It is not uncommon for the dying to be spiritual, tying themselves as it were to the mast, of a sinking ship.

We look at David Bowie’s last video, “Blackstar“, it points towards an Aztec interpretation of the song’s meaning:

Black Sun (mythology), Mesoamerican mythology
The Black Sun in Mesoamerican mythology has many mystical meanings, among them it is connected to the god Quetzalcoatl and his penetration in the Underworld through the west door after his diurnal passage on the sky. For the Mexicans there were two suns, the young Day sun and the ancient sun, the Dark sun. Some scholars regard the mythological Black sun as the ancient female origin of all, it is both tomb and womb. This way, it is the oneness that uniformly integrates unawareness, death, and yet an expectation of fecundity. The Aztecs associated the passage of the Black Sun, on its nightly journey through the underworld with the image of a butterfly. The butterfly, in turn, is an archetypical symbol of the transcendent soul, transformation and mystical rebirth, whereas also seen in the figure of the frightening earth goddess Itzpapalotl, the “Obsidian Butterfly”, that devoured people during the solar eclipses, while the Aztec underworld was the eternal dwelling place of the souls.

The video shows a woman finding the bejeweled skull of dead astronaut (?Major Tom) during a solar eclipse. She brings the skull back as a relic to be worshiped by a circle of women in a pagan ritual.  The song references a Village in Norway called Ormen (which is the dragon) and the symbol of the serpent is one associated with primordial earth mother/virgin/whore goddesses.  There is also a reference to a ship captured by Olaf called the Ormen Lange, when he refused to convert to Christianity.

Bowie’s disdain for a certain brand of Christianity is evident in his penultimate album and the title song video “The Next Day”  (1/8/2013)  when he viciously satirizes Catholic clergy abusing the poor, selling suffering porn, and cavorting with loose women turned martyrs.  He even breaks the ‘fourth wall’ and foreshadows his death with his sudden vanishing after he thanks actors Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard (and everybody -meaning us).

We will cover Bowie’s so-called sexual preferences in another posting but as for the big question of God, he was quoted:

All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God–so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true…Hell Don’t pose me that one.

-David Bowie

It would appear that Bowie’s brand of spiritualism was an older, pre-Christian pagan one because the pentagram is a sacred symbol not of witchcraft but of sacred geometry that neoplatonists recognized as containing the hidden dodecahedron, a platonic solid representing higher dimensional reality.  In my screenplay about Hypatia, who was the last prominent neoplatonic philosopher,  I interpreted the now historically-redacted symbol famously painted on her chariot as the pentagram- which was later adopted by witches and vilified by Christian orthodoxy although it had no relation to devil worship at all.