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Originally Posted by VIVIT
It's less "magic is everything supernatual" and more "supernatural things cannot be objectively categorized". Real thaumaturgical practices ("real" in the sense that people actually do them) are variously categorized as magical, miraculous, psychic, or some word in the native language of the practitioners with no direct English translation based on criteria that are no more empirically verifiable than whether the practices have any actual power, and observers of the practices may categorize them differently than the practitioners do. Fictional thaumaturgical practices are categorized however the author wants, and from a factual perspective, it's impossible to argue against those categorizations, not simply because Magic Don't Real, but because the real-life counterpart to magic has no widely agreed upon definition.
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I'm not convinced that that's relevant. Fantasy is a literary genre that exists now; it sometimes has its own shelves in bookstores and libraries, and it's used to discuss books and movies and such. And one of its common features is magic, which is a concept that exists now and has a certain range of meanings now. The etymology of the words, or the historical development of the concepts, may be of some academic interest, but the meaning is defined by current usage.
It seems to me that a very common element in works that are classified as fantasy is what Terry Pratchett described as narrative causality. Fantasy builds up to a recognition, an anagnorisis, and what is revealed is that the world works through the actions of beings with agency, not merely at the human level, but in terms of how nature itself operates: there are volitional beings behind natural events. This contrasts with naturalistic fiction, where volition, if it exists at all, exists within human beings and in their actions in the social world.