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.
SONG 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 deficientimage 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
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