User blog:The Lord Reader/Comparing ToAru's magic and ''real life'' magic's characteristics

Magic is a lot like religion dogma. It has its origins; its laws; its rites; and badass prize if you fulfill all requirements. Wikipedia has an interesting (but really, really long) article about it, and the forms it takes, and, while I was reading it, I was stuck by how much of it figured in ToAru at one point or another (for example, there is a list of magic traditions at the bottom of the page, of which many featured in the series at one point or another: Alchemy, Black Magic, Vodou, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Onmyoudou, Shinto, Sigil magic, Thelema, Witchcraft). So I decided to compare how magic works in ToAru verse and how it 'works' here.

I decided to not make use of the Wikipedia article since it would be...well, too long. Instead, I recently came across this site, which describes the most fundamental rules to everything qualifying as magic, magical thinking, or magical practices, and decided it would much simpler to compare ToAru's magic system to it.

These aren't the laws of the real universe; those are covered by science. Rather, these are quirks of human psychology. Magic that works by these laws will seem plausible enough to a human audience, and real-world human superstitions tend to take one of these forms. Some of these rules will seem familiar to you, especially if you read lots of fantasy series with their own magic systems. It took these from Isaac Bonewits' book Real Magic, and Bonewits in turn took the Laws of Similarity and Contagion from Frazer's...Golden Bough: So, what do you guys think?