That's excellent. I think it was also Crowley who commented that of course magic can produce light and fire and all kinds of verifiable signs, but that's all b

That's excellent. I think it was also Crowley who commented that of course magic can produce light and fire and all kinds of verifiable signs, but that's all beside the point and so the best magicians are indistinguishable from fakers. I'm sometimes surprised how many people have hit on some variant of this. It's everywhere from the Black Bible saying that its spells work but have no mechanism of action, to the hacker koan about Tom Knight, to the various "haha only serious" faiths like Discordianism and SubGenius. And it seems like quite a lot of very similarly-minded people arrive at it from different direction - I get the sense that there's a certain mindset that's particularly good for maintaining faith and disbelief simultaneously.