David Bowie and The Occult

It wasnt until I went to the Haunted Antiques and seen a mould of David Bowies face placed within the dark room of the museum that made me suddenly raise the question, Was David Bowie into the occult?
I had grew up listening to David Bowie songs due to my dad being a massive Bowie fan in his youth. My dad used to say he was a dark character with traits that differed to many others, listening and seeing some of his music videos you could definitely tell that he had took on a darker stage in his life at one point.

I asked Neil Packer, the owner of the musuem and he confirmed that yes he was…. I must admit I wasnt surprised to find this out….
This made me look further into his music career and what evidence is out there to support this…

What I found out was that the late David Bowie didnt just have a interest in the occult at some stage in his life, he had explored spirituality a lot from Buddhism, UFO’s, Ghosts and even claiming that he felt he needed a exorcism after dealing with what he dubbed as the Devils Pool at his home, which he dealt with himself!

His occult stage was during the 1970’s.
In 1971 the song ‘Quicksand’ was released, and he sang the lyrics:

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 doorways to other plans of reality when he described how to travel down the Cabalistic Tree of Life

from Kether to Malkuth

Meaning from Godhead to Earth.
On 25 November, 1995, he finally admitted following the Aleister Crowley movement and said that in 1976 “My overriding interest was in Kabbala and Crowleyism. That whole dark and rather fearsome never–world of the wrong side of the brain.

Who was Aleister Crowley?
Aleister Crowley (/ˈæleɪstər ˈkroʊli/; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course. He followed the order of the Golden Dawn and was dubbed ‘The Most Evil Man to Ever Exist’ by many.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which was a secret society devoted to the study and practice of the occult, metaphysics, and paranormal activities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known as a magical order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was active in Great Britain and focused its practices on theurgy and spiritual development. Aleister’s contemporary tradition, Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn, which became one of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism.

The IMPACTS
During the 1970’s. Bowie moved in with his manager, Michael Lippman and his wife, freaking them out by saving his urine, toenail and hair clippings to prevent them from being used in dark rituals. He drew protective pentagrams on the walls by the light of black candles and mumbled about Tibetan black magic.

Bowie stated in a interview that during his obsession with Aleister and The Nazis, he became very paranoid and Bowie travelled straight into the heart of psychic darkness, lost in his own world, he stated:
‘ It was the worst manic depression of my life. … My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating twenty- four hours a day. … I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth.’

The Devils Pool
Bowie moved house to 637 North Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. Bowie’s ex-wife Angie Bowie writes in Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie, “It was a white cube surrounding an indoor swimming pool. David liked the place, but I thought it was too small to meet our needs for very long, and I wasn’t crazy about the pool. In my experience, indoor pools are always a problem. This one was no exception, albeit not in any of the usual ways. Its drawback was one I hadn’t encountered before and haven’t seen or heard of since: Satan lived in it. With his own eyes, David said, he’d seen HIM rising up out of the water one night.”

Angie called Walli Elmlark back in New York for help. “David wanted an exorcism. A Greek Orthodox Church in LA would have done it for us (there was a priest available for such a service, the people had told me) but David wouldn’t have it. No strangers allowed, he said. So there we stood, with just Walli’s instructions and a few hundred dollars’ worth of books, talismans, and assorted items from Hollywood’s comprehensive selection of fine occult emporia.

“There he [David Bowie] was, then, primed and ready,” she continues. “The proper books and doodads were arranged on a big old-fashioned lectern. The incantation began, and although I had no idea what was being said or what language it was being said in, I couldn’t stop a weird cold feeling rising up in me as David droned on and on. There’s no easy or elegant way to say this, so I’ll just say it straight. At a certain point in the ritual, the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously (perhaps ‘thrashed’ is a better term) in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving air filters or the like.”

“As David watched this happening in absolute terror, I tried to be flippant – ‘Well, dear, aren’t you clever? It seems to be working. Something’s making a move, don’t you think?’ – but I couldn’t keep it up. It was very, very strange… I was having trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing. We both left the pool in a hurry and David told me to check up on the pool from time to time. I kept my eye on it for the next forty minutes of so, and nothing unusual happened, and so with my heart in my mouth, I slid one of the glass doors open and, ignoring David’s panicked screams, went to the edge and looked in.”

“I saw what I saw. Nothing can change that. On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain, which had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, malevolent; it frightened me. I still don’t know what to think about that night. It runs directly counter to my pragmatism and my everyday faith in the integrity of the ‘normal’ world, and it confuses me greatly. What troubles me the most is that if you were to call that stain the mark of Satan, I don’t see how I could argue with you.
“David, of course, insisted that we move from the house as quickly as possible, and we did that, but I’ve heard… that subsequent tenants haven’t been able to remove the shadow. Even though the pool has been painted over a number of times, the shadow has always come back,”

The question, of course, is whether the drug use and resultant psychosis induced these experiences during this time had any influence, or if the drugs served as a portal for actual malevolent entities to gain some kind of control over Bowie.

Bowie had indeed rubbed shoulders with the dark, but while dealing with the dark the drugs became a part and parcel of that.