---
title: "Tower Time: Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter on Magic, Collapse and Transformation"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/tower-time-taylor-ellwood-and-sheena-witter-on-magic-collapse-and-transformation/
date: 2026-06-23
modified: 2026-06-23
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction The Tower is probably one of the most feared cards in the Tarot. Most people see it and immediately think of disaster, collapse, loss, or everything suddenly going wrong...."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Magic"
  - "Tarot"
  - "Tower Time"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/stack_with_back_concrete-1024x576.jpg
word_count: 3464
---

# Tower Time: Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter on Magic, Collapse and Transformation

## Introduction

The Tower is probably one of the most feared cards in the Tarot. Most people see it and immediately think of disaster, collapse, loss, or everything suddenly going wrong.

But *Tower Time* by Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter looks at the card in a much deeper way. The Tower is not only something terrible that happens to us. It can reveal the structures we have built our lives around, including identities, relationships, beliefs, ambitions, fears, and survival patterns that may no longer be serving us.

The book explores how we move through these periods of major change using Tarot, scrying, body awareness, inner alchemy, spirit work, and practical magical preparation. It also asks an important question: what happens when we stop using magic only as an emergency response and begin building a magical life that can actually support us when things fall apart?

In this interview, Taylor and Sheena discuss how their own understanding of the Tower changed, how to recognise a true Tower Time, why people often rebuild the same structures after escaping them, and how personal transformation connects with the much larger systems shaping our lives.

This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation about collapse, change, magic, identity, and what may become possible once the old structure can no longer remain standing.

You can order *Tower Time* directly as a [paperback](https://taylor.thrivecart.com/tower-time) or [ebook](https://taylor.thrivecart.com/tower-time-ebook). It is also available through a range of [online book retailers](https://books2read.com/u/m2gVER).

---

[![Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter discuss Tower Time, Tarot and magical transformation](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/TowerTime_eBook-664x1024.jpg)](https://books2read.com/u/m2gVER)

**PAA: The Tower is one of tarot’s most feared cards, but Tower Time treats it as a teacher, initiator, and magical force. What did each of you have to unlearn about the Tower before you could write this work?**

Taylor - The initial lesson came when I read for a client. She had lost her job. I pulled the Tower card during her reading, and instead of looking at it as an indicator of disaster, I became curious. What did this card offer my client? I invited her to get curious with me. What we discovered together was that the card was inviting her to leave behind everything that wasn’t working in her life and go on an adventure. She took that adventure, and it changed her life in all the right ways. And it showed me an essential truth about the tower: It strips away what isn’t needed so you can return to what matters.

Sheena - I had to unlearn shame, judgment, and the fear of punishment.

I was raised in a religious household with very clear rules about what was acceptable to explore, and Tarot was definitely not on that list. When I first started quietly experimenting, the very first card I ever pulled was the Tower. I was terrified. I honestly thought God was going to smite me, or that I had opened some door I was going to be punished for opening.

But my curiosity is insatiable, and I kept coming back. Over the years, every time I circled back to Tarot, the Tower was there. If someone read for me, there it was. If I bought a new deck and pulled a card, there it was again. For a long time, I thought it meant I was doing something wrong. Eventually, I began to understand that the Tower was not threatening me. It was initiating me. It was asking me to dismantle the shame, fear, and inherited judgment that kept me from trusting my own direct relationship with magic.

**PAA: The title Tower Time suggests more than a single crisis moment. How do you define Tower Time, and how can someone recognize when they are moving through one rather than simply experiencing ordinary difficulty?**

Taylor - A Tower Time is an experience of change and transformation that strips away what isn’t working in your life. It can feel like everything is collapsing, and it is quite scary because you are often losing the structures of your life that you thought were stable. A Tower Time can be a divorce or a job loss or a death in the family, or it can be a health scare or some other experience that challenges the status quo of your existence and calls everything into question. Yet, it is also one of the most enlightening and powerful experiences you can have, because the fall of the tower is also the invitation to opportunity and discovering what really matters in your life.

Sheena - We all face difficulties. Living life brings circumstances, disruptions, risks, failures, and successes. Not every hard thing is a Tower Time. Sometimes a difficulty is simply something uncomfortable that needs support, a solution, or time.

Tower Time is not just about difficulty. Difficulty asks us to respond. Tower Times forces us to see what our lives have been built around.

Tower Times begins when what is falling apart is not only the circumstances but also our underlying system of meaning. A crisis stops being something happening to your life and starts revealing the architecture of your life. In Tower Times, you see what the structure has been built on: the beliefs, roles, identities, loyalties, protections, compromises, and survival strategies holding it together.

There is often a felt sense of before and after. You experience something, see something, or understand something you cannot un-know. They become part of the “highlight reel” of life. The moment something changed. Even events that look “good” on the surface can become Tower Times, because it is about the meaning they have for you.

**PAA: One of the strongest ideas in Tower Time is that people do not only suffer Towers — they build them. What are some of the Towers people construct through control, duty, performance, isolation, spiritual ambition, or survival?**

Taylor - People do build towers, often with the best of intentions and without realizing they are building towers. A Tower you build can be a relationship you stay in out of obligation, or a career you got into with high ambitions, without recognizing the cost. The Tower feels comfortable, and the walls you build feel safe, until one day you have really blocked your view of the world and lost the freedom of expression and being that all of us long for, and so few of us live.

Sheena - Our biggest constructed Towers are around our identities. As soon as we complete the sentence “ I AM…” The first stone is laid. When we take on labels or descriptors as identities and then start making decisions and living life through the lens of that identity, we are building Towers. So many of our Tower Times involve the shaking up or loss of identity; the core of who we believe ourselves to be is challenged.

And it doesn’t start with us, even though we are the builders. Think back to childhood. The adults in your life. How did they finish the sentence: “You are…”

How has that shaped your entire existence, the actions you have taken in the past and take now, and the way you see and move through the world?

**PAA: You contrast emergency magic with magical infrastructure. What does it mean to build a magical life before things fall apart, instead of reaching for magic only when everything is already burning?**

Taylor - When you reach for magic in a state of emergency or because of a problem, it's an act of reaction and an attempt to get back to the status quo. Ironically, it is one of the most unmagical approaches you can take to magic, to use magic as a reaction. In contrast, creating a magical life requires a level of honesty and integrity that you will be held to by your magic. It’s mapping out the long-term outcomes and then casting the magic to create them… and let me be clear: it’s not trying to create a problem-free life. If anything, a lot will fall away in your life, but the difference is that you will be continually oriented toward what really matters and the magical life you live as a result.

Sheena - Emergency magic is what you reach for when you still believe magic is separate from your life. Magical infrastructure is what happens when you are in an ongoing relationship with your magic. It is the daily, weekly, seasonal, embodied, practical, and spiritual foundation that helps you stay connected to yourself, your allies, your tools, your body, your values, and your Spirits before crisis arrives.

There is nothing wrong with emergency magic; we even teach classes on it. Emergency magic can give us a sense of agency and focus our attention, which can be vital in the moment. But if the only time you practice is in crisis, you are trying to effect change from a survival state, you don’t have access to the same physical, energetic, and magical resources you would otherwise. If you cultivate a magical life and a strong infrastructure, you have habits and a support system to hold you through the challenges.

> For us, tarot, scrying, and divination are not about outsourcing our authority. They are tools for pattern recognition, discernment, and experimentation.
>
> Sheena Witter

**PAA: Tarot, divination, and scrying play major roles in Tower Time. How can these practices help readers see the hidden architecture of a Tower rather than getting lost in fear, projection, or confusion?**

Taylor - These are pattern-recognition tools that help people get out of their own way and see the patterns that lock them into Tower situations. The Tower is an alchemical lesson that continually strips away what isn’t true to you. You can use divination, scrying, and various other forms of the oracle to see the self-imposed walls you’ve built around yourself. And then you have a choice…tear the walls down and let the Tower fall, or keep it up and continue to live a smaller existence as a result.

Sheena - Tarot and scrying create a symbolic field outside the body where those threads of a situation can be seen, named, and separated out.

For us, tarot, scrying, and divination are not about outsourcing our authority. They are tools for pattern recognition, discernment, and experimentation. They help us see the architecture beneath the collapse, but we still have to test and see how it lands in our body, lived reality, and the consequences of our choices. They help us remain curious and ask better questions.

**PAA: The body is treated as a source of magical intelligence throughout Tower Time. What can illness, pain, exhaustion, numbness, or nervous-system response reveal that the mind may be avoiding?**

Taylor - Your body is always communicating with you. We’ve been taught to disregard that communication, but when you really tap into your body’s awareness, you’ll discover it already knows how trapped, tired, and exhausted you feel. And if you listen and make changes, your life circumstances will change as well. For example, if you are tired, get more sleep and watch how that seemingly simple choice creates a ripple effect in your life.

Sheena - Our minds make and protect our stories. Our bodies reveal the cost. Our minds are rationalizing, meaning-making machines. They can keep explaining why something is fine, necessary, noble, practical, or unavoidable. They can justify anything. Illness, pain, exhaustion, and nervous-system responses can show us where we have been overriding ourselves. I do not treat symptoms as simple spiritual messages, although I have in the past; again, our minds are tricky! Bodies are complex. Illness requires care, support, and sometimes medical attention. But our bodies are constantly giving us feedback, highlighting what is not working for our systems and revealing the cost of living a life, identity, role, belief system, or relationship pattern that isn’t healthy for us, even as our mind may be rationalizing it and convincing us that we are making perfect sense.

**PAA: The inner alchemy sections connect Tower work with health, ancestry, memory, and transformation. Why is real change not just a mental or spiritual process, but something that has to be integrated through the body and lineage as well?**

Taylor - Fundamentally real change calls on us to look past the level of personality and get curious about our experience of identity. Who are you, really? You aren’t just a name or a personality. You are a person shaped by your ancestors and the patterns they lived and inherited and passed on to you. You are an identity shaped by your cultural, class, race, and so many other factors that are often ignored because there is a preference to focus on the illusion of individuality. Individuality is a comforting lie used to ignore the other variables of who you are and why you are the way you are. If you truly want to become your own person, you necessarily need to be willing to face all of your patterns and those patterns show up in your body, through your family, and in all the ways you navigate life. True transformation is a deliberate choice and it calls for the courage to let all of your towers fall away and ask what is truly left.

Sheena - How many times have you changed your mind in the last hour? We have new thoughts constantly, but a new thought is not the same as a transformation. Real change begins when insight becomes action, and action happens through the body.

That is why Tower work cannot stay purely mental or spiritual. We can understand a pattern and still have a body that is living inside old structures. We can do a ritual around a wound and still repeat the inherited response the moment we feel afraid, unsafe, or unseen. Lineage matters because many of our Towers are not only personal. They come through family stories, religious conditioning, ancestral survival strategies, and nervous system patterns we absorbed before we had words for them.

Our mind can leave the old Tower before our body does. Freeing our minds is often the first step, but Inner Alchemy is the work of returning to our bodies to examine and transmute inherited patterns, so we do not unconsciously rebuild the same structures we are trying to leave behind.

> The spirits are mirrors, in a way, they show us a lot about ourselves, albeit from a nonhuman perspective.
>
> Taylor Ellwood

**PAA: The chapters on Tower Spirits bring in daemonic spirits, planetary spirits, elemental spirits, and death-rebirth work. How do spirit relationships help a practitioner move through endings without becoming trapped in fear or control?**

Taylor - The spirits are mirrors, in a way, they show us a lot about ourselves, albeit from a nonhuman perspective. Spirits show that endings are transitions. The ending is also a beginning. Even death is a transition. It is an ending, but it’s also a beginning. The spirits can be companions and guides that make the journey a bit less lonely. Of course, this also depends on our relationships with the spirits. If you need to control and coerce spirits, that will create hostile relationships and they may be less inclined to help when you really need it.

Sheena - Both Spirit work and Tower work are fundamentally about discovering who we are and how we are in relationship. Both call us into greater relationship and presence within ourselves and with both the seen and unseen worlds. It is in relationships that we experience ourselves. Every relationship can evoke aspects of ourselves that we can’t access in isolation. The “who I am, with this being, in this present experience." It could be with another person, an animal, an aspect of nature, or a spirit.

When you truly meet another, without agenda, without control, the fear isn’t there - and when it shows up, you have a greater capacity to name it and allow it to metabolize into curiosity and wonder. We have to learn how to do this, it’s not something we are really taught to do, so being in relationship with Spirits gives you practice and really allows you to explore aspects of existence that aren’t embodied, which does have a way of dissolving some of the fears surrounding endings and death. We get to see and experience the aspects of ourselves that exist beyond the body, and that is an amazing gift.

**PAA: One of the boldest parts of Tower Time is the idea of invoking the Tower deliberately. What kind of discernment, timing, and safeguards are necessary before someone chooses a controlled burn instead of waiting for collapse?**

Taylor - I’ve gone through a few such experiences. First, it calls on the decision to give up control of the experience. That can be scary, but it is in the loss of control that we really discover who we are and open ourselves to the possibilities that we thought were out of our reach. I do recommend working with Saturn as a force that simultaneously collapses towers and creates boundaries. That paradox can help you navigate the tower experience and invite the catalysts necessary to propel change. You can fall apart and put yourself back together again.

Sheena - In addition to magic, my background is in Somatic Trauma integration, and I focus on psychedelic journey integration. Set and setting truly do matter. Do you have a plan to tend to mind/body/soul as you do the work? What are your support systems? Are you titrating your experience? Traumatic experiences are often experienced when our systems are exposed to “too much, too soon.” We have consciously and intentionally incorporated somatic embodiment and integration into all of our exploratory activities and magical practices in Tower Time because we have experienced ourselves and seen firsthand the damage it can do when we don’t take the totality of our being and our experiences into account.

It is also a matter of degrees. There is a massive difference between exploratory work - noticing patterns and looking at your shadow material, and blowing up your life. There is wisdom in the advice not to take immediate action on any life-altering decisions right after a traumatic experience, a medicine journey, or a big life change. Those events do shake us up; they can be the Tower Moments, and sometimes, despite knowing the importance of integration and giving ourselves time to do the work, we do it, we’re human, but the more work we have done before those moments, the easier it is to respond instead of react. Like any exercise or skill development, it’s about building our capacity.

**PAA: In the final sections, Tower Time expands into collective Towers: the pandemic, inherited systems, the Castle, attention economies, community, and AI. What do you hope readers understand about the relationship between personal transformation and the larger structures shaping our world?**

Taylor - I hope readers will come away with a recognition that collective Tower moments are invitations to look at where we are going collectively, and they call on us to make a choice. Who do we really become as a collective when we face the towers we have constructed as a society? At the time of this writing, we are facing many Towers, and what falls away and what remains will call for transformations that many of us may not survive. We still have time, but how we use that time calls on us to recognize the Tower rather than turn a blind eye to it and our circumstances.

Sheena - I hope readers feel some grace and self-compassion. Our personal Towers are never only personal. We are born into systems, stories, economies, technologies, family patterns, and inherited structures that shape us before we even know we are being shaped. So when something collapses, I don’t want people to immediately treat it as a private failure. We all do this, and our systems are designed to trigger those feelings within us. If it’s a personal failure, then the system isn’t responsible. It’s insidious and one of the greatest spells forced upon us.

At the same time, seeing the larger structures does not remove our agency. It gives us a more honest understanding of the systems that control us, our place within them, and our contributions to them. Once we can see what has isolated us, frightened us, controlled our attention, or convinced us we are alone, we can begin to choose differently. The real work of Tower Time is learning how to stop mistaking the structures that isolate us for the truth of who we are.

Personal transformation and collective transformation are not separate. What we do with our own Towers affects the whole. What we build together offers us more possibilities and is far more magical than anything any of us could access or create alone.

**PAA: Thank you both very much for your detailed answers and we wish you all the best with this fantastic new release. **

[![Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter discuss Tower Time, Tarot and magical transformation](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/stack_with_back_concrete-1024x576.jpg)](https://books2read.com/u/m2gVER)