"I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth." Fears that witches under the spell of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page had targeted him to help birth the Antichrist led a paranoid David Bowie to store his bodily fluids in the fridge

In the 1970s, two of England's most high profile rock stars David Bowie and Jimmy Page bonded over a shared interest in the occult and esoteric beliefs, specifically the teachings of the self-styled prophet and 'Wickedest Man In The World' Aleister Crowley, the philosopher, ceremonial magician, poet and artist.

But a relationship which began in 1965, when Bowie's band, The Manish Boys, hired session wizard Page to play on their cover of Bobby Bland's I Pity the Fool, soured to the point where Bowie imagined that a satanic coven of witches under the command of Led Zeppelin's guitarist were scheming to steal his bodily fluids to help birth the Antichrist.

This delusion dated back to a fateful night in February 1975 when Page was invited for drinks to the Manhattan townhouse Bowie shared with his then-girlfriend, American singer Ava Cherry. As recounted in Paul Trynka's David Bowie biography Starman, the atmosphere between the two men was "strained" on the evening, not helped by copious cocaine use on both sides, and the tension intensified when Page accidentally spilled red wine on some expensive silk cushions and sought to deflect the blame onto the innocent Cherry. At this point, Bowie apparently decided to revoke Page's guest status, and asked him to leave, coldly suggesting "Why don't you take the window."

'The two glared at each other', Trynka wrote. 'Page seemed to be invoking dark forces against David, who in turn, says Ava Cherry, "wanted to show Jimmy that his will was stronger."

Bowie, at the time, was not in a good place mentally. He was subsisting on a diet of milk, red peppers and cocaine, had lost a huge amount of weight, and was "hallucinating twenty-four hours a day" by his own admission. The singer was already aware of the dark lure around Aleister Crowley - namechecking him in the song Quicksand on his 1971 album Hunky Dory - but his fears that Page's superior knowledge of a man that his own mother labelled 'The Beast' would give him a more powerful command of the dark arts led Bowie to develop an obsession with Crowley, and a mounting paranoia that ominous forces were about to derail his life, which he was already doing quite nicely.

On one occasion, believing that he had witnessed the devil doing breast-strokes in his swimming pool, Bowie had his home exorcised and began drawing protective pentagrams throughout his home. But this psychic defence strategy was not enough to put his mind at ease.

"He had this whole thing about these black girls who were trying to get him to impregnate them to make a devil baby," recalled his friend Cherry Vanilla, who worked at his management company MainMan, as quoted by Dangerous Minds. "He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him. He was serious, you know. And I actually knew somebody in New York who claimed she was a white witch. She was the only white witch I ever met. So I put him in touch with her. I don’t know what ever happened to her. And I don’t know if she removed the curse."

Bowie's paranoia didn't end there.

"My other fascination was with the Nazis and their search for the Holy Grail," he once admitted. "I paid with the worst manic depression of my life... I felt like I’d fallen into the bowels of the earth."

At the peak of this madness, as revealed by Casey Rae in his book William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ’n’ Roll, Bowie began storing his own urine in a fridge in order to ward off potential attempts by Page-affiliated witches to conceive the AntiChrist in a sex magick ritual.

For the record, there is no proof of any witches ever attempting such sorcery. And Jimmy Page has never mentioned such a plot.

But this article contains 666 words, so it's best we don't get involved.