The Time David Bowie Got Exorcised By A White Witch

David Bowie has been one of the most talented and controversial artists of all time thanks to his remarkable songs, interesting personas, and his life filled with rock and roll, drugs, and sex. At the very beginning of his professional music career, Bowie drew great attention with his flamboyant, androgynous style and experimental projects.

As a part of his extraordinary style, Bowie created a stage persona/alter ego named Ziggy Stardust. With this persona, Bowie gained worldwide fame, and Bowie’s ‘Starman’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ were listened to all around the world. Then, he created another character for his next album project.

David Bowie’s Thin White Duke Phase

David Bowie embraced The Thin White Duke persona between 1975 and 1976, and it was more controversial than Ziggy Stardust. He had pro-fascist statements, which he stressed weren’t his honest thoughts. His character was described as ‘a mad aristocrat,’ ‘an amoral zombie,’ and ‘an emotionless Aryan superman.’

In addition, during that phase, David Bowie consumed a lot of cocaine and became more and more paranoid about the dark and demonic forces that he claimed were trying to enslave him. Therefore, he took some precautions against them, such as carrying Dion Fortune’s book ‘Psychic Self-Defense’ and drawing pentagrams on surfaces.

David Bowie Needed An Exorcism To Get Rid Of Demons

However, these precautions weren’t enough for David Bowie, and he needed an actual witch to protect himself from dark forces. Therefore he asked Cherry Vanilla to find him a white witch to exorcise his pool. That White Witch was Walli Elmlark, who taught magic at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences.

Here’s what Cherry Vanilla said about him:

He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him. He was serious, you know. And I actually knew somebody in New York who claimed she was a white witch. She was the only white witch I ever met. So I put him in touch with her. I don’t know whatever happened to her. And I don’t know if she removed the curse. I guess she did.”

Bowie’s wife recalled these times saying:

“At a certain point in the ritual, the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously—perhaps ‘thrashed’ is a better term—in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving filters and the like.”

Elmlark also wrote in gossip columns in a rock magazine and befriended many musicians such as Jimi Hendrix.  After she heard what Bowie asked her to do, she went to his house and exorcised the demons in his pool, along with writing a couple of protection spells against them. This story was revealed by David Bowie’s wife Angie in her autobiography ‘Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie.’