, The Tidewater Tales, 1987).