Worldtheories

The Laughing Gnostic: David Bowie and the Occult
by Peter-R. Koenig


What is art, what is rock music? It's difficult to describe its codes, its gestures, its aestethics and its perception but for the most part it can be experienced only, and only as an expression of our culture -- being in a movement of constant restlessness and mirroring all graspable parts of society. How can the feverish emptiness of endlessly repeated ecstasy be transformed into something that can be sensed, something heard and seen and be paid for? After all, this music is not qualified through the consciousness of its creator but through the states of mind created by its perceptors.
Frank Zappa expressed it in 1974 when Fido (a 'modified dog'?), was questioned about "conceptual Continuity" and answered thus: "The crux of the biscuit is the Apostrophe(')" ('Stinkfoot').



This article is going to be massively expanded and published as a book, at due time.
A teaser might be found in The Voyeur, Midwoud/The Netherlands, The Laughing Gnostic: David Bowie.
See also Ultraculture. "The Laughing Gnostic". Other contributors: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Brion Gysin, Ira Cohen, Jhonn Balance and others





What's David Bowie got to do with occultism and gnosticism?

Apart from being a sometime brilliant musician and dilettante artist, Bowie's religious perspective and compositional techniques mirror an eloquent fragmentary projection of society. "I'm actually very nineteenth century - a born Romantic" he uttered in 1995. His work resembles that of many European post-romantic novelists and thinkers, such as Hermann Hesse (the Steppenwolf), Gustav Gründgens (his most famous rôle: Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust) or Aleister Crowley. Indeed, the Gesamtkunstwerk 'David Bowie' crystallises this splintered reality into cultural artifacts, and these in turn coagulate into new realities.
Bowie (born 1947 as David Robert Jones) is seen by some as a sort of 'Renaissance Man' whose professed 'universality' is an attempt to show the landmarks of evolution by reassembling the fragmentary pieces of our society; and in this, he resembles many occultists.
But unlike most occultists, Bowie has considerable wealth, critical acclaim, penetrating intelligence, and enduring good looks; he seems set to go on to even greater heights and achievements. What next, godhead? There is a Faustian/Mephistophelean element here. How else to explain the absolute zenith of this man's worldly trajectory? In fact, there are people who are convinced that his success wouldn't be possible without some kind of otherworldly assist.* I do not share this opinion. It is my conviction that Bowie's work has been seriously underestimated, and cannot be reduced to a series of single topics.
Nevertheless, it can't be ignored that Bowie has constructed his public persona from the various parts of the puzzle that are at the roots of modern occultism. He was summoning up some of these pieces at the tender age of 16 already.

No part of this essay is meant to be deadly serious. It’s about fun, and playing with words. It’s about entertainment. You could comb through any body of work and attribute references to whatever subject you want. Often the reader will meet loose ends—and in the case that one of these readers turns out to be David Bowie himself, he will possibly have the disconcerting experience of reading about an aspect of his own life story and wondering who the hell I am talking about.



"they think that we’re holding a secretive ball"

So what has David Bowie got to do with occultism? He gave the answer himself in his 1971 song 'Quicksand':

I'm closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley's uniform of imagery

In the 1976 song 'Station to Station' he mentioned the occult key doors to other plans of reality when he described how to travel down the Cabalistic Tree of Life

from Kether to Malkuth

that is from Godhead to Earth.
On 25 November, 1995, he finally admitted that in 1976 "My overriding interest was in cabbala and Crowleyism. That whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain. ... More recently, [1995] I've been interested in the Gnostics".

Never forget the context, though. His ex-wife Angie Bowie, an important witness to the peculiar period in question, is stopping any critic’s hallucinations of occult society conspiracies involving Nazis, when she reminded the author of this article that “We were only 21 and 23 for God’s sake!”



What is Gnosticism and is it found in Bowie's fragments of reality?

'Gnosis' comes from the Greek word for knowledge, and may broadly be defined as a way of knowledge, as opposed to faith. The following definition of Gnosticism shows it as something partly spiritual, something partly psychological -- a chronic dislocation or unsettled-ness with the world.
Those who are happy with and in the world, who benefit from good health, and who experience love and satisfaction in their preferred fields, seem not to need the universe-healing Gnosticism, which I believe is a religious tool to heal the agony of unbearable life. Gnostics live in two worlds at the same time. They seek a divine reality, a realm within this world here, which is only a sort of shadow world.
Historically viewed, Gnosticism is a varied set of overlapping religious traditions that often contradict each other. It is part of these traditions that every gnostic constantly invents their own Gnosticism. Living in a world which is subjectively felt and experienced as a "rotten place" (a Gnostic term), cries out for salvation. Art, music, hedonism, creativity, religiousness and all manner of creative and alternative lifestyles according to "Optimum through Maximum" or "Optimum through Minimum", hint at a possible or potential gnostic undercurrent of self-realisation beyond but through this world; or with Bowie's lyrics: "For you're dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy" (1974).

Bowie created a world beyond his earthly (meanwhile wealthy) existence: in the manifestation of constant emanations of differing stage personæ who sometimes blended in with his 'real' personality but most often had been used by him to disguise his alienation from himself, from society and its mechanisms: this is the recurring motif of his quest for the authentic self. Most prominent in his personal history is the fact that when he was a child one relative (from the maternal side of his family) after another required psychiatric treatment, sometimes due to religious hallucinations. This sort of 'pain' is traceable in much of his lyrics: it made him strip "myself down" and fill the blank spaces left behind "with a completely new personality. When I heard someone say something intelligent, I used it later as if it were my own. ... It's just like a car, replacing parts." In 1972 he felt that his "brain hurt like a warehouse / it had no room to spare".

As Bowie is one of the most innovative rock and pop artists ever, his creation of multiple personalities also mirrors pop culture, with its paranoid and para-religious myths of Star-Men visiting the earth, either becoming or influencing Messiahs, or else trying to live as unobtrusive Lodgers or Passengers among the Earthlings.



Famous keywords

Bowie's keywords Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn show us where to dig deeper to understand his symbolism.

The Golden Dawn was a magical secret society which flourished at the end of the 19th century and taught a unique blend of Jewish mysticism (called Cabbala, also to be found in Bowie's symbolism), astral travel, magic, yoga (also practised by Bowie) and how to communicate with angels and demons. For this latter communion it was first necessary to empty the mind, to make room for the unknown to enter - something that bears a strong resemblance to Bowie's 'cut-up' method of writing lyrics. "I've always felt like a vehicle for something else but then I've never really sorted out what that was" (1973). "There's a feeling that we are here for another purpose." Eventually he described his working method: "You nick a touch of this, you nick a touch of that. Then you do it better simply by using Scotch tape, sawdust and a little imagination."
In the same way he invented a biography for himself by glueing together 'objets trouvés' (found in books, newspaper articles about himself, interview questions, TV programs) and often cleverly calculated inventions of stage personæ.

Aleister Crowley was born in England in 1875, into a wealthy and religious family at the height of the Victorian era. In 1898 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In Egypt in 1904, Crowley penned an occult poem heralding the dawning of a New Aeon which would be governed by the Law of “Do What Thou Wilt” (as can be found in Bowie’s “After All”, 1970). After the death of one of his students, Crowley’s life took a turn for the worse. His reputation in the British press as “The Wickedest Man in the World” was now, more than ever, working against him. Crowley’s later years were overshadowed by poor health, drug addiction and a desperate hunt for money In 1935, he was declared bankrupt and mostly lived from the monies from his religious sheep. He got through the London Blitz and eked out his existence in rural hostels; he died in Hastings, England in 1947.
Crowley expanded the limits of the Golden Dawn by advocating identifying oneself with various Gods (called Assumption of God Forms), union with those Gods (angels and demons) during orgasm and/or consumption of mingled male and female sexual fluids.
Crowley's key maxim was "Do what Thou Wilt" (as can be found on Bowie's 'After All', 1970), which (among many other interpretations) is equated with the Greek word "Thelema" which stands for "Will". In the Crowleyan world, 'Thelema' refers to sexmagick (which Crowley spelt 'Magick' to distinguish it from the purely ceremonial variety): to reach illumination while having sexual intercourse through techniques focussing the sexual energies upon a wish, a sort of an inner photography which represents the desire to be fulfilled. I will expand on this subject later on.


Stairway to Heaven

When I asked Angie Bowie why her ex was involved in magick, she remembered that he heard that Led Zeppelin were involved in the occult, and so he wanted to be even cooler and scare Jimmy Page. David Bowie decided to retaliate with his magick, and allegedly said to his wife that he would do so with what he knew of Tibetan magic (“the dark side of Buddhism” as he called it); everything to do with Aleister Crowley was “small shit.”
There might be another reason why the Crowleyverse wasn’t fit for many artists except for them using some keywords. Busy rock stars have no time for Crowley’s marathon magick. The picture of the “Most Wicked Man” suffices for marketing strategies only.
Jimmy Page was allegedly already interested in the Qabalah at the age of eleven. In 1964, Page had been a member of Bowie’s “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men”. Certainly a tool in order to talk before a microphone only. In the next year, Bowie and Page cooperated on the Bowie track “I Pity the Fool”, and Bowie received the guitar riff for the 1970 song “The Supermen” from Page.



The Cut-Up method: "Inspirations have I none"

The cut-up technique was originally devised by the Surrealists who called it automatic writing or cadavre exquis, and later reassembled by Brion Gysin and most famously used in literature by William S. Burroughs: you take a text, cut it into pieces, reassemble these pieces haphazardly, and thus create something new.

Because Bowie used the cut-up technique to 'write' many of his lyrics there is not much sense in trying to analyse them as a whole or each lyric individually word by word: instead one has to focus on the recurring images and codes that appear in the entire "David Bowie" 'opus', which connote his kind of gnosticism. Bowie defined his use of the cut-up method as his way of discovering his own past and future. He himself became a cut-up himself too - at least for those who followed his career closely throug the years - these followers were (and still are) confronted by reflections of themselves in the splintered facettes that make up Bowie's often odd-sounding lyrics; in Bowie's ever-changing styles of fashion images; in Bowie's constant name-dropping of keywords of books whenever a micro or a pencil of a journalist was and is at hand. It's probably also worth pointing out that he talks in fractals.

“I don’t necessarily know what I’m talking about in my writing,” he told Charles Shaar Murray. “All I do is assemble points that interest me and puzzle through it. That becomes a song, and people who listen to that song must take what they can from it and see if information they’ve assembled fts in with anything I’ve assembled.”
Does Bowie simply hide that he has nothing to say as Nico opined in 1969: “I was not jealous of his intelligence—he is entirely superfcial, which is why he never knows what to look like. Or what music to make. Or whether to be a boy or a girl.”

From the Dick Cavett Show, December 4, 1974:
Cavett: "Do you want to be understood? You know what I mean... like Ziggy Stardust was...
Bowie: "There’s absolutely nothing to understand. I mean..."


The cut-up method makes it largely irrelevant whether or not Bowie is conscious of himself as a Gnostic; that is, whether he knowingly expresses himself in Gnostic terms - or whether he is hiding it ("in an all time low").

The Cabbala combines several factors: the analytical and linguistic aspects of it have certainly proved of interest to the erudite side of Bowie's character, while another part of him has been drawn to the meditative Cabbala, where one immerses oneself in the Divine attributes of words and numbers to ascend spiritually. There is also a physical way of Cabbalistic working, the 'Ecstatic Cabbala', which involves exercises in breathing and movement, as well as chanting and singing.

Cabbala became "the new religion of Hollywood" in the 1990's, as stars like Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall and Roseanne Barr took up what had previously been a highly recondite subject.


Bowie has described himself as a "post-modern Buddhist"; certainly his working methods look post-modern, with their nature being associatively handicrafted rather than concrete. Ordinary materials in the form of music and text are taken, arranged, and re-arranged. Bowie studies the result, and tries something else, as he navigates his way through revisions, corrections, and different material. This method goes some way towards explaining his apparently inconsistent changes in musical style, and how he views his own work - something he claims as a masterpiece one day, becomes defective the next.
Bowie turned into a Gnostic who gave out Gnosis, a theme which constantly recurs in his live performances, lyrics, and music; for instance in his rôle as the messianic alien Ziggy Stardust (1971-1973), or as the 'Hanged Man' from the Tarot in his 1987 shows - or else in the photographs where he appeared with stigmata and a halo (1998).



One word about sources

As the regular, commercial Bowie recordings mainly mirror the marketing strategies of his producers and record-companies, I have based this article mostly on bootleg recordings of his live concerts, or on studio recordings which were never released commercially. I feel that artists tend to express themselves more freely on stage (even though stage performances are the main source of income for many musicians), as opposed to when the artist is being supervised in a recording-studio by a producer with an eye on the market-place. So for legal reasons, I obviously cannot reproduce the exact sources for most of the material used herein. My advice to the interested reader is to buy as many Bowie records as possible!




"The Laughing Gnome"



Without his all-consuming depressions ("hitting an all time low") Bowie's personæ would be a lot harder to understand, and ultimately be of little interest to any researcher, however dedicated. In fact, Bowie is more of a Gnostic than an artist - much, obviously, to his chagrin, as he wants to be known as an artist first and foremost. At the early age of 16, in about 1963, Bowie penned the lyrics to his song 'I'm tired of my life', in which he sketched out his future career: "I'm trying to decide which game is best for me, which can I bear ... You don't perceive so I'm leading you away". The pattern was the idea of changing identity or thinking up your own identity.

Deciding which game to play is plainly Bowie's habit of changing personæ, or re-inventing his personality. Thus the idea of 'finding himself' showed up in Bowie's stage 'fragments' of such personæ like the Mod and the Bob Dylan phase (1964-1968), Major Tom (1969-1970), Ziggy Stardust (1971-72), Aladdin Sane (72-73), Halloween Jack (Diamond Dog) (1974), The Man Who Fell To Earth (1975), The Thin White Duke (1976), The Svelte Lounge Lizard (1978), Ashes To Ashes (1980), The Elephant Man (1980-81), Serious Moonlight (1983 when he once again claimed to be the real David Robert Jones), Screamin' Lord Byron (Tonight, 1984), Tin Machine (1989), Nathan Adler (1995), Earthling (1997), on the Internet alias Mr Plod (1997) and as Boz in the PC-game Omikron in 1999.

To some degree all these personæ are re-creations of the Pierrot figure, a disguised Gnosis in the form of parody. Bowie has repeatedly appeared on stage (and still stages) as the 'Pierrot in Turquoise', a sort of a Threepenny Pierrot (the colour turquoise connoting "the British symbol of everlastingness" as one of his early teachers gnomically recollected). This figure originated in 1967, when Bowie was a member of Lindsey Kemp's mime company - an environment where everything was apparently tragic, dramatic and theatrical, that is just an extension of his own life. At the same time (circa 1968) he performed in the mime-drama 'The Mask' playing the part of a youth who becomes fatally identified with his painful mask, a rôle which Bowie would later repeat as "Ziggy Stardust" who is stifled by his Mask while "making love with his ego" on stage (this is remeniscent of Oscar Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray' which was later the plot in Bowie's video for the song 'Look Back In Anger').
The 1979 track 'Look Back In Anger' was used as the opening song for many of Bowie's stage performances between 1983 and 1997.

The voiceover of the 1968 pantomime concludes, as the lights dim on the lifeless body: "The papers made a big thing out of it. Funny though - they didn't mention anything about a mask."

The Mask was a concept that Bob Dylan had toyed with in 1964, when he appeared onstage with the words: "I got my Bob Dylan mask on", to which he added "I'm glad I'm not me" in 1966. This was making a plain distinction between searching for an identity, and actually producing it. The reference to the Mask signified a knowledge of how artificial it was as a myth, and how it was a sort of excessive satire. Bowie had outlined his projected career in his 1967 'The Laughing Gnome', where he sang about how he saw himself and Mick Jagger growing new personæ in the future:

'I'm a laughing Gnome and you can't catch me'
'Haven't you got an 'ome to go to?' (No, we're gnomads) ...
And we're living on caviar and honey (hooray!)
Cause they're earning me lots of money

In the German versions of his songs from 1967 as well, the time-table had been arranged, for example in the track 'Mit mir in Deinen Traum' (which translates as 'With me in your dream', which rather contradicts the English original 'When I Live My Dream'. Here he extolled the dreamland where a certain "you" is going to meet Bowie in that "you's" dream.



"He is a symbol of a new age / He glides above the realms of you and me"

Feeling "that the human complex is such an inadequate form of existence", Bowie said that he experienced "an incredible loneliness". He has always styled himself as a creature dwelling in the "human zoo", tattooed with Tarot cards (like Ray Bradbury's 1951 'Illustrated Man'); a 'Karma-Man' (which dates from 1967, and was on the live set list until 1970, talking about Zen-Buddhism while he joined the Tibet Society in 1967 with his then producer Tony Visconti) sitting "on my karma, dame meditation" ('Little Wonder', 1997) and being a 'Silly Boy Blue' (1966, "Child of Tibet", "Mountains of Lhasa") who never leaves his body now and so has "got to wait to die". -- (On the live set list in 2001)
'Dame meditation' most probably refers to the Kundalini, the yogic fire-snake that resides in the genital region, waiting to rise to the yogi's head to enable illumination symbolised by a lotus flower.

Buddhism is a tool to combine diet, drugs (or rather the absence of drugs, as stimulants are not considered to be appropriate indulgences), yoga and sexual techniques.
The Buddha's main objection to alcohol - and indeed to all recreational drugs, was that it befuddles consciousness, thus making mental development difficult. He also often warned against alcohol's negative social effects. Consequently abstaining from all recreational drugs including alcohol is one of the precepts that all Buddhists are expected to practice. But one wonders whether psychedelics would be useful in the practice of Buddhism?
Yoga is one of the preliminary conditions to master the body before using it as a temple. By westerners, Yoga is mistakenly thought to be simply a system of physical exercises to keep the body supple and the mind calm. But the meaning of the word yoga is union and the system was developed by eastern adepts to assist them in attaining union with the source of all being.

Regarding Yoga: I watched a barefoot Bowie sitting in a very difficult Yoga position during his live performance of 'The Man Who Sold The World' (1970) at Zurich on 14th February 1996.

Between 1967 and 1969, it was reported that Bowie slept upright in an antique wooden box, ate only two modest meals a day, and underwent periods of intense silence.
But Zen and Mahayana Buddhism weren't his only tool to expand consciousness and perception.
The hippie era was already over when he parodied it on his album 'Space Oddity'; by 1970 he was smiling "sadly for a love I could not obey" for he was not to become one of those stars with a mundane message who devote their lives "to save a slogan". At a time where he suffered from 11 flop singles, 2 flop albums and has stalked through seven Record Firms (in 1969, his father who was closely involved in his son's career, had died), he was looking for a "new love" and "new words". In his song 'The Cygnet Commitee', Ziggy Stardust again was prefigured: "I gave Them life / I gave Them all ... / I opened doors that would have blocked Their way." Impotence when confronting reality gave birth to fantasies of omnipotence.



"The flaming Dove"

Having already described himself ironically as "the Cream / Of the Great Utopia Dream" and as "a phallus in pigtails" in 1969, by 1971 Bowie was saying "I want to be a Superman"; he expressed these feelings more precisely in his song 'Quicksand': "I'm closer to the Golden Dawn / immersed in Crowley's uniform ... / I'm not a prophet or a stone age man / Just a mortal with potential of a superman."

In the live versions during 1973 the keywords "Golden Dawn" and "Crowley" were left out. It was only in 1997, when Bowie was in the process of floating himself on the stock market, that he started to re-use fragments of his worn-out and discarded personæ again, and 'celebrated' Crowley's 'uniform' as the opener to his live gigs that summer.

Sexmagick was hinted at in 'Holy Holy', 1970:

Listen Lady, let me lie low, lie low with you
To be lie-high-high-high-high-high, my! Oh my!
Slowly, we get too good and too holy
Helping one another, just a righteous brother

["righteous brother" is a term used in masonry and also in the Golden Dawn]

At the same time, he blessed gay culture with lyrics like "He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips / And showed me the leather belt round his hips ... / The snake and I, a venom high". ('The Width of a Circle', 1970).

Homosexuality was also hinted at in songs like 'Lady Stardust' (= Marc Bolan in 1970), 'Queen Bitch' (= Lou Reed in 1971), 'Looking for a friend' (Freddi Burretti, Bowie's costume designer), 'Scream like a Baby' (1979, where 'Sam' was like a gun), 'Hallo Spaceboy' (which in 1995, the date of the song, was the name of a S&M club in Amsterdam) and many others.




"Boys Keep Swinging"



In 1971, Bowie stated that he wanted music to be "tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. ... It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium" and so he introduced his androgynous gender-bender persona, as his lovers Romy Haag, Amanda Lear, as well as his wife Angie Bowie were able to observe at first hand - and to the admiration of his audiences.
While spending his time gazing into crystal balls and communicating with the spirit-world through a Ouija board, Bowie developed the persona of an androgynous messiah-figure who would blueprint the music scene of the 1970s and who would question accepted notions of truth and authenticity - especially where sexuality and pop/rock music running counter to everything deemed 'natural' was concerned. This undoubtedly fed Bowie's desires for 'folie de grandeur' and an aesthetic of excess, both of which might be used to re-create the self as a manufactured object - and which would mean the replacement of God as the creator.
But what about the occult world view, where sex is sometimes viewed as neither male nor female, but as a state of mind?
And eventually, for the audience 'Bowie' became like LSD in the water supply.



Ziggy Stardust - our fine, feathered friend
Who he?

In Bowie's visionary performance, the story went that civilization was going to collapse and the 'Infinites' would arrive. Ziggy Stardust (a sort of a Golem, "your face, your race, the way that you talk / I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk") was advised to announce the coming of these 'starmen' bringing hope. Ziggy is their prophet, the messiah who takes himself to incredible spiritual heights, and is kept alive by the devotion of his disciples. When the Starmen finally arrive, they take bits and pieces of Ziggy so that they can manifest themselves as real physical beings. Eventually they tear him to pieces on stage during the performance of the song 'Rock'n'Roll Suicide'. At the moment of Ziggy's death, the Starmen take on his essence, and become visible.

This drama is gnosticism at its purest. In Manicheism, every man and woman were once STARS, that is divine. Through a Philip K. Dick-like "crack in the sky", most of the divine quality reascended to heaven, leaving behind only some tiny little sparks of the Divine Light in humanity on the physical level. These sparkling 'leftovers' of the Divine (when the so-called Logos spermatikos left mankind), imprisoned in matter, have to be concentrated upon building up a brilliant "Body of Light" fitted for return to the "Blessed Realm" in heaven. Thus in this form of Gnosticism, the whole body of man was considered as divine (the Temple of the Holy Ghost) and the sexual organs were meant to fulfill a peculiar function: namely, the re-creation of the universe. In Manicheism, all other matter is "evil", a place of decay; and although many manicheist scriptures speak of the ascetic aspect (enjoining no meat, no coitus, no marriage) there are more controversial reports that take a diametrical opposed view. But whether ascetic or sensual, it was a core belief of Manicheism that "angels" copulate with "archonts" as a way of freeing human beings from their the "evil bonds" to matter. - Archonts are the guardians of the universe and are often viewed as maleficient forces. One of the archonts is the demiurge or the creator of the world. The recurring image of archonts is that of jailers imprisoning the divine spark in human souls, held captive in material creation. -- But through the union of Good and Evil - angels and archonts - souls were purified and what is removed in this purgation might be 'given to all the species of the Earth'.
There are also strong shamanic elements involved; mutilation of the body (a reflection of Ziggy being torn apart) is common in shamanistic initiation.

In his book 'Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy' (Bollingen Foundation, published by Princeton University Press, 1964), Mircea Eliade recorded a Yakut shaman stating that as a rule the prospective shaman 'dies' and lies in their yurt for three days without eating or drinking as part of their initiation. The shaman recounted that in former times the candidate went through the ceremony thrice, during which he was cut to pieces. The candidate's limbs were removed and disjointed with an iron hook; the bones were cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body-fluids thrown away, and the eyes torn from their sockets. After this operation, all the bones were gathered up and fastened together with iron. It was also believed that the limbs were distributed among the evil spirits of disease and death. Each spirit devoured the part of the body that was its share; this gave the candidate shaman the power to cure the corresponding diseases. After devouring the whole body the evil spirits departed.
The myth of renewal by fire, cooking or dismemberment has continued to haunt mankind even beyond the spiritual horizon of shamanism. Posing together with Damien Hirst, in 1994 and 1995 Bowie was going to play with the idea of torn apart bodies as Art.

Manicheism was also an important part in Aleister Crowley's "philosophy". Did his slogan "Every Man and Woman is a Star" lead to Bowie's Starman, Ziggy Stardust, the Rock'n Roll Star of the 1971-73 Ziggy-Incarnation?

"I was very aware of the idea of androgyny or an unknown gender being attached to most priesthoods in the East... Those original shamans have mutated into the entertainer ... that's where I was at in the early '70s," Bowie recalled in 'Interview' September 1995.



"I've had my share so I'll help you with the pain"

"It's the process that matters, isn't it? Rather than getting your information - or redemption - easily and directly you must go through this long stubborn painful trek. As with alchemy, the end result isn't as important as the long process whereby all the inessential aspects of "you" have been stripped away ..." [1995]

While Bowie had sexual intercourse with his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, his closest friend Marc Bolan (originally one of Ziggy's rôle-models for 'Lady Stardust' already in 1970 where Bowie sang "songs of darkness and dismay") celebrated libertine Gnose: "I got a Rolls-Royce 'cause it's good for my voice".
It's plain that Bowie and his coevals either neglected or ignored the ascetic aspect of Manichean practice (who avoided activities tending to disperse the Light/Divine Sparks) and sought their salvation/health/cure of souls via Optimum through Maximum. Or, as Bowie sang later in Bertolt Brecht's 'Baal' in 1981: "He will have his sky down there below"

When the stage shows in 1972 and 1973 opened with Beethoven's 'Freude Schöner Götterfunken' [Ode to Joy], it seemed that the musicians in his band, The Spiders from Mars, had found 'God' as well; but through the medium of Scientology. [Beethoven also was used in 1990 as the opener].

Scientology and Crowleyanity have more in common than at first appears, as readers of Michael Staley's article The Babalon Working can learn.

In the end Ziggy Stardust had to die for real, as Bowie dropped Ziggy and sought out a new persona in his search for a mainstream audience; for a time he appeared to be 'going straight', but this was when the human being called David Bowie encountered cocaine. Bowie has always been described as a hyperactive personality with a very low attention-span. Maybe Gnosticism has a physical parallelism in people whose brains are under-stimulated by a lack of dopamine, a condition which impairs the 'censoring' or controlling functions of the fore-brain. People suffering from such lapses in concentration compensate for the lack of internal mental stimuli with apparently purposeless activities, while remaining hyperactive, restless and scatter-brained. Similarly, there are cocaine addicts who suffer from a hyperkinetic disorder, and need the drug to compensate for their feelings of 'emptiness'. Like music, drugs may serve as providers of creativity and productiveness, by inducing changed constants of perception and behaviour - which in turn leads to changes in expressions of creativity. Too much Dopamin (Levipoda, L-Dopa) also can be seen in the context of schizophrenia and the believe in the 'paranormal', that is seeing meanings between things as in Cabbala.



"And in the death ..."

In the biggest stage show ever mounted in rock history (the show stage was based on the expressionist designs of "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari"), in 1974 Bowie presented himself as 'Halloween Jack' with his own face as a Japanese Kabuki-Mask, on which yet another persona was painted: Aladdin Sane (A Lad Insane).
An unreleased track from this time is called 'A Lad In Vain'.
Everything became a mirror. In 1993, Bowie took up to spray Aladdin Sane's red-blue zig-zag lightning-flash directly onto his face for portraits on the cover of lifestyle magazines, e.g. for "Q".
In the early 1974 live shows he played the rôle of the 'Cracked Actor', parodying a Hollywood Pierrot Hamlet who addressed a skull with the lyrics: "you sold me illusions for a sack full of cheques / you've made a bad connection 'cause I just want your sex.".
The song 'Cracked Actor' appeared on the live set again in 1999 and 2000.

Reported to be heavily addicted to cocaine by the end of 1974, Bowie had his band introduce him with a 1969 song's lyrics: "The Sun machine is coming down" and underlaying now new songs like 'Who Can I be Now' ("can I be real?") and 'It's Gonna Be Me' ("be holy again") with dancemusic ("For you're dancing where the dogs decay, defecating ecstasy") in the most surging 'party/disco' style - which worked surprisingly well - unlike Bowie's attempts at dancing, which were stiff and jerky.
Lester Bangs reviewed this performance as a "parody of a parody".

In 1975, he was undoubtedly talking to himself while duetting with the sex icon Cher in 'Can you hear me?' In February that year Bowie insisted "that Hitler was a terrible military strategist but his overall objective was very good." It was clear that he was living in other realms.

In May 1993 he professed in "Q": "I honestly have no idea what I thought between 1975 and 1977."

Bowie was reading Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, he met the Crowleyite Kenneth Anger, and soon would develop a new alter ego: the emotionless Aryan superhuman called The Thin White Duke - or maybe the god Set?

“I had this more-than-passing interest in Egyptology, mysticism and the cabala. At the time it seemed transparently obvious what the answer to life was. My whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of impending doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism.” (Musician, May 1983.)

Angie Bowie recalled a good deal of occult activity during the subsequent LA period in 1975-76; it was also clear that Bowie was vulnerable to the influence of sycophants and hangers-on while he was heavily into cocaine. It has been alleged that at this time he scribbled frantic cabbalistic calculations on his own correspondence, stored his own urine in a fridge, and was obsessed about preventing anyone else getting hold of his nail-clippings and hair-trimmings - as Marianne Faithfull saw. This sort of voodoo superstition - a fear that bodily waste could be used for evil purposes by occult enemies - may also be found in Crowley's more secret teachings.

Rumor has it that Bowie kept his hair and fingernail clippings in the fridge of Michael Lippman’s home where he was living then, so they could not fall into the hands of those he thought wished to put spells on him. Bowie constructed an altar in the living room and he graced the walls with various magick symbols which he hand-painted. Candles burned around the clock, he regularly performed banishing rituals, and he protected his friends by drawing sigils on their hands.
The seventeen-year-old Cameron Crowe allegedly found a stirred-up Bowie burning black candles against an aborted magical ritual during the LA period. Eventually Crowe published several narratives in Rolling Stone and Playboy of Bowie drawing black magick symbols, seeing disembodied beings, thinking he was the Messiah, keeping bottles of his urine in the fridge, etc., etc.
Angie Bowie witnessed her husband exorcising the swimming pool: “When he did the exorcism he cited from one of the books I got for him from the magick store in Hollywood. Some exorcism spell, who knows? I offered to bring in the Greek Orthodox Bishop from Santa Sophia’s Cathedral in Los Angeles. I though I might humilate him into behaving himself, stop doing so much cocaine and have to receive a house visitor; but that didn’t work. David performed the ‘Swimming Pool Exorcism’ himself... in fact, when I found a house in California in Los Angeles, an old Hollywood house with a second-foor solarium with a pentagram painted on the foor, he nearly had a heart attack and said we couldn’t live there! David loves to play weird. He just can’t stand not to be the head Ho Ho.”
Bowie asked someone for a mezuzah, a talisman against demons used by Qabalists. In April 1974, while in London, Angie Bowie received a phone call from her husband in LA, who claimed that he was kidnapped by a magician and two witches who wanted to steal his sperm. Allegedly, they intended him to befather a Baby for Rosemary.
Angie Bowie reacted reluctantly: “Believing he was held captive by a warlock and [***] and he was to inseminate the whatever by All Hallows’ Eve. I told him, I said, why did they bother to hold you captive, they just needed to ask. I’m sure you’d have been delighted to [*** ***] AGAIN... I never bought his stories. NEVER. Flying all the way to Los Angeles for him to invent some hallucination, drug-induced, about witches and warlocks... Please!”

There's another anecdote about Bowie's fear of other people magickally using things he touched.

In 1983 and 1984, the late Derek Jarman wanted to do a film called 'Neutron'. Prospects looked really good financially as he had lined up an impressive cast-list and who else than Bowie wanted to play the lead. The two had a meeting in Derek's apartment and everything seemed hunky-dory. But then Bowie suddenly started chain-smoking and Jarman noticed that his guest was getting more and more nervous and was shooting furtive glances at one of his bookshelves plus some drawings on the wall. Then suddenly in the middle of a conversation Bowie stood up, made a lame excuse and left. Twenty minutes later Bowie's driver and bodyguard came back to the flat and said that the master had forgotten something and then proceeded to remove the cigarette-stubs from the trash... Needless to say Bowie backed out of the project which then collapsed. Jarman never did have the time to explain that his John Dee books and the Enochian squares on the wall were souvenirs from the time when he made 'Jubilee', a film in which Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth the First's astrologer, had been one of the main characters.
Dee's 'Enochian' system of magic, with its complex magical diagrams, was an important part of Golden Dawn teachings.

There is a postscript to this story. The producer of 'Twin Peaks' for sentimental reasons bought the rights to 'Neutron'. The project was revived recently. And guess who wants to play the lead?

Here is one of Aleister Crowley's 'secret teachings': "All bodily excrements, such as cut nails, and hair, should be burnt; spittle should be destroyed or exposed to the Sun; the urine and faeces should be so disposed of that it is unlikely that any other person should obtain possession of them." Yet still in March 1987 Bowie was insisting: "I never was in the occult". But for all these years he sang about the 'Jean Genie' who "keeps all your dead hair for making up [witchy] underwear".



"I'll be your king volcano right for you again and again"

The 1976 track 'Station to Station' is a fine example of Bowie's use of occult symbolism. Not only does he refer to Aleister Crowley's book of pornographic poems when he sings of "making sure White Stains", the 'stations' of the title refer to the ten stations of a cabalistic diagram called the 'Tree of Life', where the transcendent aspect of God becomes manifest through ten emanations or spheres (called 'Sefiroth' in Hebrew) from the highest 'Kether' (the crown), to the lowest 'Malkuth' (the kingdom).

Anyone who has the CD version of 'Station to Station' finds Bowie's photo on the back cover where he's sitting on the floor drawing this so-called Tree of Life with the 10 Sefirots. "Don't look at the carpet / I drew something awful on it", he sang in 'Breaking Glass' in 1977. Some years later, in March 2001 he admitted that this lyric "refers to both the cabbalistic drawings of the tree of life and the conjuring of spirits."


Bowie also opined that these Stations are referring to the Stations of the Christian Cross, the fourteen landmarks on Christ's path to the crucifixion.

Occultists who use the Cabbala make their reality transcendent by means of seeing Cabbalistic images all around them in the world - every thing and incident is interpreted in correspondence with the Tree of Life, as somehow a direct dealing with God - and sometimes also through the use of sex. They travel the paths and spheres of the Tree; to travel in "one magical movement" from "Kether to Malkuth" "lost in my [magical?] circle" (as Bowie sings) equates with the descent of the transcendent God to the immanent physical level, thus making man one with the Divine. And vice-versa, going from "Malkuth to Kether" could signify employing sex, and rising during orgasm from the physical level to become God.
But which God was Bowie trying to reach? "Does my prayer fit in with your scheme of things?" he asked 'God' in the track 'Word on a Wing' on the same album, in 1976.

You need magical circles in order to manifest Angels or Demons. The magician stands in one circle and the Angel has to appear in the other.
When Bowie had asked the journalist George Tremlett whether he had ever tried to communicate with the dead using a ouija board, Tremlett said no. “Don’t,” replied Bowie, “It can mess you up, especially if you’re taking drugs.” (David Bowie: Living on the Brink, London, 1997. p. 149.)

Also in 'Station to Station' he was "flashing no colour" which hints at his experimentation with the hindu Tattva system which advocates 'colour-flashing' in order to enter the several astral planes contributed to the 5 elements.

This song reappeared in the live set list in 1999, 'Station to Station' he sang again in 1990 and in the Summer 2000.

But “flashing no color”: Which Tattwa has no colours? It’s the Akasha-Tattwa, the superimposed quintessence of all the others. What are you going to do with fashing no colors in a magical circle? Breaking glass?
My question to Angie Bowie: “Regarding astral travels. Did he use the Hindu symbols called Tattwas? You focus on one of the images, and eventually ‘astrally’ enter, step through it like through a door.”
Angie Bowie: “Yes, but he did not say it was Hindu; I thought it was Tibetan. When I focused on a spot it became very bright, and when he moved toward me the spot turned to black and I told him his presence would close my astral eye.”


There is another less serious insight in Bowie's songs that involve a dialogue between Bowie and an 'Angel' (perhaps a sort of Mephistopheles?); there is a strong implication of some kind of Faustian pact, though this isn't immediately obvious.* In 1999 Bowie's posed as 'Mephistopheles' on photographs.

In 1976's 'Golden Years', Bowie sang "I'll stick with you baby for a thousand years, nothin's gonna touch you in these golden years" to an "Angel"; this could be interpreted as the angel and Bowie assuring one another of their thousand year pact... though Angie Bowie remembers this track as a much more conventional love-song, written for her when Bowie was trying to save their failing relationship.
Then there is 'Cat People' from 1981: "See these eyes so green, I can stare for a thousand years; these tears can never dry. Judgement made can never bend." Maybe this is Bowie and his angel telling each other about their millenial pact as mentioned in the Bible, and the hurtful burden of God's condemnation.
You might find this association intriguing: in 'Let's Dance' (1983) the lyric runs "Under the moonlight / the serious moonlight", which bears a resemblance to Aleister Crowley's 'Lyric of Love to Leah' from his diary for 1923: "Come, my darling, let us dance / To the moon that beckons us / Come, my love, let us dance / To the moon & Sirius!" A product of a 'cut-up'? A deliberate play on words? There are semantic connections between the two - as in "If you should fall into my arms / If you say hide we'll hide ..." and Crowley's "To dissolve our soul in trance / Heedless of the hideous / Heat & hate of Sirius." Also compare:
[Demon Dog] Diamond Dogs = Dog Star = Sirius = Serious Moonlight

In 'Station to Station' there is the line "throwing darts in lovers' eyes". In Crowley's system, the dart or arrow is a symbol of direction, and shows the dynamic of True Will - which is not being but going, not individual but universal. The arrow pierces all points simultaneously in a perpetual orgasm; it is tipped with poison, an alkahest capable of dissolving the illusion of separateness.

In Crowley's 'Thoth' Tarot cards, the complementary card to 'The Lovers' is called 'Art', which depicts the flight of this arrow beyond its disintegrative stage. The two figures in 'The Lovers' are now resolved into their synthesis, which is Perfection. The arrow is soaring Beyond, piercing the rainbow. There is no goal, only the dynamic of the flight. The flight is towards Perfection. The House of God is smitten by the Lightning Flash of Illumination, the impact of the Holy Guardian Angel and the Flaming Sword of the Energy that proceeds from Kether to Malkuth. Thence are cast forth two figures representing by their attitude the Hebrew letter Ayin: these are the twins (Horus and Harpocrates) born at the breaking open of the Womb of the Mother (the second aspect of the House of God (or Tarot card 'Tower': symbolic of the ego in its phallic aspect) as "a spring shut up, a fountain sealed").

So perhaps that's why in 1987 the figure of the 'Glass Spider' sings of Bowie's empty river of universal consciousness "Gone, gone, the water's all gone, Mummy come back 'cause the water's all gone". Here 'Mummy' is Ishtar, Aphrodite, Maryam, Arianrhod, Pallas Athene, Venus... and Bowie's future wife Iman.



In 1976, the 'Thin White Duke', alias Bowie opened his live performances with a mask covering his face. After showing Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's film 'Un Chien Andalou' as a prologue, he came on stage as a self-styled "Frank Sinatra of the Nightmares" "throwing Darts in Lover's eyes", ripping the Golden Mask off his face when singing the revelatory lines from his song about the Sefiroth "From Kether to Malkuth".

Since the late 70s Bowie performed his little trademark gesture of reaching above him and then touching the ground while delivering the 'magickal movement from Kether to Malkuth' line, a move that seemed to crop up a whole lot in later videos in all sorts of contexts - even to the point of getting an (apparently) bemused Jagger to follow suit in the clip for 'Dancing in the Streets'.



The Cut Up method and the Occultist's State of Trance

Achieving richly-detailed concretised 'visibility' from trance-images is an experimental procedure; the possibilities of what will be observed coalesce, the vision jumps all over the place, and blends fragments together. Neither the occult nor the cut-up technique would seem to furnish the basis of a secure or well-integrated identity. The instantaneous 'moment' quickly induces a new use for the ears and eyes: 'Sound and Vision' that extend to all that is known, until the perception becomes infinitely complex. This may engender a lack of precise definition of relevant experiences (such as a lack of emphasis on a bearer of a symbol), which enables new comparisons to be made between signs and symbols; and perhaps new laws, and new rhetoric, as the aim of new frameworks. Sounds and visions become the projection of a human being into a state of Gnosis. Through this altered interpretation, there is an increase in reflection, which becomes a metaphor for the continuing stratagems of illumination.

ALEISTER CROWLEY’S SEXMAGICKAL SYSTEM

Adoration of the phallus as the redeemer, both within and without oneself

Illumination through interaction with something outside the closed vessels of the vagina and the anus

Illumination through interaction inside the vagina with either the blood or the secretions of a woman when excited

Illumination through impregnation + fertilisation of an egg + the act of creation or succession

Illumination through isolation in the anus where it is considered unable to interact with anything at all

Illumination through interaction with excrements (one of Crowley’s preferred ingredients) and small amounts of blood (when small wounds occur through the intercourse), mucus and of course the mucous membranes that lead directly into the blood supply, etc., etc. Crowley dreamt of giving birth to a foetus per anum: "a mass of blood & slime."
Techniques like these have become popularised through the writings of Aleister Crowley who was once a member of the Golden Dawn, and later of the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was (and still is) deeply involved with sex-magic. In public perception, both the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis are pseudo-masonic organisations where the aspirant (or member) goes through stages of ceremonial initiation wearing semi-Egyptian costumes - like the one Bowie wore for a photo session with Brian Ward in 1969. (See, for example, "David Bowie Black Book" by Miles, London 1980, p. 40, where Bowie is shown giving the occult sign of "as above so below" - otherwise the symbol of 'Baphomet', the old Knight Templar's idol. Or in the photo on the inner sleeve of the CD version of 'Space Oddity' Bowie portrays the Sphinx, an important occult symbol; also on the cover of the bootleg CD 'The Shadow Man').


Angie Bowie doesn’t see any occult intentions behind this: “He ran out of photo shoot ideas. We did that one in London in the early 1970s. Natasha Korniloff and Lindsay Kemp’s brains were plundered for every image and every possible costume.” It is rumored that Bowie began developing a Tutankhamun stage project in the early 1970s, but it never got beyond the planning stage.


Let's take a closer look at the line "one magical movement" from 'Station to Station'. To travel from "Kether to Malkuth" in "one magical movement" would mean leaving out three sefiroth that lie between Kether (the Crown) and Malkuth (the Kingdom): Tifereth signifying 'love' or 'beauty', Yesod meaning 'base through union' or 'foundation' - and a hidden sefira: Da'ath which means 'words through the throat' or 'knowledge', a tunnel to the reverse of the Tree of Life, ruled by demons.

Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth
There are you, you drive like a demon from station to station

I shall not discuss here the skipping of Tifereth and Yesod (his relationship with Angie Bowie was nearing its end); but the omission of Da'ath, or 'words through the throat' was certainly manifest in the next few years of Bowie's life, when he recorded several albums containing tracks with no lyrics.




Without losing one drop of sweat



Bowie was spouting occult keywords far and wide without any apparent fear of being publicly condemned. "That whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain" as he later called Aleister Crowley's field, was - and is - expressed in complicated wording, as we've seen in the previous analysis of the lyrics in 'Station to Station'.

So were you involved in actual devil worship?
"Not devil worship, no, it was pure straighforward, old-fashioned magic."
The Aleister Crowley variety?
"No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called " Psychic self defence". 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 trough them, and saw what was on the other side!"
DRUM'N'BASS ODDITY, New Musical Express, February 1997, By Jay Mathews

In circa 1987 he uttered this: [real audio format]

Bowie consistantly denied his occult interests, until the biographies of Angie Bowie, Marianne Faithfull and Amanda Lear were published, and proved that he was interested in the subject. But the public took little or no notice of this in the 1970's, even though Bowie's friends Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull had both been involved in the notorious underground film projects of Kenneth Anger, a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, who had met Bowie in 1975.

Anger's membership is easily demonstrated by the way he signs his private letters with the abbreviation "O.T.O.", and the fact that he is a known associate of the chief of a modern-day American version of the O.T.O., called the 'Caliphate'. In fact, Anger was listed as a member of the 'Caliphate' O.T.O's IXth degree in the group's membership list for 1999 (see details of Crowley's sex-magical system above). A member of Charles Manson's infamous 'Family', Robert Beausoleil, lived together with Anger for some time. Before he took up murdering Hollywood celebrities, Beausoleil had acted the part of Lucifer in Anger's movie 'Lucifer Rising'; when he was sent to prison, he composed the music for the same movie. Kenneth Anger was also instrumental in the founding of Anton LaVey's 'Church of Satan' - and allegedly it was LaVey who played the role of Satan in Roman Polanski's movie 'Rosemary's Baby' (this is in fact not true). Sharon Tate, one of the Family's murder victims, was Polanski's wife.

In 1993, Bowie admitted that it was the atmosphere surrounding the Manson murders that had induced his fascination with what he called 'Black Magick'. Nonetheless, most people were far more interested in Bowie's latest hair-style than his lyrics. He still maintained "I'm Pierrot, I'm Everyman. What I'm doing is Theatre, and only Theatre... what you see on stage isn't sinister. It's pure clown... putting over the great sadness of 1976."

By now living as a tax-exile in Switzerland, Bowie had scaled down his elaborate and expensive concerts to a minimalist show without a set, instead using white light against a black background; he himself adopted a 1920's look. His friend Iggy Pop, an icon of public self-consummation and consumption (with razors), was seen dancing in the background at these performances. Linked up to a new management and record-company, both Bowie (now rich, but still maintaining an 'arty' profile) and Pop moved to Berlin for a time; there in a seven-roomed flat they numbed their depression with beer and cocaine, and produced voiceless textures of electronic sounds whose style was to influence many rock musicians in the future. Far removed from the public's gaze, Bowie started painting, mostly rather amateurish portraits in the expressionist manner of the 1920's, or else versions of the Cabalistic Tree of Life with its ten spheres/stations and twenty-two paths (corresponding to the Tarot trumps). As mentioned before, one of these occult paintings is shown on the back cover of EMI's 1991 CD re-release of 'Station to Station'.

Bowie recorded 'Low' with Brian Eno; together with Iggy Pop, they "fabricated" the album 'The Idiot', Bowie became "Heroes" (also the song title in between inverted commas), Pop ironically caught sight of the 'Lust for Life' but both remained 'Passengers', headed by Bowie as 'Lodger'. Aimless.
When Bowie sang a duet with Bing Crosby about the 'Peace On Earth', shortly before the latter's death, as a Christmas record in 1976, it was hard to tell their voices apart: suddenly, unaccountably, Bowie had become mainstream.




Breaking Magical Glass



Short outline from the forthcoming book

Davor Zadnek is a practising Thelemite:
If we assume that breaking glass is a mirror or a crystal ball, than I would say that this lyric is most probably about evocation. "Your room" would than hint that it is not usual evocation but the one that uses sex, which is a more powerful and advanced technique. The inclusion of the Tree of Life would probably mean that Bowie is using this "tree" as a basis for his magickal work, perhaps evoking some beings that are closely related to the Tree of Life.
But 'carpet' is usually associated with astral travel (flying carpet in Arab stories). So, this could mean that the practice is not only evocation but also Raising on the Planes (astral travel) used to investigate the Tree of Life. So, this could hint that he is using a combination of both techniques – and many occultists indeed find the combination of both techniques much more effective. Usually they first use Raising on the Planes and than use the connection gained in this way for evocation but there is t he possibility to first use a magickal mirror to get a glimpse of one sphere of the Tree of Life and than use the vision in the mirror to enter that sphere with astral travel. As the second interpretation is in accordance with the succession in the lyric, this would mean that the first part is not about evocation of some particular 'being' but of 'scrying' [explain] certain part of the Tree - or looking at a certain part of the Tree with the magickal mirror and than using those images to astrally enter into this part of the Tree. This is not a common technique but it can be used (and is used) and this second interpretation is in my opinion more in accordance with the song.
But because Bowie uses the word "listen", this could mean that a certain evocation of a being is indeed present as in evocations the beings are usually firstly heard and only than you make a visual connection. But looking at this with the conclusion that we found in the second paragraph, I would say that he is using general scrying of some sphere of the Tree and that first some being(s) "appear" and they first make audible contact but the working is 'concentrated' on the sphere of the Tree and not on a part icular being - so that the 'apperance' of this being(s) is more a contingency than anything else. Than he uses astral travel to intensify the experience of this sphere and make the more definite visual connection – the word "see" could imply that.
I would say that "Oh-oh-oh-oh" means sexual intercourse, so we have another point that this is about sex magick.
The lines "You're such a wonderful person" and "But you got problems" could hint at the experience that he is getting through - first the vision of beatitude in all and then because of the transformative nature of this working, the unconsciousness complexes came to the surface of the consciousness and he sees his problems or project them to him/her. Or it could mean that he gets clairvoyant.
"I'll never touch you" could perhaps mean that Bowie will not hurt him/her or better that he/she is not going to be influenced by all this as this is his personal working and that he/she is not part of it. "Don't look" in "Don't look at the carpet" could mean exactly that - you must be ready for this experience or they might be too much for you, so Bowie is protecting him/her. Crowley used sex magick in this way, as he could not find a suitable partner.
Rabbi Luria's old schema, given pre-eminence in the Golden Dawn and A.'.A.'.. Serious Qabbalah scholars like Gershom Scholem thought Crowley and Mathers (the founder of the GD) were a bunch of swindlers.


Maggie Ingalls, famous in the Thelemic Continuum for expanding Crowley's Thelema in the 70s:
This is an interesting set of lyrics. I read it as a loony accusing his girlfriend of being nuts: ("But you got problems"), which is just a projection of his own mental state. The breaking of glass, in the way he words it (especially with the "again") seems obsessive/compulsive action designed to harm both the girlfriend and himself.
I agree that the first glass that comes to mind is a mirror or crystal ball, but the Tree of Life symbolism leads me to consider that the broken vessels, shells, or shards that are the Qlipoth might be what he means. "Don't look at the carpet" is contradicted by "See!", which suggests that the broken glass is all over the floor.
The last line, "I'll never touch you", can be read as either a threat or a promise. He'll never touch her, but he will create hazardous conditions in her room--he'll never touch her because he thinks she's the crazy one--or he's assuring her that he won't physically assault her--or all of the above?
There do seem to be ritual elements implied, but it feels to me that it's a private ritual invented by the 'speaker' of the words...maybe he's in a moral struggle, his 'angelic' and 'diabolic' aspects locked in combat.


Explanation of the used keywords and more details about the lyrics of "Breaking Glass" in the forthcoming book




"Put a Bullet in my Brain"



Meanwhile, having somehow consumed all potential musical rivals, his sound-tapestries gained lyrics again.

Lou Reed of Velvet Underground fame had been imported by Bowie to the UK from America; Bowie had then produced Reed's famous 'Transformer' Album in 1972, hence making Reed's success largely dependant on Bowie's reputation. That year Bowie wrote songs for one of Britain's most successful bands of the day, Mott the Hoople, as well as producing Iggy Pop's most influental album 'Raw Power'. His name also appeared on albums by Lulu, Mick Ronson, Dana Gillespie, Steeleye Span, The Beatstalkers, Dib Cochran & The Earwigs, Peter Noone, Arnold Corns and many more. As if this were not enough, he had developed a deep friendship with Mick Jagger, recorded or appeared on stage with Gene Vincent, Jeff Beck, Bruce Springsteen, Brian Eno, Rick Wakeman, Cher, Bing Crosby, Marc Bolan, Marianne Faithfull, John Lennon - and re-recorded his songs in Italian, German and French versions - it was obvious Bowie was an 'Artist'. There was hardly any better description of a true gnostic than a "Man who Fell to Earth" (a sci-fi film of 1975, where he starred the main rôle), bringing "Sound and Vision" (1977) or alias Ziggy Stardust saving the world.

But a definite loss of creativity had overshadowed him; all his life Bowie had confined much of his admiration to those who tried to emulate him. By 1979, the whole universe seemed crowded with more or less accurate Bowie-clones, among whom was the opera-singer Klaus Nomi [know me]. As a pure gnostic, Bowie 'consumed' Nomi, by performing with him; both wore stiff plastic Pierrot costumes when they sang 'The Man Who Sold The World', who had "died a long long time ago".

During the Song 'TVC15' Bowie performed a Golden Dawn Posture, called "The Enterer"
The first song he ever had written, 'I'm tired of my life' (in c. 1963) was recorded again in a new 1980 version, with partly altered lyrics under the title 'It's no Game'