Bowie writes about his experiences with Magic, and tells joking that it actually works 😉

Q: “So were you involved in actual devil worship?”

A: “Not devil worship, no, it was pure straightforward, old-fashioned magic.”

Q: “The Aleister Crowley variety?”

A: “No, I always thought Crowley was a charlatan. But there was a guy called [Arthur] Edward Waite who was terribly important to me at the time. And another called Dion Fortune who wrote a book called ‘Psychic Self-Defense‘. You had to run around the room getting bits of string and old crayons and draw funny things on the wall, and I took it all most seriously, ha ha ha ! I drew gateways into different dimensions, and I’m quite sure that, for myself, I really walked into other worlds. I drew things on walls and just walked through them, and saw what was on the other side!”

-David Bowie, interviewed in NME, 1997