Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (10 page)

The piano is the bridge that resolves these elements. Music has an alchemical quality. And there's more than one voice on the piano. You have two hands. One can be playing a celestial melody while the other is doing quite the opposite. The joining of the profane and the sacred, or the passionate and the compassionate, happens right there on the keyboard. It reconciles a bond severed a long time ago. There's so much shame around
passion's innate hunger, which sometimes can be deemed profane, but music can access its reality: that which has been sacred but has been severed.

That is what the sacred prostitutes understood. Termed the Hierodulae, these priestesses of the love goddess—whether you are calling her Inanna or Ashera or whomever—these sacred women knew how to transmute the sexually profane. Do I know how they did this? No. But I was taught that these sacred prostitutes could not have transmuted anything if they had “taken on” or become the sexual projection of the male whose company they were sharing. That would mean that they had gno-sis of how to balance the sacred and the profane. They had an understanding of the sexuality that lives in the unconscious, which if not pruned and nurtured will take over a person's garden and choke all growth. Wasteland. Game over. Next player.

Sometimes, it seems, we're all looking for something outside ourselves because there's been this rejection of a piece of our consciousness. Mistakes can be made when taking on this division. A lot of people will say that they channel the Magdalene, but then they take the sacred into the realm of the profane and leave it there. I was taught that when you're working with archetypes you have to remember that you are connecting with an essence much older than yourself, whose character you must respect. We are not those creatures. We each have a pattern inside. You can see when Aphrodite is working through certain people. It's an aphrodisiac simply when they walk into the room. You smell it in them. And it's not something they learn. This is core, this is within. And you can't dissect it or examine a blood sample. But if you're using this stuff and you don't integrate its lessons and transform yourself the way the original myths described, it can become quite a destructive situation. Passion's hunger can become addictive and abusive. That was something that took me many years to learn.

If you walk down that road, then you must define the role of the sacred prostitute. You're walking into an arena where women do not take on the projected image the men have of them during sex. Whoever the man wants to think this woman is, that is not at all who the sacred prostitute is for one second. They know who they are. And they have integrated this and owned this concept in their bodies, without even a mortgage to pay. They own it. They had to do the work to achieve this ownership.

I know that today there are women who have taken on the title of sacred prostitute and are trying to walk that path. But what we're talking about occurred at a time when these women weren't called prostitutes: they were the Hierodulae, or the Sacred Women. Their role was revered, and they trained their whole lives. They were initiated.

There have been many other performers brought up by very religious parents, and then when they are able to own this essence and put it into their music, the sensual-sexual thing that they were not allowed to acknowledge and partake of in real life actually materializes in the music. If anybody knew you were consciously partaking of this sensual-sexual thing, you'd be ostracized. You would be thought of as sinful. Elvis went through something like this, if you think about it. Trace the roots of American popular culture, and the story is there.

ANN:
The confrontation that changed Amos's life replayed the clash that produced rock and roll in the first place. A tussle with authority was involved, as well as a toss in the imaginary hay.

When I was five—I remember it well—my missionary grandmother, Addie Allen Amos (Grandma Amos again), wrote me a letter that said,

“Until you learn to love Jesus, there will be no Christmas under the tree for you.” She was studying me. She had marked me somehow. I think I'd said that I found Jesus cute. It was completely natural for a young girl to see a picture of a boy even if he was a little older, and think he was cute— to me that was healthy. But she and the Church knocked all the health out of it.

She would have been throwing that stone at the Magdalene, there's no question. And there have been women like this through the centuries. They have been queens, or wives of the vicars, or figures in the Inquisition, or pilgrims. They were the “good” women of the community. As I said before, she was the most revered woman in the community, my grandmother.

The hierarchy of the Church as a whole, and my father, still chose not to see the division between Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary as a paradigm inflicted on Christian women. And my grandmother believed that you could never integrate these two. The Magdalene was the whore, and if there was anything in her granddaughters that smelled of that, we were gone. We were being seduced by the Dark Side. My “extended Christian family” perpetuated this idea of a Satan that can come within and take you over unless you walk their particular Christian path, their way. They let me know that you can literally be possessed. In the spiritual sense, not little men with horns … but I believed their God was the sinister one. Don't worry, I'll get to him in a minute.

ANN:
The piano and her songs carried Tori through childhood and into adolescence. The instrument became her vessel as she entered Peabody Conservatory and began playing in church and other public settings. Yet it also continued to transport her into the dominion of her own fantasies and longings, a place where she had ever more to hide.

I remember being quite young, back in Baltimore, before I was eight, in the bedroom I shared with my sister. She wasn't there. It was afternoon, because the light was coming in, and I had this afghan made of wool. And I remember lying underneath it and squeezing my legs and pretending Jesus was there. I didn't know how you had sex, but I felt this feeling at the base of the spine and inside. In the soft place. I was just squeezing, like you do, and feeling him. And it was Jesus; I was thinking of the picture they had downstairs. That's around the time my grandmother said I needed to learn to love Jesus—I just rolled my eyes at her and said, “Grandma, you have no idea.”

Around that time I started to listen to Led Zeppelin, focusing mostly on Robert Plant. I would listen to the records and kind of study him. I wanted to figure out why so many Christian fathers were intimidated by him. I remember this very well; the powerful men in the Church didn't want Led Zeppelin records in the house. My father would come home from board meetings and say, “This Zeppelin thing is just a thorn in everybody's side.” The girls were moving their hips in a way that was just primal, and it was something that couldn't be controlled or contained— they couldn't stop themselves. See, Robert Plant tapped into something there. The whole band was a part of this, but there was something about Robert that lifted it into a different category. Because he was part of, and continues on some level to be part of, the belief system I was trying to uncover for myself, that marriage of the sacred and the profane.

I was around fifteen when I really learned how badly what I was doing could be perceived in other's eyes. My sister came back from medical school to visit one time, and I tried to get to a place where I could talk about masturbating. And she said to me, “You've got to stop this now. Stop talking
about it, and stop doing it.” This is how we were brought up. My hand was going to fall off, according to her. It's right back to that shame place, because there was no initiation, no rites to aid the passage into sexuality and make it sacred. Anything you did was profane, even if it felt romantic. Everything went into the music then, after that conversation. I didn't stop masturbating, of course, but I knew I wasn't supposed to do it and that I shouldn't talk about it. We go back to hiding it in my sonic paintings.

I've had a laying-on of hands to try to rid evil from me. I was in confirmation class; my father was there. It was an extremely powerful experience. Not intimidating, but almost as if there were salvation there. In confirmation class everybody had to go through a process of kneeling at the altar, and all I remember was, at a certain point they said something to the effect of “Do you have a desire you need to confess?” and I said, “I desire to masturbate.” And the hands went on and they said, “Satan will leave you now.” At that point I realized that it wasn't accepted in my inner Christian circle. And you know what I also realized, though I couldn't act on it right away? I didn't need to stop masturbating; I had to change my inner circle.

Masturbation was so, so, so not publicly talked about when I was a teenager. Now, the Internet has changed things in a good way and a bad way; at least kids can find out about such things, even if they're in Bumfuck. Misinformation and exploitation can be spread, but so can people's experience. There are women talking about masturbation now. The sacred, the profane, the balance. I was never exposed to any of that in a way that said it was okay. It's definitely in the songs and will continue to be in the songs.

When I looked back and realized my first crush had been on Jesus, that alone gave me a clue to the type of relationship I wanted in real life: a relationship in which a woman is treated like an equal partner. A relationship
in which a woman is respected. From the Gospel of Thomas, also known as the Secret Sayings of Jesus (another one of the manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi), I quote from the translation by Dr. Marvin W. Meyer from his book
The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels.
I'll set the scene for you first. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus is answering questions from the disciples and from Mary Magdalene, and the final question is an inquiry about when the Kingdom will come. And “Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Behold, I shall guide her as to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit like you men. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ” Hang on a minute, all you feminists: wait for the translation. In Dr. Meyer's notes he explains, “Here Jesus’ response to Peter, though shocking to modern sensitivities, is intended to be a statement of liberation. The female principle is saved when all that is earthly (that is, allied with an earth Mother) is transformed into what is heavenly (that is, allied with the heavenly Father), thus all people on the earth, whether women or men, require such a transformation.”

That Jesus stood up to Peter and elevated Mary Magdalene to the male disciples’ status made me think,
No wonder Mary dug this guy.
Once, a while ago, I had a kind of waking dream that became a conversation while I was playing the piano. A conversation with Mary Magdalene, who, like a jazz musician, just sat in and started jamming with me. I looked at her with a guilty conscience and said, “You know, Mary Magdalene, I didn't mean to have a crush on your man.” And because I didn't hear a response from her, I kept rambling. “You know, maybe it was more like James Taylor. I mean, in 1971 Jesus and James could kind of pass for brothers, and didn't Jesus have a brother named James?” And all of a sudden I heard this throaty, sexy laugh. And in my day-tripper dream world
Mary Magdalene said to me, “Don't you see, you're looking for a guy that treats women a certain way—a guy who wants a complete partnership with a woman.” And then she was gone.

I started to think about the word
terrorist.
It's a word you hear several times a day now. I started to think about what being a terrorist can mean in different situations. I wanted to explore the realm of personal invasion. Now this would be an invasion by someone you know personally, not a stranger. We all know about strangers being filled with hatred— strangers who lash out against a government or an ideal. As a result, this stranger kills innocent people, tragically, people you may know personally. But when there is an intimacy between two people and one person starts to feel invaded by the other person, that is personalized terrorism. As we all know, the battleground between two lovers, or two friends, or two coworkers can be vicious. Painful. Heartbreaking. And bloody. I started to think about the weapons that might be used in this kind of battle, and as I kept digging for an answer, I stumbled into the Realm of Assonance. I started to think,
Okay, what is the paradox of terrorist?
And Assonance, that beautiful creature, came to my aid and whispered, “Kiss.” And sure enough, we have all felt invaded by a lingering kiss, for good or ill. But I had to find terrorism not just in a relationship of a couple—representing two divided Beings—but within one Being. After all, isn't that the ultimate discovery, the ultimate pain—division within the self, the soul from the body, the mind from the heart, wisdom from consciousness, the addiction from the cure, the two Marys … divided?

The lyrics started to come to me quickly …

The Power of Orange Knickers, under my petty coat. The power of listening to what, you don't want me to know. Can somebody tell me now, who is this terrorist? Those girls that smile kindly, then rip your life to pieces. Can somebody tell me now, am I alone with this—this little pill in my hand and with this secret kiss. Am I alone in this?