Credit: Dangerous Minds / Brian Ward

During the mid-1970s, a time when David Bowie subsisted on a diet of cow’s milk and cocaine, one of his favourite books was Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense, an instruction manual by a major-league Golden Dawn magician for diagnosing and guarding against attacks by other sorcerers.

Marc Spitz’s biography points out how one part of Bowie’s coke-and-milk diet violated a basic tenet of Dion Fortune’s program (“keep away from drugs”), but the magician probably would have nixed the other staple, too.

She didn’t invent soymilk but played an essential role in its history as an advocate and experimenter. During World War I, while working in a laboratory for the Food Production Department of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fortune apparently discovered a means of making soymilk, as well as a method of turning it into soy cheese. In 1925, writing under her birth name, Violet Mary Firth, she published a book on the subject, The Soya Bean: An Appeal to Humanitarians.

While I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet, a volume called History of Soymilk and Other-Non Dairy Milks (1226-2013) reproduces the table of contents and some of the foreword. Part one considers the ethical reasons to avoid animal products (chapter three: “Milk Is Not A Humane Food”), and Part two describes the wondrous properties of the soybean.

Fortune argues that commercial solutions to the problem of animal exploitation are more effective than “individual abstention from flesh-food”.

The foreword begins: “The manufacture of a vegetable milk from the soya bean is a matter in which I was much interested during the war, and I think I may claim to be the first person, in this country at any rate, who succeeded in making a cheese from vegetable casein”.

In Sane Occultism, however, Dion Fortune cautions against making “a religion” out of vegetarianism and says the practice is not for everyone, so maybe she would have just advised Bowie to lay off the yayo and put a few more sandwiches in his diet.

It’s easy to laugh now—Bowie, emaciated and wide-eyed, swigging milk while scanning for psychic assassins—but in the cracked-mirror funhouse of mid-70s Hollywood, this was just another Tuesday. Dion Fortune’s soy-fueled humanitarianism might have seemed worlds away from the carpeted paranoia of Bowie’s Los Angeles exile, but both were chasing the same thing: control over invisible forces. One tried to purify the body and spirit through legumes and mysticism; the other through bleach, blow, and endless repetitions of Station to Station.

And yet, somehow, it makes a weird kind of sense. A milk-swigging wizard-prince channelling Kabbalah and chaos magick, clutching Psychic Self-Defense like it was a holy relic, while subsisting on the very thing its author might’ve once curdled into soy cheese. Bowie didn’t just blur the lines between pop star and occultist—he stomped on them in platform boots, powdered to the gills, and hungry for transcendence in any form it came.

Below, the Thin White Duke guzzles low-fat milk from the carton in a scene from Cracked Actor. (Maybe someday John Oswald will get around to making a Plunderphonics version called Lactose Cracker.)