The human species is equipped by evolution with a mind that adapts during development, and during that training period it can develop a functional distortion that allows the existence of gods, demons, and other supernatural beings as distributed personalities and personality fragments with magical powers. These powers derive from the ability to distort perception; the distributed components of these personalities communicate by various means subliminal to the hosts.

Doing magic is fundamentally controlling the human mind. A stage magician creates an illusion; it’s an illusion because he sees through it, though the audience doesn’t. A real magician, on the other hand, creates an illusion that he can’t see through, either. If the illusion is strong enough — we could say if the magic is strong enough — then no one sees through it. The illusion is indistinguishable from reality. We experience a shared shift in reality. For all practical purposes it is reality.

This kind of magic is very different than stage magic. Stage magic is based on deception, and thus is ultimately cynical. Real magic, on the other hand, must be based on belief and knowledge. One cannot set out to deliberately deceive oneself and everyone else without serious consequences.

So the first step is to provide a framework within which real magic can coexist with the real world as we know it. This is not as hard as it might seem, because, while what we know about reality is large, what we don’t know is enormously larger. This vast unknown leaves plenty of room for magic.

Fundamentally, we perceive the world through the mechanism of our senses. We know a great deal about this mechanism. Where our knowledge breaks down, though, is in the transition from the mechanism to the subjective.

At this moment I am hearing road noise from the streets outside this room. I have strong knowledge that this is vibration of the air impinging on my eardrum and transmitted to the cochlea, where specialized cells are stimulated to send signals along nerve fibers to my brain. All this is mechanism.

But the mechanism is not the sensation; the sensation is a subjective phenomenon about which we actually understand very little. It would be quite possible, for example, for a human to identify these sounds as the distant roar of demons, with accompanying feelings of dread and fear.

There is a section of highway within a hundred miles of my home known as "blood alley". It’s a narrow, winding mountain road that is the only available route for a large number of commuters — sometimes tired and distracted commuters, in a hurry. There have been numerous accidents along this highway, and many fatalities — speeding cars would sometimes cut the sharp curves, and hit another car coming in the opposite direction. In some especially bad places highway workers put heavy temporary concrete barricades to separate the two directions of traffic. These barricades are covered with many black tire tracks, each one a record of a potentially deadly encounter. These tracks are the embodied sign of the Demons of Blood Alley.

But the possibility of real magic remains — and the bright light of science has only created darker shadows…​

Imagine the scene in 2043, when a small team of students of real magic make their first contact with a demon.

"We aren’t worried about old demons", whispered Hawkins, as the dark figure wavered in the smoke…​