"Magic Shows"

The latest issue of Lapham's Quarterly contains a tour de force on superstition and magic throughout the globe and history. I came to it through a link from Kottke, who links specifically to the essay Very Superstitious by Colin Dickey, though Kottke's link suggests he is linking to the entire issue.
Kottke also quotes Very Superstititous, approving of the part in bold, below, which comes from the book The Golden Bough by James Frazer (I've shortened the part quoted, note ellipsis):

... Yet what separates magic from religion or science is not its methodology -- Frazer himself notes that it "is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science" -- it's that ordinary people can do it, transforming their lives with the ambitious power of everyday thought.
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Frazer and Kottke are right about the part in bold -- it is a sentiment expressed by Richard Feynman and David Hume as well¹ -- but Dickey and his essay muck it up.² It is precisely because magic and miracles are not replicable that makes them unreliable (to say the least) and as general practices false. Replicability is about methodology. When Dickey says that magic is not distinct from science due to methodology he is full of bunk; he has not understood Frazer.

Dickey's essay is full of similar conflations. Incredibly, throughout his essay he treats those who persecuted "witches" as opponents of superstition.³ He provides a misleading rendition of the circumstances regarding the discoveries of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis -- an early practitioner of antiseptic practices -- whose discoveries were not widely adopted despite observational support; Semmelweis had odd (and wrong) theories about why antiseptic practices worked. The thing here is that Semmelweis's discoveries and methods were replicable -- distinguishing them from magic -- though his explanation was not. Those who criticized him (and he was not universally criticized) misunderstood what he was doing and (not ironically, given Dickey) conflated his unsupported theories as to cause with his methodology.

Dickey, in the end, is not writing in favor of superstition so much as lamenting the little respect that sympathetic magic gets in what he calls our "hyperrationalist age," repeating a common canard. I lament for rationality.
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¹ Of course, just because Dr. Feynman and David Hume said it does not make it so. The merits of what is said make it so.
² Note in the language quoted above from Dickey (and Kottke) Dickey also differentiates "magic from religion or science." that's a particularly bizarre turn of phrase: some of us think religion has a great deal in kin with "magic" (some religions even refer to their practices as magic) and little to do with science (if not outright antithetical to it).
³ Dickey treats most "witches" as having been prosecuted as practitioners of sympathetic magic -- which was "black magic" or Satanic in the eyes of their prosecutors. This does not mean that the prosecutors were not superstitious. In fact, they very much believed that the accused were practicing "magic," something the accused routinely denied.