Ah, well, "magic" probably not the best word here, to be honest. I find Clojure to be the absolute opposite of witchcraft - everything is pretty transparent, there's no magic encapsulated behind layers and layers of abstraction. Data is just data. Functions do what they say. The macro system is explicit. The REPL makes every intermediate step inspectable.

The irony is that Lisp looks cryptic to newcomers precisely because there's almost zero syntactic sugar hiding the structure. Once you adjust, you realize the "weird syntax" is actually the absence of magic - it's the parse tree, exposed directly. Alas, people prefer sugar flavored lies instead of "inconvenient" truth. I was pretty much the same - wasted years of my life, circling around shit that was all about "magic". At some point, your mind just can't take it anymore - it wants "plain & stupid". Because when shit just works - it doesn't feel that stupid anymore.