Ziggy Stardust: Tantric Master in Platform Boots?

When I first watched the footage of David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon, I suddenly felt validated and enriched in a way I had never experienced before. For a while, the mysterious sense of love emanating from that stage was a mystery to me. Eventually, I managed to put my finger on it. It wasn't the sentimental love of a star for his fans. It was something more radical: Bowie loved his audience by refusing to exclude them from his own being! He was up there representing each and every one of us. He wasn't just David Bowie performing for a crowd, he was drawing thousands of individuals into himself and uniting them in a single, radiant pulse. Philip Glass sums it up perfectly: ‘He was like a mirror that reflected the listener back to themselves, but in a more heightened, heroic form. He functioned on a transpersonal level.’¹

Bowie was incredibly loving in a ‘Self-ish’ way. He once remarked that he 'collects personalities'.² He must have understood that there is only one true Self and that 'collecting' another's personality is simply reclaiming a lost frequency of one's own light.

In a 1973 interview, Bowie described the thrill of performing as follows: ‘It's the biggest kick I know. I know there's drugs and you get a different kind of buzz off those, but stages, there's something else, it's partaking of people.’³ Could he have been describing a ritualistic act of consumption? He wasn't taking from us, he was merging with us. He stood at the universal inside, the pre-manifestational Source where the distinction between 'I' and 'you' has not yet been made by the individual mind. It was as if he was saying, ‘I don't relate to you because I am you. I have already traversed the distance you think exists between us’.

In my opinion, his androgyny was integral to this radical Self-love. It wasn't just a fashion statement, it was a metaphysical necessity. By presenting himself as both man and woman - or, more accurately, as a man within a woman - he was signalling wholeness and sameness on a profound level. He demonstrated that the ultimate form of love is recognising that there is only one Self to love. I agree with the cultural critic and author Camille Paglia, who referred to him as 'the high priest of the ritualised self', synthesising the masculine and the feminine.⁴ His androgyny was a vector for Oneness, rather than mere gender bending!

Nondual Shaiva Tantra, a branch of Hinduism that I am very fond of, teaches us that divine androgyny is something that we are all moving towards as we approach the ultimate reality of Paramashiva or Shivashakti: the union of the male and female principles, and of all polar opposites. I learnt a great deal about divine androgyny from Ziggy. His persona anticipated this ultimate reality brilliantly, and even now, a decade after Bowie stepped off the physical stage, he is still beckoning us to stop abandoning each other in duality. He is inviting us to join him in the one true Self.

Was Bowie familiar with the teachings of Nondual Shaiva Tantra? I don’t know. However, although he probably wasn't sitting in Haddon Hall reading Abhinavagupta's Tantrāloka, he was deeply conscious of the mechanics of the Self. Before Ziggy, in the late 1960s, Bowie was a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism. He studied under Chime Rinpoche and nearly became a monk. Both Tibetan Vajrayana and Nondual Shaiva Tantra share the same 'ancestor': the Mahasiddha traditions.

Bowie learned early on that the ‘I’ is a construct. This must have given him the spiritual permission to treat his own and others' personalities as raw material. So when he said he 'collects personalities', he was just using a layman's term for the Buddhist/Tantric realisation that pure consciousness has no fixed form. In several interviews, particularly during the 1970s, Bowie described himself as a 'photostat machine' and an 'art form of indifference, with no permanent philosophy behind it whatsoever'.⁵ This in itself may have been his philosophy, and it wasn't entirely uninformed by Eastern mysticism.

By the time Ziggy emerged, Bowie had moved on to Western esotericism, studying the works of Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn and Gnosticism. He was well aware of the alchemical concept of the Rebis, the divine hermaphrodite representing the union of opposites, which is essentially the same concept of singularity found in the Paramashiva doctrine of Nondual Shaiva Tantra. And he certainly had aspirations to embody this eternal, transcendent figure. In The Complete David Bowie, Nicholas Pegg states:

‘Throughout his career, Bowie was a man haunted by a search for the absolute. Whether through Tibetan Buddhism or the Kabbalah, he was looking for a way to transcend the individual “I”. Ziggy Stardust was his first great success in creating a vessel that could hold the collective consciousness of a generation.'⁶

While Bowie may not have used the Sanskrit of the Tantras, he mastered their mechanics. By employing the language of 1970s pop culture, he was able to perform a spiritual transmission without the need for formal meditation or study. He enabled people to immediately experience the one Self, without imposing fixed religious labels that the mind might have used to create separation.

I would boldly argue that any glorification and idolisation of David Bowie and particularly his Ziggy Stardust persona is entirely justified. What we saw in him and continue to see is exactly as universal and eternal as it appears to be. And I'm sure the Starman isn't resting in peace; he's radiating peace somewhere new in a different form, ready to bless our hearts once again. Happy deathday, Bowie!

¹ Glass, P., in the preface to The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg (Titan Books, 2016).

² Harty, R., Russell Harty Plus, London Weekend Television (LWT), broadcast 17 January 1973.

³ Murray, C. S., 'David Bowie: The New Order', New Musical Express, 14 April 1973.

⁴ Paglia, C., 'The Magic of David Bowie', The Victoria and Albert Museum: David Bowie Is (Exhibition Catalogue), V&A Publishing, 2013.

⁵ Crowe, C., 'David Bowie: The Playboy Interview', Playboy Magazine, September 1976.

⁶ Pegg, N., The Complete David Bowie, 7th edition (London: Titan Books, 2016), p. 14 (Introduction).