Life & Wisdom Quote by Lynn Abbey

Abbey smuggles a quiet provocation into what looks like worldbuilding housekeeping: if magic was "presumed" to work for "many centuries", then the more interesting story is not spells but belief. That one verb, presumed, demotes magic from hard physics to social fact. It works because enough people, across enough time, acted as if it did. In other words, the real engine is consensus, not incantation.

The line also needle-points a common fantasy shortcut. Readers are trained to expect a single underlying system - one hidden rulebook the clever protagonist can decode. Abbey refuses that comfort. By insisting there were as many theories as cultures and religions, she frames magic as a mirror of human pluralism: every society manufactures an explanation that flatters its own values, hierarchies, and metaphysics. A priestly caste will call it divine permission. An empire will turn it into bureaucracy. A marginalized community will treat it as folk practice, portable and deniable. Same phenomenon, different power structures.

There's an implicit critique here of intellectual arrogance, too. "How magic worked" becomes a proxy for how people explain anything they can't fully control: disease, weather, luck, violence. Even if magic is real in Abbey's universe, our access to it is mediated by mythmaking, institutional incentives, and cultural translation. The context is fantasy, but the subtext is anthropology: knowledge isn't just discovered; it's narrated. And the narration changes depending on who gets to speak.