"Questioning spiritual life [was always ... germane" to Bowie's songwriting. The song "Station to Station" is "very much concerned with the Stations of the Cross"; the song also specifically references Kabbalah. Bowie called the album "extremely dark... the nearest album to a magick treatise that I've written". "Earthling" showed "the abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism or a kind of gnosticism... What I need is to find a balance, spiritually, with the way I live and my demise." Released shortly before his death, "Lazarus"—from his final album, "Blackstar"—began with the words, "Look up here, I'm in Heaven" while the rest of the album deals with other matters of mysticism and mortality.