An acquaintance asked me that the other day. I had to think for a second, but… yes.

Do I believe in magic? Absolutely. What is electricity but bottled lightning? What is modern medication if not applied alchemy?

I’m being neither flippant nor particularly trite when I tell you this. Rather, I would remind you what, precisely, magic is — great power drawn from the very forces of creation, exercised in ways we cannot possibly understand, harnessed to accomplish the implausibly mundane.

Consider: At this very moment, you and I, geographically distant though we are, are presently engaged in an act of cooperative communication using a system of engraved silicon slabs covered in occult runes and rare metals, precisely laid in myriad complex patterns smaller than the naked eye can see, all connected through a system of wires made of metal and glass — or even mysteriously transmitted through thin air. And that’s just the hardware! Mystic glyphs in an incomprehensible tongue were assembled in millions of lines, a mass enchantment cast by programmer-cum-enchanters working from their isolated laboratories all across the globe…

Yes, of course there’s magic. Seriously: Don’t you feel silly for not having noticed it before?

Except of course there’s no need for that. We live with it constantly, all around us, surrounding us, governing our very lives. Occult knowledge, mastered only by the very few, makes up the modern parts of the world in which we live. It is vast, and immane, and transcendent, and we only pretend to understand it, much less govern or exercise control. Were our attention not being drawn to it at this very moment, we wouldn’t notice its presence any more than a fish would that it’s swimming in water.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to being lectured at by a dead person who is conveying his message to me by way of an elixir distilled from oak tumors, displayed in curious runes on thin slices of desiccated vegetable matter bleached with rare earths, bound with the decayed remnants of flax and glued together using boiled bones.

It’s a very good book. Or is it necromancy?