THE |
|
a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
to occult, mystical, and spiritual subjects. |
To: alt.magick From: "Fr. A.o.C."Subject: Re: Name the Three for Fun Prizes! David Bowie? Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2002 19:01:22 GMT Speaking of Bowie... ever catch all the references to Magick in much of his 1970-80s material? In "Quicksand", he sings: I'm closer to the Golden Dawn, Immersed in Crowley's uniform Of imagery. Pretty damn obvious. Then follows: I'm living in a silent film, Portraying Himmler's sacred realm Of dream reality. This is a reference to the Order of Vril and The Thule Society, though many detractors took it as evidence that Bowie was a Nazi sympathizer. Or how about the lyrics of his song "Station to Station"? Here are we, one magical moment, such is the stuff From where dreams are woven. Bending sound, dredging the ocean, lost in my circle. Here am I, flashing no colour. Tall in this room overlooking the ocean. Here are we, one magical movement from Kether and Malkuth, There are you, drive like a demon from station to station. The whole album is one of Bowie's best, perhaps his finest 1970s work. I wonder how many of his fans knew what the references to "flashing colour", "in my circle" and "station to station" meant, even with the obvious clue of naming two Sephiroth? The whole album is full of Western Mystery allegories, including "Golden Years" and "TVC5", but especially "Word on a Wing", which hints at K&C of the HGA and astral scrying, among other things. To drive the point home, the picture on the back of the Rykodisc CD version of the Station To Station album shows Bowie drawing the Tree of Life on the floor (the circles are the Sephiroth, with Malkuth at the bottom by Bowie's right hip). An acquaintance of mine once told me he worked in a bookstore near where Bowie was staying in L.A. (where he was recording the album), and he sold Bowie several books on Magick and the Qabalah, including some of Crowley's works. 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. (Well, David *was* doing a *lot* of cocaine in those days...) Bowie admitted in an interview (in 1995) 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, I've been interested in the Gnostics". And in New Musical Express in 1997: Q: "So were you involved in actual devil worship?" A: "Not devil worship, no, it was pure straighforward, 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 trough them, and saw what was on the other side!" And today, there's the track "Sunday" on his latest album, "Heathen": for in truth, it's the beginning of an end... and nothing has changed, everything has changed". - Fr. A.o.C. "Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets." -- Kurt Vonnegut
The Arcane Archive is copyright by the authors cited.
Send comments to the Arcane Archivist: tyaginator@arcane-archive.org. |
Did you like what you read here? Find it useful?
Then please click on the Paypal Secure Server logo and make a small donation to the site maintainer for the creation and upkeep of this site. |
The ARCANE ARCHIVE is a large domain,
organized into a number of sub-directories, each dealing with a different branch of religion, mysticism, occultism, or esoteric knowledge. Here are the major ARCANE ARCHIVE directories you can visit: |
|
interdisciplinary:
geometry, natural proportion, ratio, archaeoastronomy
mysticism: enlightenment, self-realization, trance, meditation, consciousness occultism: divination, hermeticism, amulets, sigils, magick, witchcraft, spells religion: buddhism, christianity, hinduism, islam, judaism, taoism, wicca, voodoo societies and fraternal orders: freemasonry, golden dawn, rosicrucians, etc. |
SEARCH THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
There are thousands of web pages at the ARCANE ARCHIVE. You can use ATOMZ.COM
to search for a single word (like witchcraft, hoodoo, pagan, or magic) or an
exact phrase (like Kwan Yin, golden ratio, or book of shadows):
OTHER ESOTERIC AND OCCULT SITES OF INTEREST
Southern
Spirits: 19th and 20th century accounts of hoodoo,
including slave narratives & interviews
|