Whether it was the pythian oracle, the witch of Endor, bone-pointing Aboriginal killers or voodoo-active pirates, there have always been people around who could call upon the supernatural and have it answer. There are varieties (spirit-binders, fetish-makers, animist shamans) but most forms of magic have long pedigrees.

They stayed hidden for a long time, mostly because the typical reaction of people without magic is quite violent when confronted with people who do have magic. There are all kinds of crazy stories about the Borgia popes being satanic magicians, about Pilgrim warlocks using magic to clean out the natives before being unmasked at the Salem trials, about the efficacy of human sacrifice in Central America going head-to-head with the angelic protectors of Catholic conquistadors. It’s hard to say anything for sure before the Theosophists came out into the open and Spiritualist Movement surged after World War I. But there were just enough people eager for some kind of light after the war’s darkness, hoping for contact with the Other Side and reassurance that mankind was being guided to a better place. Lots of people pursued Spiritualism, and a few things got scientifically verified.

Magic worked. It could contact dead people and provide information that indisputably demonstrated the existence of some kind of human memory after the death of the physical body.

Magic could also contact immaterial intelligences that were not and had never been human.

Not everyone could do it. Two “operators” of equal education could perform the exact same rites, with only one succeeding. Common wisdom holds that some immaterial force of will is necessary to infuse the form of a spell with the energy to operate. Only those with powerful personalities seem to become magicians.
Among those who can do magic at all, the simplest sort seems to be subtle influence on the physical world.

Gross distortions of the physical world aren’t nearly as common or easy. But they aren’t impossible.

The vogue for magic lasted until a few scrappy investigators discovered that, far from being a new cultural force, there had been magicians quietly influencing politics for as long as fifty years. The calumny that magicians caused the Great War is certainly a gross oversimplification, but most people believe that there were magicians who encouraged it and spirits that greatly enjoyed or benefitted from it. As you might guess, the spirits who got off on trench warfare are not the most pleasant kind.

But magic didn’t really earn the fear and hatred of the common man until the rise of National Socialism in Germany. Based around a cabal of enchanters, the Nazis were the first openly sorcerous government. Their atrocities are now considered the primary example of what magicians do when given authority.

After World War II, the practice of ritual magic was banned in most countries, and much of the lore was lost or suppressed. While both the U.S. and USSR legally repressed the practice (after the Supreme Court decided, in The People vs. Megan Boroviak, that magic acts were separate from religion and were therefore exempt from Constitutional protection), it’s long been suspected that both sides were secretly using enchantment in their games of espionage, brinksmanship and battles through proxy nations. Indeed, a few dramatic screwups on both sides revealed to all but the most blindly patriotic that most nations were attempting, desperately in some cases, to acquire or recreate lost occult knowledge. A play on one of the words for a magical tome is one reason that the long period of covert strife between Russia and America is called the Grim Wars. 

Despite the rhetoric of People for Religious Liberation (a so-called “magicians-rights” movement) that “once you outlaw magic, only outlaws will use magic,” most people abhor sorcery. Of course, laws and social opprobrium are leveled against murder, theft and drug abuse too, and an awful lot of that goes on.