David Bowie died at age 69 on January 10, 2016. A veritable library of articles, tributes, remembrances and such have appeared since. A few mention his erstwhile interest in the occult. A lot of these are pretty tenuous but there’s a few of passing note. Here’s a 2013 article currently posted at Ha Aretz discussing his connection with various Jewish rockers (Lou Reed, Mark Bolan, Bob Dylan) and his reference to the Tree of Life in the lyrics to the song “Station To Station.”
Madonna had nothing on David Bowie when she came out as a devotee of Kabbalah in 1998. British rock star Bowie, who is much in the news right now for his terrific “comeback” album, “The Next Day” (Columbia/ISO) — his first new recording in a decade, widely and justifiably hailed as his best work since 1980’s “Scary Monsters,” — beat Madonna by 20 years or so when he sang about the sefirot, the mystical vessels of divine energy, in the title track of his 1976 album, “Station to Station.”
Read the entire piece here:
http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/features/1.696705?v=11365B3A192F8CBFE0BF446DFD8D5637
As per his feelings about Thelema and Ordo Templi Orientis, there’s this excerpt from a vintage interview:
Q: “So were you involved in actual devil worship?”
A: “Not devil worship, no, it was pure straightforward, old-fashioned magic.”
Q: “The Aleister Crowley variety?”
A: “No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called [Arthur] Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called ‘Psychic Self-Defense‘. You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, ha ha ha ! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I’m quite sure that, for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked through them, and saw what was on the other side!”
David Bowie, interviewed in NME, 1997
which fits in with the opening lyric to his song “Quicksand” from his Hunky Dory album.
