David Bowie Used Witchcraft To Get Over Coke Paranoia

A new book about David Bowie claims the rocker used a New York-based white witch named Walli Elmlark to help him get over cocaine paranoia.

Bowie, according to Spin magazine writer Marc Spitz's (How Soon Is Never) Bowie: A Biography, used to stay up for hours with a "pile" of cocaine on top of his coffee table and a sketchpad and books handy while he was writing 1976's Station To Station.

"Psychic Self Defense was his favourite," Spitz writes, according to a Contact Music article. "Its author describes the book as a 'safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.

"Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface."

Due to his cocaine use, Bowie lost hours and hours of sleep and became "convinced there were witches after his semen," Spitz writes. These witches were apparently determined to use it to make a baby they could sacrifice to the devil. Basically, Spitz writes that Bowie was hallucinating the plot to Rosemary's Baby. That, or he predicted the groupies of the Metal Sludge gossip boards 30 years before they came to prominence.

"I'd stay up for weeks," Bowie told Spitz. "Even people like Keith Richards were floored by it. And there were pieces of me all over the floor. I paid with the worst manic depression of my life. My psyche went through the roof, it just fractured into pieces. I was hallucinating 24 hours a day."

To get over his sleep deprivation and beat the evil spirits, Bowie met with and consulted Elmlark, who exorcised the rocker.

"Angie [Bowie, the rocker's ex-wife], who was living there at the time, noted that it started to bubble and smoke, and that it only rained outside David's window while the rest of the L.A. sky was clear. Elmlark wrote a series of spells and incantations out for Bowie as he continued to wrestle with the forces of darkness."

Bowie: A Biography is out Tuesday (Oct. 27) through Crown Publishing.