It's curious to wonder when did humans begin associating words and writings with magic and special powers? Actually, when did pre-modern-human apes begin thinking about magic at all?
Even more so, once one realizes that you can use language to persuade other people to act in a way that advances your own interests.
Belief in ghosts also seems to be near-universal among humans, to the point that it may be an evolutionary adapted trait[0], this would naturally lead to animist religions, which are essentially beliefs that everything has a ghost. Human psychology being what it is (and religion being in a sense the human mind turned inside out and projected upon the world,) if you believe in ghosts, and you believe in luck and karma, eventually you believe in restless spirits and wicked monsters that blight your crops and bring you nightmares and all sorts of monsters of the id, and then your religion provides rituals and spells to deal with them.
Speaking of which, here[1] is a very good lecture by Dr. Irving Finkel on the first recorded beliefs about ghosts from ancient Mesopotamia, and the magic they used.
Also, for much of human history, the only people who could read and write were priests and astrologers, elite classes who controlled the 'secret knowledge' about the seasons, signs and portents of the future and rituals regarding the dead (the word "magic" originates from an ancient Persian word for priests[2]), which would lead people to believe words had innate magical power, or at least that the spells they wrote down did.
[0]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/chimpanz...
[1]https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-cognitive-psyc...
Amazing to see how quickly my comment is downvoted away, within seconds. You must be very quick at checking your references. Try this thread posted parallel to my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26449135
"Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, as in telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, a.k.a. telekinesis, and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. It is considered to be pseudoscience by a vast majority of mainstream scientists, in part because, in addition to a lack of replicable empirical evidence, parapsychological claims simply cannot be true "unless the rest of science isn't." ... Parapsychology has been criticised for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide convincing evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research."
Uh, possibly fair enough. But apparently in his book
"Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests."
Yet, for them, it's just another survival tactic.