David Robert Jones, known professionally as rock star David Bowie, died Sunday at the age of 69. According to his son, film director Duncan Jones, Bowie died peacefully, surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. There was very little Jewish connected with Bowie most of his life, except for a few lines from the title song of his 1977 album “Station to Station,” that go:
“Tall in this room overlooking the ocean / Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth / There are you, you drive like a demon from station to station.”
The two terms, “Kether” and “Malkhuth” are the highest and lowest in the string of sephirot-emanations of the Divine into the tangible realm, first presented by the Sefer Yetzira, which scholars believe preceded the Lurianic Kabbalah and the Zohar.
Seth Rogovoy, writing in the Forward in 2013, noted that Bowie’s flirtation with Kabbalah was part of a spiritual quest that stretched from Tibetan Buddhism to Christian mysticism, to occult worship and even to a little bit of neo-Nazism, the latter almost costing him his career.
In 1995, Bowie admitted that in 1976 “My overriding interest was in Kabbalah and Crowleyism (the teachings of English occultist Aleister Crowley). That whole dark and rather fearsome never–world of the wrong side of the brain. … And more recently, I’ve been interested in the Gnostics.”
Pop kabbalist Madonna said she was “devastated” by the news of Bowie’s passing, announcing that Bowie had “changed her life.” She tweeted: “Talented. Unique. Genius. Game Changer. The Man who Fell to Earth. Your Spirit Lives on Forever!”
Possibly.