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Bowie imagines himself being initiated into a forbidden sect offered salvation by way of musical Gnosticism: To know yourself you must cast aside the illusion of convention, freely eat what the serpent offers, but never be ashamed of the knowledge you find. Themes of superhuman masters haunt the entire album, but it's unclear if Bowie imagines himself their equal or their pawn.
Image: A detail of the cover of Peter Bebergal's book, Season of the Witch. (Supplied)
It's on his 1971 album, Hunky Dory, Bowie's fascination with magic becomes less opaque as he makes reference to things fairly well known by other seekers in the early seventies. Occultist Aleister Crowley gets his necessary nod on 'Quicksand '— a downbeat song about a spiritual crisis.
Bowie's biographer Nicholas Pegg makes particular note of the song 'Oh! You Pretty Things', with its warning that 'Homo sapiens have outgrown their use.' Pegg believes this is a nod to the writing of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, a man finds an entrance to the hollow earth where he discovers ancient superpeople described as a 'race akin to man's, but infinitely stronger of form and grandeur of aspect' who use an energy called 'vril' to perform wondrous feats such as controlling everything from the weather to emotions.
Did you know Rhythm Divine is also a podcast? Subscribe on iTunes, the ABC Radio app or your favourite podcasting app and listen later.
This delightfully strange story might have gone the way of other quaint nineteenth-century fantasies, but for Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, first published in France in 1960 and translated into English in 1963, which created a wave of esoteric speculation and occult conspiracy theories still being felt today. The authors were inspired by the writer Charles Hoy Fort, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, used an inheritance to spend his time in the New York Public Library collecting stories and data from a wide range of sources, all of which suggests an underlying and connected web of paranormal and supernatural phenomena.
More in next post
Image: A detail of the cover of Peter Bebergal's book, Season of the Witch. (Supplied) It's on his 1971 album, Hunky Dory, Bowie's fascination with magic becomes less opaque as he makes reference to things fairly well known by other seekers in the early seventies. Occultist Aleister Crowley gets his necessary nod on 'Quicksand '— a downbeat song about a spiritual crisis.
Bowie's biographer Nicholas Pegg makes particular note of the song 'Oh! You Pretty Things', with its warning that 'Homo sapiens have outgrown their use.' Pegg believes this is a nod to the writing of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, a man finds an entrance to the hollow earth where he discovers ancient superpeople described as a 'race akin to man's, but infinitely stronger of form and grandeur of aspect' who use an energy called 'vril' to perform wondrous feats such as controlling everything from the weather to emotions.
Did you know Rhythm Divine is also a podcast? Subscribe on iTunes, the ABC Radio app or your favourite podcasting app and listen later.
This delightfully strange story might have gone the way of other quaint nineteenth-century fantasies, but for Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, first published in France in 1960 and translated into English in 1963, which created a wave of esoteric speculation and occult conspiracy theories still being felt today. The authors were inspired by the writer Charles Hoy Fort, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, used an inheritance to spend his time in the New York Public Library collecting stories and data from a wide range of sources, all of which suggests an underlying and connected web of paranormal and supernatural phenomena.
More in next post
Image: David Bowie poses with Twiggy in Paris for the cover of his 'Pin Ups' album. (Getty/Justin de Villeneuve) 
Image: Ziggy Stardust era Bowie in LA, 1973. (Getty/ Michael Ochs Archives) 
