The Televisionary Oracle (10 page)

And yet I have to say that it has always been easier for me to love those big, ancient tales than the implication they have for my personal life. The glory and the mission of Mary Magdalen are myths I have been able to appreciate best when I’ve tried to pretend that she wasn’t me.

But the people who’ve treated me best and loved me most say that Magdalen
is
me. I am, according to them, the fulfillment of the prophecy. Their avatar. The reincarnation of the divinity that last inhabited the earthly body of Mary Magdalen—come again to formulate and disseminate the new covenant of the ancient feminine mysteries, the dispensation for the next cycle of evolution.

And oh by the way, there
won’t be
any next cycle of evolution if I fail to do my job. The prophecies of Magdalen, supplemented by those of her most esteemed interpreters down through the ages, are unambiguous about this. Unless I successfully lead the charge to restore the long-lost balance of male and female, patriarchy will literally exterminate the human species. By what means is irrelevant—nuclear holocaust, germ warfare or genetic engineering gone astray, global warming or ozone-layer destruction or rain forest depletion. There is only one
logical outcome to misogynist culture’s evolution, and that is to commit collective suicide.

According to the prophecies, it would almost be too late by the time Magdalen was born again. The patriarchy would be in the final stages of the self-annihilation it mistakes for aggrandizement.

Maybe you can begin to guess why I began to impose, at an early age, a buffer of skepticism between me and the role I was supposed to embrace. How many children are told that they have come to Earth to prevent the apocalypse?

At moments like these, I hallucinate the smell of a cedar wood bonfire. Visions of magenta silk flags flash across my inner eye, and tables heaped with gifts for me. These are psychic artifacts from midsummer’s eve six weeks after my sixth birthday—the day of my “crowning” as the avatar. For a long time my recollections of that day were a garbled mass of other people’s memories, which I had empathized with so strongly I’d made them my own. With the help of a meditation technique I call
anamnesis
, I have in recent years recovered what I believe to be my own pure experience.

I awoke crying that morning from a terrible nightmare, which of course I wasn’t allowed to forget, since Vimala was there, pouncing from her bed in the next room with her cat-smother love, asking me what I dreamed and scribbling it down in the golden notebook she kept to record every hint of an omen that ever trickled out of me.

I dreamed I was doing somersaults down a long runway, dressed in a flouncy red-and-white polka dot clown suit and big red flipper shoes. Thousands of people were in the audience, but they were totally silent even though I thought I was being wildly funny and entertaining. Then I picked up a violin and began playing the most beautiful but silly music, and the crowd started to boo, and some people walked out. Vimala jumped up on stage from below and stripped off my clown suit and flippers. Underneath I was wearing a long magenta silk dress. From somewhere Vimala produced a ridiculously big and heavy crown that seemed made of lead or iron. It was taller than my entire body, and when she put it on my head I reeled and weaved all over the runway, trying both to prevent it from tumbling off and to keep myself from falling. The audience cheered and whistled and clapped. I broke
into huge sobs, which woke me up.

“Did your dream make you sad?” Vimala soothed me, as she kissed my birthmark.

I said nothing, but slumped and wiggled my front tooth, which was hanging loose by a thread of flesh. Although I’d been crying in the dream, I stopped soon after I awoke.

“There’s no need to feel sad,” Vimala said. “How can you feel sad for even a moment when you are such a very powerful queen of life with so many blessings to give?”

I wanted to cry but I couldn’t bring myself to. Instead, I yanked at my tooth.

And then suddenly it was free. Blood geysered down onto my red silk comforter and I started to shake. Vimala instantly removed the sash from her kimono and pressed it against my wound.

“Lie back down, wonderful one,” she comforted me. “Rest a while. Here, give me that tooth and we will wrap it up for the fairies to come and take tonight.”

She climbed under the covers with me and held my head in the crook of her arm. I fell back asleep.

When I awoke Vimala was gone. I decided I would lie in bed until she came to summon me. As I wandered back to the memory of my dream, I wanted to cry again and even felt the beginning of a sob erupting in my chest. But by the time it reached my throat, it was forced, a fake. I let it bellow out anyway, and the pathos of it almost ignited a real sob. But that too aborted itself.

As I looked around my giant, pie-piece-shaped bedroom, trying to penetrate the numbness I felt about the signs of luxury I beheld there, I allowed myself to experience, for the millionth time, my oldest, most familiar emotion: a blend of gratitude and guilt for all my blessings.

There in the corner where the curved outer wall of my tower met one wall of this, my “Moon Room,” Sibyl had built me an astoundingly authentic play castle, complete with drawbridge, crenellated battlements, and three pint-sized rooms. Inside were all the accessories a child queen could ever hope for, including a treasure chest of jewels, conical hats topped with banners of silk, and a magic mirror.

Beside the castle was my art station, with every kind of clay, paint, and crayons I would ever need to create my masterpieces, along with
feathers, leaves, crystals, glue, a small hammer and other tools, pieces of wood and nails—everything. Beside that was Sibyl’s handmade, three-story oak dollhouse, filled with perfectly crafted miniature wood furniture. The entire room was a riot of toys, dolls, books, music, and countless other objects designed to nourish my imagination and overwhelm me with the knowledge that I was the most beloved child who had ever lived.

The emerald green walls—what could be seen of them through the swarm of toys and props—had been handpainted by Artemisia with scenes depicting the thirteen stations of Mary Magdalen (as opposed to the fourteen stations of Jesus). The figure of Magdalen was portrayed by the most successful female characters from fairy tales, including, of course, Rapunzel herself.

And this was just one of my huge rooms on just one floor of the four-story enchanted tower where I lived with Vimala. And in each of six other homes which formed just a part of our larger community—which seemed for all I could tell to be centered entirely around my happiness—there was a special room just for me where I could go to stay with my other six adoptive mothers. I had—and still have—seven mothers! And each has always doted on me as if I were her only child, even though Sibyl, Cecily, Artemisia, and Burgundy have natural-born children of their own.

My blessings were prodigal, supernal, monstrous. My meals were without exception masterpieces; the recipes came from cuisines as varied as my mothers’ ethnic backgrounds. I had a thousand different outfits to wear, a hundred different shoes. My mothers conducted intricate, mysterious rituals at least once every new moon and full moon—mostly, it seemed, for my benefit—and streams of interesting women who seemed equally in love with me were constantly visiting on these and other occasions. I was read to, played with, massaged, hugged, and taught by a tag-team of seven smart, psychologically healthy women who never grew bored or impatient with me, because the moment they might be on the verge of submitting to those feelings they handed me over to a fresh substitute.

Not one of my mothers, not even once, ever gave me the slightest suggestion that I should be overawed by my abundance. No one ever manipulated me into behaving the way they wanted by threatening to withhold
their love. And yet neither did they spoil me. I was expected to work in the garden, and clean up my toys, and be responsible for my emotions.

The guilt I swam in was apparently my own invention, devised under my own inspiration. Without any direction, as if drawing telepathically on the frustrations of underprivileged people I had never met, I somehow managed to conjure a chronic reflex that combined the feelings of “How can I possibly deserve such wonderful treatment?” and “Thank you so much, beloved Goddess.”

Not infrequently, I daydreamed about what it would be like to experience real pain. Having my hands cut off was a good fantasy, fueled by the Grimms’ fairy tale about the girl with no hands. I tried, ineffectually, to imagine what it would be like to have my mother die, as Sibyl said hers had when she was a child. At times I felt something like envy for the sorrow and agonies of characters in books.

Maybe this wouldn’t have been a problem if my seven mothers had decided to tell me about the experiences in my early life that qualified as tragic. Those traumas—the loss of my twin brother, my heart surgery, and my biological parents giving me away to Vimala—had all happened before I could talk, at an age when memory was shaping its records out of materials that could not easily be retrieved later.

By the time I was informed, at age nine, of just how difficult my early life had been, it was too late to erase the imprint. That weird blend of compulsive gratitude and guilt was always there, preventing direct communion with the divine favors forever flowing my way. As a result, I half-wasted my blessings for years. I was caught up in my self-conscious dialogue with them, forever missing the point.

The point being: Don’t get all bound up in worrying about the implications of the blessings; just get out there and use them, spread them, multiply them. Respond to them with the same spirit with which they have been given to you.

In light of this failing of mine, beauty and truth fans, the disaster I am about to describe to you may seem forgivable.

I lay in bed that morning for as long as it took to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to cry right then. Finally I rose and wandered out of my Moon Room.

From the window that runs the entire length of the Sun Room’s
outer wall, I watched my seven mothers and other women at work outside, preparing the grounds for the ritual ahead. Each of the other three towers was already festooned with long trains of silk magenta flags. On the circular green at the heart of our community, there were a harp and drums and the tall effigy of Persephone and a cauldron stacked on top of cedar logs and five huge round black marble tables with a silver cup and piles of gifts on every one. More prayer flags had been strung between the myrtle trees, whose branches held feathered serpents and corn dollies and colored eggs and bull skulls and balloons. Around the periphery of the green was a boundary of giant pumpkins, miraculously full-grown here on the first day of summer, as well as ripe tomatoes and pears and fat white candles.

It all looked very festive—and dismal. As I watched the arrival of women I had never seen—pilgrims, I had been told, from chapters of the Pomegranate Grail based all over the world, visiting especially for this joyous occasion—I could feel my entire body tightening into a rigid coil. It was one thing to be queen in the spontaneous play and fairy tales I had always enjoyed with my mothers and the three other children who lived in our community. I could slip in and out of these roles according to my whims, and just as naturally try on the personality of the witch or the king or the dragon or the wise old man. But today that slippery, delicious freedom was to be stolen from me. My face was to be forever locked inside the visage of the remote heroine I had heard so much about.

For as long as I could remember, I had felt everyone—my mothers and the forty or so other members of the Pomegranate Grail who hung around from time to time—sneaking looks at me that oozed longing, expectancy, adoration and, the most bizarre of all, worship. It rarely failed to unnerve me, or cause me to flinch (at least inwardly: I learned to hide the outward signs). At times my mind would rationalize that they were mistaken to feel this way, that I was not who they thought I was. At other times, I fantasized that I was not just myself as I experienced myself, but also a stranger who was sort of like an unsprouted seed in me. That last image was the hardest to bear. I often felt as if I were standing beside myself, that there was another version of me, invisible and mute.

Maybe all my loved ones thought they were hiding these “attacks”
on me. After all, the blatantly innocent look of wonder that would sometimes possess their faces would usually only emerge when they thought they were out of my direct field of vision. But though the looks themselves always came from sideways and behind, the other signs were laughably obvious. Every gesture that I made, every skill I learned, every goddamn bowel movement I emitted, seemed like a revelation to them, to be noted, named, registered, studied, and celebrated.

At least I had my childhood to escape into. I could always break into a hoppity jig or nonsense song when one of my caretakers-cum-devotees would ask me some absurdly portentous question like “What is the quality in me you would most like to see changed?” or an occult riddle like “Where can Persephone find the stone that the Builders rejected?”

As I gazed down from my Sun Room at all the remarkable women preparing for my special day, I began to mourn. I sensed a growing wordless fear that by tomorrow my childhood would be killed; that I would no longer be able to escape into it.

A few hours later, as the sun neared its highest ascension into the northern hemisphere, I was stripped naked by Vimala and the twelve other chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail—lovingly and with reverence, of course—and ritually bathed in the giant cauldron there in front of more than two hundred women and children. As Vimala dunked my head beneath the tepid holy water, I kept my eyes open, trying to stay focused on the two dead bugs I’d spied floating on the surface.

After that, all in attendance lay face down in the grass, ritually turning themselves into stepping stones for me. I did what I had been instructed to do: walked, still naked, across the backs of every adult woman with my full weight, and lightly tapped the backs of the children and babies with my left foot. I enjoyed this. I relished being able to look at everyone without them staring at me. I loved the utter, humid silence being punctuated by the series of grunts from the women I pressed into the grass. I felt like I was a musician playing a new kind of instrument: a field of living bodies, each of which emitted a different tone. A crazy idea occurred to me. If I was now the Queen of Heaven and the Underworld, maybe I had more power than I realized. I decided to see if I could get the grunts to play one of my favorite
songs, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Amazingly, as soon as I set my mind to it, it seemed to happen. It made me happy for a while.