Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (11 page)
Read Tori Amos: Piece by Piece Online
Authors: Tori Amos,Ann Powers
I still didn't give up the Church. You have to remember, my father was my manager after I left the conservatory. I was playing in gay bars, but he was steering my career. I'm still going to services every Sunday at age twenty-one. I felt at the time, I think, that I could overcome the
contradictions. I had never believed that degradation was the path of the Magdalene. I didn't care what the interpreters of the Bible said. And the more I researched it, the more I discovered what was right. At the same time, I was looking for what Robert Plant was tapping into. This sensuality without the subservience. But really, in my life, I was still experiencing the division between the sacred and the profane. I was not experiencing the transformation of the profane into the sacred. Not yet.
Finally, a month or so after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to L.A. Partly, I was trying to get away from my father's control. At a certain point, the curfews he was imposing, the protectiveness, it was just overbearing—considering I worked six nights a week, bringing home my own bacon. At the time we were having too many disagreements. Whom he wanted me to date and whom I wanted to date … it was just all falling apart then. And I knew that I had to become a woman.
In L.A., ironically enough, I lived behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin. But I started running around with all sorts of people and getting exposed to all sorts of ways of thinking. This period was a huge turning point for me because I decided what I was going after, even if I didn't know how to go after it yet. I was around other people who'd come from kind of the same place I had, escaping their upbringing, so everybody was always searching. I was exposed to other cultures and began to see how different people worshiped and how different people looked at the joining of two people. Yet I was still having personal relationships in which I had to take on a role. And this lasted for a long time. Until I was broken down enough on such a level that something in me rose up to the powers that be and just said, “No. I don't need you to see me as an honorable woman, or as an object of desire; I don't need to pay respect to your Gods.”
During those years in Hollywood, what worked was the rock chick type or the folk poet. So much of the music business is about men desiring you.
I mean, there weren't a lot of ugly women getting signed. Maybe in some way I decided,
This is what the industry seems to want, and everything that I'm doing isn't working.
When I would turn in the tapes of me at the piano to various producers or A&R men, the responses would be, “This is not happening. Nobody wants this. The piano girl thing is dead.” To you who are reading this right now, that statement, “The piano girl thing is dead,” seems ridiculous in light of what is occurring right now in music. And it was a ridiculous, unfounded assertion. But it was implemented by the Record Company Cheeses, and it did its damage.
It took a while to recover and reintegrate. By the time I finally got to make
Little Earthquakes
, I made a conscious decision not to be objectified here. My material had to be about the content, not the powder-puff compact. They couldn't come between me and my piano. So in a way, no matter what people wrote about how I was onstage at the time, I think I desexualized myself. I was trying to find out who this person was who played the piano. There was a return to the girl I had been at five, who had her own beliefs when she stood up to her grandmother. When she stood up to the patriarchy of the Christian Church. At this time in my life there was a reclaiming of a person. A person whom I had locked out of the proceedings at a certain point.
I wrote a song during the recording of
Little Earthquakes
that never got released, and one of the lines was “Boy masturbating down the hall in the dark”—that's how it starts. I can't remember much more, but I remember the next verse:
I have 50 hearts, they're all in 50 different drawers
When you come calling I always put the purple one on
If I dumped all 50 out on the living room floor
would you say clean up the mess before I get home?
It was just one of those moments of seeing fifty different girls inside myself. There's a girl who goes and does business. There's a girl who attends church. There's a girl who has sex, too. She knows her trade. There were so many girls, I couldn't keep track of the keys to the hotel … And the men I was dating at the time may or may not have seen these divisions. Here I was, declaring myself a steward of the Magdalene, uniting the two Marys, and yet in my life I was the complete opposite. This was the paradox.
CANVAS:
“God”
With
Little Earthquakes
I started to face down the split between the Marys, both personally and in the larger sense. I continued to explore it during the
Under the Pink
phase. I think taking on the role of Ms. God, or God's lover in the song I wrote called “God” (from
Under the Pink)
was a big step for me personally in reuniting the two Marys within my Being. I began to realize that I needed the voices of both Marys to hold an anchor for the Ms. God archetype I was to embody in order to sing this song. I'll ask myself the question that other people have asked me over the years: “Define which God, Tori. Which God is the God in the song ‘God’? Do you mean God, God?” And my answer is “It depends on who you think God, God is.” In
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
, Elaine Pagels makes the “God behind God” concept of certain early Christians quite clear by quoting from different texts found in Nag Hammadi. Referring to the Apocryphon, the Secret Book of John, Pagels writes, “The Secret Book tells a story intended to show that although the creator-god pictured in Genesis is
himself
only an anthropomorphic image of the divine Source that brought forth the universe, many people mistake this deficient
image for God. This story tells how the creator-god himself, being unaware of the ‘blessed one, the Mother-Father, the blessed and compassionate One’ above, boasted that he was the only God (‘I'm a jealous God; there is none other besides me’). Intent on maintaining sole power, he tried to control his human creatures by forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”
Here I need to refer again to Dr. Meyer's
The Secret Teachings of Jesus
from the Gospel, the Secret Book of John. The one we know as Jesus the Savior is teaching his disciple John:
Now Sophia, who is the Wisdom of Afterthought and who represents an eternal realm, conceived of a thought. She had this idea and this invisible Spirit of Knowledge also reflected upon it. She wanted to give birth to a being like herself … rather, something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, for she had produced it without her lover. It did not look like its Mother and had a different shape … she threw it away from her, outside that realm, so that none of the Immortals would see it. For she had produced it ignorantly. She surrounded it with a bright cloud and put a throne in the middle of it except for the Holy Spirit, who is called the Mother of the Living. She named her child Yaldaboath. Yaldaboath is the first Ruler who took great power from his Mother … this gloomy Ruler has three names: the first name is Yaldaboath, the second is Saklas. The third is Samael. He is wicked because of the mindlessness that is within him when he said, “I am God and there is no other God besides me.” The Lord continued speaking to John … “The arrogant one took power from his Mother, he was ignorant, for he thought that no other power existed except for his Mother. He saw the throng of angels he had created and exalted himself over them.”
In
The Gnostic Gospels
, Elaine Pagels writes, “According to the
Hypostasis of the Archons
, discovered at Nag Hammadi, both the mother and her daughter objected when ‘he became arrogant, saying, “It is I who am God, and there is no other apart from me.” … And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are wrong, Samael” (which means “god of the blind”). And he said, “If any other thing exists before me, let it appear to me!” And immediately, Sophia (“Wisdom”) stretched forth her finger, and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region of Chaos…. And he again said to his offspring, “It is I who am the God of All.” And Life, the daughter of Wisdom, cried out; she said to him, “You are wrong Saklas!” ’ ”
So to answer the question, this is the God to whom I refer in the song “God.” I am not referring to Jesus’ Divine Father termed the “holy Parent, the completely perfect Forethought, the image of the Invisible One, that is, the Father of everything, through him everything came into being, the first Humanity,” again from Meyers. In this translation Jesus frequently refers to himself as “the Child of Humanity.”
At that time my life as a woman seemed settled. I was involved with my producing partner, Eric Rosse. We thought we were a lifelong thing. We were looking at buying a house in the Taos area of New Mexico. But the truth is, we were more collaborators than man and wife. We were really dear friends. There was a deep respect and pairing, but I wasn't his girlfriend at heart. I wasn't his squeeze.
After making
Under the Pink
, we were just worn out. We broke up during the tour. The whole crew knew about the breakup and saw other men
sort of coming in and out of my life. There was certainly gossip. Mark, my future husband (who kept his distance), was around; he was the engineer on this tour. He just kept to the sidelines, observing, occasionally bringing me a cup of tea. I had a crush on him from the first day I saw him, but this was months and months before we got together. And I was busy chasing baby demons.
The
Under the Pink
tour was long, and the compartmentalization within me had gotten worse and worse. The fragmentation process had worked perfectly. It can be very functional. I think that's why a lot of women have affairs, why they lead other lives. It all has to come out some way unless you find a way to say,
No, I'm one person, I let my hair down, I have a good time with my friends, I put my hair back up, but either way I'm the same person—I just have different sides.
Shapes with different sides … The hexagon. The honeycomb, a structure of hexagonal cells constructed from beeswax. While writing the songs for
The Beekeeper
, my latest album, I've been walking through many different types of gardens. The songs were trying to show me that they formed a shape and were independent but connected to each other, no different from the structure of hexagonal cells that make up the beehive.
Margaret Starbird, author of
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail
and
The Goddess in the Gospels
, has been inspirational to many daughters of the Christian Church, myself included. She is also “a faithful daughter of the Roman Catholic Church” and years ago set out to prove that the idea of Jesus’ being married to Mary Magdalene was a heresy she had to clarify. This educated Christian woman has shaken one of the pillars of the Christian patriarchy. In her words, “It is my conviction that Christianity and its inception included the celebration of the hieros gamos, the ‘sacred marriage’ of opposites, a
model incarnate in the archetypal Bridegroom and his bride—Jesus Christ and the woman called Magdalene.” In her latest book,
Magdalene's Lost Legacy
, she writes about the symbol of sacred marriage: ?. “Jewish rabbinical tradition teaches that the Ark of the Covenant kept in the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem contained, in addition to the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, a ‘man and a woman locked in intimacy in the form of a hexagram’—the intimate union of the opposites.”
The beehive, formed of hexagons, was foundational for the visual piece of
The Beekeeper.
Once it was clear that we were working within the structure that was made of six sides, I began to subdivide the album into six segments. A large subtext of
The Beekeeper
is the garden, though our version of “the Garden of Original Sin” metamorphoses into “the Garden of Original Sin-suality.” Our garden is made up of “the archetypal symbols for male and female, the V (chalice) and the (blade)” (as mentioned by Starbird in her book,
Magdalene's Lost Legacy).
She goes on to say, “This feminine association of bees was known and honored in ancient times: priestesses of the goddess Artemis were called
melissae
, and Demeter was called ‘the pure Mother Bee.’ In Hebrew the name of Deborah, one of the great Old Testament heroines, means ‘queen bee.’ ”
Our sonic garden for
The Beekeeper is
made up of Desert Garden, Rock Garden, The Orchard, The Greenhouse, Elixirs and Herbs, and Roses and Thorns. This is where the story of original Sin-suality between male and female takes place.
CANVAS:
‘Marys of the Sea”
There is a chorus here, clearly. Funny, but this one was inspired by an old folktale that I was reading the other day, the tale of Mélusine. I'm
just beginning to write the verse lyrics and chorus. The music I've been haunted by while developing the verse for this is a piano riff that I found for less than—oh, I don't know—less than a minute on the tape I was listening to while on the rowing machine. I haven't committed to any final melody to go with this verse. I've got about seventeen that I sing in the shower, and none of them has won “Ms. World” as the melody for “Marys of the Sea” yet. But I'm haunted by this piano riff, knowing that it has to join up seamlessly with the chorus. The verse piano riff is a musical motif that keeps circling itself, conjuring the picture of a ring, an image that happens to work with our story.
While I was researching this I found out that the early Christians were into ring dancing around Jesus’ time, before the Council Creeds of
Nicaea (A.D. 325) and Constantinople (A.D. 381) were imposed on Christianity. This compelled me to dig for information wherever I could. I found a folktale based on the power of the ring myth, which had me chasing the Ring Lord myth (the one on which Tolkien based
The Lord of the Rings).
Historically there is a Ring Lord culture, harkening back to ancient Sumerian and Scythian times. In ancient Sumeria (pronounced Shumeria)
in the Mesopotamian region, the Anunnaki gods and goddesses from approximately 4000 B.C. were implementing the ring as part of the municipal government. I wanted to chase down a historical story that originated with Tiamat, the Dragon Queen, and I found one. The story of Mélusine, whose tale (and eventually
tail)
finds her carrying the three rings, ends up in modern-day France. She is of a tradition that echoes back to the sacred feminine. The story seems to date from A.D. 733, which shows us that the ring dance had been able to sustain itself for thousands of years. It seems to have occurred in ancient Sumeria possibly originating in Scythia, which stretched from the Black Sea region over the Carpathian Mountains, known to us as the Balkans.
Mary Magdalene
The philosophy of the ring culture seemed to spread from Scythia to Mesopotamia to Egypt to Europe to what is now known as Ireland and Great Britain, where the ring represented eternity, wholeness, and unity. Many goddesses have been featured through ancient history with the symbols of the ring and the rule, the rule symbolizing a just universal law and the ring symbolizing sovereignty. Some historians think it is possible that Jesus danced the ring, that he partook in the dance as an ancient sacred ceremony. St. Augustine of Hippo, according to ancient texts, wrote about a ring dance ascribed to Jesus and the apostles. This would mean that the Magdalene probably danced the ring as well and might have brought the rings’ symbolic wisdom to their inner circle herself.
As I'm pulling in different possibilities to try and crack the code of this song, I sketch everything on the canvas. There will be many canvases for “Marys of the Sea”
—Les Saintes Maries de la Mer.
Because the Magdalene went to France in A.D. 44 and died in what is now called Saint Baume in A.D. 63 in Aix-en-Provence, she is remembered as the Mistress of the Waters. I've chosen to incorporate the phrase in French,
because it has existed in this form for hundreds and hundreds of years as the story has been passed down and is with us today.
I'm trying to include different sides to the Magdalene myth in “Marys of the Sea.” Naturally this includes Mary Magdalene as part of the
hieros gamos
, sacred marriage, but also included as a subtext is the sexist attitude toward women held by the disciple Peter and the apostle Paul, fathers to the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. This sexist sentiment was echoed by men hailing from the early orthodox Christian tradition, one of whom was Bishop Irenaeus (who could be a dead ringer for my religious grandmother if you ignore their sex difference). Bishop Irenaeus was not a fan of what we call the Gnostic Gospels, and neither was another religious man called Tertullian. From Elaine Pagels and
The Gnostic Gospels:
“Tertullian directed another attack against ‘that viper’—a woman teacher who led a congregation in North Africa. He himself agreed with what he called the ‘precepts of ecclesiastical discipline concerning women,’ which specified: ‘It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer [the eucharist], nor to claim for herself a share in any
masculine
function—not to mention any priestly office.’ ”
“Marys of the Sea” was also inspired by
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
translated from the Coptic with commentary by Jean-Yves Leloup. This Gospel sheds a lot of light on the inner relationship of the disciples. Peter's envy of Mary Magdalene is obvious when, in this Gospel, Mary is recounting what Jesus (the Teacher) had taught her in private. When she was finished, after Andrew (Peter's brother) expressed that he did not believe the Teacher had spoken these ideas, “… And Peter added: ‘How is it possible that the Teacher talked in this manner, with a woman, about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant? Must we change our customs, and listen to this woman? Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?’ ”
After Jean-Yves Leloup's explanation of this quote, which expanded my perception of this, the Gospel continues, “Then Mary wept, and answered him: ‘My brother Peter, what can you be thinking? Do you believe that this is just my own imagination, that I invented this vision? Or do you believe that I would lie about our Teacher?’ ”
In that moment it becomes crystal clear that this is a woman who just cannot win. She cannot win in history, as she has been relegated to her position as prostitute. She cannot win with her contemporaries, many of whom are disciples, because they are filled with jealousy over her intimacy with Yeshua or Jesus (the Teacher).
I have chosen to highlight Jesus and Mary Magdalene's intimacy in the song “Marys of the Sea.” I was partially inspired to do this by a quote from the Gospel of Philip (59:9), which I quote here from Jean-Yves Leloup's introduction in
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene:
“With regard to the unique and particular nature of his relationship with Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip insists, for example, that Mary is the special companion of Jesus
(koinonos) …
‘The Lord loved Mary more than all the disciples, and often used to kiss her on the mouth. When the others saw how he loved Mary, they said, “Why do you love her more than you love us?” The Savior answered in this way: “How can it be that I do not love you as much as I love her?” ’ ”
Also referenced in this song are the scarlet women, the sacred women—the Hierodulau. The Black Madonna has been attributed to the Magdalene by many. From
Bloodline of the Holy Grail
by Laurence Gardner:
The Black Madonna has her tradition in Queen Isis and her roots in the pre-patriarchal Lilith. She thus represents the strength and equality of womanhood—a proud, forthright and commanding figure, as against the strictly subordinate image of the conventional White Madonna as
seen in Church representations of Jesus’ mother. It was said that both Isis and Lilith knew the secret name of God (a secret held also by Mary Magdalene, “the woman who knew the all”). The Black Madonna is thus also representative of the Magdalene who, according to the Alexandrian doctrine, “transmitted the true secret of Jesus.” In fact, the long-standing Magdalene cult was closely associated with Black Madonna locations. She is black because Wisdom (Sophia) is black, having existed in the darkness of Chaos before the Creation. To the Gnostics of Simon Zelotes, Wisdom was the Holy Spirit—the great and immortal Sophia who brought forth the First Father, Yaldaboath, from the depths.
Hundreds of years after the historical
Les Saintes Maries de la Mer
occurred, apparently because the Magdalene traveled with two other Marys as well, we discover the historical Mélusine who brings her rings to France from the old Pictish lands of Caledonia (in the far north of Britain, which was later incorporated into what we now know as Scotland). In the end, Mélusine will likely end up evolving into an entirely different song and “Marys of the Sea” will remain her own. An amicable split will eventually occur—as cells in the body would do— creating an offshoot of the original bloodline.
