Magic: Misremembered technology?

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If we could create a wormhole between the middle ages and our present era, the people over at the middle ages will almost immediately call our technology "magic" or "the work of the devil" and such things. Is it possible that the very idea of magic is actually misremembered electricity-based technology or is it more that what it seems? After all the "Mana" we usually see in fantasy role playing games works almost exactly like electricity.

Allow me to elaborte a little further

Fireball/firebolt spell = flamethrower

Ice blast/freeze spell = a blast of liquid nitrogen

Thunder/lightning spell = taser guns used commonly by the U.S. police forces.

Wind/air spell = giant fan(?)

Could it be that we were suppressed and stripped of our advanced technology under mysterious circumstances? after all they are various myths and legends (most notably the 'Atlantis' myth) centered around the idea of advanced civilizations either getting destroyed by the "god(s)" and/or being stripped of our technology. Are we living in an endless cycle of advancing our technology only for a bunch of "gods" to steal it away from us and/or destroy it?

If this is true, shouldn't we take the fight against the God(s)!? I say we nuke them out of the sky!! !

Your mythologies notwithstanding, time-travel is impossible because it breaks the rule of Causality and the law of Conservation of Matter and Energy.

Myths are just primitive humans trying to make sense of their world without the benefit of science. There is no evidence for any forgotten technologies more advanced than Greek Fire and Electro-Plating.

The problem with trying to address the JK Rowling and MMORPG type magic is that no one in history has been known to do it - thus it's difficult to really even get agreement on whether this is ever what the word meant aside from today's pop fiction.

The magic of known history is a much more boring thing (at least if you're not interested in philosophy and religion). It's really just a western derogatory slang for gnostic practices similar to those such as raja, bhakti, and gnana yoga in India.

I understand what you're getting at, but I don't really see it as plausible. There's no apparent reports of any such thing actually occurring, at least nothing really credible.

One of the sources of this form of "Magical Thinking" seems to be the Myth of Atlantis.

From a hundred words or so in Plato's "Republic", people have created the myth of a vast island nation with flying cars, panaceas, anagathics, sentient robots, death rays, and a host of other gimmicks and plot devices that have found their way into science-fiction, and then back out again into the cultural noise.

One of the ideas that seems to be growing in popularity among historians and other social scientists is that the Atlantis Myth describes the collective memories of people in all areas of the globe regarding the inundations of their coastal villages as the oceans rose at the end of the last major glaciation period about 12,000 years ago. These memories have coalesced from stories of each individual village being flooded out over a hundred years or so into one conglomerated myth about a single nation that was destroyed and sank into the sea in a single night.

Easy to accept, once you realize that 12,000 years ago was when humans first developed agriculture, and first started building villages - near water, of course - but about 5,000 years before writing was developed in Egypt and Sumeria. Word-of-Mouth is notorious for distortion and exaggeration of the facts, after all.

Yes as the Industrial Revolution unfolded in the early 1800's and technological change began to happen fast enough to be perceived as change some folks began to project high technology into ancient myths (including the bible).

Ignatius Donnelly wrote a late Victorian era best seller reviving Pato's idea about Atlantis, and presented "evidence" of an ancient pre flood civilization centered on a lost landmass in the Atlantic that conquered the world with the help of steam powered blimps flying around the skies (he wrote the book before the Wright brothers). Read some of it when I was a teen. The book is pure balderdash, but its quite entertaining balderdash. Kinda like Tolkien's Middle Earth. Except Tolkien didnt pretend to be writing nonfiction.

As technology advanced further and faster in the twentieth centurey the idea became even more seductive that our high technology had somehow been introduced to our ancient ancestors as evidenced in myth. And as we entered the post war Space Age the emphasis switched from lost human civilizations to Space Aliens as the favored alledged introducers of high tech to our ancient ancestors.

For decades there has been an industry of books trying to prove (for example) that the Ark of the Convenant was a radio transmitter for Moses to talk to "God" (ie aliens up in the mother ship), and the like.

So the OP is not the first to think of this idea.

Nope, just modern imaginings and myths from the last 500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis

There is no geologic proof, which there would be glaring proof if it did exist, for supposed lost islands and continents.

The modern conception of magic in media was created with video game mechanics in mind and does not reflect the reality of ancient rituals and traditions.

We'll probably be in for some surprises for a long time to come in terms of the age of human civilization. There are a lot of ruins in places they shouldn't be (especially 80 feet under water) for cultures purported to only be several thousand years old. Similarly a lot of things do get found from times and on continents that make us scratch our heads. For Egyptian culture to 'start' at it's most advance and stumble backward rather that forward over time is also confusing. Could there have been a pre-melt Phoenecian style culture with a considerable empire? Not out of the question, but that doesn't make Atlantis either. Somehow, regardless of how cool their trading vessels might have been there's no reason to believe they had floating cars or sky ships.

To read about Poseidonis, the last vestige of Atlantis, it was claimed to have 3 large islands and 7 small ones, there's a whole story of the laws and rulers and when you read it it sounds a lot like a legominism - ie. you're not supposed to take it literally. The 3+7=10 is a formula that's all over the place in the ancient Mediterranean, some of the more obvious showings were the tetraktys of Pythagoras and the cryptic writings in Sepher Yetzirah. To see something absurd as sculpting a land mass in conformity with 3's, 7's, or 12's is a big nudge and wink.