Nobody understands why legacy code works. The wizard admits he just copy-pasted from "Arcane Overflow" (StackOverflow) and has no clue what the symbols actually do, but removing them breaks everything. The perfect metaphor for that one critical function in your codebase with the comment "// DO NOT TOUCH - NOBODY KNOWS WHY THIS WORKS".
The "magic circle" is just your typical spaghetti code that somehow passes all the tests. And let's be honest, we've all been that wizard - confidently explaining code we don't understand until someone asks one question too many.