Article by Peter Koenig - David Bowie and the Occult

Somehow this is one of those things that would work better as a website than a book.

hahahaha this is the funniest thing i've read all day!!

spot the incredibly wacky leaps of logic and hilarious misuse of scientific reasoning in this graf:

"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 Cabbal"

this is so going in the science blog!!

Bowie should just write the foreword. "I'm never doing an autobiography so enjoy this. I did!"

Or a PhD thesis, perhaps. This part of the article really tickles me -a completely wild piece of theorising that speculates that DB's slump in the mid 80's was caused by his attampt to engage in a bit of contractual bargaining with Lucifer:

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Here are Mr. Ball's intriguing thoughts about David Bowie in the 80's (predicting some ideas introduced later in this article):

"I'm not alleging that such a pact existed. I don't even know whether such pacts can be genuinely entered into. Nonetheless it is a interesting image.
Bowie' self-preservational instinct got the better of him and he simply flinched from Lucifer's project. For a bright guy like Bowie, the culmination was hardly a matter for deep rumination: the road was littered with dead rock gods, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, etc., i.e. all victims of their Luciferian trajectories. This theory is premised on the notion that Lucifer wants rock gods to crash and burn, so confident is he of his own supreme powers of seduction. He will get your soul AND kill your idol! Cause he's bad and your "always crashing in the same car." The fastidious, control-freak aspect of Bowie's personality prevailed upon him to renounce Lucifer's plan. Surely things could be re-negotiated as with a bad record deal, no? Thinking fast, Bowie says "Wait, wait, I'm not the Lizard King or the Voodoo Child, I'm the Man Who Sold the World. And by Hades, I mean to prove it." Bowie spends the 1984-93 period tinkering in his basement to little avail. Lucifer gazes on like an impatient investor, his Brixton project slowly rotting on the vine before his very eyes. The boy better have something good, he thinks.
Thank God, the mid-nineties arrive. Bowie's mystique, sustained almost entirely by Lucifer's lavishing of creative riches during the 70s, sustains him long enough to win the mantle of Rock God Survivor or, as Peter-R. Koenig suggests, the Redeemed Redeemer. This is the "escapee from the asylum" designation, ostensibly outside Lucifer's purview, an "unintended consequence" of the remarkable staying power of those London Boys who, by all rights should be dead but persist nonetheless as merely the undead: Bowie, Richards, Jagger, Clapton, Page, Townshend, Osborne, et al. See them fall over themselves on VH1 retrospectives, condemning drugs and loud parties. To a man, they confess to past failings and "youthful indiscretions". Bowie pleads nolo contendere claiming a sort of spiritual "amnesia" during the coke-infested days of 1975-77. But in truth they are all merely being lured to a still larger seduction: the multi-billion dollar corporate industrial complex of the late 90's OR "Lucifer meets the financial markets." Bowie bonds, a sort of creative mummification, become the rage. However Satan is bad for business. It scares the adults. Sprint and Revlon co-opt Her Satanic Majesties Tour. Gee mom, they were all silly personæ anyway. See, it was only me behind the ouija board. Bowie's abandonment of Lucifer cannot sit well with the Great Pitch Forked One. I mean, doesn't a Luciferian pact seal your fate forever? Are you allowed to reap the rewards and then disclaim the pact? One might "look back in anger" at a deal signed in haste or in a period of personal distress. But there's no going back. Bowie may have miscalculated or realized the price of his bargain too late. Lucifer cannot simply be shed like a stage costume. Let me put it this way: IF Lucifer exists, he should be VERY pissed with Bowie.
There are other prospects:

Bowie has abandoned nothing. The "regular guy" Bowie of the last 20 years is merely a more cunningly conceived image, designed to beguile an even broader audience. So pleased was he with Bowie's early successes, that Lucifer has decided to employ Bowie to resonate across ever larger segments of society. There's no doubt that Bowie's wealth and global renown have, inexplicably, grown over the last couple of decades, despite the atrophying of his creativity. What sustains his popularity?
Bowie has seduced Lucifer. No longer simply a minion of the devil, Bowie's persona has been adopted by Lucifer as his own. He is a permanent preening project, the consummate vehicle, so photogenic, so empty. Bowie is Lucifer. In the ultimate "selling of the world", Bowie/Lucifer are demonstrating most audaciously that the world can be beguiled on image alone. Content and merit be damned. The world is a whore ["The earth is a bitch ... Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use" as Bowie sang in "Oh! You Pretty Things" in 1971; and in "Time" in 1973: "His script is you and me, boy / He flexes like a whore"] which will lift its skirts for nothing at all (The Whore of Babylon). Lucifer would derive great pleasure from seducing millions on pure illusion/falseness and then laughing at them eternally for their stupidity and the ease of their capitulation.
Don't kid yourselves. Bowie, not Al Gore, is the spiritual father of the Internet. The schizophrenic flitting down numerous threads like hallways in an asylum, closets full of Yahoo identities and personæ, tenuous, spurious links from one conceptual framework to another. Bowie's crowning acheivement (or most toxic legacy if you prefer) is the centrality of the gif/jpg image. In a Bowie cosmology, consistency breeds only contempt. No address is comprehensive, nothing is sacred and most can be led anyplace when they have been unmoored from everything/hitched to nothing. If Lucifer exists, he owes Bowie much for working diligently to prepare such a fertile environment. It can only work to Lucifer's advantage. This would be my "Bowie as John the Baptist" theory, i.e. the Great Preparer, preparing for whom, the AntiChrist, Satan himself? Others have worked on this Grand Project in other stations of life and art. Bowie is a very capable lieutenant within this Project."

I mean, I haven't yet heard a more convincing argument for 'Tonight'...

BTW: "Gesamtkunstwerk" means "synthesis of the arts." Oh, don't give me that "I knew that all along" look.

I didn't! That was my 'Wow, you are so knowledgeable' look.

Don't give me that either. I looked it up.

"Mr. Ball"

The mysterious Mr. Ball.

I had no idea that 'The Laughing Gnome' had such hidden depths. Here's me thinking it was a song about meeting a little fella on the street. Instead, it is a debauched fantasy about a life of materialist excess with Mick Jagger after each has signed a Satanic pact. Hooray! I like it a lot more now.

I hope this was a college thesis at Hampshire University because that would make my damn day.