Pop Culture Magickian :
An Interview with Taylor Ellwood
by Wendy Darling

Author & Book Information: Taylor Ellwood's Official Web Site Taylor's LiveJournal Immanion Press: Pop Culture Magick Amazon.com: Pop Culture Magick Amazon.co.uk: Pop Culture Magick

Taylor Ellwood had already contributed multiple articles to Inception by the time I first met him in fall of 2003, at the Grissecon I convention. There we ever participated in a ritual of Dehara, the magic system being developed based on, and growing out of, the Wraeththu world.

In the past couple of years, Taylor has been doing a great deal of writing. He is co-author of Creating Magickal Entities and recently Immanion Press published his first solo magic book, Pop Culture Magick. Taylor is also the author of numerous published articles. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Kent State University.

The following is an interview with Taylor about the material in his latest book, including his work with Dehara magic.

How long have you been doing pop culture magick (PCM)?

I've been doing pop culture magick since 1997, though when I first began it was more watching shows and thinking, "That's a novel idea. Can I find this in actual magical practice?" I didn't really get into it until 2000, when I began to realize that I could apply a lot of existing magical principles to pop culture.

For those unfamiliar with PCM, could you give a couple of concrete examples of ways a magickian might use PCM as part of his or her "toolkit"?

Well, you can use the techniques from PCM to take a different approach to magick.

For instance, creating a pop culture altar that is dedicated to pop culture icons that you enjoy reading, watching, or listening to can be an exercise that gets you more in touch with what you're working with and at the same expands your pantheon.

Another example is taking your video game console or television and turning it into an active tool of your magical workings. Instead of just playing a video game or watching the TV, why not actually charge a sigil by playing a video game, or pick a pop culture icon from a show and use the attributes to make an entity you can work with?

There's never really been much writing on using pop culture in magick. There are a couple of chaos magick books that make allusions to the topic, but no one had really explored the idea of using pop culture in magickal practice. I had been experimenting with it and I wanted to write a book that could give people an alternative to the usual magickal practices they'd read about or participated in.

Pop Culture Magick is a new approach to doing magick that takes the culture around us and uses it. It's creative, innovative, and challenging because it's not about doing what's been done, but doing something completely different.

I've found that some people are fairly open to it, particularly chaos magicians, but also druids and pagans in general. The only real resistance I've encountered has come from ceremonial magicians who probably feel its not dignified or stuffy enough for them to use. As with anything else, some people will like the idea of pop culture and some people won't.

Mainstream culture is mundane, everyday culture. It's the daily grind, the 9-5 jobs, the late night news with the latest stories about terrorism or Iraq. It's the reality that expects us to conform, so that we look, act, and think like everyone else. Pop culture is culture that's different, and changing all the time. It's alternative culture, it's someone who stands out and doesn't fit a conformed consensual reality. Pop culture is temporary, representing different values than mainstream culture.

If something is part of pop culture for a long time (examples: Mickey Mouse, "The Andy Griffith Show," "Gilligan's Island") does it not become simply part of mainstream?

Yes, it does, because eventually it comes to represent the values of mainstream culture. We don't really hear about these examples any more. They faded into the background and became part of the drab mainstream culture.

Is it possible to use counter culture or underground energy, icons, characters, etc. as part of magick, or must it be "pop culture"?

Yes, it is. In fact a lot of counter culture is pop culture.

Star Trek and anime are two very visible forms of counter culture. People into Star Trek are called "Trekkers" or "Trekkies" and are viewed by mainstream culture as nerds or geeks and yet Star Trek represents values that do run counter to the capitalistic society we live in.

Anime also has people dressing up like characters, learning Japanese and again being viewed by mainstream culture as different.

So too is Punk Music and other genres of counter culture music part of pop culture. The more noticed a counter culture becomes, the more it becomes pop culture.

No, you don't, but it certainly doesn't hurt. The way I view it, a literate mage is a person who's not sticking with the tried or true, but trying to experiment and go in different directions. Pop culture is just one direction a person could go in.

It makes a lot of sense, but I've encountered people who simply won't entertain the idea of using pop culture at all, as if it's the worst thing in the world.

Also as a magician I can't emphasize enough how often paying attention to what's occurring around you is essential to finding opportunity around you. What seems stupid can still be useful for the magician depending on the working s/he is doing.

Really what it comes down to is being open enough to consider working with something like pop culture. Why shut yourself off from potential opportunities because something doesn't fit the conventional views of magick? I say it's better to be unconventional, to use what is around you and not just decide not to use it because other people might look badly upon you or because it doesn't fit conventional views of how magic is done.

I find by having a broad base of magical knowledge and experiences, it's easier to come back to any particular discipline with other experiences and use those experiences to advance that discipline further. In other words, by drawing on more than one tradition or approach to magic, you not only encounter a lot of diversity of thought, but also a chance to apply that diversity to any one tradition and advance you're understanding of that tradition. For instance, by learning how to play the cello or guitar, you can take some principles of that and apply it to how you play the violin, improving your virtuosity by having the diversity of experience to experiment and improve your skills on the violin.

Television, books (of any genre), newscasts, newspapers, comics, internet, basically any form of media.

The amount of attention that is given to a TV or movie character can be quite a lot. That attention is energy, and in a real sense gives the persona of the character life and a godhood of sorts.

This is particularly evident by how such characters have spawned cult followings. Harry Potter is a good example, where so much attention is put into the character that you really can't not know about him. He's become part of our mythos. I've worked with him and the other characters, using them for reflexive meditation, where they teach me something about magic or an issue I need to work on in myself. I did an Ostara (spring) ritual using Harry Potter and the local group I did this ritual with found the working to be highly informative, and in a couple of cases members received advice about particular situations in their lives.

It's certainly possible these people are doing a form of magic unknowingly. The reason is because they are creating ritual around the show. Posters on walls become icons and even part of the altar. Costumes become identities to assume and then take part in the pop culture. The only difference between these people and PCM'ers is that these people may not know what magic is or that it actually exists.

The costume is like another identity, or a mask, or body paints. When you put the costume on you are entering into sacred space, the sacred space of pop culture in this case. You're becoming part of a different culture for a time, living in that culture, and celebrating that culture.

At conventions this particularly becomes apparent because you encounter other people in costume, also celebrating the culture. The convention is a safe place where this culture can temporarily become reality. The costume is part of that process. The costume not only identifies you as part of the culture, but it connects you to the energy, the belief and attention that go into the culture.

And of course that energy is something you can use in your magical workings. When you take the costume off, you leave sacred space, you go back to everyday reality, but every time you put that costume on you enter sacred space again, enter another culture, another way of living life.

Taylor Ellwood's Pieces in Inception: "My Experiences with Aghama" (Spring '03) "The Role of Catharsis within Storm Constantine's Books" (Fall '03" "Wraeththu and Tantra: How Storm Got Me Into Sex Magick" (Fall '02) "Wraeththu and Tantra: A Look at Sex Magick and Its Ideologies" (Summer '02)

Well, I got involved right at the beginning. Storm and I had known each for a year and I had told her about some of my pop culture workings and also my thoughts that in her own way she and her writing were part of pop culture. So when she first started experiment with Dehara she very kindly invited me to partake in the experiments.

The work has proceeded in some intriguing directions. Storm and the group in England have taken a more ceremonial approach to Dehara, but in that approach they've created a very stable system of magic to work with.

Over here (in the U.S.) I've taken more of a sex magic/chaos magic/shamanistic approach to Dehara. The body paints I use, for instance, are very much something I imagine Wraeththu practitioners using, and of course sex magic is very prevalent in the series.

Right now the first book of the Grimoire of Deharan Magick is currently being worked on by Storm. It will be published in December, and I for one look forward to reading it and working on some of the ideas and approaches that Storm and other have developed. I know currently that the Dehara group is moving into more meditation and dreamworkings. Only time will tell where we'll go next.

I think that's very true. The amount of excitement and energy that has come from fans definitely impacts the writing that she does, the characters she works with and the overall energy behind the stories. I've found that this energy makes her writing and the magic we work together very vibrant and powerful.

Anime does get a bit of a bad rap over here. Part of the problem is that in the U.S. cartoons are generally regarded as childish or for kids. But anime isn't just for kids. It deals with adult themes and relationships and is watched by both children and adults in Japan. Over here that's something that many Americans are just discovering.

I would say for those people who think anime is silly to use in magic... try and watch some. Generally the people who make statements like that haven't watched anime. I know, for myself, anime has been very influential in how I do magic, particularly some of energy work I've developed as a result of watching the shows and then applying the principles to my own practices. In some cases anime has also confirmed how I do something magically, which leads me to suspect that there's a lot of occultists writing these anime.

The main difference is the format, the inclusion of pictures with words. Like anime, comics are treated stereotypically and the association of pictures with words is looked at as being less sophisticated than reading a book. In actuality reading a comic involves taking in a lot of visual detail as well as textual announcements.

One thing you repeat several times is that idea that there's a lot of actual magickal practice to be found on TV, in books, in anime, etc. and that mages and learn from this and try the "fictional" practices in their real magick work. Can you give a couple of examples of things you've learned from pop culture?

Certainly. In Yu Yu Hakusho there is this concept of territories, specific spaces within a set radius of a person where that person can alter a rule of reality, based on his/her personality.

I'm currently refining a technique involving power spots, which are vortices of energy. When a magicians connects to such a vortice s/he has more access to energy and can use that energy in his/her workings. In my case I'm interested in trying to bend a law of reality or two, such as not being cold on a winter day. So far the results have been mixed, but the purpose of experimentation is to refine techniques until they do work.

Another example would be the anime Yugi-oh, where kids duel each other the spirits of cards. I've applied that concept to working with the spirit of a given tarot card and while I haven't used them to duel, I have worked with the spirit of a given card as a way of doing pathworking (a form of meditation) or I've set that entity a specific task that I need it to accomplish.

About the Interviewer:
Wendy Darling (nickname Wiebke Fesch) is a web designer, fanfic author, and editor of Inception. She lives in Atlanta, GA, where she is self-employed, operating her own web design business, Metro Girl. Wendy is co-author of a Wraeththu Mythos novel called Breeding Discontent, and is an editor with Immanion Press. You can reach Wendy at wdarling@abraxis.com.