 There was a lady, a lady he gave, children he had three. She sent them away. All right, we're doing the cantistory of Prankies and all of the cousins tonight. These things are related in that they are both pre-industrial devices. And by pre-industrial, I mean going back to the dawn of time, they're devices that have been used by humans as long as they could put a piece of coloring material or charcoal on a wall or a cave or a piece of paper. But they're used to augment a story or a song. And the reason I say that they're so ancient is because there is evidence in journals kept by the early Europeans who went to Australia that the indigenous population would paint a scene of their family, their history on a cave wall. And then they would paint their bodies to match that painting. So as they told the story, they became merged with the story of their history. And that made me think entirely differently about the cave paintings I was raised looking at pictures of. I just thought they were supposed to be pretty pictures. And it never heard to me until just a couple of weeks ago that that actually is probably was how humans always told their stories. When they could, they decorated them. Now in the old ones, there were many, many names for it, not cantistoria. They were blank and staff, meaning you stood on a bench to do them or whatever. They all had names depending on the country and the dialect. But the idea with the old ones was to mix up the pictures. And that was supposed to add excitement. But for me, it probably would add a lot of mistakes. And then I have a little cantistoria that I painted knowing that you wouldn't be able to see it. So for the excitement, I'll hold one of these up once in a while, and you will not have a clue what in the world I'm talking about. And that should add excitement. And then when that's done, we'll do the cranky. All right. Now the ballad we're doing tonight, and a ballad is a story song. So it's called The Wife of Usher's Well. And in the United States, it's called Lady Gay. And it survived in fragments from the Middle Ages and was first collected in 1802 by Sir Walter Scott. And I've tucked him under there because he's in my bad books. Why is he in my bad books? Because he collected ancient material and put it together and used it in a sort of disorganized mass. However, he wanted to inspire and his own work. And so because of that, he also rewrote a lot of old ballads. So this one, if it was in fragments, maybe he took it and sort of mashed it together the way he wanted. Because who knows? But the first one written down in a complete form was in his collection, probably by him. Anyway, no matter who did what to it, the roots and all the themes of it are deeply medieval. Now I'll tell you in a little bit what that means. This ballad came to America with immigrants from the Scott's English Borderlands, which is a very fertile musical ground. And many, in fact, most of the Appalachian ballads and tunes came from there and then were vastly altered by the immigrants once they came to America. And so this is the story of a mother and who happens to also be a sorceress. She knows she's very sorcery. Now she learned her children. Her children have gone away to school and she's learned that they've died. Now she's not an ordinary woman and she's not ordinary sorceress. She's shockingly powerful. And she represents and did represent the people of that time. She represented Gaia, the Earth Mother. And she uses her huge and powerful magic to bargain with the universe to get her children back. So she overrules nature. And how does she do that? At first, she prays. And the verse suggests a standard Christian prayer, the first verse. But immediately, it's followed by another much older verse where her true voice wins out. And it's really cursing the universe if they don't give her children back. She threatens all of life. We'll have ceaseless storms and floods, unceasing floods if she doesn't get her children back. And so this is the tiny cantistoria that no one can see of her sitting in with her books, figuring out how she's going to do that bit of powerful magic. And the floods are rising right there. This pointer, the professor is supposed to have a pointer in doing this. And my pointer is an old ski pole that my children use when they're now old women. But when they were children, they used this mutilated Barbie doll as their scepter. And so I never could throw it out. I thought it was just so typical of them. A little boy down the street, little boy, Mark's grandson said, you're a capitator. So I'm going to use this capitation here. And he will get to know all about what's what, can I point? OK, traditionally, the great mother has a triple form. And in this ballad, that's expressed by her three children. And when they arrive, she assumes they're alive, but they're not. In coming back, they warn her about her mistakes. And in some versions, the children have become, especially in the Kentucky versions, the children have become sanctimonious little moralizers. And they scold her for her efforts to make them comfortable. And they call her acts of love vanities. And they're really stink pots. And I didn't happily learn that version. Anyway, that tension of her doing what she thinks her kindness is them taking it in as being irreligious, that tension illuminates the struggle that was underway for a long time in the British Isles as Christianity won dominance. And the indigenous beliefs survived, but they pushed into the dark. And in this ballad, the old ideas kind of stick up like rocks in a tidy lawn. You have this beautiful half obliterated pagan beliefs that are partly covered by Christian doctrines. And they are very visible in this song. And I sang it since I was a young woman, and I never noticed what I was singing until I started reading about this ballad and thought, oh, my dear, this is a lot more complicated. It really speaks of an age where there were troubles. And in fact, the years after 1300, which is around the time this ballad originated, when I said medieval in England, that means from 1,100 to about 1,500, 1,400. The years after 1300 were very hard in the British Isles. There was a mini ice age that struck, and it damaged crops, and it caused a famine. And the cold was blamed on numerous weather witches. And there were, apparently, one thing I just read, said 40,000 to 60,000 weather witches who knew there were weather witches. They were expected to keep the weather nice, and the weather was bad. And so it's like the town road guy gets blamed for the ice. They were blamed for the bad weather, and they were killed. And that was not a good time to deal with the witch. They were brutally punished. And generally, this was a time of terrible fear, and turbulence, and wars, and the ultimate horror was the plague, the plague, the Black Death. It hit Great Britain in 1348, and up to half the population died in one year. In Scotland, where it was a less deeply populated area, but towns and whole families were eradicated in a blink. And because of the valid words that you'll hear later when I do the song, it says, there came a sickness over the land that stole her faves away. And I thought about that, and I thought, well, this is the right date. So I'll use the plague as being why I explained the death of her children. And because an entire art form emerged out of the plague years, and it was called the Dance of Death, and it's this sort of thing. You see people holding hands with skeletons and they're dancing. It seemed to fit the song since the time was right. And I used a medieval etching, which you'll see when we cranked through the monastic plague hospital drawings inspired the picture that I did of what happened to her children when they were having their earthly demise. Magical belief systems were at their absolute peak during this time. What were they? Number one was witchcraft. Witchcraft was woven into every aspect of medieval life. The sorceress sends her children away to learn their grammary. That's what the song says. It's not grammar. It doesn't mean ABCs, the way some people sing it. They send them away to learn their ABCs. But it's grammary, and that's how I learned it too. It was sung that way. And it's a long obsolete word meaning the study of the occult. So she's a witch and she sent her children away to learn sorcery. And most interesting to me is that despite the innumerable changes this ballad has undergone since the 1300s, this once feared word is now a meaningless word, but it's still being sung. It's been left there in that ballad. And I think it's because it held the rhyme the best. And so they didn't know what it meant. People failed to learn pretty quickly, forgot what it meant. And so they just left it there. And the word grammary, sorcery, survives as the word grimoire, which is a medieval word for magical textbooks. And any Harry Potter fan knows this, that Harry Potter is always fiddling around with grimoires. And it was originally French. And it meant any incomprehensible book in Latin, but after a bit or by other people. A book that's unreadable and something else. But it soon came to me in any book of magic. And volumes like that were feared as if the books themselves embodied magical power. And they were kept locked or chained up. But very few survived. Here's a drawing from one of them, straight enough. It's very few survived because they were destroyed whenever witches got persecuted. Their materials were also destroyed. OK, so where did these kids go to study their grammary? North, it says in the song. She sends them away to the north. And north is not just Scotland, even though it had a well-established system of magic. Think about Freemasonry and sacred geometry and the Scottish rites and all that stuff. That's very much still medieval ideology involved in those rituals and in that thinking. But they also had more sympathy for witches than England did. So she's in North England, she sends them north. But more important is that the north star is what you look at when you look at the night sky, the pole star. And when you look north at night. And all our night stars, the whole sky is revolving around the north star like a wheel around a hub. And in the shamanic world, that hub doesn't move. That's the north star. It never moves. It's fixed. And everything else moves around it from our viewpoint. And in the shamanic world, it's considered the visible point of eternity, which is a really interesting idea that they somehow made a correlation between that still, silent place in us the meditative state brings. In the shamanic world, that would be well-experiencing that. But that they would find a metaphor for that in nature is really very interesting to me and kind of charming. And Aristotle called that point the unmoved, unmoved mover. And poet T.S. Eliot said, it's the still point of the turning world. And so there are a lot of people who sort of agree that that is a special kind of mystical place. And it certainly was in the Middle Ages. Symbolically, the north signifies the gate to the higher realms. That is the gate. And if you're going to transcend into a higher form, as the children in the ballad seem to do, they go to the north gate of paradise. That's where the action is. And it's the border between our world and the next. And so here it is. This is a larger one of a lovely witch. And she's got her eye on the north star. She's heading out. And here's the tricky part of the ballad at this point. The mother wants for her children to go. And she doesn't want them to go. She doesn't want them to die. And she's asked demand that they come back. But transcend, that was probably the goal of them going away anyway. But to do both of those things is unacceptable somehow. And so here's the problem, though. If they go, they will step into a world where Gaia is not the most powerful god. And the transcendent god, the sky god, is more powerful than the earth god. And if they go through that into that realm, she loses them. And they are doing a alchemical transmutation from lead into gold, which was very desired in reality. You want that gold? But as a personal growth of life, a spiritual growth, that was the goal of the medieval mind that you transmute from lead worthless into gold. And so if her children are allowed to do that, she fears she'll lose them, and she'll also lose power. So she calls them back. Now, what is she calling them back from? The medieval world was organized by all these complex belief systems, alchemy, astrology, magic, all kinds of things of that sort. And on top of this, the year was overlaid by the church calendar. It was just this thick layer of saint days and feasts that just were unending. And it's all tangled into pre-Christian beliefs. And everything in both of those realms had meaning. Everything meant something. And that's what I found out when I started studying this ballad instead of just singing it. It's important to note that many old ballads start in the merry month of May when all the buzzers swelling. That's what they always say in the merry month of May. And May is a time for earthly freedom. And it's a little tiny picture of a gardener. And this ballad was said, the poet and metaphysician and medieval scholar named Charles Upton said that May, he was talking specifically about this ballad, but he said that May honors the Roman goddess Maya. And that is true. And she's the one who weaves the world illusion. And it's an illusion that both glorifies and it hides simultaneously the transcendent God. So in Usher's Well, it begins when the children leave. They leave in May. And I painted this flowery night scene. And it ends when they return in November. And there's a verse that I don't sing that says they come back on Martin Mustay. And that's November 11th. So they're going to span of six months. That means nothing to us, but it's in the Zodiac, which was very important in the Middle Ages. That's a span of 180 degrees. And that is a turning. And spiritually, it means a total change of mind resulting in a spiritual conversion. And so for them to be gone for six months was a big, big deal. And it's a word called metanoia. And in English Bibles, it's translated as repentance. And I don't know that that exactly matches what I was thinking that word meant, but it's a different take on it. The children come back, but they don't come back as she expects. There's two of them. She has three. We'll have to count that one twice. They aren't quite living, and they aren't quite dead. And they know the various rules about the living and the dead. The rules are that any intimacy between the living and dead might kill the living. And it will make the dead restless. And if they're restless, they might walk. And sometimes they walk as ghosts. And sometimes as revenants, which are more fleshy, but they're dead. And interactions between the living and the dead create bad outcomes always. In old ballads, if anyone kisses a corpse, which they seem to do all the time, they die right away. And the dead get tainted by this kiss. And in the Unquiet Grave, which is a very beautiful old ballad of the lover saying, who's been dead for over a year, and she's crying at his grave, and he begs her to stop. And she wants to just kiss him one more time. And he says, no, it will kill you and it will hurt me. And so that's the kind of thinking that's going on with this idea of these dead children being asked to come back and interact with the living. It's not a good idea. We contaminate them. Now, that's not a common idea now that the living contaminate the dead. But it was very common in the Middle Ages. To avoid contamination, the children return home wearing birch bark hats. Now, that birch floor, it's sacred birch floor. And there they are harvesting their birch bark. It's still practice today. It's very old magic. And it's still practice today in little small ways that people don't even think they're doing. But the most ancient evidence has been found in high status Iron Age Celtic graves. Seven of them have had where they've dug them and they found these miraculous survivals of these weird birch bark, conical birch bark hats. And the anthropologists couldn't guess the use of such hats. I just read the article last week that told me about this. They had no idea what these things were doing. It was amazing. They survived 2,000 years or however long it was. But the oddest thing was, what were they? Well, they should have learned this song. Because this song tells you it's the ancient folklore in this song says that birch bark hats will protect the dead from being damaged by the living. So those graves, somebody who loves those people in these rooms are all the Celtic lands. They've been found in various places. And somebody who loved that dead person put that hat in there so that they could make the transition to where they needed to go. If they had to go through populated areas, they wouldn't be harmed as they made their trans, whatever it is that you do, trans migration. OK, so that valid, in this valid, the dead children make their hats. And they're kind of like a medieval version of a tinfoil hat. It's sacred birch trees. And they're sacred birch trees. How could you know they grow beside this north gate of paradise? Whatever that is on the north star, that's where they're growing. And they mark the threshold between this world and the next. And that idea has long given birch as a reputation for driving out evil. And so, for instance, baby cradles were very popularly made of birch. And I still have known people who built baby cradles. And they preferred birch. And it's because it's supposed to protect babies from maligned spirits. But nobody remembers that. And if you're a cattle driver, you should use a little birch switch to gently move your cows along, because it will keep them happy and healthy and furl. And I was pleased to learn the other day that the sugar substitute silo tall is made out of birch bark. And I thought, oh, good, because I'm taking quantities of it. And such wood brings good fortune. And so they knock on wood. We all know that one. And even today, naughty children in some rural areas are whipped with a birch switch to make them less wicked. And they say, give him the birch, or he was birched. And I was raised with this notion, and I probably still have switch marks on my legs from being given the birch. It didn't make me any less naughty. But that's how they treated us. The children in the ballot aren't punished. Their mother wants to feed them. And she serves bread. It's on there. There's bread and there's wine on a fine table. And that really does stand in for a communion. And the communion is the symbolic right of the transcendent God. And so the children are attempting to move to a new realm. And they can't eat. And they're dead. They can't eat. There's a couple of reasons why they can't eat. Eating food would pull them back and trap them in a lower spiritual state. And the mother has set the table up in the utmost room. It says, utmost room. Where the utmost room is. Well, in the Bible, the upper room is where the last supper is served. And I drew it with little stairs. So you can see, that's up. That's the utmost room. But the odd part is that here the mother is metaphorically, again, stepping on toes and taking something that is powerful, that isn't really of her tradition to try and make her children happy. And then there's the backmost room. And that's where they are taken to sleep. She makes a nice bed for them to sleep. And that backmost room is certainly the unconscious state of sleep. And the oldest child, we'll throw that there, the oldest child doesn't let them sleep. She's taking them, saying, awake, awake. And awake, if you know about cantata, you know that awake is, or if you know a guru, wake up is the universal state of spiritual knowledge. You're supposed to be awake. And so here she's reminding them for what they're going to go through. They need to be awake. So the children know the rules. But if they enter into the world with a living, they can't eat or sleep. That's just the rules for the dead. They can't do that. And they have to have a prearranged signals. Here's one of them. If a rooster crows, that means it's dawn. And you're not allowed to be around when daylight comes. So you're supposed to clear and go back to wherever it is the dead are. In the later songs, a savior might appear and tell them to come back. Some of these later versions really are sort of dripping with them. I don't know how to describe it, but it's a lot of Jesus. And the old one couldn't be further from that subject. But they're told to return to the land of the dead when dawn comes. And every dead guy knows it, apparently. Now they also set limits on grief. There's a very sad mother. Okay, doctors nowadays treat chronic grief with psychotropic drugs. And they do it for the sake of the living. It's not done for the sake of the dead. In the ballad, her children condemn their mother for her excessive grief, and it hurts them. And rules were devised to control grief for the sake in the old days. The rules were for both the living and the dead. It would be better for them both. And some of the rules of mourning that still survive that were devised to take care of this problem had to do with odd things, like the color clothing you wear would you're grieving. And how long you could wear that clothing or an armed band, how long that would be suitable to wear for the dead. The time spent, how long you sit with the dead after they're dead. And the different religions have different views on this, but many of them still survive. How long before burial, all those sort of things. And most important in the medieval time was how long can you mourn? A year and a day is allowed and not a minute more. And too much grief and the dead can't sleep. And a lot of ballads, there'll be some little hint in there that that's what they're talking about. Quit it, this is enough is enough. And this ballad says, has this very clear at the end. Okay, so we might fear the dead might harm us. And a lot of people are afraid of ghosts and they won't go to graveyard or sleep in a house that's supposed to be haunted. But the idea that the living in danger of the dead is no longer part of our belief system. But it was a real concern in the Middle Ages. And the children remind their mother of this. And they complain that her tears are wetting their grave wrappings. Her tears are holding them back and they don't wanna be stuck and they don't wanna be stuck, particularly wrapped in tear soaked winding sheets. And the winding sheet, according to this man Upton, he says, that's part of the fabric that's woven by Maya to create a sense of reality. And that is what the children want to leave behind is our reality. And so they don't wanna be stuck in tear soaked winding sheets. Okay, the last verse is no longer sung. I was surprised to see that it is still in written books that include, like the Northern Anthology where it's poetry, this old ballads are included as poetry. And the last verse, the kids say farewell to their mom and they say farewell to the barn and the buyer and that way you know that they're agronomists, that's their business. And then they say farewell to the pretty girl that tends our mother's fire. And you think, who? You know, this last verse is a new character being introduced. What's going on? I don't know who she is, she's not been mentioned before. And then you have to think about it. Who is it who keeps the fire? There she comes. It's Vesta. She's St. Bridget, the goddess of the hearth. And she cares for the domestic side of nature and she's the patroness also of alchemy. And she was also, yeah, alchemy was the great organizer of the medieval world, above all things really. And so for them to have that verse at the end was kind of nice, that they're saying goodbye to all the things that made their life makes me rational. This pretty heady stuff. So I think that we should go to the simplicity of the ballad now. The ballad scroll was painted before I learned about the, I had seen those verses and heard them sung, but I never sung them because I thought they were ridiculous. I didn't know what they meant. I mean, I was like this, you know, the guys who dug up the tombs. I didn't know what it was. It seemed very odd to me. And I, so I didn't sing them. And now I'm going to, I've added them in there. So there's a long time when this cranky cannot roll forward because if it rolls forward we'll get it out of the story. So you just have to sit there and look at these children in there. Okay. I make whistles too, so while he does scene change which is moving a lamp from one place to another, I'll show you one of the whistles I make, which is I do, I've been doing whistles about ballads for a book and that it's been having a very hard time being born. And this one is up from that. Here's a little, I've made her children look like little street rats. And here's the rooster crowing and here she is with all her fancy table and she's sort of like, oh dear, that didn't work. And it sounds like this. And then there's a little high voice to the children. Whistle. He didn't photograph so well for the book, but I might figure out what to do about all this. Tell me when we're set. Are we set? Yes. Okay. If I can get some notes that I like. There was a lady, a lady he gave. Children, she had three. She said that they'd not been gone. Oh, a little while. Scarcely a month or another for this land. And it stole, it stole her baby away. Yes, it stole, it stole her baby away. She wept, she prayed. Oh, she wept so hard. She wept for children. I wish the wind were cold and the sun has long gone when the three livers gave. When the night when her children refixed them a tape. Neither can we sign. Oh, she made them a bed in the back door's room. So, so, take it up, take it up. Take it up, take it up.