Florence & The Machine’s Everybody Scream: The Witchcraft of Womanhood

When Florence and the Machine releases an album, it never simply drops. It descends a bit like a vision. Everybody's scream feels like Florence Welch's most haunted revelation yet. It's an album where myth, womanhood and catharsis intersect. It's a world of sirens and saints, witches and martyrs, women who rise, rage and rebirth themselves through sound. In today's episode, we'll explore the mythology and folklore woven through everybody's scream. Uncovering how Florence continues her lifelong project of turning pain into ritual and emotion into myth. [Music] Hello and welcome to Ladies of Law, the podcast where we take all of the most wonderful women of mythology and folklore and we unpick, unravel and explore their origins, their stories and how they've changed through time. To arrive in today's modern world. I'm India and I'm so grateful to have you here with me today. If you're new to the podcast, welcome on in. I really hope you love it here and if you do, please follow or subscribe on your favourite podcast platform and you can leave me a review or a little comment. I love them all. I do also have a Patreon and a Discord server you can check out too. And if you listen to the last episode, you will know that I've had a bit of a break and that did also extend to Patreon and Discord. So if you do join and think, why is it tumbleweed in here in India, that is why. But I'm back and I have lots of stuff to come. I actually just did a little mini exploration into the folklore figure at Riannan and how she influenced one of my favourite songs by Fleetwood Mac, which was super fun and that's over on Patreon. And as you know, we are having a musical episode today. We are covering an album that came out very fittingly on Halloween. Everybody scream by Florence and the machine. And as only now I'm saying that out loud, I realise it all rhymes, doesn't it? Anyway, that wasn't as funny as I seem to have just found it. And this is going to be another one of those episodes where I experiment with a new format and a new way of looking at women in mythology and folklore. So I do hope that you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think and let me know if you'd like to hear more of this type of thing because I really enjoyed writing this one. And I promise you don't have to be a Florence fan for this episode. You don't have to have heard her music before. We're looking at lyrics, we're looking at themes and how these tie-in, two folklore and mythology and we'll be having a good old chat about lots of stuff, lots of witchy stuff, which I think we can all appreciate. I'm going to break down some lyrics and themes, like I said, see how they tie in with the things that we usually talk about around here and I'm just super excited. So let's get going. Before we jump into the album itself, I figured it's probably a good idea to have a little bit of background on the Florence from Florence and the machine. And she's a figure whose artistry is kind of inseparable from the mythic and mystical and the melancholic. Born in 1986 in Campbellwell, South London, she grew up in a household that was very much richly intellectual. Her mother, Evelyn Welch, is a distinguished academic. She's a Renaissance historian with a focus on fashion and art and the cultural symbolism of the body. Her father, Nick Welch, was an advertising executive raised in a household that blended kind of the creative and the cerebral. And she was exposed very early on to both classical literature and visual symbolism, particularly the Renaissance preoccupation with death, ecstasy and transformation. Her maternal lineage also includes her grandmother, who was a devotee of the occult and who introduced Florence to Tarot, Talismans and Esoteric Law, planting little seeds for a very lifelong fascination with the unseen. Welch has frequently spoken about her childhood as one steeped in a strange, almost spectral sensitivity. She was a voracious reader of myths and fairy tales and often found solace in the company of imaginary companions. So it was a bit of a precocious interior life. It was very much rife with fantasy and often shadowed by grief and it formed a kind of early aesthetic theology, one that would later blossom into the sonic and liriical incantations of Florence and the machine. From a young age, she was drawn not only to stories of gods and monsters, but to the ambiguity of female archetypes within those stories, witches, cybles, sirens, mad women, goddesses, all wrathful and redemptive. Her formal musical education was pretty minimal, but her expressive instincts were sharpened through an immersion in the sonic worlds of people like Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks and PJ Harvey. All women whose voices didn't just sing, but they summoned. She herself has said that it was actually through music singing in a church choir that was her first moment of touching something outside of herself. So to Florence, music has quite literally always been transcendent and a link to the other. And it would make sense that because of this, Welch's own performance style has always leaned towards the ecstatic and ceremonial. Arms raised as if invoking some elemental force, vocals pushed to the threshold of rupture, her movement somewhere between dance and exorcism. In concert, she's less of a pop star than a pre-stess, presiding over a mass of emotional and spiritual release. And she's cultivated a bit of an aesthetic universe over the past decade. And I'd say it was kind of like a synthesis of gothic romanticism, pagan mysticism and feminist mythology. Her albums are populated not by conventional love songs, but by haunted forests, blood-writes, apparitions and mythic descent. Nature is never just background in her work. It's like a psychic landscape charged with lots of symbolism. Forests represent the unknown unconscious, oceans standing for overwhelming emotion and fire becomes both destruction and rebirth. And I won't go into too much detail about her back catalogue because we are here to talk about everybody's screen today. But for instance, on her debut album Lungs, she has the song How, Where love becomes a kind of like and thropic curse, it's animalistic and sacred and wild. And on blinding, she wanders through a surrealist dreamscape populated by witches, ghosts and crows, suspended between waking and haunting. And throughout that album, you feel this impulse towards ritual, which becomes a lot more fully fleshed out in the next album, ceremonials. And that's a record built from materials of gothic cathedral music, so we've got harps and organs and choirs and reverberant drums, and they are sort of arranged in a way that carry her voice like an incantation. Water is a central theme in this album and it signifies both baptism and oblivion. There's songs like Never Let Me Go, where she drowns not in despair, but in ecstatic surrender. In What the Water gave me, the sea offers both inheritance and annihilation, and the lyrics are really drenched in this religious and mythic imagery of ghosts and devils and prayers and crucifixes and confessions. And there's really a fierce feminine holiness that just refuses either purification or silence. Throughout the whole album, on the next album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, she kind of shifts this mythic lens more inward. The celestial does remain, but the drama has changed a little bit where ceremonials channeled pain through symbolic grandeur, How Big confronts it more directly, songs like Ship to Rec, and What Kind of Man, interrogate not only heart rate, but also her own emotional destructiveness. She's no longer the haunted, but she's the one doing the haunting. She's wrestling with the ruins of relationships and the enormity of her own grief. Because this album doesn't deal with death, but actually the aftermath of death, the mourning that lingers when the myth collapses, and yet the myth never quite disappears, even at her most emotionally candid. She cannot help but cast her experience in luminous sacred terms, not to obscure reality, but to honour it. High as Hope, the next album by Florence in the Machine, is even more radically self-exposing. It's very vulnerable and restrained. And a lot of that is more self-interspection and more grounded in reality, but there are songs like Big God and Sky Full of Song that both sort of disorient as much as they lift. And finally, the most recent album before everybody's scream is Dance Fever. And that one explores more the tension between like artistic performance and domestic life and the juxtaposition of that. And the anxiety of being isolated during the pandemic. And kind of a desire to be free and find release through art. And it also explores themes of womanhood age, spirituality, and also a fascination with the medieval phenomenon of Coriomania, which is the compulsive erratic dancing that gives the album its name. So across all of these albums, Florence Welsh constructs a mythopoetic framework for feminine experience, a cycle of initiation, descent, confrontation, and quiet reclamation. She doesn't ask to be rescued, nor does she dwell in victimhood, but she mythologises emotional experience in order to dig up its meaning. And through her music, she offers an alternative cosmology of womanhood, one where madness, magic, grief, sensuality, and divinity all coexist without shame. And now we are all caught up. Let's talk about everybody's scream. [MUSIC PLAYING] fierce and fearless descent into the rawerous chambers of the feminine experience. It's a mythic, bodily and spiritual reckoning, shaped by trauma, transformation and transgression. Like I said, it was released on Halloween, so it already arrived very much steeped in ritual and metaphor, and it really fuses modern autobiography with ancient archetypes. The scream itself, all at once a sound of birth, death, protest and ecstasy becomes the album's central gesture. It's an invocation and it's a spell and it's a release. And what is really important to note, and I will just put a little bit of a trigger warning here for child loss. The project was born from devastating personal experiences. In 2023, Florence Welch suffered a near fatal ectopic pregnancy, and that was an event that she herself described as the closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death. And the fallout of that trauma is very much woven into the fabric of everybody's scream, not only as a subject of grief, but also as the entry point into a deeper exploration of women's pain, silencing and transformation across time. "I had stepped through this door," she said, and it was just full of women screaming. And that scream, as I said, is very much central to the album and it reverberates across the album, summoning a chorus of mythic figures, witches and crackins and sirens and sowing mothers. And while Welch has long drawn inspiration from folklore and fantasy, this album is not an aesthetic play, it is kind of an act of living myth-making. Because in this album, the magical and the medical and the poetic and the pathological are all inseparable. Witchcraft appears in this album not as affectation, but as ancestral memory, and a survival strategy really, it's a way of mourning and resisting and reconstituting the self after this obliteration. And music-wise, it's unruly and Picasso, it's full of ecstatic chance and ritual repetition. Florence herself, I think, I think she said, "The first, I think she wrote it in a notebook, the first thing that she wanted to do was hire a witch choir." And I believe that is what she did and you can hear, said choir throughout the album. A lot of it is not very easily consumed, but I don't think her music ever really has been. And the songs operate a bit like incantations, a bit like summonings. And Florence's voice, I'm sure a lot of you have heard it before, most of you probably have, but it's a very unique voice, it's very distinct and it ranges from this kind of like ethereal hymn vibe to like gutter all-ground and it evokes this lineage of wild women. So everybody's cream is not really a collection of songs, it's more of a ritual sequence, like a sonic grimoire tracing the arc of grief and metamorphosis through a very distinctly feminine mythology. It's everything all at once, it's very much monstrous and maternal and feral and mystical and it speaks from both the wound and from the alter. And I think it's one of the most exposed and mythically expansive albums that Florence and the Machine has released. And what I want to do, I thought about analysing each song track by track and going through the lyrics and finding links to different mythologies and folklore and characters, but I feel like that might be a little bit boring for you guys. So what I've done instead is I've grouped them into categories. So I've kind of taken themes that I've picked out from this album through doing a lot of time on genius reading the lyrics and listening to it and stuff. And I've grouped them into a few different categories. So what I'll do is I'll go through each of those categories and we're going to talk about lots of different themes and we will link it to different mythologies and different cultures and folklore figures throughout the way. So I hope that's okay. If it's not, then you've come quite far in this episode for it not to be okay. But that's what we're going to do. And the first section that I have kind of pulled out is called the stage and the self. So we're going to jump into that now. The album opens with its title track, Everybody Screen, a thundering invocation that establishes the tonal and spiritual terrain that we're about to enter. It is both temple and theatre. It's like a ritual of blood and sound and it's a space of like feminine reckoning. At its core, this song is a reclamation of space. All kinds of space, sonic space, physical space, mythic space, literally from the very first line. Get on the stage and they call her by her first name. She sort of positions performance as possession. The stage is the alter that body is a vessel. It's not just entertainment. And I keep using this word, but it's invocation. You don't get a point every time I say invocation in this episode if you did. You'd have lots of points. And there's also a duality to the song that echoes through ancient ritual drama. The ecstatic ceremonies of Dionysus, for instance, the masked dances of the Mayan ads, the trance like states of oracles. And in the background, you hear everybody dance, everybody scream in this kind of like chant type situation. And I guess it kind of functions like a chorus and a Greek tragedy. It guides us into this like communal catharsis. And the song becomes like a sacred space where emotions that are too large to just be spoken are given full permission to just erupt. And she kind of covers this in her own words where she says, "Here I don't have to be quiet. Here I don't have to be kind, extraordinary and normal all at the same time." So that is where the monstrous feminine, the too loud, the too emotional, too much is not punished but revered. And we've all felt like that too loud, too emotional, too much. But there on the stage, Florence can be her true self. And she's extraordinary, but she's also normal because we all feel those feelings. But what lies beneath that euphoria is something far darker. As I said earlier, the context of everybody scream is not just artistic, it's existential. Like I said earlier with the pregnancy loss and that quote that I mentioned, I walked through the door and it was just full of women screaming. That really does, that that just lingers throughout this track and the album as a whole. And throughout her discography, which has long flirted with which craft as a metaphor, but everybody scream takes that to a much deeper, more lived urgency. And there is a verse where she says, "The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells and the injections, the harvest, the needle, protect me from evil." And that line is so fascinating because it combines the ancient and the modern. The line between apothecary and surgeon blurs. And the spirituality and the witchcraft that helped guide Florence through healing after her loss is just as vital to this narrative as the doctors who saved her life. In this world, medical intervention and spiritual ritual are not oppositional. They are both means of survival. They're both just as important. They're both ways of keeping death at bay. And all throughout this song, we have this sort of pendulum swinging between vulnerability and grandeur. And it kind of collapses the binary between performance and prayer. When she sings a line, I will come to you in the evening, ragged and reeling, shaking my gold like a tambourine. You can hear echoes of the wandering sibil, draped in prophecy and madness. And then another line, a bouquet of brambles all twisted and tangled. This is floor a transformed into the thorns of a fairy tale. The cursed maiden made saint through suffering. Her femininity here is not ornamental. It's more enchanted and sharp edged. She's not offering roses here. She's not offering flowers. She's offering brambles, a bouquet of brambles. And just imagine trying to grab onto that, you know, and what that feels like and what imagery that kind of evokes. And probably my favorite line in the whole song is here I can take up the whole of the sky, unfurling, becoming my full size. And here it's like Welch is no longer just a front woman. She is a tightness reclaiming her mythic scale. And remember, we are living in a world where ambitious women are still very much punished for being too much. So the act of bursting through ceilings becomes an act of myth making. This is the witch breaking free from the stake. The goddess refused worship now commanding it by force of will. The scream then is not just grief. It's ritual. Like the women of ancient keening traditions, Welch howls not only for her own loss but for generations of silenced and unseen women. It's kind of like this echo chamber of rage, ecstasy and power. It is a leusinian mystery by way of the comfortable, a howl that says I am still alive. Or as Welch herself has said, there's a feeling of dying every time I make a record. And this time I nearly died. Everybody scream is not merely a song it's a summoning of lost futures and spectral women. And when Welch calls out everybody scream, it's not command, it's an invitation to come and join the myth. Now this next bit I am going to call resurrection because if everybody scream the song is a bit of an invocation. One of the greats is a confrontation and it's a confrontation that comes from the underworld. It's a reclamation of lineage and power, long denied. From the very first line which is "I crawled up from the earth, broken nails and coughing dirt." Florence Welch positions herself not just as a survivor, but as revenant. She emerges like Persephone, slauring her way, out of Hades, not as a maiden, plucked and returned, but as a queen of shadows, dragging herself upward through soil and silence. This isn't a passive resurrection, it's more of a feral rebirth. So maybe she's a bit less like Persephone, and more akin to the Aztec goddess, Miktikasawattl. And Miktikasawattl is also known as the Lady of the Dead, and she's a very powerful goddess from Aztec mythology, who rules over Miktilan. This was the underworld, and she rules alongside her consort, Miktilan Dikutli, and she's often depicted with a flayed face and a jaw a gait to swallow the stars, and she presides over death not as an end, but as a sacred passage. She's a guardian of bones and a protector of souls, and she's actually the mythic origin of the Adelaus Muaythos, and her ancient festivals were the precursor to this. And she continues to be associated with the celebration of ancestors and the dead through rituals and offerings. And I thought about one of the greats. I love this song, by the way, it's really, really good, and if you haven't listened to it, I would very much recommend. But I thought about Florence Welch in this song, and I was trying to think about the journey that she's going through in this song. And it just, yeah, it really made me think of this mythological figure, because this sort of like visceral resurrection really does echo the terrain of Miktilan, which is the Aztec underworld, like I say. It's not, it's not gentle, right? It's not a, it's not a resurrection that was a, was a reward. It was earned through suffering and endurance, just as in Aztec cosmology. And Miktikas Awatul is a figure to be both feared and revered, and that's something again that I think comes through in this song, you know? She was a sovereign over what society tried to repress, like decay, sorrow and female rage and death's fertile power. And in one of the greats, Florence Welch comes back not as a survivor, but as a bit of a liminal figure, really, and she embodies both death and divinity. And she becomes almost a contemporary Miktikas Awatul. And as we all know, women who return from the dead across all mythologies and folklore very rarely come back unchanged. They come back and they are feared. In Anna, to mention her again, stripped of her powers hung on a hook like meat and resurrected only after sacrifice. She returns not softened, but she's actually sharpened. Medea, for instance, betrayed and bereft emerges as kind of like this divine avenger firing hand and any mercy left way far behind. And Welch channels this mythic metamorphosis as a bit of an artistic inheritance. To become one of the greats is not just a career ambition, it's an all-fick journey into death's architecture, into an industry and an ideology built to consume women and discard them. And she's singing right from the edge of that abyss stitched back together like ISIS reassembling Osiris at this time for herself. And it's really interesting because she goes on to mention trophies. She says, "Killed every one I'd ever kissed, hung them on the wall like trophies, and it conjures an image of Artemis, the virgin god of the hunt, independent, blood-soaked and feared." And there's also Carly, the Hindu goddess of time and destruction, often depicted wearing a garland of skulls, not trophies of cruelty, but trophies of transformation. And Florence Welch in this song is dangerous not because she harms, but because she survives. Like Medusa, she becomes monstrous only in response to violence. Her gaze is defensive and her power is misread. Her lyrics become a Gorgon's ledger. Each killers a protection. And when she asks, "Do you regret bringing me back to life?" It is less a plea than a warning. Like a whisper of Lilith, the first woman and eternal rebel banished for refusing to submit. Even the line, "I wrote down all my fumbling visions transmitted by a television, hums with an almost prophetic tension. Here, Welch to me, becomes a bit of a serious, speaking in riddles, far too wild to be understood, too precise to be ignored." In myth, as we have seen quite a lot over the course of this podcast, those types of women often maddened, and their truths are completely dismissed unless they are filtered through a man. And one thing that happens a lot in this album is, Welch just completely embraces, madness. She steps into it and owns it completely unafraid. In fact, she sings in this very song. So like a woman to profit from her madness. So she actually just names the trope, before it can claim her. She kind of takes the accusation, before it's thrown at her, and she wears it like arm, or she turns it inside out. These are not myths that define her. They are templates that she reconfigures. And after that, there's a lot of satire, so she says, "And this is one of my favourite lines of any song of all time ever." She says, "It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can." And that to me is far more than industry critique, although it is. It's definitely industry critique. I see that as a bit of spellcraft. It's like Cersei naming the pigs. It's the Enchantress revealing this illusion of masculine genius, stripping away all of that mystique to expose the pure and utter entitlement. It's like a lyrical dagger, and it's so precise. And she goes on to be even more cutting. And precise, she says, "You're my second favourite frontman." And that's just such a tease, isn't it? And it just reveals this like tightrope that we walk as women, especially women in art, but I think it extends to just all women, you know? With fierce but still charming, we have to be brilliant, but still desirable. And she goes on to talk about femininity, where she says, "Two feminine to function, a pile of bodies and a trail of destruction." And in my head, I'm listening to that, and it's kind of summoning the Mayan ads, the wild devotees of Dionysus, whose ecstasy and rage tore men up, limped from them. And I mentioned the banties before, but it also gives banty to me, that Irish deathwala. And all of this is just terrifying because it can't be tamed. And the scream is not chaos, it's catharsis. It's a reclamation. And then at the end, we've got this repeated image of arms outstretched back from the dead, streetlights bursting overhead. And that resonates like crucifixion. But in the hands of Florence Welch, it's a reenchantment. The outstretched arms recall not only Christ, but Bridget, the Celtic goddess of poetry, flame and renewal, whose blessings often came through pain. The burst of light above is no divine spotlight, it is resurrection by way of performance. In this song, Welch stands as martyr and witch, oracle and ultimately, roxter, bearing wounds and wonder in equal measure. And the closing mantra of this song is, "I will let the light in, I will be happy, it will be perfect." And this again, to me, just feels like spell work. And to me, that is a bit like the chance of Julian of Norwich, who is a medieval mystic, and we're going to come back to her in a bit. Because Welch invokes the same stubborn and sacred hope, and it's like a mythic refrain at the end from the mouths of cursed women, who even in ruin, dare to imagine healing. [Music] Now for our next section, we're going to get a little bit witchy. We're going to get witchy, okay? Are you ready witches? Because this bit I'm calling Witches, Wildness and Feminine Exdacy. And I know the previous two sections have only really focused on one song, but I am. We're going to talk about a couple in this bit here, so firstly, I want to talk to you about the song Witch Dance. Now in this song, Florence Welch unspools herself into the wilderness of the feminine subconscious. The song opens with open my legs lie down with death. And that is just a frank, ritualistic surrender to forces beyond comprehension, eros and mortality, mingling in this like ecstatic tension. And it evokes this territory of the wild woman, the witch, the seris, whose sexuality and spirituality refuse to be split is all one. And in the ancient world, the priestess and the prophetess often lay side by side with the dead, seeking visions through altered states. The figure that Welch conjures in this song to me is Ishtar, crawling to the underworld to meet her sister, Oreshkagal. It is. dwelling on the border of life and death in a hut of bones. It's the cunning woman the midwife once branded as a witch for working a little bit too closely with the mysteries of blood. She's echoing the delfic oracle inhaling vapors from the earth to speak truth in riddles. The pithya, whose madness was also holy. And she goes on to sing of Fox's chattering in the night. And it animates the natural world around her. Her desire is beyond reason and her body bleeding, yet she cannot stop. And to me that's a direct echo of folkloric women who dance themselves into ecstatic exhaustion. In this song, she's embodying the archetype of the Mayan ad again. But she's not alone in this song. She also meets some monitors from the bar to Broadway and then turns them away. And reclaims her own monstrosity. She says, "There's nobody more monstrous than me." And that inversion I think is really, really crucial. The folkloric woman has so often been cast as monstrous, as a siren, as a crone, or a banshee. And in this song, Florence doesn't want to tame that. She doesn't want to change that. Again, she embraces it just like she previously embraced the madness. She's embracing the monstrous as well. She's becoming it. And in doing so, she's finding agency. And she joins a long, long lineage of boundary dwellers. Lamiahu devoured children after her own was stolen. And Lilith again, the rebel bride of Eden, the cellkeys and the swan maidens who vanish when caged. Desire beyond reason, she says, is a ruinous thing. And that phrase alone invokes countless mythic warnings about unruly women. We've got Eve, we've got Pandora, we've got Cersei. All these women who are punished not for evil, but for curiosity, for hunger, for wanting. And Welch makes the mythological a little bit political. She says, "I tear off my nightgown and run naked through the town." Once again, this is really evocative of folkloric tales of mad women and saints. And things like possessed brides and mystics, especially ones like Marjorie Kemp, who is probably one of history's most outrageous figures. She was a very, she was an extreme mysticist and involved a lot of public sobbing in an all white, all white wardrobe. And she also wanted to be laid naked on a wheel, taken from town to town and have mud thrown over her. She was very extreme. But what's really cool about her is that she was completely and utterly illiterate. And yet still wrote the first English autobiography. So what we know about her actually comes from her own book. So yeah, you can find that book. And I won't go into too much detail about her today, but I'd love to talk about her a bit, a bit more in-depth at some point. But this is the type of figure that I think is is sort of conjured up in this song and how Florence Welch sings of, you know, tearing off her nightgown and running naked through the town and crying. It's so dramatic. And the lyrical terrain shifts a little bit in the song "Sympathy Magic", where it kind of goes from the wild external motion of witchdans into more of an internal unraveling. She says "Crouched in a ballgown, anxious and ashamed". Which to me puts her in this posture that's like a little bit fairy tale and a little bit post-stardom trauma. You know, she's kind of like a a Cinderella wrecked by the weight of fame and performance. And she says herself, the vague humiliations of fame. But to me these humiliations feel less about external gaze and more about the systemic weight placed on women in the public eye. You need to be beautiful, you need to be good, you need to be worthy. And Florence's response to that is "I do not find worthiness a virtue". And that to me is like a renunciation of not only patriarchal judgment but also of religious morality. She says "It didn't keep me safe like you told me that it would". And there's a lot of this spiritual tension in this song. She says as well, "The only God that I know does not want me on my knees to believe. Instead, arms wide and head high aching". This theology, if you can call it that, is again steeped in feminine mysticism and it is the same tradition that gave voice to Hildegard, of Bingen and Julian of Norwich. The divine is not distant, it's not farfully, it's wind, it's light, it's the sun. She says "Let the chorus console me". Again, that summons this ancient function of the collective voice. And it goes back to what I said earlier about the Greek chorus. It's conscience and witness and it's a reminder that no woman weeps alone. And if we think about witch dance being a bit more of a rageful song and sympathy magic being a more of a aching song. The song "Cracken" seduces. And the sea monster here is not a male fantasy of femininity. It's not a siren, luring sailors to doom. Instead, Florence gives voice to the creature herself. She is the devourer. She's the one whose tentacles crush. "Do I terrify?" she asks. Half-taunting, half-tracking. The Cracken is a folkloric beast that stirs from the deep when ignored, when misjudged, when it's pushed a little bit too far. You didn't see me, just another drunken groupie. So when your hand reached out, I pushed you further down. This song inverts the male gaze and in doing so, she becomes the watcher. I fix you in the gaze of my one unblinking eye. So she's joining this pantheon of Oceanic goddesses and monsters here, Tiamat, the Babylonian chaos dragon. Sedna, the Inuit-seemother betrayed and transfigured. Silla transformed into terror after betrayal. And it's in this song that Welch most directly channels this monstrous feminine idea. And you can read more about that in the works of scholars like Barbara Creed or Marina Warner. But it's this idea that female power, once it escapes patriarchal control, becomes horrifying. Welch here refuses to be slain. She is growing limbs. She's singing loud. She's swallowing ships whole. And yet under all of that, under all of this fury and rage and power, she's still. she's still wounded. She still says, "Do you see me now?" Over and over and over again. And it's just really revealing that beneath the monster's gaze is just the girl who wasn't seen or heard. In the wake of her miscarriage, Welch spoke about how Cyril felt to perform through physical agony to feel something moving inside her that was not a child but a threat. I never knew my killer would be coming from within. Is a line from the song King, which is on the previous album. And it's really interesting that she wrote that song before any of this had happened. But here it's sort of resurfaced. It's not directly but in essence, the cracking becomes the grief that went unseen, the pain that bloated underneath the surface until it broke. So if you take all of these songs together, they are kind of the feminine archetypes, right? You've got the witch, the mystic, and the monster. Each woman is inextremist. Each one challenges the binaries of good and evil, sane and mad, beautiful and grotesque. So Florence Welch doesn't just invoke folklore, and this is pretty clear to see. She inhabits it, she reshapes it, she lets it scream. And this next section is called Blood and the Body. We're going to talk a little bit about the female body and how that's represented across the album. And I'm going to start with the song Perfume and Milk. Because here Florence reconfigures the physicality of the female body into a site of transformation and sacredness. And this song begins in [BLANK_AUDIO] of a domestic tone really, it's kind of like observational, perfuming milk, the body and bloom. And that sounds quite nice, but this is not a soft ode to femininity, it's a slow immersion into decay and regeneration. The whole song is just pulsing with an earthy materiality. She speaks of rot, worms, herbs, soil. And these all just echo folk rituals, trying to fertility and the cyclical death of the seasons. Think about when we spoke on our corn mother episode, you know, there's a Demeter grieving percepony, but is also a contemporary woman grieving a body that has failed to carry life to term. And Florence has spoken really openly about what happened back in 2023. And in an interview with the Guardian, she recalls returning to the stage just 10 days after emergency surgery, bleeding internally during the performance. She said, "I had a Coke cans worth of blood in my abdomen." And I think, perfume and milk carries this duality in every single verse, you know? It's the bodily abundance of blooming and lactating and sort of softening into that maternal instinct. Completely juxtaposed by the rot, the ruin, the flurries of frost that return too soon. And again, that creates this ancient tension, because in mythology and folklore across all cultures, the female body is sacred, and it's also fit. We see that, you know, the old duality bingo bell that we've been ringing for like over a year now. The female body is the site of divine creation in so many mythologies, but it is also the site of monstrous danger. And not only in mythology and folklore, but think about every single episode when we get to the rise of Christianity, when we get to that medieval period. And women fearing becomes at an all-time high. The female body has always been a horrific, horrific danger. So think about Lilith, the first woman in Jewish folklore who refused to submit to Adam and she was just recast as a demon of child death, or Hera. She was the protectoress of women and the destroyer of the unfaithful. And I think there's a really good line in this song where she sings "Am I a woman now?" And I think that's really interesting, because this question is posed not in a sentimental way, but in grief. And that grief takes on a more ritualistic form in the song "You Can Have It All," where, "Forrent sings, I sit in the salt water, call in a vision of my daughter." And that gives the imagery of a private sales. "I like to candle place my grief upon the altar. Here she becomes both mother and mourner, which and woman. The home becomes a shrine. She arranges furniture like casting bones, trying to regain any kind of control in a world she knows cannot be controlled. She buries her scream in the garden, and from it grows a red tree. That is a really startling image that feels lifted from a Celtic myth or a grim fairy tale. For instance, in Irish legend, the red tree or the Rowan tree is both protection and omen, in Florence's mythology in this song. It's the thing born of pain, glowing unnaturally with jagged leaves. It's alchemy. The scream that she's buried in the soil hasn't disappeared, hasn't gone away. It's transformed. It's got roots. It housed in the wind. And just to look back to sympathy magic for a second. Because that song also enters the body, but from a bit of a different angle, that is more from the stance of recovery. And she sings of scars that fade, but still pull inside. And that's a bit of a poetic rendering of trauma memory and somatic haunting. It's interesting because in many old tales, which is not born, which is they are made through grief and disillusionment, through a big suffering that the world can't explain, and thus condemns as unnatural. So this ball gown and glamour and divine femininity is crumbled and what rises from it is an innocence, its power. And it's in Perfume and Milk, where we have the most direct references to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. Mostly in the line, all shall be well, all shall be well, which was a refrain that echoes probably one of the most enduring lines in Christian mystical writing. Belonging to Julian of Norwich and she was a 14th century anchoress who during a near death experience received a vision. And this vision was so radical in its tenderness that it would survive plagues, inquisitions and centuries of silence. She wrote, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." And that phrase is not born out of Navertae, but of confrontation with death, pain and spiritual disorientation. And Florence's own invocation of it doesn't come clean. It's tangled in rot and ritual and pain, as I said earlier, Perfume and Milk, the body and bloom, the rot and the ruin, the earth and the worms. So the transcendence doesn't rise above the body, it's within it. And Julian too refused to separate body from spirit. She wrote, "Of God as mother of divine milk and wombs of the holy found in flesh and blood." And Florence does a great job of modernising this, you know? She takes this maternal mysticism and says that sacredness is not found in purity, but in decay and seasons and hormonal shifts and grief. And there's a moment in this song that I love. And it's really startling, it's ordinaryness to us, to you and I. And she says, "Downloading revelations of divine love on my phone, trying to read, but getting distracted." It's like she's trying to say, "I'm trying to heal the ancient way, you know, I'm trying to do things like they did back in the day, but I'm just a girl, I'm just a modern girl." She's holding Julian's text in her hand on her phone. She's midscroll, midheartbreak, trying to find anchoring in something that doesn't flatten her grief into productivity. Julian is a bit less of a theologian here and more of a companion. She's another woman who's looked deaf, straight in the eye and come back with words, not answers. And just like Julian, Florence builds her theology from longing. She says, "I am changing, becoming something else, a creature of longing, tending only to myself." And that is the effective mysticism of women across time. Faith, not expressed through doctrine, but through ache and milk, through holding things in your body that you didn't ask for and still trying to love that body. So to me, perfume and milk isn't just a song, it's like a modern devotional, you know, it's a mystic's prayer, whispered from the edge of town in a house in the woods, cradling an iPhone and wearing a loral crown. You know, it's such a mashup of time periods and yeah, it's not about certainty, it's about just surviving long enough to tell your story and finding holiness is not just in the heavens, but you know, it's in the worms too. It's in the worms in the ground, guys. It's in the worms in the ground. And in this, in this song, there is descent, there's a collapse and then there's crawling back up through the underworld a bit like in one of the creeds. And she says she goes on a pilgrimage to wherever you are. And that pilgrimage is kind of literal and metaphorical. She gets in the car and she drives aching, a woman bleeding into myth. And blood is not just a presence here, it's a portal, it's in the lineage of menstrual magic and fertility goddesses and offerings. And the ancient body knew that it's not holy because it's beautiful, but because it is capable of holding contradiction and Florence herself once told Rolling Stone that there's a feeling of dying a little bit every time I make a record. And that tension most definitely lives in these songs, you know, it's breathless and reborn. And perhaps most poignantly in the song and love, the violence of embodiment, finds like a sacred stillness. She says, "Love was not what I thought it was. It's not sweeping passion." She says, "It's more like surrendering to something, more like resting than running. The witch has survived her trial, the banshee has fallen silent, the bloodstrider, and the earth still turns." Now I'm going to talk a little bit about domestic myths and curstromancers and just everyday folklore. Because if much of everybody scream conjures grand mythic rituals and elemental forces, songs like Buckle and Music by Men bring us crashing back into the domestic, which is not no less of a haunted place. Because these are the songs of hitch-entable grief of writing out text messages that you never send. Weaponizing silence of the tragic, tragic Apple Notes app of heroines in therapy sessions and in the shadowed corners of modern romance. And yet they are steeped in folklore, the folklore of gendered longing of archetypal betrayals of the kind of love that resembles a curse more than a blessing. In Buckle, Welch offers what's perhaps the most biting emotional portrait of the whole album. A woman unraveled by desire that she knows will destroy her. I made a thousand people love me. Now I'm all alone. She sings. And to me that reimagines something like the siren as an exhausted abandoned performer. She's been worshipped from afar but she is alone in her own wreckage. And the man that she desires is casual and cruel and withholding and he becomes a bit of a trickster god, maybe like a Loki figure or a shapeshifter. Someone who arrives only to disappear. And she says, "When he enters the room, I just buckle. My resolution in tatters. It's like a love spell gone wrong, or a spell cast by patriarchy itself, one that teaches women to desire the unreachable or the emotionally vacant. In fairy tales, the woman waits by the window. In Florence as well, she's blocking a number that won't stop echoing in her dreams, like a modern witchcraft where the the ritual is her, the text thread and the altar is the bed that she's left crying in. And in the chorus, she says, "Keep me a secret. Choose someone else. I'm still hanging off the buckle on your belt." The buckle is like a talisman, like a cursed object. This isn't just a love song, it's an invocation of binding, like an old Scottish charm to ensnare a lover. But here the spell traps, the speaker herself. The lover becomes a devourer, a dark force. We could just as easily be in the myth of Hades and Persephone, but stripped of glamour and dragged out into a night out in Soho. And if buckle explores the claustrophobia of longing, music by men turns that yearning outward into more of a cultural critique. This song is sharply funny and bitterly sad, really, dissecting the emotional asymmetry between the male and the female artistic voice. Let me put out a record and have it not ruin my life. She pleads, capturing not only the burdens of being a female artist, but also the emotional labour of simply trying to love a man who won't look up from his phone on the way to couples therapy. And in this song, Welch calls out the myth of effortless masculinity in music, the indie bro who can wear a t-shirt and be a genius. And remember back on one of the greats where she said, "It must be nice to be a man and make boring music just because you can." This sentiment echoes very much through this song as well because this track references a relationship strained, not by hatred, but by ego, by silence, by fragility, the kind of slow, drip, suffering women have been enduring in relationships for centuries. It's not a Gothic tale, it's a very much domestic one. And yet it draws its power from folklore just the same. Because there's a long literary history of women attempting to love men who cannot hold their weight in the story. Consider Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, all the wives of silky husbands who always return to the sea. Welch taps into this with lines like, "I fall in love with everyone I meet for 10 minutes at least." And to me that evokes a kind of cursed romantic archetype, the woman faded to love but never to be truly met. And these two songs might seem smaller in scope compared to the mythic conjurings elsewhere in the album. But they're no less significant, in fact they're necessary. Because they remind us that folklore doesn't only live in the forest or in ancient ruins. It lives in your phone. It's in your WhatsApp messages. It's probably in your Snapchat with a filter on. It lives in all of the sleepless nights, in all of the endless scrolling on dating apps, in the women who still can't stop hoping, in the man who's never asked to change, in that ache that repeats lifetime after lifetime. Florence herself, reflecting on her career once said, "There's always this push and pull between destruction and beauty. It's where the power is, in the tension. In buckle and music by men, that tension plays out not as a scream on stage, but as a quiet devastation behind closed doors. These are songs of hauntings. Not by ghosts, but by unmet needs. Not by ancient gods, but by modern indifference, and yet they feel no less sacred. And through their vulnerability and fury, they become spells of their own, whispered in bathrooms and blasted in headphones. As a folklore of womanhood after all, has always been a patchwork of size and screams and unsent messages. And even the smallest heartbreak is mythic. And we're getting to the final stages of the album now. And I'm going to do a bit that I am dubbing myth madness and the unknown. I'm trying to think of catchy names for all of these different sections. I don't really need to, but I'm just doing it for funsies. But anyway, as we descend into the final part of the album, we have drink deep and the old religion, and they guide us into a space of liminality, the haunted threshold between worlds, between waking and dreaming. These are the songs to me that feel closest to to spell work. And they're very much saturated with archetype. They evoke the deep myths that have always surrounded women's bodies, blood and longing, tales of theories in which isn't forests of madness and sacred knowledge. Drink Deep is probably the most overtly folkloric piece on the record, drawing from fairy law with unsettling precision. The speaker descends through Bramble and Briar under Ash and Oak, which are very classic entrances to the underworld in British and Celtic folklore. And there she finds the hidden folk, a clear echo of the fairy or fair folk who have very long populated stories of dangerous beauty and temporal dislocation. In traditional tales, time spent in the fairy realm is often disorienting. One night may equal 100 years. In Florence's lyrics, what I thought was a night was a thousand years, and what I thought was a sip was a thousand tears. The Encharmament there is both seductive and horrifying, which I think all true encharmans are. And that mirrors the tradition of the changing myth of women who vanish into the other world and return altered or just don't return at all. But Drink Deep kind of complicates that narrative because the singer realises she is drinking not only from the fairy realm, but from herself. And she says I drink of myself. It's a radical act of self devouring. It's an image of strong links to feminist psychoanalysis and to myths of transformation and sacrifice. The cup, a vessel of both communion and consumption is a palpable symbol of feminine mysticism. Here, the woman is the witch and the spell, and the chalice, all ones. And then we move on to the old religion which is a title already weighted with a cult resonance. And this track has a as a primal rhythmic energy echoing the ritualistic repetition of ancient rites. The old religion often refers to pre-Christian paganism, a term used in modern wicker and witchcraft to describe a lost matrophocal spirituality grounded in nature and cycles and embodied ecstasy. And Welch gets into this lineage directly, invoking some animal instinct starting up again. And a desire for freedom from the body, freedom from the pain. The song's reference to lightning strikes, fallen trees, crawling on hands and knees, all conjured the image of the possessed prophetess. A woman overcome by divine fury. This is Julian of Norage again. And Welch described everybody scream as an album born from trauma written in the wake of her near death experience. And I think this song might be the most honest confrontation with that spiritual rupture. I'm afraid, don't let it find me she sings. And yet it's already inside her, the storm is not external, it is the body and what's been done to it. In traditional tales, women who spoke too much and bled too really who saw visions were called mad or witches. And in the old religion, Welch reclaims that accusation. She sings of being wound so tightly, I hardly even breathe, describing the pressure that is both psychic and societal. The song closes in ecstatic repetition, invoking the ritual circle, the charm, the trans. We're not in the world of narrative anymore, we are in the world of initiation. So these two songs together form maybe a bit of a dissent myth. Again, like Inanna's journey to the underworld, or Persephone's seasonal imprisonment, but unlike those myths, there's no clear return. The wisdom that Florence brings back is not resolution, but transformation. And everybody's scream doesn't promise healing in a neat, linear arc, which I think is starkly realistic. And instead it offers flashes of insight from the darkness, little lanterns in a fog, as Welch once described her creative process. These songs remind us that mythology is not always about triumph, sometimes it's just about surviving, or just about naming the monster, and finding out that it is you. In both drink deep and the old religion, the monstrous and the divine blur. These are songs of sacred unraveling, not tidy, mythologies but their wild, their bleeding. And through their invocation of the fairy realms of pagan rituals and the madness of women who feel too much, they offer a final spell, not to heal, but to witness, to scream, and to survive. For this final section of today's episode about Florence and the Machines, everybody scream, I'm gonna talk a little bit about closure, and a little bit about the soft myth of love. Because if drink deep and the old religion put us in a trance-like state and very much spiritually rapturous, then the album's closing songs, you can have it all and and love. Emerge not with clarity, but with very much softened and altered vision. These songs aren't triumphant recoveries or clear conclusions, but they're a little bit more murky. They are more fragile and they bring a choir to kind of magic. And these ones are a little less about the scream itself, which we've spoken about lot in the album so far. These ones are more about the lull, the kind of hush that follows the scream, not the spell itself, but what it leaves behind. You can have it all is probably one of the most emotionally complex pieces on the album, and it opens with Florence seated in the saltwater. And this is a timeless image of purification of sorrow and rebirth. In many mythic traditions, saltwater, the sea, the womb, the amniotic tide, is the sight of both creation and mourning. It's the domain of Yamaja, the Europa, a reshaw of the sea and motherhood, known to be both nurturing and ferocious. Yamaja carries the grief of lost children in her tidal rhythms, weeping saltwater tears, her maternal power rooted in both protection and loss. And Yamaja is especially venerated by women seeking healing after loss. So she's usually invoked during rituals of protection and fertility and mourning. So already we have a very explicit link between this Afro-Caribbean Arexia and Florence Welch's personal life and the context surrounding this album and this song. So in this song Florence sits in the saltwater and calls in a vision of a daughter. And to me that is invoking a gesture that feels very much directly aligned with Yamaja's domain. Because this is a song about mother loss and it's not necessarily the loss of one's mother but it's the loss of motherhood itself. It's the grief of a pregnancy that ends in trauma rather than in a birth. And the saltwater becomes potentially both ocean and amniotic fluid. It's a place of return and the buried scream that grows into a tree mirrors the rituals in which grief and pain are given to Yamaja in votive offering. So things like candles and flowers and songs tears cast into the water. So by echoing Yamaja's symbolic world. Florence transforms her private loss into something a bit more archetypal. The mourning mother who doesn't weep in silence but instead reshapes the landscape with her sorrow. And in doing so she becomes not just a woman grieving but a vessel for a long line of feminine power that knows how to survive even the most unspeakable and unbearable losses. And if we go back to the line calling in a vision of my daughter that's acknowledging the ghost of a child who never came into the world. Because this is a very deeply personal allergy but its language is very much rooted in the ritualistic. It's almost sacrificial. She says lighter candle place my grief upon the altar and grief here becomes the votive and offering to something a lot larger and unknowable. And to me that goes back a little bit to Mekkeka Swatol in Aztec mythology because she presided over ritual mourning not with cold attachment but with ceremony reminding us that death too does belong to women. And the phrase you can have at all is both a lament and a taunt. It echoes the impossible expectations placed on women to bleed and bear and perform and grieve but do it all gracefully. It reminds me of the speech at the end of Barbie, the bumping movie. But it's true. In mythology we often find women who are asked to give everything. Eurydicee, Ephigna, Sychee and they still remain silent and Florence refuses silence even in this very much gentler song. She gives her grief, colour and space and shape. Tree grows tall, can't cut me down she warns and that's a line that could very easily sit alongside the oldest folklore of which women in dry ads rooted very deeply in the earth. And then we go to the final track of the album and love and that's just a quiet revelation. It's a bit of a coda really. It's not a conventional love song. It pretty much subverts almost every expectation of a love song. Love was not what I thought it was she admits. In a tone I guess it feels closer to to or you know? Like this wow like love is not how I thought it was going to feel. And they compare love to an animal crawling deep into a cave. Not this massive sweeping romance but just quiet just a quiet surrender. And that imagery belongs to the wild again the den that burrow the instinctive pull inward. And there's not any mythic heroes aren't here there's only peace and even that comes hesitantly. And there's a line repeated and repeated pieces coming and that is a really soft incantation spoken again and again until it becomes believable. And that I feel is a is a lot closer to the medieval mystics that Florence has long admired who we've spoken about already like Julian of Norwich or shall we well and all shall we well and all manner of things shall be well even in the midst of illness and fear. And love might be the most stripped back moment on the album but I think that simplicity is really deceptive because what it offers is a really rare kind of feminine mythos not the maiden or the mother or the crown archetyped but something that exists between those things it's a woman who has crawled through grief and vision and and rage and had a huge amount of trauma who is now simply trying to rest. Because there's no big mythology here you know it's not dragons or crackens or gods and monstrous womenists it's it's letting go the mythology here is just letting go and surviving. So this album which is huge in sound in scape in range of themes that includes references to massively important mythological figures and not with fireworks not with noise but with a really gentle echo of something passed through not resolved just laid out and witnessed you know this is Florence Lane it all on the line and we've witnessed it nothing's been resolved nothing has fully over because the ripple effect of what has happened is is going to be a lifelong thing and I think that in itself is is myth you know that is folklore because every single great folklore tale every single mythology tale reminds us that the true the true magic of story and the true magic of folklore is in the telling think about this podcast think about the way that we talk about how things change through time and how things are presented differently and different perspectives come to light over time we look at things through the lens of ancient cultures we look at how the lens of Christianity affects the way that we see things the way things are told the way that different mythological women are presented. And we look at the lens of feminism, the rise of feminism. How has that changed things? How has that adapted these stories? And it is in the telling. The magic is in the telling. As everybody's scream draws to a close, what lingers for me? Isn't the echo of the songs and of Florence Welch's voice? But it's the resonance of something a lot older, something mythic and ancestral. Because the scream in everybody's scream doesn't exist in isolation. It travels through time, through space, through cultures and continents, through the mouths of women who were never meant to be silent, women who've taken pain and trauma and experience and turns that into ritual, and turn ritual into music. And as we've spoken about throughout this episode, Florence doesn't stand alone. She very much accesses a long, long line of women who have this feminine power that's equal parts, wisdom, equal parts, wild. The kind that refuses to be domesticated or forgotten. Florence very much sings in a lineage. And we can hear that. If you look at the mysticism of Stephen X, who, like Welch, wears lace and trauma-like spell work, she danced barefoot on the stage and sang of Riannon, a witch and a goddess, a woman who can't be held down. And you hear it again in people like Kate Bush, whose voice spirals like smoke, and weaves domesticity and wildness into a dreamscape. In more recent times, Anna von Hauswolf, who I'd really recommend you guys go to listen to if you like this sort of stuff. Because in her music, we hear the sacred turned terrifying. There's organ drones and operatic wayals and ghosts and all kinds of stuff going on there. There is definitely a new kind of generation of what I would call witchy spellcasting music. And there's loads of differing perspectives of this. You've got artists like Ethel Cain, with a more southern Gothic altar of blood longing and divine ruin, building a more modern mythology from the bones of an evangelical American south. Bands like the last inner party, very theatrical, bit more high fem, and they flirt with the divine and the demonic. It's a bit more opulent, but with an edge. And all of these women, like Florence, and music, they are making worlds their world building. That is folklore, that is mythology, that is it happening in real time, it's sacred, and it's fractured and it's oozing with symbol. And they all remind us that the feminine has always been a site of contradiction. That is something that we talk about all the time in this podcast. Women are monstrous and maternal, desirable, but dangerous. All at the same time, and it's through embracing this, this, duality, this complexity, and stepping into all of the archetypes of siren and witch and martyr mother monster, that these artists transgress the roles written for them. So everybody's scream is in this sense not just an album, it is a modern myth cycle spiraling through the wreckage of a body and a world searching for ritual for resurrection and release. Florence doesn't offer answers really, at all she just offers spells, she offers grief, shaped into gardens, and screams buried as seeds in the garden, a wild wisdom of things that bleed, but still bloom. And I think to me, the enduring message that I take away from this album is that pain can be sacred, that the person or when sung with mythic edge becomes almost political and art when you scream in from that place of being wounded can be a form of survival. So that is my, that's my hot take, a very long hot take on the album, everybody's scream by Florence and the machine. And I was looking through, because I was like, I'd really like to ask you guys a question. Try and start asking you all questions at the end of this podcast just to get you thinking, you know. So I look through all the lyrics and I wrote a few down, but what I'm gonna ask you is I'm gonna go back to the opening track where she says, unfurling, becoming my full size. What would it mean to you to become your full size? And Florence Welch says she does that on stage, she can be herself, she can be the full Florence. But what does it mean for you? Firstly, where do you feel like you can become your full size? And secondly, what does that mean? What does that look like? Let me know in the comments in my TikTok comments, which I'm gonna get better at using my TikTok account. Okay, I just, the reason I do a podcast, because I don't do the whole face thing, you know, but I'll do better. Or you can join the discord. Thanks for everything a down below, but I really want to know. I really want to know what that means to you. Thank you so much for joining me on this slightly different episode of Ladies of Law. I really, really hope you've enjoyed it. If you have any want me to do some more music related explorations, let me know. You can do that in the comments. If your platform allows, or on my social media or in the discord, like I just said. In the show notes, you can find all of the links to sources that I used for this episode. There's lots of cool stuff in there. I'm using YouTube channels about Afrocaroby in mythology, folklore, really cool stuff. So go and check those out. Thank you once again, and I'll be back next time to Unravel another thread in the rich tapestry of women in mythology and folklore. [end of transcript]