Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  ANN: Rock and roll is an erotic art. That's a central truth perennially revealed, riding into the public consciousness on Elvis Presley's hips, Robert Plant's androgyne scream, even, though slightly degraded, Britney's stripper sneer. No one accepts, celebrates, and explores this given more keenly than Tori Amos, veteran traveler in the delicate areas where imagination meets the flesh From her first days as a singer-songwriter, she has stood, eyes and voice open, before subjects around which other stars pole-dance. Speaking honestly of rape in “Me and a Gun,” sexual dissatisfaction in “Leather,” or masturbation in “Icicle,” Amos undertook the feminist task of speaking women's truth to patriarchal power. Later, her investigations became both more personal and more enigmatic. Blunt lines edging toward obscenity shoot through songs like “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” and “She's Your Cocaine;” more mature statements like “Lust” and “Crazy” gain both tenderness and richness from an underlying heat. Like desire itself, deeply and often bafflingly individual, Amos's songs communicate a palpable rush through unexpected words and music.

  The voluptuous lexicon revealed in Amos's songs finds a counterpart in a performance style based in bodily yearning and release. The joy of sex moves through Amos when she sits and moves at her Bösendorfer, as does its agony. Yet too many observers have reduced her onstage behavior to an undignified phrase, “humping the piano,” just as too many have read her lyrics as just a lover's diary. The truth is deeper. Amos is indeed playing a game with Eros when she gyrates aboard her instrument, but to comprehend it one must go beyond biography and the pleasures of the moment to grasp a very old story.

  She states it outright: “I serve the Magdalene.” Now that Jesus’ mythical (and likely historical) consort is the stuff of a best-selling thriller, it may seem as if Amos is simply seeking the hottest spiritual avatar when she declares this loyalty. In fact, her life's work is grounded in the pursuit of reconciliation between this maligned priestess of sexual healing and her virtuous counterpart, the mother Mary, otherwise known to Amos as culture and Earth itself.

  As with so much that informs her art, Amos first heard the Magdalene legend in church. But she's followed it much further, to the very base of her artistic self—the musician as a channel for a spirit as impious as it is blessed.

  TORI:

  “For good or ill,” my father would sermonize to me, “you are a daughter of the Christian Church.” And you know what? That's probably the most accurate statement my father has made in respect to who I am as his daughter and my relationship with the Christian Church. I'm remembering the different bishops of the Methodist church, sitting around my mom's Sunday dinner and expounding on Jesus. Similar to Paul, known as St. Paul, these bishops were preaching their own theology, in Jesus’ name. They, with their theological degrees, there with my father—who subsequently was to receive his doctorate from Boston University. Yes, we had quite a group discussing the Gospels around the dinner table. Were they preaching Jesus’ message of gender equality? No. But probably the most glaring omission, to me, was when they would refer to Jesus as the Bridegroom.

  So, stay with me here a second. Be with me at that Sunday dinner way back when, and hear the reasonings I was given. “We think of Jesus as the Shepherd, and we are the sheep.” “We think of Jesus as the Vine, and we are the branches.” And everybody—drumroll, please. Now, I was about eight in 1970, as this last statement was said by a bishop—not a bad guy mind you: a very, very kind man. But being kind doesn't mean that you have any idea what you're spewing. So then he announced the final “truth” in his trilogy: “And last, we think of Jesus as the Bridegroom and the Christian Church as his Bride.” Choke, cough, cough, choke. There went my candied sweet potatoes, regurgitated with the sour.

  “Excuse me, sir.” Through sips of water and a driving force within, I found my voice and looked at this very religious man and said, “Excuse me, but who did you say Jesus married?” And the bishop looked somewhat bewilderedly at my father, and my father jumped into the conversation and answered … I must say not so much as patronizingly, but with that glazed “I know my Jesus personally” kind of look. He answered, “We see Jesus as the Bridegroom married to the Church,” both he and the bishop shaking their heads together in reverence. Oh, jeez. I said, “But who was Jesus’ Bride?” And my father answered, “We believe the Christian Church is his Bride.” “Well, what about Mary Magdalene?” The church leader looked a little uncomfortable, and I knew I was pushing it—but I couldn't stop. He and my father went into some speech about Mary Magdalene being a sinful woman, a woman of ill repute that got saved and blessed by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Then she faded into the background as if she were just one of Jesus’ many followers.

  What they were saying kind of reminded me of a picture I had seen of young women fainting over male rock stars. And, freeze frame. Take that picture. In that moment, I realized that my Mary had been minimalized by The Patriarchy. I realized that I knew that she truly was the Lost Bride. They were working just way too hard to convince me otherwise. This is before Margaret Starbird's book on the lost legacy of Mary Magdalene and before she published The Goddess in the Gospels. This is before Elaine Pagels's revelatory translation of biblical texts, texts that were discovered in the twentieth century and unveil much about the Magdalene. This is before Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians. This is before Laurence Gardner's involved research exposing the suppression of ancient concepts in books such as Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus. And the list goes on.

  Whatever I realized on that brutal Sunday back in 1970, I also realized that I was in a small minority that believed that the Magdalene was a sacred and important piece to the emancipation of Christian women. I had been born a feminist, but that day I knew I had to take the next leap. I know now that my avatar all along has been closer to Lisa Simpson than anyone else. Once I understood that, I had to make a huge leap as I had the taste in my mouth of regurgitated, soured candied sweet potatoes. I understood that the Magdalene was very much still in exile—even as women were burning their bras from coast to coast, I burned an idea into my head …

  What is the sacred prostitute? What is the sensual spirit? The women's mysteries are ancient and precede the Magdalene by many years. She was someone who walked the walk and integrated her teachings into her Being. Once there were schools for these teachings at which young girls would become apprentices, then initiates, and train, eventually becoming what we would call today medicine women. The information they were gathering was suppressed to the point at which the teachings had almost to be passed down encoded, or those women would be tortured and murdered in many circles. Even during the time of the Magdalene there were disciples who appeared to be against her, the Feminine, and her beliefs. I don't only serve the Magdalene. I serve an idea. The idea of the resurrected Feminine. In different cultures it will carry with it different names. The Secret Book of John, which was also discovered in Nag Hammadi, discusses hidden mysteries in the Christian myth. In the Christian myth the resurrected Feminine is called Sophia for Wisdom, and the Feminine counterpart to Sophia is called Achamoth for Consciousness. The way I understand it, many of Jesus’ core teachings, which were uncovered in many of the scriptures found at Nag Hammadi, are really about reuniting the aspects of the Feminine—Wisdom and Consciousness, Sophia and Achamoth—together at the “Cross of Light.”

  In traditional Christianity the false split gave us two characters: the Virgin Mary and the Magdalene. Of course, within the psyche they must be joined, not polarized for a Christian woman to feel whole. The Virgin Mary has been stripped of her sexuality but has retained her spirituality; the Magdalene has been stripped of her spirituality but has retained her sexuality. Each must have her wholeness. I call this “marrying the two Marys.”

  There are so many people who come to my shows with this division in them. It seems that you can't be thought of as a Divine Mother typ
e and have the respect of those around you if you're also the sacred prostitute. We divide and conquer on the deepest of levels, by cutting off our own spiritual Being from our own physical Being. Talk about painful. I lived it myself at one point. To have sex, I had to take on a character, because I couldn't be the me that I know and look at in the mirror and express all the different things I wanted to. Basically I didn't know how to “do what I just did under the covers” and then turn around and pick up my glasses and books and go to the library as the same person. I am both of those creatures; they are one person; but it was proving difficult to gather all those pieces and have them live together as one integrated Being. And, of course, I see it in the world all the time—the men go to the mistress and then to the wife. And the wife gets resentful because she is not allowed to experience or express that overtly sexual side of herself, and then the mistress gets vindictive because she doesn't get Christmas or Easter.

  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.

  TORI:

  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.

  TORI:

  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 badl
y 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.