Bowie and Kabbalah with Jay Michaelson Preview
What is it that Bowie is drawing on the back of Station to Station? Why, it’s the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, of course! And if you don’t know what that means, or what “one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” means, you’ll find out in my interview tomorrow with Jay Michaelson.
Jay is a writer, journalist, academic, and rabbi whose work spans Jewish mysticism, law, and spirituality, including his award-winning book The Heresy of Jacob Frank, which traces the evolution of Kabbalistic and messianic thought into esoteric myth. His scholarship and teaching frequently engage with Kabbalah and related mystical traditions, situating them within broader conversations about religion, politics, and contemporary spiritual practice. He’s also a Bowie fan. I’ve wanted to do a Kabbalah episode for a while, and Jay was the perfect guest to feature.
I didn’t set out to do a series of interviews on Bowie and spirituality, but it’s been working out that way. Bowie was always a spiritual seeker, and his songs address spiritual themes far more frequently than, say, space. It seems to me that from the late 60s through the mid-70s, Bowie’s spiritual quest took him to some diverse places including, as is relevant to tomorrow’s episode, Kabbalah, but also Buddhism, occultism, and Christianity. Part of his frustrating interest in Nazism was at least partially related to his larger interest in what can be called Western esotericism (but that’s a different episode).
Jay has a relatively high public profile and speaks on an array of topics, including politics. I advertise my shows using a service that doesn’t like politics. But part of our discussion crossed over into that territory, and I’m going to post that as bonus content, probably on Wednesday or Thursday of next week. What we were talking about that strayed into areas that the algorithms will not be happy with is millennialism and the related concept of accelerationism. Millennialism is an old idea related to the end of the world. Accelerationism is a newer idea, or at least a newer term for the idea that, in order for the world to get to a better place, it needs to end first. And since that’s (supposedly) a good thing, we might as well hasten things along.
Bowie occasionally dropped hints that he was an accelerationist well before the term was coined. “The Earth is a bitch, we’ve finished our news; Homo Sapiens have outgrown their use… Gotta make way for the homo superior,” so goes “Oh! You Pretty Things” (1971). A few years later, and more infamously, Bowie said, “I believe very strongly in fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is to speed up the progress of a right-wing, totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over as fast as possible.” That about sums up accelerationism right there.
Bowie never quite dropped the idea that the world was collapsing, but he might have abandoned the idea that the fall would precipitate a rise. By the time he got to “Sunday” (2002), he opens with the observation, “Nothing remains.”
The good news, according to Jay, is that for most of history, it has always been five minutes to midnight. All manner of belief systems, including versions of messianism (including Christianity), involve prophecies of the end of the world as we know it, only to be followed by a better world that emerges from the wreckage.
The bad news is that too many people in power hold a version of this type of belief now. Jay first encountered accelerationism on the left, from those who expressed a sentiment similar to Bowie’s: that it would be better for society to collapse under someone like Donald Trump than amble along under someone like Hillary Clinton. Surely, after we hit rock bottom under Trump, a socialist paradise will rise like a phoenix.
Among the many problems with this view is that there are different types of accelerationists surrounding Trump, and unlike their left-wing opposite numbers, the right-wingers are in charge. Jay largely discusses religious accelerationists and their motives pertaining to the Iranian war. I mentioned that, to my knowledge, the term was coined or at least popularized by Dark Enlightenment adherent Nick Land, whose promised land is less godly and more techy—the version of Homo Superior envisioned by Land, and fellow travelers like Peter Thiel (benefactor to Vice President Vance) and Elon Musk, are essentially rich cyborgs who rule over a world of city-states that have cast aside democracy (I’m not making this up). And we shouldn’t forget the race warriors, who hope for a race war from which America will be made white again.
Anyway, that is largely not in the part of the interview that posts tomorrow. But what posts tomorrow is plenty fascinating in itself. And then later in the week, look out for the bonus content, because I’m not even going to try to advertise that. So stay tuned!