Quote Originally Posted by Goldenboko View Post
Overall though, Square took the word magic and replaced it with materia, because it sounded cooler.
I felt the word was stupid. They might as well have called it "matter", it wouldn't have made it sound more or less cool.

Clearly, one does not have to be a magic-user to utilize materia with magic in it. Obviously, then it is not as much the materia alone but the link humans have to the Ancients that allows them to access the knowledge of the Lifestream crystallized in the materia.