David Bowie, Station to Station (1976)

The title track of the album that introduced the Thin White Duke, built around the line "here are we, one magical movement from Kether to the Schwartze Kristallnacht" — Bowie's own splice of the top and the bottom of the Tree into one lyric, mid-relapse into the worst of his cocaine years.

⭐⭐ NOT FILED UNDER MU-BORROWED, BECAUSE HE SAID SO HIMSELF. Asked about it in 1997, Bowie stated plainly: "All the references within [Station to Station] have to do with the Kabbalah." ⚠ But it is Kabbalah arriving through Aleister Crowley rather than through a rabbi — Doggett's biography lists the song's material as "magic; the arts of legendary musicians...the Kabbalah's account of progress along the Tree of Life from Kether to Malkuth; love and cocaine," and the same period gives the Duke his Thelemic props. This is the Golden Dawn's Kabbalah, not the Zohar's — the same Latin-to-Mathers-to-Crowley chain the wing already traces elsewhere, arriving this time by way of a Berlin hotel room.