| Much of Boys for Pele stems from Amos's response to what she believes is "one of the greatest lies that has been told, the lie about the sacred bride and the sacred bridegroom." Originally, Jesus was the sacred bridegroom, but the bride--or goddess--and her cults were wiped out by Christianity-- making Mary Magdalen a whore instead of a priestess and taking away the Madonna's sexuality. "There's not a sacred bride in our culture." Amos says her life would have been different, that she would be less oppressed by shame about her passion and sensuality, if she had been raised with the sacred myth intact. "We kind of skulk off into the darkness to fufill these sides of ourselves. We get tied up of defecated on because we've judged our true desires as women so harshly." If the bride had been acknowledged, she argues, "there would have been honor of the feminine. There wouldn't have been patriarchy as we know it of matriarchy. There would have been balance." This idea also applies to rock. "If you look at rock culture, there is very much a desire for the sacred bridegroom to die. The sacred brides don't die much. Janis Joplin is one of the very few." In her song "Muhammed My Friend," Amos honors the bride with the lines, "It's time to tell |
the world/ We both know it was a girl back in Bethlehem." You can just see a torrid Tori-video with a girl in a skimpy red dress stepping off the cross and dancing into the distance. All of this myth-speak isn't an abstraction for our sacred girl. "Even if you don't read history or you aren't interested in anything that happened before the 60's, there are reasons why we think the way we do. There are reasons why people are going crazy right now." Paraphrasing Joseph Campbell, she says: "A culture that doesn't know its mythology is powerless. Some kids show up at my shows crawling out of their bodies. They'd turn their power over to anything; that's cause they don't know the tools to go in." The tools are the myths themselves. Without them, we won't be able to understand who we are. This tapestry will dissolve, the faeries will be silenced, white horses will lose their horns, and the goddes will becone the frightened girl forever. The more you,live inside Tori's tapestry, the more you realize how necessary it is to keep the golden threads of myth intact. |
