---
title: "Taylor Ellwood on the Evolution of Practical Magic"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/taylor-ellwood-on-the-evolution-of-practical-magic/
date: 2026-05-17
modified: 2026-07-24
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction In this interview we talk with Taylor Ellwood from MagicalExperiements.com. Many thanks to Taylor for sharing his path with us here at Perseus.From his website: 'Taylor Ellwood is the..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Magic"
  - "Meditation"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/ChatGPT-Image-May-17-2026-04_39_22-PM-1024x576.png
word_count: 3744
---

# Taylor Ellwood on the Evolution of Practical Magic

## Introduction

In this interview we talk with Taylor Ellwood from MagicalExperiements.com. Many thanks to Taylor for sharing his path with us here at Perseus.

From his website:

'Taylor Ellwood is the original magical experimenter. He’s developed multiple systems of magic and written a number of cutting edge occult books, including **[Pop Culture Magick](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/pop-culture-magic-series), [Space/Time Magic](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/space-time-magic-series)**, **[The Process of Magic](https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=c7779f6f54bbdeace0668fbef04a0eeb3de3e7e09e39c9b2e4aa4d3ef23a47abJmltdHM9MTc3ODk3NjAwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=2a8df929-42b5-6146-3a10-eada43c860ef&psq=The+Process+of+Magic&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYW1hem9uLmNvbS9Qcm9jZXNzLU1hZ2ljLUd1aWRlLUhvdy1Xb3Jrcy1lYm9vay9kcC9CMDdGNUxXR0ZS)**, and **[Walking with Spirits](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/walking-with-spirits)**. His work is grounded, innovative, and relentlessly practical, offering tools that bridge the gap between the seen and unseen.'

Join his Substack [here](https://magicalexperiments.substack.com/).

---

![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-4-794x1024.png)Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter. Image courtesy of [Magical Experiments](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/)

## Interview

## Early Practice and Formation

**PAA: You began practicing magic at sixteen after already wanting magic to be real through fantasy and imagination. When you first moved from reading or imagining magic into actual practice, what were the first exercises, rituals, or disciplines that gave you a sense that this was no longer theoretical?**

The first author I read, Ted Andrews had several books that proved to be formative for my early magical work: How to Meet and work with Spirits Guides and Enchantment of the Faerie Realm. Each of those books had a few exercises in them around seeing auras, and using your senses to detect the spirits. I really worked those exercises for the first year of my magical practice, working on expanding my extrasensory perceptions so I could sense and work with spirits. I also found the exercises for working with elemental spirits and archangels to be helpful, because it taught me a lot about how to connect with the spirit world. I think the most important lesson I learned was that the spirits weren’t on other planes of existence. There were and are in our world, waiting for us to recognize and work with them. Both of these books taught me the fundamentals of combining psychic senses with magical abilities to practice magic and to this day these practices still inform the foundation of my magical practice.

**PAA: Your early work brought together neo-shamanic and Hermetic practices. How did those two streams shape you differently, and what did blending them teach you about building a practice rather than simply inheriting one?**

Interestingly enough I came to both of these practices because of Ted Andrew’s works, because he combined them together. His work inspired me to continue researching neoshamanic techniques via Harner’s core shamanism practices and the Golden Dawn approach to ceremonial magic. I spent approximately the first 2-3 years of my magical practice learning these specific systems of practice and from the beginning I found ways to apply each practice to the other practice in order to complement the practices.

The neo-shamanic techniques taught me a lot about visualization, spirit work, and working with nature and elemental forces. The hermetic practices taught me the formal structure of magical workings and helped me put together rituals. When I combined the practices together, I learned how to identify the gaps each system had and field in those gaps using the practices of the other system. For example I could apply the formal ritual structure of the golden dawn as an aesthetic practice that gave the visualizations a physical form of practice. I could apply the neoshamanic techniques of working with spirits to create collaborative relationships with spirits instead of using the formal coercion and command structure that was present in the Golden Dawn system.

Combining these two systems early on taught me to critically examine and question how a given magical practice worked and find ways to improve on what was already there. It also formed the foundation of my later experimental work, particularly with blending non-occult disciplines with magical practices.

## Experimentation and Magical Method

**PAA: Many practitioners stay within one system for decades, but your path moved toward experimentation quite early. Was that because existing systems felt incomplete to you, or because experimentation itself was already part of your temperament?**

I’ve always been a naturally curious person, never satisfied with a given answer. This has been further sharpened by my time in academia and as a technical writer, where I was taught to find the gap in a given process or system and find a way to address it, attack it and otherwise come up with a solution to fill the gap.

In my earliest years as a practitioner, I applied my curiosity to ask why magic was performed a specific way. I wanted to know if the magical practice could be improved on or streamlined or otherwise changed. I would experiment with different variations of a practice because I wanted to know what I could do with magic and what the limits of my own abilities were. This prompted me to take a given working apart and try out different ideas to see if I could get the same result or a better one.

To this day, one of my primary motivations around magic is the evolution of magic as a practice. I enjoy stress testing a given system of magic and finding ways to improve it through the combination of unorthodox concepts and disciplines and the result has been the creation of more than a few systems of unique magical practices that I apply and teach to this day.

**PAA: You describe magic as something to test, refine, and learn from through both success and failure. When you are testing a magical idea, what are you actually paying attention to before, during, and after the working?**

I pay attention to my body, because that’s where the magic lands and is expressed first. I pay attention to the environment around me and how the quality of the light changes as well as the energy and experience.

What I also focus on is the soundness of the idea. Does it make sense? Can I experience or discover a measurable change as a result of doing the magical work?

When I do the magical working I ask myself what I would iterate differently the next time. I’ll make small changes and occasionally large ones. It’s never a one time working. I work the magical working until I’m satisfied that I’ve learned everything I want to learn from it and also refined and developed it to the point that it produces a consistent result and can be used as needed.

**PAA: In your experience, what separates a genuine magical experiment from simply improvising or mixing techniques together?**

Improvisation usually occurs in a moment as a response to a situation. It can be useful and important to improvise. Mixing techniques can also serve as an initial exploration of experimentation, because you are trying to discover how to take what works with one technique and complement another technique.

Genuine experimentation incorporates both improvisation and mixing of techniques, but it also builds iteration into the process. When you do a magical working multiple times you get the opportunity to discover what really makes it work and create a consistency in the work that makes that magic reliable.

Experimentation is also informed by your curiosity and studies. I’ve studied a number of non-occult disciplines over the years and then brought those disciplines into magical workings as a way to experiment with what magic can do. Think about your own interests outside of the occult and ask yourself - “How can I take this interest and apply it to magic?” There may not be an apparent answer but at some point inspiration will strike.

> One of my sayings is “Challenge what you know to discover what you can learn.” This really applies to everything in life, but if we apply it to magic what it means is that there is always room to discover and if you recognize this it will provide a sense of wonder and imagination that keeps you young at heart and supple in wisdom.
>
> Taylor Ellwood

**PAA: Have there been experiments that forced you to change your understanding of what magic can or cannot do?**

I would say every magical working ought to do that…it certainly has for me. I’m always learning something new from the magical work that I’m doing. It may be something very small but the point is that I’m always looking to change what I understand about magic.

One of my sayings is “Challenge what you know to discover what you can learn.” This really applies to everything in life, but if we apply it to magic what it means is that there is always room to discover and if you recognize this it will provide a sense of wonder and imagination that keeps you young at heart and supple in wisdom.

## Process, Design, and Troubleshooting

**PAA: In The Process of Magic, you focus on the mechanics of magic, consistent results, troubleshooting, and getting results that last. What made you want to strip magic down to process and mechanics rather than present it mainly through ritual forms, symbolism, or tradition?**

No one else was doing it. Most books on magic stick to ritual forms, symbolism and tradition laden with esoteric terminology. That makes it hard to learn how magic works or what can be done with it. I saw this gap in the literature of magic and how its taught in general and I decided to write about it so magic could become more accessible. Even now, I observe that most of the occult articles, videos, classes, etc are still oriented around the mystery of the esoteric. It’s very romantic and sentimental, but it doesn’t actually help people do magic if your magic isn’t made accessible. That’s why I focus on the mechanics, consistent results, etc, because people want results more than they want the sentimental esoteric romanticism that so much of the occult is steeped in.

**PAA: You teach that practitioners can customize and design their own workings rather than rely on prescriptive spells. When designing a working, what are the most important decisions a magician has to make before any ritual action begins?**

First you need to define your result - both in terms of what you want and what you don’t want. This creates the parameters for the spell work you’ll do as well as the mundane actions you take. Once you have the parameters it’s important to decide what actions to take that will help you accomplish the result. Pick those actions and make sure you understand what you are doing. Then execute and let the magic happen.

**PAA: In Magic by Design and How to Troubleshoot your Magic, you place a lot of emphasis on improving workings that are not producing results. When a working fails or only partially succeeds, where do you usually begin looking for the problem?**

First I look within. Is there a part of me that feels resistance or is sabotaging the working. 9 times out 10 that will be the issue and it means that you aren’t fully aligned with the result you want to manifest. Something needs to change within you in order to align yourself to the result you want to manifest.

If it’s not an internal issue, it’s an external variable that you either didn’t know about or didn’t factor into your magic. At that point add what you know about it into the magical work and see if the result improves.

I look at results as indicators that inform you on whether your magic is on track or off track. They aren’t the end of the magical work, so much as they indicate whether magic is working or not…and to keep going.

Troubleshooting teaches us a lot about the fundamentals of magic and how it works, because it gives us a way to look at a given working or spell and discover how all the pieces fit together.

## Pop Culture Magic and Correspondence

**PAA: In your Pop Culture Magic work, you show how fandom, modern mythology, pop culture spirits, social media, technology, and even role-playing games can become magical material. What first convinced you that pop culture could function as real magical substance rather than merely personal symbolism?**

I was pretty much convinced from the very beginning of my magical practice. As I started exploring the various systems of magic, a question I kept coming back to was whether these same systems would work if I were to swap tools, deities and other such things. Pop culture provided a natural experimenting ground in which to answer this question and what I discovered is that provided the magician understands what they are doing, there is a lot that can be swapped out of a given system that allows you to get viable results. Pop culture also is something we can relate to because it is contextual to our time and experience and this also enhances the efficacy of magic.

**PAA: When working with pop culture spirits or systems, how do you build depth and relationship over time so that the work becomes a genuine practice rather than a temporary fascination?**

The key word is time. If you’re going to work with a given pop culture then it requires the same commitment any magical practice calls for. Your pop culture magic will naturally evolve as you evolve or it will fall away if it becomes less relevant. Give it time and dedicated practice.

**PAA: You also write about matching pop culture mythology to traditional and new correspondences. How do you decide when to preserve older magical structures and when to let the pop culture material generate its own structure?**

A large part of that is context with the magical system you are working with. One of the most understated and misunderstood aspects of magic is the importance of developing your own correspondence system. The correspondences that you find in most books were never intended to be a one size fits all for magical practitioners. Correspondences should be developed from the perspective of your own experience and practice. When that occurs the correspondence system will be much more powerful because it is based on your experiential knowing of the material as opposed to using someone else’s correspondences. A correspondence is really a relational understanding that the given correspondences have corollaries that are relevant to the person’s magical practices and allows them to access specific knowledge and relationships through the correspondences.

## Space, Time, Identity, and Inner Alchemy

**PAA: Your Space/Time Magic work uses time, space, imagination, memory, dreams, retroactive magic, and identity to turn possibilities into results. How did your understanding of magic change when you began treating time and memory as active parts of the working rather than just background conditions?**

What fundamentally changed is that I recognized how much our experience of time and space shapes our collective experience and our conscious day to day life. Magic provides an alternative perspective that liberates us from the tyranny of clock time and space, and offers a way to conjure possibilities into existence. Working with time, space, memory and imagination as active components shows us that magic is really an ontological expression and experience of reality that changes as we change our respective identity. This allows us to move away from doing into being. Instead of trying to force reality conform to our will, we change our identity and as a result soften reality, so that seemingly improbable possibilities can be manifested into results.

**PAA: In Magical Identity, you argue that identity is central to effective practical magic. How does identity work change the magician’s relationship to results compared with simply doing a spell for an external outcome?**

When you change your identity, you are creating internal agreement with the result you want to manifest. If you only focus on the external circumstances, then you may get a result, but have it go away because your identity hasn’t fully accepted the result. Changing your identity creates an inherent buy-in to the new reality you are manifesting, making it possible for it to stick, because you’ve addressed any resistance or limiting beliefs that otherwise would sabotage the magical work and the desired result.

**PAA: Your Inner Alchemy work brings the body, cells, neurotransmitters, microbial life, and internal energy into magical practice. How did your body become a field of magical work, and how has that changed the way you understand spirits, embodiment, and transformation?**

When I was 20 I got tired of being depressed. I didn’t want to take the drugs to regulate my emotions because of the side effects. I did some research and developed a viable way of changing my neurochemistry and this became the foundation of the inner alchemical practices I use. As I continued experimenting I came to realize that the human body is a complex biological ecosystem with multiple life forms existing and I decided to start working with those life forms as spirits.

This experience taught me that our own human experience and beingness is a universe all its own and it helped me recognize that the perception of a separate spirit world is just a perception and limiting one that prevents so many people from accessing their own true potential. The spirits don’t exist on a separate plan…they are here, waiting for us and our body is the portal that invites in the magic and the manifestation of possibilities into results.

## Spirit Work and Magical Entities

**PAA: In the Walking with Spirits series, you emphasise rapport, collaboration, co-equal relationships, experiential embodiment, and simplified invocation and evocation. What changed in your spirit work when you moved away from coercive or command-based approaches?**

I only briefly got into the coercive, command based work in my early years, mainly as a result of learning ceremonial magic. I quickly realized that this approach produced more negative results than beneficial and asked the question: what would happen if I made friends with the spirits? I had already taken this approach with nature and elemental spirits and I found that taking such an approach naturally created better results because I wasn’t trying to force the spirits to do something, but instead finding a way to create a mutual win that benefited all parties. I’ve never had any of the ill effects that so many other magicians have reported and what this really demonstrated is that questioning what we do and why we do is essential to making the magic our own and creating better results in the process.

> Many people create an entity with the paranoid expectation that the entity will turn on them. What they never recognize is that they have build that expectation into the entity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy...
>
> Taylor Ellwood

**PAA: In Walking with Magical Entities, you discuss servitors, egregores, thought forms, fuel sources, programming, revision, and relationship. What have created entities taught you about responsibility and long-term magical maintenance?**

What you attend to matters and that includes what you create. Many people create an entity with the paranoid expectation that the entity will turn on them. What they never recognize is that they have build that expectation into the entity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, never really questioned because someone told them to expect that. As with anything else, the relationship you create is developed as a result of the curiosity or lack thereof that enters into the relationship. Curiosity is essential for contact. This also applies to your magical work outside of spirit work. Get curious about what you’ve done. At the time of this interview, I’ve been going through older classes I developed and it’s been useful for helping me stay curious about my own work, so I don’t take it for granted!

## Elemental Magic and Daily Practice

**PAA: Your elemental spirit work draws from Hermetic and Taoist models but also expands into elements such as gravity, magnetism, time, and space. What led you to modernise elemental magic in that way, and how has working with elemental spirits changed your practical understanding of the elements?**

Elemental magic has played such a pivotal role in my magical work. One of my earliest experiments involved exchanging life essence for elemental essence and that experienced has informed my approach to elemental work. I modernised elemental magic because it seemed clear that the original model was based on a classical understanding of the world, which modern science has evolved past. We know there are other elemental forces and so it made sense to work with the elements in that way. The modernisation has shown me that elemental magic is much more extensive than realized and that we need to stop treating it as a categorization of things and instead engage it as an active magical practice. Working with gravity, creativity and other elements has shown me how the elements are an expression of the way our human experience interacts with the spirits. Broadening our definition and experience of the elements through modernisation allows us to discover how those elements move in our lives.

**PAA: After decades of practice, writing, teaching, and experimentation, which parts of your daily or weekly magical practice remain non-negotiable?**

Daily meditation and martial arts is non-negotiable. I choose to stay fit in body and mind so that I can be at my best spiritually. I do a daily magical working called sphere of art which is part of the meditation process…the martial arts and qigong completes it.

## Looking Back and Closing

**PAA: Looking back across your books and systems, what has remained most consistent in your magical practice, and what have you most clearly changed your mind about?**

My curiosity and drive to evolve magic by combining it with non-occult disciplines has remained consistent over the years. I am always asking questions, exploring ideas, and developing new systems of magic. I haven’t really changed my mind about my various systems. I think what I’ve done is matured as a magician and a person and it makes me appreciate the rich nuance of my work as well as the continual evolution. I hopefully have many more years to continue experimenting and sharing my work.

**PAA: Lastly is there anything else you would like to share with the readers?**

First thank you for reading this interview and thank you to Perseus Academy for interviewing me. I really appreciate the opportunity to connect and share with you.

If you’d like to learn more about my unique take on magic, I invite you to visit [Magical Experiments](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/) and the [Magical Experiments Substack](https://magicalexperiments.substack.com/) where I share my writing and classes. I am continually innovating and creating new systems of magic.

**PAA: Many thanks for your time in answering our questions we greatly appreciate it.**

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