Since my informal review of Pop Culture Magick by Taylor Ellwood was such a big hit, I think it’s probably time for me to put together a more formal review and analysis of the ideas contained within the work.

First things first though, here is a link to Ellwood’s website (along with what seems to be Ellwood’s LiveJournal site) and to Amazon where you can buy the book and decide for yourself. As always, the best idea is to do your own research - and supporting independent authors is never a bad idea either! (You may also be able to buy the book directly from Immanion Press, but I’m having trouble seeing where during my cursory browsing of their site.)

Here is a little bit of information from the book’s back cover to get you up to speed:

Pop Culture Magick introduces a new approach to magick.

We cannot escape from popular culture; it is all around us, constantly bombarding us with images, icons and celebrities. Taylor Ellwood shows how you can use this plethora of material in an innovative new magickal system: Pop Culture Magick. […] The truly flexible magician is the one who adapts with the changing times. Pop Culture Magick is a reflection of the need for magick to change and evolve, in line with modern culture.

So far so good. I like the basic premise of it, which is why I bought the book in the first place. In fact, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in my own life and studies trying to reconcile the worlds of pop culture and religion (which should be obvious from even the most cursory glance at my website). So I am no stranger to this line of thinking.

The back cover also boldly promises numerous things such as: “How to create pop culture god forms and entities”, and “How to create your own system of magick based on fantasy books, movies or any other form of pop culture media.” There are a couple others, but that ought to be enough to give you a flavor for the book’s initial marketing promise.

Despite my existing interest and work with pop culture from a religio-mythic perspective, my only other exposure to this concept of “pop culture magick” comes from comic book author Grant Morrison’s similarly titled article: “Pop Magic!” which came out in the Disinformation Book Of Lies nearly a year before Ellwood’s date of publication. I have to say that I think Morrison managed to pack a lot more information from both a theoretical perspective and a practical perspective in a mere nine and a half pages than Ellwood seems to have done in almost 200. In the introduction, Ellwood says he’s never read Morrison’s comic books at least. Maybe he should have checked out this highly pertinent essay (an online copy of part of it may be had at Morrison’s site).

I personally don’t have an opinion on the safety or efficacy of marrying pop culture to ritual magick, but I have been warned against the idea from other thinkers who I rather respect. Jennifer Emick writes:

[…] this ‘pop magic’ bullshit is the worst, like giving gasoline and matches to children. There’s a reason this is an initiatory tradition.

I’m sure a great many chaos magicians would disagree fervently with such an assessment, and they are welcome to delineate their arguments to the contrary. Evidently though, Ellwood has been forced to deal with such criticisms as he cut his own path through the wilderness. From page 24:

I mentioned in the first chapter of this book that a lot of people were skeptical about the idea of pop culture magick. One attitude I have noticed in the occult community is of sneering disrespect for pop culture, and for anyone using it as a form of magick. […] I think that those who sneer at the idea of using pop culture do so because there’s this need to keep magick as counter-culture as possible and the idea of using using pop culture is something that they feel threatens the secret counter-cultural image.

I’ll leave that battle to those more interested in continuing, but this was never my original problem with the book. My expectations for this topic matter are much more in line with those left by a commenter named Jacob on my site:

I haven’t read Pop Culture Magick, but I think the real point may be in trying to pull everything around you into your spiritual path. Video games (for example) are fun, but we generally categorize them as mundane–but find a way to synthesize it with your kabbalistic/magickal/whatever stuff, and it gains a whole new dimension of personal meaning.

Maybe it’s not necessarily about achieving a particular end, but uniting the sacred and mundane elements of life to make things more exciting.

Giving Ellwood the benefit of the doubt, I expect this was a major aspect of his intention as well. In fact, I would wager that Ellwood and I agree on a great many essential points, even on slightly more obscure ones that celebrities act as sort of equivalents culturally to something like the Greek pantheon.

So if I’m on the same page, so to speak, as Ellwood, then why all the disagreement? Personally, I find the craft of the writing and the organization of the ideas to be not especially good. Let me start you off with Taylor’s definition of “pop culture” in the first place and maybe you’ll be able to see what I mean. From chapter 1, pages 13-14, Taylor offers:

What is pop culture? Pop culture, as mainstream society understands it, isn’t quite what pop culture actually is. Most people, for instance will associate any kind of celebrity that dominates the media news as being pop culture, but that’s not always true […]

What pop culture is, is defined by what it does. Pop culture resists the mainstream blah culture. It possesses and represents different value systems, which clash with the values of mainstream culture. However, the value system of a pop culture icon can and usually is consumed by mainstream culture unless the pop icon changes.

Now I find this concept to be very confusing. Not only is Ellwood trying to inject pop culture with new potential spiritual meaning, he’s also trying to redefine what pop culture actually is. Just by a show of hands, how many people actually agree with Ellwood’s definition above? I for one don’t. I see the point that he’s trying to make though, about the ebb and flow of what’s popular in culture. What’s popular today may not be popular tomorrow. The edge of the wave is always moving, always stays vital. That much I agree with. But I find the idea that pop culture is somehow opposed to “mainstream” culture to be way off. By my own understanding of how culture works, nothing that seriously goes against mainstream values gets that popular. Why is this? Because corporations which produce and distribute pop culture aren’t going to accept something which is going to threaten their market. If something becomes popular that seems counter-cultural, it’s merely because it has reached such a level of acceptance among ordinary people that it’s okay to break it into the mainstream officially as a product. In other words, corporations monitor the likes and opinions of average people, and when they reach a critical mass, they are repackaged and sold back to them as a formulaic product. Sometimes this process results in good products, and sometimes bad - but the thing to remember is that it’s not random and it reflects research, and more importantly existing market potential.

Weirdly though, Ellwood seems to have only done research on the meaning of pop culture by asking one other person, a person who didn’t even have a definition. Or at least, that’s what he writes on page 17:

The irony in all this is that many magickians don’t know what pop culture is. I did a survey on pop culture/literacy through four occult email list serves [sic]. The total number of people on the lists was around two hundred, yet oly one person answered the survey. Think about this: only one person answered the survey. [bold mine] The questions weren’t hard, but did require some thinking. So the people on the list either chose not to answer because they genuinely didn’t have an idea about the subject material, or they didn’t care. The answers I did receive were disheartening and showed a fundamental gap in what occultists knew. Why should I base my assumptions off just one survey answered? I do not base my assumptions off the answers of one person, but rather on the glaring realization that so few were interested in participating, probably for the same reason that the person who answered the survey explains right here:

“I really don’t have a definition of it [pop culture] as I’m not overly interested in the subject.”

No offense Taylor, but it sounds like you need to do some more research. After all, this is the real backbone of your entire book: pop culture. It’s not just some aside that you can toss out and move on without resolving.

Ellwood then spends an entire chapter muddling around on the importance of “pop culture literacy” for the occultist, without ever really solidifying on a reason why they should be interested in it, besides his assertions that they merely should. It just doesn’t hold up for me. Ellwood briefly puts a toe into the water of defining literacy in terms of semiotic domains and cultural theory. This is another area which I have great interest in. If you want to see a totally air-tight explanation of these ideas coupled with explosive thoughts on the nature of learning, I fervently recommend you check out James Paul Gee’s excellent What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning And Literacy. That book is written by an older gentleman, a college professor who one day sat down to try to teach his son (or grandson, I forget) how to play his new video games, only to realize that the boy instead ended up teaching him, as his literacy was far greater. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that Gee’s book even has more practical applications for “magick” (and many other things) than Ellwood’s.

In any event, Ellwood’s definition of pop culture as something which challenges mainstream values breaks down a lot when you actually look at what cultural artifacts Ellwood uses as examples. There’s a hodge-podge of your typical classic sci-fi/fantasy literature (Dune, Neuromancer, Dragonlance), to Star Trek, to anime to video to board games. (Forgive me, but this was the original reason for my labels of “nerd” and “dork” when I first wrote about this book) I could be wrong, but none of those things really seem to hold up to the idea that pop culture is either counter-cultural or consists exclusively of cutting-edge popular-right-this second material.

In reality, it would be nearly impossible to write a book which incorporated pop culture phenomena going on right this second, as popularity is extremely ephemeral (I do agree with that much). By the time you’ve published a book, it’s already changed immensely and irrevocably. This is part of why I use the internet as a forum to discuss these things instead - because it allows us up-to-the-moment conversation on such things.

In any event, I would also challenge the usefulness of limiting your use of cultural artifacts to ones which already have a pretty obvious use of occult ideas. For instance, Alan Moore’s Promethea, or Hellblazer, just to name a couple. If the goal is to use ideas that have wide currency in culture, then you’re going to have to dip into *real* pop culture, things that everybody knows and sees, and which don’t have overt occultic influences. Things like daytime or primetime TV, pop singers or movies that are out right now. For examples of how that might look, check out my Pop Culture Tarot series. Though Ellwood mentions such things here and there, he never really taps into what seems like not only better more creative material, but ones that would increase the interest of regular people to check out his book and perhaps try to apply the material to their spiritual lives.

One more note on that topic: Ellwood also rather oddly keeps mentioning an author/friend named Storm Constantine with a series of books and a role-playing system called Wraeththu (also available from Immanion Press. I say odd, because while I understand the desire to promote a friend’s work, it seems useless to do so at the expense of recognizability and shared cultural context for readers.

This all may seem like splitting hairs, but again, if you want to deal with pop culture as a whole, then you have to do that. You can’t make up a weird definition of it, and then only talk about the things you like, because they already have occult influences. It just doesn’t hold up under much scrutiny, nor do I find it particularly useful.

Anyway, the actual meat of the book is composed of this stuff - of Ellwood running off lists of his favorite anime and comic books (all of which I can understand, as I’m a huge nerd myself). Each chapter focuses on a different concept of how to marry your interest with such things to occult practice. Each chapter also ends with a series of short exercises designed for further exploration.

In the comments to my original informal review, Ellwood emphasized the importance of actually doing these exercises:

I wonder, did you even do the exercises in the book, or did you just read it? If you did just read it, then perhaps you should go back and do the actual exercises before making further judgements.

In fact, I did not do the exercises. But I don’t feel like that is going to exclude me from being able to make judgements or worthwhile insights into the book. In all honesty too, I found the exercises to be rather pedantic and boring-sounding. After reading through them, I was left with basically no motivation to actually do them. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

[Chapter 1:] Define literacy

[Chapter 2:] Read Stuckey’s The Violence of Literacy. Then write an essay that applies Stuckey’s concepts to an occult framework.

[Chapter 6:] Choose an anime series and watch it. Find a character you identify with. Make a costume and invoke yourself into the character. Go to a convention.

[Chapter 7:] Pick up an occult comic and start reading it. How accurate is it to the actual occult studies you know? How does it glamorize the occult? Would you use any of the ideas from the comic?

Anyway, they go on and on like that. What they sound like to me is homework and that makes them sound very uninviting. Write an essay? Shit, I love writing and that even sounds boring to me. Very few of these seem to be centered around ritual magick at all, or what little I know of it.

In personal correspondence, Ellwood also suggested that I read up on chaos magick for background on where he got some of his ideas. This seems like a good idea on the one hand. But on the other, that means this book is marketed very poorly. If you’re going to write a book about pop culture, then you need to be prepared for people who are coming at it strictly from a pop culture perspective. Especially since you already know that (some) people already involved in the occult have such resistance to this approach. Your best bet would actually be to go ahead and pitch to the newcomers - people who don’t know why “magick” is spelled with a “k” never mind what the hell chaos magick might be.

In summary, I love the idea of trying to apply pop culture in a spiritual way. I think there are a lot of pitfalls to it though, including the ones I went into above. But also the very real danger of glamorizing consumerism (as if that needed any help, right?). Why must a pop culture magician go out and buy things in order to practice their craft? If they are interested in “chaos” wouldn’t it make more sense to steal, destroy and/or create their own? The other danger I see here is that cultural artifacts are generally designed by corporations, etc to make money, rather than promote spirituality. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to turn them to our purposes, but it does mean we should watch out for giving these symbols and concepts more time than they are really worth. What’s the difference between me worshipping a Pepsi logo in an occult context and me just buying Pepsi all the time as a regular consumer? To me, the answer seems to be that the occultist feels like they are “getting away” with something, or maybe sticking it to the man. A more effective method though might be to boycott Pepsi and tell corporate-produced culture to go fuck itself. Hard. But that’s just my opinion.