Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (18 page)

The imagery of forbidden fruit would underpin his next album,
The Man Who Sold the World
, in 1970. Something was stirring in Bowie, a kind of eerie decadence, plainly seen in the UK cover version: Bowie lounges in a dress and leather boots on a silk-draped couch, the floor in front of him littered with a deck of playing cards. The songs are heavyweight, some sounding like early heavy metal, and the themes are equally menacing and explicitly sexual. Bowie imagines himself being initiated into a forbidden sect offering salvation by way of musical Gnosticism: to know yourself, you must cast aside the illusion of convention, freely eat what the serpent offers, but never be ashamed of the knowledge you find. Themes of superhuman masters haunt the entire album, but it's unclear if Bowie imagines himself their equal or their pawn.

It's on his 1971 album,
Hunky Dory
, that Bowie's fascination with magic becomes less opaque as he makes reference to things fairly well-known by other seekers in the early seventies. Crowley
gets his necessary nod on “Quicksand”—a downbeat song about a spiritual crisis. Bowie's biographer Nicholas Pegg makes particular note of the song “Oh! You Pretty Things,” with its warning that “Homo sapiens have outgrown their use.” Pegg believes this is a nod to the writing of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his 1871 novel,
The Coming Race
, a man finds an entrance to the hollow earth where he discovers an ancient superpeople described as a “race akin to man's, but infinitely stronger of form and grandeur of aspect” who use an energy called “vril” to perform wondrous feats, such as controlling everything from the weather to emotions.

This delightfully strange story might have gone the way of other quaint nineteenth-century fantasies if not for
The
Morning of the Magician
s by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, first published in France in 1960 and translated into English in 1963, which created a wave of esoteric speculation and occult conspiracy theories still being felt today. The authors were inspired by the writer Charles Hoy Fort, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, used an inheritance to spend his time in the New York Public Library, collecting stories and data from a wide range of sources, all of which suggests an underlying and connected web of paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Using Fort's method, Pauwels and Bergier outlined a secret history in which important historical figures intuited their own role in shaping a cosmic destiny for mankind, aliens had visited mankind during the first days of Western civilization, and alchemy and modern physics were not in opposition. The seventies also needed a messenger who could personify astronomical dreams and occult permutations, a figure of decadence and wisdom who could deliver
a rock and roll testament to what it's like to fall between the worlds. Only Bowie could imagine such a creature.

Bowie's next release would create one of the most iconic and powerful rock personas of all time: Ziggy Stardust. Forgive the hyperbole, but in what is one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time,
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
, Bowie subverted the grandeur of spaceflight along with the wonder and excitement over the moonwalk and turned the cosmos into a place of ominous mystery, where fallen alien messiahs would learn to play guitar. Bowie synthesized the spiritual hopes and fears of the seventies without ever resorting to New Age platitudes. Ziggy is not here to experiment on humans, he is here to experiment on himself, seeking forbidden knowledge in the urban wastes of earth.

In 1973,
Rolling Stone
arranged a meeting between the two poles of cultural transgression: William Burroughs and David Bowie. Burroughs occupied a central place in the underground pantheon. Both gay and a drug addict, he explored these aspects of himself through some of the most challenging and disturbing novels written in English. Bowie was his Gemini twin, a wrecker of mores who was reaping fame and fortune as the deranged but beautiful creature of pop music. Burroughs might have been looking for a way into the mainstream, and might have believed rubbing elbows with Bowie would get him closer.

During their talk, Bowie describes the full mythos behind Ziggy, describing a race of alien superbeings called the “infinites,” living black holes that use Ziggy as a vessel to give themselves a form people could comprehend. Burroughs countered with his own vision to create an institute to help people achieve
greater awareness so humanity will be ready when we make eventual contact with alien life-forms.

Bowie's fascination with alien Gnosticism gave way to a return to the decadent magic of
The
Man Who Sold the World
, particularly with the album
Diamond Dogs
, one of the most frightening albums of the 1970s. The warning of an imminent apocalypse in the song “Five Years” on
Ziggy Stardust
is realized in the dystopian urban wasteland where “fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats.” The only hope is in the drugs and the memory of love. The track “Sweet Thing” is a beautiful killer of a song, Bowie's voice hitting the high notes as if desperate: “Will you see that I'm scared and I'm lonely?”
Diamond Dogs
might be a fictional vision, but the truth underlying it was Bowie's increasing and prodigious cocaine use, and an even deeper curiosity with the occult. Supercharged by coke, a drug known for its side effect of throat-gripping paranoia, Bowie's interest in magic could only turn ugly.

By the time Crowe met with him, Bowie was convinced he was cursed, possibly by Jimmy Page, and took to drawing Kabbalistic symbols on the floor of his studio. Crowe listened as Bowie talked lucidly about his music and then suddenly began describing an apocalyptic future where rock's pretense of evil and darkness would become reality and give Bowie a kind of dictatorial power: “I believe that rock & roll is dangerous. It could well bring about a very evil feeling in the West. I do want to rule the world.” While he didn't mention it to Crowe at the time, Bowie believed his plans were being thwarted by witches set out to steal his semen (the substance needed to magically create a homunculus).

A few months later, Bowie and his then wife, Angela, bought a sprawling Art Deco house in L.A. And in a perfect bit of nonfiction plotline, Bowie discovered that the previous owner, the dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, whose life inspired the musical
Gypsy
, had painted a hexagram on the floor of one of the rooms. Bowie fell apart, and began claiming the devil lived in the home's pool. The only way to stay in the house would be to perform an exorcism, so Bowie gathered together all the necessary accoutrements, and he and Angela stood in front of the pool and performed their own private ritual. In a later interview, Angela claims that despite her disbelief in such things, she was witness to the water beginning to bubble and a stain appearing at the bottom of the pool. The exorcism wasn't enough for Bowie; they moved out a few weeks later.

In a 2009 interview with his biographer Marc Spitz, Bowie revealed what cocaine was doing to his already occult-addled mind: “My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.” Bowie's coke-stimulated interest in the occult was mostly concealed in his private life, but an astute listener can find a myriad of clues in his music. Occultism in the 1970s was concerned primarily with ideas of the devil. Culturally, one couldn't escape his grip, even if it came by way of the family pet (
Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell
); the strange quiet child next door (
The Omen
); or the local motorcycle gang (
Psychomania
). But Bowie was able to bypass the devil for a more authentic and maybe even more dangerous kind of occultism. While Arthur Brown saw his musical performance as a form of shamanism, Bowie saw magic as a form of self-
actualization, but guided by a commonly misunderstood notion of magical perfection.

The occult in the 1970s was also dominated by the resurgence of magic instruction manuals used by magicians to conjure demons and other unlikely allies in their search for knowledge of the divine. The genre became so popular, publishers began printing fictional tomes as if they were recently excavated ancient texts. Other books were intended to actually teach the public something about the art of magic.

The two most popular books on magic, Israel Regardie's
The Golden Dawn
and
Psychic Self-Defense
by Dion Fortune, provided hands-on application in the context of the magical society, particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which both authors were members. Regardie's book was the first time the Golden Dawn rituals were made public in such a systematic way (he was accused by other members of “breaking his oath”), but the book itself is almost impossible to follow without knowing something firsthand about the order.
The Golden Dawn
offers both individual and group exercises, but it's not unlike a book on trying to learn card tricks without knowing the maneuvers first: “Go to the West, make the Pentagram, and vibrate EHEIEH.”

What it does provide is a glimpse into the practice of magic not bound in the popular notion of Satanism or even witchcraft.
The Golden Dawn
is a book of nonfiction fantastic realism, igniting the occult imagination of the 1970s and providing the basis for the founding of a number of Golden Dawn–related groups still active. Fortune's book, on the other hand, is much
more pragmatic, offering cookbook wisdom, including how to ward off curses and magical attacks.

While Crowley certainly had his influence on Bowie, the mercurial singer smartly did not exploit him, or use his name to conjure an image of a black magician, as Ozzy Osbourne would later do in his 1980 song “Mr. Crowley.” Bowie was attracted to Crowley as a figure of Luciferian grace, in the sense described earlier, wherein Lucifer represents a kind of self-realized dandy, a Baudelaire-like poet who is not afraid to explore the more taboo aspects of sex, will, and intoxication. But this notion of a perfected spiritual man, an image Bowie had been playing with since “Oh! You Pretty Things,” was easily conflated with the idea of Aryan perfection. This formulation has long posed a problem in understanding the history of the occult.

Madame Blavatsky is often cited as the location where this tension first manifested. Her book
The Secret Doctrine
lays out a taxonomy of “root races,” an evolution of humanity's spiritual destiny. The first of these is ethereal, without form, and the root races evolved over time. Blavatsky would provide pulp fantasy writers with a deep well to draw from with the next races, the Hyperboreans, Lemurians, and Atlanteans. The fifth root race is the Aryan, which Blavatsky claimed was the peak of humanity at that time. A sixth would rise above the Aryan, and then the seventh would see the final and perfect human being.

Gary Lachman, in his biography of Blavatsky, explains how race was a deeply important topic during Blavatsky's time and, while we might find some of her ideas to be troubling, they were part of a larger cultural milieu. More disturbing, Lachman writes, is how racists used her ideas to further their own bigoted
occult ideas. The Thule Society, for example, was a group of Germans—including Rudolf Hess—with decidedly anti-Semitic views who believed a racially pure people arose in the mythical land of Hyperborea.

The Thule Society would become the inspiration for an entire industry of books purporting that the Nazis sought occult power, believing they could create a perfect and deadly Aryan being. Pauwels and Bergier's
The
Morning of the Magicians
was the first book to bring this to popular awareness, and their occult–Nazi link was replete with strange science and the quest for legendary objects imbued with great power. If not for
Morning of the Magicians
, it's unlikely the Nazis in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
would have sought the biblical ark as a means to wield the power of God as a weapon. And while those villains meet their fate in no small part thanks to Indiana Jones, others would write the Nazis back into history with a romantic idealism.

Through a reading of
Morning of the Magicians
it would be easy to connect the dots from Lytton's occult fantasy of hollow-earth superhumans found on
Hunky Dory
to the Nazi-inflected ideas of homo superior. Bowie would find himself getting mired in this kind of thinking. The image of Nazi occultism offered a perfect storm of shock and awe for a rock spectacle and a persona both beautiful and deadly. All of these ideas would merge into the apocalyptic fervor, but because Bowie was such a brilliant artist, he could channel it into music.

In an interview with
Arena
in 1993, Bowie looked back on this time with regret. He understood that, while made delusional by drugs, a yearning for God was the driving motivation behind all of his occult dabbling. Bowie had become fascinated
with the book
The Spear of Destiny
by Trevor Ravenscroft (you couldn't make up a name this good), which claimed Hitler was obsessed with finding the spear a Roman soldier used to pierce Jesus during the crucifixion, a supposed artifact of deadly mystical power. This, along with the legend that Hitler was also looking for the Holy Grail (also later popularized by the third Indiana Jones movie,
The Last Crusade
), so captivated Bowie that he put aside the reality of the Nazis' deeds to instead imagine them on some great, holy quest. “And naively, politically,” Bowie said, “I didn't even think about what they had done.”

Bowie's self-destruction was in service to the fascist mythology of the palingenesis. In Bowie's case it was his person, not a nation stripped of its preconceptions, desires, loves, and fears, becoming nothing more than a shell, and resurrected in perfection through a means of rigorous reprogramming. Bowie was not looking for a perfected inner self so much as a perfected outer self, his art an expression of his perfected will. There is no better means of carving up a persona than cocaine, and mixed with the Kabbalah and racial occultism, Bowie couldn't have picked a more effective formula. Fascism, for Bowie, was less about a political accent than it was about fashion.