It is funny watching people’s faces when I tell them I am a paranormal junkie who does not actually believe in a paranormal realm. I don't subscribe to a religion, I don't hold a faith in an afterlife, and I don't consult deities as anything more than human relics of art. I still go on ghost hunts, take ghost tours, sit for tarot readings, and enjoy the rest of it. Part of the reason is the mystique. Part of it is keeping a working agnosticism inside an atheism. I'm not convinced that paranormal or religious entities are true in the literal sense. What I can prove isn't the same thing as what I believe. I don't believe in God in the classic sense, which is the atheism. Agnosticism is about knowledge, and I know I cannot disprove ghosts or gods. I am also interested in what people do. Paranormal study is a primal and passionate subject across beliefs and populations, and that alone is enough to stay in the room.

So I explore the occult and the paranormal with a skeptic mind, and I have fun doing it. Years of philosophical traditions, some academic and some experimental, have turned up useful learning even when I walked away with no personal paranormal event to report. It can be disappointing to put yourself in a place where you are supposed to feel something unearthly and come out more convinced of an ordinary reality than you were when you went in. I have learned not to let that disappointment exile me. Other people’s insights about ghosts and gods are observable. The ghosts and the gods haven't been, at least not for me. The people are the part I can actually study.

There is a line in the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate. Al Pacino, as John Milton, calls God an absentee landlord and then says he is a fan of man. That line is close to why I keep dabbling. I have never seen anything that made me think the world is ruled by a non-physical entity rather than by physics. I have never seen a lamp leave a table without a hand or earthquake moving it. I have never seen a spirit. Even as a small child praying hard in church, I never heard the voices I was told would come from God or the angels. For a long time that silence was depressing. I have since turned the lack of paranormal activity into a reason to become a better fan of man and the paranormal.

Al Pacino Speech on Devil's Advocate (1997)

Roots of Skepticism

It still surprises me that I grew into a natural skeptic after an Appalachian Christian upbringing, and after years of exposure to the other faiths and traditions that also live in Tennessee. The hills and hollers are decorated with more than one belief system, even where Christianity is the loudest. It matters to me that I stay near faith-based people. They are human beings with reasons for what they hold. If someone is telling me about a spiritual or supernatural experience, it matters less that I have not had it with them than that a real person is in front of me explaining what moves them.

Some of the analytic bent could be neural. Years ago a doctor looked at sensory issues, joint and gut problems, and a habit of existential rumination, and the criteria pointed to Level 1 autism. Not every autistic person lands on a nonreligious logic. Meeting other autistic people has made it plain that the processing can favor literal thinking. It is genuinely hard for me to comprehend some of the paranormal experiences other people report, because I do not have them. Being a fan of man still leaves room to enjoy the conversation. Agreement isn't required for the connection.

No one in my community steered me toward skepticism. The upbringing and the broader culture steer away from it. Questioning God’s existence isn't considered polite. Over the years I have learned not to spend my energy proving other people wrong. I would rather uphold my own rationale and leave them their philosophical and spiritual independence. For my own thinking I stay with the material, the observable, and the tangible. I am interested in the scientific method and in processes that can be measured, tested, and repeated. The idea of something non-physical has never quite landed. Even if ghosts and gods were real, the way people describe them is still full of physical claims like movement, embodiment, activity. That is why Jangled Jester centers on physicalist magick, a study of self-enchantment through the form and function (or magick) of what exists.

How Form and Function is Magick

Without a mystic persuasion, and with a mechanical way of thinking, I kept noticing that the interesting question was always how and why a thing works. In magick communities I heard practitioners describe magick as an elusive force that moves things in a near-miraculous way. The link between form and function, how a thing is shaped and what it does, can be called magick if it stays rooted in those two. That is why the practice points in so many directions. Things transform, for better and for worse. What works to the benefit of people can be called good or white magick. What harms or wrecks can be called bad or black. What is too mixed to sort can be called gray. The labels are a filing system. The mechanism, or collaboration of form and function, is the same.

Skepticism has a place in the occult curio world because it keeps the questions moving. It has never been a limit on self-enchantment or on staying interested in the paranormal. I don't get the same outcomes some people report. I also don't lack curiosity, and I don't lack a reason to be in the investigation. Skepticism can make the interest richer. You get better at experimenting, more willing to change a stance, more careful with data, and more honest about your own bias. What matters to me as a skeptical and magickal thinker is finding how things work. Skepticism has been a tool that keeps the practice rolling instead of letting it stagnate. It has also been a kind of courage in rooms where other people freeze. Being a skeptical paranormal junkie has made ordinary life more surprising. Sometimes the tangible explanation is the spookiest part. The indifference of the universe, or the possibility that there is no afterlife and no angelic realm, unsettles a lot of people. For a fan of man, it is a comfortable home.