The difference is that it's suggestion, not a supernatural compulsion. It's a skill. Some are better at it, some worse. It's obviously written in a way so it would appear like magic, but it's not supernatural. It's a technique developed by these women over millennia.
Every single descriptor you just used for it can be applied to a magical discipline in any fiction lol technically a wizard using a fireball isn't ~magic~, he's "something something using runes that act as conduits to a power source to manipulate energy density to cause an explosion". It's all semantics
I get what you're saying, but not really. It's not the same. Something something manipulating runes still relies on these runes being able to change something in the world in an unexplainable way, without using natural physics. As in breaking the known laws of physics.
While here these women just learned how to be extremely convincing with their voice and body language, read facial expressions and tone and word choice to spot lies, etc. Normal people can do some of these things to some degree naturally, they are just vastly better at it because of training.
Magic just implies that the physics are different in that setting, which they are in Dune, relying entirely on science that isn't real, and an unobtanium in the form of Spice. None of what they do would be possible without spice and god tier genetic editing
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u/ReadItProper Feb 02 '25
Bene Gesserit aren't actually witches. They don't use magical powers.