Bowie’s hazy personal cosmology found its fullest expression on the album Station to Station (see p. 88), which is packed with references to obscure occult works. Another figure in the deep-pile carpet of his cocaine psychosis was gnosticism, root of many of the esoteric religions Bowie dabbled with in his quest for secret knowledge that explained the way the world worked.
Gnosticism is a catchall term for the alternative versions of Christianity that existed in the first few hundred years after Jesus’s death—the ones that didn’t find their way into the official “canonical” version because the church’s founding fathers considered them heretical. For example, gnostics considered God to be a mother as well as a father, and Jesus’s resurrection to be a myth, not a real-life event. They also believed that it wasn’t humans who brought about the “fall” into sin but the earth’s creator, who for gnostics is not God but a character called the Demiurge. With the help of his aides the Archons, the Demiurge keeps humans imprisoned on the material plane, unable to glimpse the truth of their predicament. A select few, however, achieve gnosis—a higher level of illumination, the direct intuition of spiritual truth. We can guess that Bowie, manically conceited thanks to all the drugs he was taking, considered himself to be one of them.
A trove of gnostic manuscripts was found in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, and Elaine Pagels’s bestselling study of them was published in 1979. Bowie had moved on to saner pastures by then, but he would still have been excited by it. With elegant precision, Pagels showed that early Christianity was far more diverse, eccentric, and complicated than people realized. The alternative Gospel of Thomas, for example, could have been written earlier than the “official” Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It gives Jesus a whole new set of maxims, such as: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Bowie seems to have viewed gnosticism as an active religion, not a dusty museum artifact. In a 1997 interview with Q he mentioned an “abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of Gnosticism.… What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise.” More than any other book on the list, The Gnostic Gospels would have helped him to achieve that goal.