Drug Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie

Abstract

“Drug Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie” examines Bowie’s drug use in the early 1970s, surveying drug literature from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey to David Bowie passing through Baudelaire, Victorian pre-Raphaelites, and Aleister Crowley on the way. The chapter focuses on Bowie’s drug references from The Man Who Sold the World (1970) to Station to Station (1976), discussing Crowley and the Pre-Raphaelites in relationship to this period of Bowie’s output with a special focus on the links between drug use and occult mysticism. Bowie’s attraction to drugs followed a Romantic impulse to reenchant the world in the face of encroaching modernity and a desire to enhance creativity and achieve transcendence in a way consistent with his occult readings during this period. Bowie finally gave up in the face of diminishing returns and danger to his own life.