Is magic real?

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Magic does not exist.

The belief that magic does exist is based on faulty pattern recognition, logical fallacies, cognitive bias, culture, and other various and sundry forms of BS perpetuated by those who prefer ignorance and abhor critical thinking.

unless you mean the work of magicians on a stage in which case of course THAT is real.

I think Eliphas Levi said it perfectly in one of his headings in 'Paradoxes of the Highest Science' - that religion is magic sanctioned by authority.

As for some of the limits and conditions of astral light as it's commonly called:

What was called Magic is nothing more than Technology that the primitives did not recognise/understand.
That still happens even to this very day. Except these days it's often passed off as being due to swamp-gas.

The best way you could answer your own question is try reading some of Israel Regardie or Gareth Knight's work. You could also look at Nick Farrell's blog for overview.

No such thing as magic. It's all fraudulent claims and parlour tricks - nothing more.

One additional thought - the only way one can really make the whole framework and construct accessible to themselves in terms of being able to digest the psychology of it is to consider the world from a panentheistic monist perspective. That's not a new creation at all - Pythagoras saw the world that way, so did Plato, Plotinus also being chief of the 'neo-Platonists'.

I remember when I first had a curiosity about this stuff, what it was, how on earth it could work whatsoever I decided to pick up Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books on Occult Philosophy (the version annotated by Donald Tyson) because I'd heard that Agrippa's work had been the source-ground of western esotericism for the past 500 years and that The Magus by Francis Barrett was just a cheap knock-off and plagiary of Agrippa's work. Reading the first book on natural magic made it really clear that Agrippa believed in the power of the seven Ptolemaic luminaries and considered the world an engine where thoughts drifted down from heaven, through the celestial spheres of the stars and the zodiac, drifted down through Jacobs Ladder as described as the geocentric drive-train of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, and finally hitting the Earth to then sink in and reflect back up into sentient or otherwise physical forms. This drive-train is described also in the Greek pantheon as well as comprising eight of the ten spheres of emanation in the Kabbalistic/Qabalistic tree of life.

At this point you probably want to slap me for saying all that or suggest I'm too stupid to be breathing. I'd consider that sentiment similar to the disgust and malice that I'd draw from fundamentalist Christians and Muslims - albeit you're considerably gentler in suggesting that there's no eternal hell for me to burn in for my blatant intellectual dishonesty.

My personal take on what I described above - none of it's actually 'real', we as a culture made it up. The funny thing about so many people 'making it up' with respect to something like this (really assessing our universe without the aid of telescopes, satellites, or modern equipment) is that for centuries, really millenia, we created logical links. In effect we MADE astrology work and made it true by enough consideration along those lines. I think that's probably the most unforgivably offensive and downright solopsistic thing I have to say on this - that one person's thoughts have perhaps a slightly insignificant pull, however the thoughts of millions, even billions, create forms in pre-material templates that render an overlay to reality that effects people who both believe in it and don't believe in it alike.

The only caveat to what I even just said there - it is uncanny that stupid, bronze-aged man all across the world by their review of the movement of the seven luminaries and their comparison of that to human behavior seemed to note very similar effects of mars, very similar effects of jupiter, of saturn, venus, the moon, etc.

I know that most people in this thread don't know, don't care, and would likely consider that anyone who'd even speak vaguely in semi-defense of this stuff is committing social and intellectual suicide here. I'm not nearly as interested in being part of the chin-stroking intellectual aristocracy around here (to which the only way in of course is reductive materialist outlook). Perhaps I'd suggest that I'm much more interested in peeling apart the layers, figuring out what the ancients had, why it worked, considering the possibility that all of this is a way of creating your brains software rather than being a slave to something written on your behalf really without your asking, and staying open-minded to the possibility that this is more than simply creating software patches for your brain - that when you have done this long enough you do find yourself being able to reach beyond the limits of your physical body, being able to - as Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin suggested, not just see the face of the clock telling you time but the whole apparatus from inside of the clock in all it's processes that make it tick.

That's where my head is at on this topic - much better to try it out to see what's there rather than to spit on it, call it garbage without examination, and live your life couch-surfing with nothing better to do than really get old, out of shape, and decompose in both your integrities and your psychology way ahead of the grave. At a minimum, for all of those who know with 112% certainty that I'm a cuke, a nut, and a disgrace to modern humanity I'd at least like you to consider that the subjective is the core foundation of our psychological and physical health, to the point that we have it in sh1t-shape because we hate it at the expense of the objective we end up destroying ourselves. I see the objective as unignorable but equally so flushing the subjective down the toilet is flushing your endocrine balance down on something that's much less a reality and much more a functional fixedness that one parades around with pomp and arrogance.