Scholars of religion have noted this pattern extensively. The distinction between “miracle” and “magic” in religious discourse is less a substantive difference in the underlying phenomenon and more a rhetorical tool for establishing which practitioners have institutional legitimacy and which do not. The category of “magic” has historically been applied to the practices of the marginalized, the colonized, the heretical and the indigenous — not because those practices were structurally different from what the dominant tradition was doing, but because they were performed by people who lacked the authority to call them something respectable.