Do you think belief has any role in magic, and if so, what is that role? For example, is belief a crucial component, or simply icing on the cake, or not useful at all?
If belief has a role to play, whose belief does it have to be: the practitioner's, the target's, both, neither, Other? Does it matter if the subject is inanimate?
And belief in what, exactly -- yourself, your spell, your gods...?
If belief is indeed a criterion placed on something, for example magic, does that somehow make that thing less 'real'? Take a psychosomatic disorder, for example, where the body gets ill because the mind is deluded about something. Is that disturbance somehow not 'real'?
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