I believe Magical Studies should be a distinct branch of psychology/sociology/anthropology, with its own sub-fields, including:

• economics
• placebo effect
• memetics
• religious studies
• somatopsychic and psychosomatic phenomena
• faith exercise science
• servitorology
• parogenetics
• spellcrafting

Centuries ago occultists, magicians, alchemists often had a proto-scientific mindset.

What you’re describing is already happening in some ways with eastern practices like yoga and meditation. Scientific medical and psychological studies are done to try and break down to distill what makes it effective. For example the whole mindfulness meditation wave, that’s still going on.

The difficulties with scientific research into these areas, is that occult and magical beliefs and practices come in a big complex package. Do some parts work, if you separate them from the rest? Probably? Is the whole more than the sum of its parts? Likely.

Scientific research into the non or even anti rational woo, doesn’t have much credibility and status besides anthropological and cultural studies.

During the Aboriginal Dreamtime, the stories say that the world was colder. There was less water, and the coast was further away. At the time of colonisation, these were fairy tales. Today, science agrees with myth. Those stories are so old, they come from the ice age. The glaciers were bigger and colder and the ocean was shallower. Australia's landmass was bigger. The continental shelf was the continent.

Two-Way Science is when the scientific community and the Indigenous community share knowledge and work together. It's pretty new, because the scientific community were pretty full of ourselves until recently. Hopefully science can progress faster now that we're asking the old experts for help. And hopefully we can help the public see that "woo" is very scientific.

Oral traditions often contains lots of valuable information.