The Function of Magic in the Philosophers' Stone

The primary question that hung with me after the completion of "The Philosophers' Stone" was this: how can we reconcile the presence of magic in the later stages of the story when the first part of the story takes great pains to demean even the suggestion of magical influence. While my first instinct was that this conflict was indeed troublesome, a closer reading of the text was illuminating. The principal "magic" moment of the story occurs when the beautiful young boy appears in front of King Mark and offers him a stone with which he is to rub all over his body. Mark does so, and is turned into a donkey. The impact of the stone, which the boy promises Mark that his "wish will be fulfilled", is certainly comedic. It's sort of a foolish image to think of this befallen king rubbing a stone all over his chest and head, only to find himself in the form of an ass. I think it is this form that he takes that governs my reading. He doesn't become a horse, a bird, or a "noble" creature. He becomes a jackass. Wieland uses "real" magic to further strengthen his argument for the nonexistence of magic. If you believe in this nonsense enough to rub a stone all over your body, you don't just become a jackass, you are jackass. When Mark awakens from his dream discovers that he is still in his animal form, it furthers this idea that Mark's true form is indeed that of a donkey, and the human form is but a disguise. When Mark transforms back he does so by eating a lily (Note that eating a lily carries none of the ritual that his initial "stone-rubbing" paraded). He performs an act natural to a donkey. He grazes. He's accepting his identity as a jackass. The wife's analogues victimization and transformation suggests that she too was living on false beliefs. Perhaps Wieland was just trying subversively comment on the idea of the adulterous knight, whom is actually the maidens true love. That she disappears in the middle portion of the story suggests that her narrative/message was not as interesting to Wieland as was King Mark's.