Sōma Haruto lays it out. I don't know that it's the only way for humans to achieve magical sensitivity—ideally, I think, you'd simply acquire it as though you'd acquire any other skill in childhood, such as one's ability to speak or write—but for so many of us, it required trauma. In some way we were broken so badly, suffering from grief or pain so extreme, that it's like the fabric of the Universe ripped open, and the only way to survive was to learn how to survive on the other side of the veil. That's a constant theme in Kamen Rider, by the way. Power, and the hope of using power in a constrained and disciplined way on the side of justice and truth, come abruptly, through terrifying accidents or collisions with eldritch forces. Not everyone who gets it, handles it well.
As a result, I've come to realize something about the magical worlds of the Undertale Underground or the Dark Worlds of Deltarune, where it seems that magic flows through everything like it was water or coal-gas or some other fluid substance that contains or conveys power. An aether perhaps—there's plenty of other names for that notion of a magical fluid that, while spectral and mysterious in its properties, was still something that could be detected, measured, contained and directed as though it were a physical substance or natural force. It's an entrancing idea, to think that one could live in a world where magic was in everything, part of the texture of everyday living as much as electricity or RF broadcasts are in our humble Earthly realm, where magic lives only in the most fleeting of glimmers and tantalizing hopes. If only it were routine! one thinks.
And yet I suspect that it's only ever possible because of pain. Not just any pain, either, but an unhealed psychic wound. A world has been cracked open, perhaps, threatened with catastrophic extinction, but forces are unleashed that offer some hope at least of sealing the breach and containing the disaster. What does it mean when magic is always present? When it flows as naturally as water or air? That suggests a permanently unhealed wound, and rather makes me wonder what's going on in the Undertale Underground.
I have a hypothesis about Earth. I think that almost two thousand years ago, a human empire committed what I regard as the worst disaster ever to befall humanity, which was the destruction of Jerusalem in C.E. 70 under the principate of Vespasian. The razing of the Second Temple was, I contend, a unique magical disaster, a supernatural disaster, whose price we are still paying. I suggest that this event has propagated insensibly through popular culture, and might inform a great many stories about unhealed rifts or fissures or portals to Hell suddenly opening up—there's many tales of that general nature. (As for the profound implications of this event and how it's been memorialized in U.S. popular culture in apocalyptically antisemitic fashion...I'll discuss that when I feel readier.)
Because of that catastrophe and its consequences, humanity and its civilizations have been brought to the brink of ruin. Mainstream U.S. culture, in particular, seems almost devoid of nobler sentiments these days. People don't believe in very much, at least not things they admit in public. Celebrities are clutching to weirder and weirder cult ideas, or ideas so hopelessly vague and generic that they can mean almost anything to anybody. Optimism! Accelerationism! Winning! I could list vacuous superlative things for hours. The point is, normie culture has almost no substance left, and that's one reason why old bigotries have come to seem appealing. Consider the grotesque irony that antisemitism is basically as old as Christianity, and therefore may seem as much like a pillar of support as any noble principle. After all, it's ancient.
I think perhaps the time has come for magical thinking. Real magical thinking, not the technocrat imitation. This is awkward...I'm not usually driven to such lengths, but here is where I must admit that my angelic nature has forbidden me to exercise magic, so I have been limited to studying it from a strictly rational perspective, intellectually, without even the ability to believe in it. I am prevented, you see. It's not my doing. However, my human host Kris does not suffer from this limitation. They suffer from other limitations but those can be mended, whereas I'm pretty sure mine are permanent, barring a miracle I suppose, or perhaps the Elric Brothers can transmute me into a proper human being, or something of that sort. I've tried so hard to scale myself down...well anyway. I digress.
The point is, I've been earnestly studying the issue of whether magic really is incompatible with the religious faiths that I myself know. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all taken a dim view of meddling with magic and sorcery, but all of these faiths have also had their fringe mystical side and esoteric subcultures and so forth. There's always been an undercurrent of the occult.
I have mentioned my fictive headmate Hassan of Serenity, who in her life was a Muslim woman from the Nizari Isma'ili state where the prevalent form of Islam was an esoterically minded offshoot of Shia Islam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizari_Isma%27ilism) that was considered heretical by mainstream sects, and she's here through the magical systems of the Fate/ Universe as well. She's admitted, however, to occasional misgivings about whether it's quite right to be dealing with magic; there are some rather sharp passages in the Qur'an about it, though interpretations differ widely.
From my Catholic perspective I've had misgivings of my own. Whether magic can be used ethically, and how it can be determined if magical use is ethical, are questions I've mulled though without much progress. There's a general appreciation of a distinction to be made between left-handed and right-handed uses of magic, so to speak. That may roughly equate to the question of whether it's ever permissible to commit a sin (lying, say, or stealing) in the service of some larger goal. One can glimpses ways of justifying an "evil" use of magic, such as casting a curse, but so far I haven't though the matter through any more than that.
I feel like it's worth the risk, at last. Perhaps only magic can save us now, and it's time for magic to return to the world. There are hints that it was not perhaps entirely gone in the earlier centuries of European civilization. I have a very loose hypothesis that the scattered energies of the C.E. 70 Jerusalem catastrophe had some lingering influence in the world after that, one which gradually dispersed. The Renaissance and the Reformation seems to have practically extinguished the embers, but nothing is ever really gone, is it...
This decision is too big for us right now. Is the world ready to risk magic?
~Chara of Pnictogen
