May 13, 2023 • 36 mins
On a mundane level, a cauldron is nothing more than a great cooking pot, but it takes on supernatural dimensions in various myths and legends. In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history of cauldrons and their links to tales of witchcraft, rebirth and the mandate of heaven. (originally published 05/26/2022)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. It's vault time.
This is an older episode of the show that originally
published May twenty six, twenty twenty two, and it's part
two of our series on the Cauldron. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our series about cauldrons.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That's right. In the last episode, we talked about cauldrons
and mostly an introduction into the idea of the cauldron
is both a mundane tool for heating water and making soup,
but also getting in a little bit to the idea that, okay,
this is something that also ends up taking on sacred
and supernatural characteristics in various traditions. But for the most
(01:06):
part we talked about soup technology, which in and of
itself is pretty fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, we pondered the foggy distant prehistory of salmon soups
in Japan.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, so a lot of this episode is going to
look at the cauldron in Chinese traditions and in Chinese history,
in mythology. So in Chinese culture and history, the ancient
cauldron is known as the ding, a cooking cauldron with
two looped handles and three or four legs. The three
(01:43):
legged ones tend to have a more of a circular pot,
while the four legged ones tend to have a rectangular
pot and appear more like what we might think of
as a chest or something in Western traditions. It's maybe
a little less recognizable as a cauldron if you're basing
your expectations on cauldrons in Western traditions.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it made me wonder, like, wait a minute, why
are pots always round? I mean, they don't have to be.
So this is a pot that's got corners and it
looks like something that link would pop open and pull
a treasure out of. Oh it's the hook shot.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah. Well, I mean these are ultimately artifacts that have
a number of supernatural associations with them. But in terms
of the actual Chinese cauldrons or ding that have survived.
For instance, one example that came up in my research
is from the Warring States period around This is from
(02:40):
around four to thirty three BCE found in the Leodoun
Tombs in central China. Upon its discovery, it still had
ox bones inside it and soot on its base, meaning
that it was apparently used for cooking, perhaps as part
of a funerary feast. It was made of bronze and
also include did lifting hooks and a ladle lifting hooks?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Does that mean something you'd like put some hooks in
to move it out of the fire?
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Correct in this In this case, now, when we get
into later discussions of cauldrons, you also get into the
idea of flesh hooks for your cauldron. They have to
do with, obviously, for the manipulating a flesh, you know,
some sort of meat that you're cooking inside of said cauldron.
But these I believe, Yeah, we're just to move the
cauldron around while it was heated.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Okay, So a cauldron, we know, can be used for
the chores that sustain everyday life, cooking food and washing
and so forth. But in Chinese traditions, cauldrons have a
much more culturally and religiously charged significance. Even though they
could be used for those same mundane tasks, they might
also decide the very fate of your existence.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
That's right. And I do want to stress that a
lot of this will also end up lining up with
traditions in the West as well. That will get into
much later. But yeah, this thing that for all intents
and purposes is about heating water for soup or maybe
for laundry or something like that ends up taking on
greater significance. So in Chinese tradition, the ding became associated
(04:15):
with power and land ownership, and it was used not
only for food production and also for storage. It was
also used to make sacrifices to the gods.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And the idea of gods here might also well include
ancestral spirits, right, the sort of a blurring of the
distinction there that, like appeasing one's ancestors, was believed to
play a role in determining your fortune right now.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
One of the sources I was looking to for this
episode is an article titled Visions of Hell in Asia
from twenty eighteen published in the Journal of the Oriental
Society of Australia by scholar Paul Morablai, and in it
the author rites quote in ancient China, the cauldron was
the alchemical recipient par excellence for the sacrifices animals and
(05:05):
humans required in order to transmute them into immortal creatures
when mixed with certain minerals and metals. Now, I want
to stress that he's talking very broadly here. This is
not to imply that all of these various cauldrons, including
the specific one I just mentioned, was used for anything
like human sacrifice. But of course, human sacrifice is something
that one encounters in the ancient traditions of every human culture.
(05:30):
Just about so. But yeah, this idea that we touched
on very briefly in the last episode, that what is
a cauldron, what is a cooking pot? But other than
something that transforms one thing into another state.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Right, so, it might transform say a tough piece of
game meat into a nutritious broth and a much more
tender piece of meat. And it might transform various ingredients
living and dead into a bunch of fumes, a pillar
of smoke, or a burnt offering that would be seen
as pleasing to the gods or to one's ancestors.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Correct. Now, when it comes to the sacred thing, there is,
like we mentioned earlier, it also has this prestige with it.
It signifies power, and it can also signify divine right
of rule. And in this there's no greater example than
the nine cauldrons of You the Great. Now we've discussed
(06:26):
You the Great before and stuff to blow your mind.
See as the legendary ruler of the Shia dynasty of
the second and third millennium BCE. Born from the belly
of his father's corpse, he's said to have quelled the
Great floods and established dynastic rule in China. His control
of the flood is attributed differently in different tales, but
(06:49):
I think we can summarize it as entailing the defeat
of monsters, the possible Promethean theft of the sacred self,
renewing soil from the gods, the help of various gods,
and also the use of damn and irrigation technology. So
he's you know, he's a culture bearer. And oh, he's
also said to have measured the earth, and in some
(07:11):
accounts he stands eight feet tall. But the other feet
attributed to You the Great is that he also cast
the nine cauldrons upon rising to power, as yang An
and Turner discussed in the Handbook of Chinese Mythology quote,
those cauldrons had the divine function to teach people to
distinguish between faithfulness and treachery, and to keep evils and
(07:32):
demons from harming people. So they were treated as national treasures.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And I believe it's that this story is related to
the idea that the cauldron itself is a sort of
symbol of power, both in a literal and metaphorical sense,
like that in the literal sense that you would have
to be a rich and powerful person in ancient China
to own one or more of these cauldrons, and also
that the cauldron was kind of like a symbol of
(07:59):
some one's power or political dominance.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Right, right, And in this case, there are nine of them,
because there were nine cauldrons for the nine provinces, but
then nine also had cosmologically important connections as well. There's
also this tradition of saying that the nine cauldrons sometimes
are scattered and lost, and it was said that whoever
(08:24):
wished to claim imperial power and rain by the mandate
of heaven would need to collect all these nine cauldrons.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, I think I recall reading somewhere that there's an
expression means something like seeking after cauldrons, or something that
means like ambition for power.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah yeah. There are a number of different sayings in
Chinese tradition that allude to cauldrons and make use of
the motif. In the book Chinese Mythology and Introduction and
Burial ads that while you the Great forge the vessels,
they are said to have been cast by feeling the Dragon,
god of wind. The cauldrons could and would change weight
(09:03):
and size, or even vanish completely or reappear at will
quote according to the virtue or decadence of the dynasty
possessing them. Whoa, so yeah, this gets pretty interesting. For instance,
if a dynasty is virtuous, then the cauldrons would become
so massive that they would be almost impossible to lift.
It was said that when the child people over through
(09:25):
the shung, the child's virtue was such that it took
ninety thousand men to lift a single cauldron. But then
when the chin overthrew the chow, one of the cauldrons
just like immediately flew into the river.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Oh so the inanimate objects have a will of their own.
It's almost like the one ring, except that yes, way,
the cauldrons are virtuous, whereas the ring is wicked.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah yeah, it's also specifically noted that it is the
weight that is important, not the size. So you might
have a dynasty that is corrupt, and the cauldrons might
look enormous, but they weigh little, and thus signifying that
you know that they are morally impoverished. But then the
(10:07):
opposite is also true. You might have a noble dynasty
and the cauldrons are very small, but it would take
like ninety thousand men to lift a single one of them,
because such is the virtue of these rulers.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Oh, that resonates in a very pleasing way, because you imagine,
like an evil dynasty having these giant cauldrons that are
easily blown over by the wind. Yeah, big surface area
and very little mass.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think it works on so many levels.
They are said to have been cast in iron and
also said to be illustrated with images of the gods
and forged from metals offered up by the nine regional stewards.
There is also discussion of them being important to distinguish
malign creatures, which are sometimes translated as goblins and trolls.
(10:51):
So I'm not sure if that's meant to mean that
the cauldrons also depicted these quote unquote adverse beings, but
because it doesn't seem like it's explicitly stated. But at
the very least they had images of gods on them. Now,
as for the use of cauldrons and sacrifice, an burl
includes a wonderful passage from the ancient text the Book
(11:13):
of Songs or the Classic of Poetry. The passage in
question is celebrating the agricultural culture hero and god Huji
aka Lord Millet. Here is part of it, in translation,
of course, describing the sacrifice, our sacrifice. What is it
like some pound, some baiale, some sift, some tread. We
(11:36):
wash it soaking, soaking wet. We steam it, piping, piping hot.
Then we plan with thoughtful care, gathering southern wood, offering
rich fat. We take a ram to make the wayside sacrifice,
roasting and broiling to usher in the new year. The
bronze pots filled the brim, the bronze pots and cauldrons.
(11:57):
As soon as there aroma rises up odd on high.
Enjoys it with pleasure. The rich fragrance is right and proper.
For Hoji inaugurated the sacrifice with no fault or blemish.
His people have continued it to the present day.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I like the line on here about as the aroma
rises up, God on high enjoys it with pleasure. Because
that that is not unique to this poem or to
Chinese religious traditions. That it's a it's a common feature
of many religions mentioning God enjoying God, or God's enjoying
the smell of a burning sacrifice.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of this that is
that is ultimately a universal. It's fascinating. Now for the
second episode in a row, I'm going to also cite
a children's book. This is another children's book. This one
(12:54):
is titled Two of Everything, and Chinese American author Lily
toy Hong wrote this It's fun, and she credits it
is being based on a Chinese folk tale, and I'd
love to read another telling of it, but I haven't
been able to find one. I'm sure it's out there.
But it does involve some sort of a magical pot
or cauldron in this story, which is which has some
(13:18):
some wonderful illustrations an elderly couple in China. And this
has a historical setting, by the way, so it's not
I don't think it's supposed to be like modern China.
But this elderly couple, they happen to happen upon this
pot or this cauldron, and they quickly find out that
anything you drop or place inside the cauldron comes out duplicated.
So you can imagine how this story goes. You know, food,
(13:41):
gold gets duplicated, and finally somebody's going to fall in
that cauldron. The old man falls in the cauldron, and
now there are two old men. So the story ultimately
ends on a happy note, with the couple deciding, Okay,
we're going to put the pot away. We're not going
to use it unless we absolutely have to. But by
this point they're living side by side with their own
doppelgangers who have a replica of everything that they have.
(14:05):
So I was looking around to try and find another
version of this story and I was not able to.
But in the process, I found another story that includes
cauldron's as a key plot point that I think will
transition into something else we're going to talk about in
a bit. It's a wonderful little story called the Wizard's Lesson.
This story appeared in the book Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies,
(14:29):
edited and translated by Moss Roberts, a professor of East
Asian Studies at NYU. The original title is Tuzu Chun
and it is included in the Suswan Kwi Lu, an
early ninth century CE collection compiled by Li Fu Yin,
though there seemed to be some disagreements on the exact
(14:50):
date of when this original text was published or written.
This story is awesome, yeah, I think at times per play.
I've seen some online like some sort of blog style
discussions where people are like, what is this about? But
it has some wonderful wizardry in it. So basically the
(15:10):
story goes like this. We have this character too, Zuchun,
and he's a scoundrel. Basically, he's spent all his money,
He's burned all his friends and family members, you know,
borrowing money and so forth. So he finds himself on
the street with nothing, and then up comes an old
man and ask him, hey, look there, buddy, how much
money would it take to set you right? Like how
(15:32):
many strands of coins will it take? And tuzu Chun
names a sum and the old man just kind of scoffs,
and he's like, oh, you should probably go higher than that,
and he gives him another sum, and the old man agrees,
and he gives him enough cash on the spot for
a night's rest somewhere and says, meet me tomorrow in
the market and I'll give you the full amount. So
(15:53):
this goes exactly as promised, and the next day he
receives his first millions from the old man. Like it's
it's a true fortune, enough for him to have a
real proper start at rebuilding everything in his life, and
then some. But you can imagine what happens next. He
immediately blows it all on a lavish lifestyle, and before
(16:13):
long he's back on the street again. Then here comes
the old man approaches him again, and this basically the
same thing happens once more, only this time he squanders
an even greater fortune. The third time, however, the old
man warns him that if an even greater fortune won't
do the trick this time, then there's clearly no helping him.
(16:33):
So finally Tuzu Chun has a change of heart. He
finally realizes, Okay, this old man has been so kind
and patient with me and just overly generous, and I've
done nothing for him. He has this change of heart
and realizes that he shouldn't be spending this all on himself.
He should try and do some good in the world.
And he tells the old Man that he is going
(16:56):
to do this. He's going to go help the widows
and the orphans, he's going to make men's with family members,
and then at the end he's going to meet up
with the old man wants more and do right by
him as well.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Oh okay, so you might expect this to be the
end of the story. He's learned his lesson.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
But no, it keeps going and I I, you know,
this might be a situation where you have sort of
combined stories, you know, to become one at some point.
But what happens next is the old man he he
you know, he goes out in the world, he does
all the things he's going to do, and then he
meets up with the old Man again. The old Man
takes him up to the mountain to a splendid residence
(17:32):
and inside here's an alchemist furnace, guarded by a white
tiger and a black dragon. It's written that jade white
fairy women stand by. And the old man is no
longer dressed like the old man that he met in
the market. Those those three times. No, now he's dressed
in yellow and scarlet robes. He's dressed as a dallist wizard.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Oh so immediately at this point, I'm like picturing him
as played by Chinying Lamb from the Mister Vam movies.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, yeah, that would be a wonderful stern performance of
this character. So at this point, he presents tuzoo Chone
with a beaker of wine and three white pills. He
tells him to take the pills, and no matter what happens,
no matter what he sees and the visions that are
about to hit him, he must not speak. Okay, I'm
(18:23):
gonna read a quote from the story here. Take care
not to speak. The wizard cautioned, be it a revered spirit,
vicious ghost, demon of hell, wild beast, hell itself, or
even your own closest relatives, bound and tormented in a
thousand ways, nothing you see is truly real. It is
essential that you neither speak nor make any movement. Remain
(18:43):
calm and fearless, and you shall come to no harm.
Never forget what I have said. With that, the wizard departed.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Okay, so none of it's going to be real as
long as you keep your mouth shut, You'll be all.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Right, right, And then the visions begin to hit him.
So it's it's just kind of like one way of
the visions after the other. So first a swarming army
rides up on him in a ten foot tall general
in armor it's just referred to as the General comes
up on an armored horse and demands that he to
identify himself. He remains quiet. The general leaves in a rage.
(19:17):
And then and then to Tusu Chun is tormented by
snakes and spiders and other beasts. There's a there's he's
a rasped by storms.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
This is the devil rides out, this is the Christopher.
Lee is like, he's got him in the circle.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, yeah, instead, only this time it's the circle is silence.
He cannot break that silence.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Tuzu Chune. I'd rather see you dead than speak.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So after the storms, the general returns, and this time
he has his men place a great cauldron in front
of tuzu Chun. And in the story it's written the
general return this time leading an ox headed sergeant and
his soldiers of Hell. Together with the other weird faced ghosts,
they placed a huge cauldron of boiling water before tuzu
(20:05):
Chun enclosed in on him with spears, swords and pitchforks,
and so at this point they threaten him, they say, look,
identify yourself or we're going to boil you alive. He
doesn't speak, So then they drag his wife before him
and they start beating her, and he still refuses to speak.
So they chop her up into little pieces, and he
still doesn't say anything, and finally the general denounces him
(20:25):
as a quote master of the Black Arts and has
his soldiers behead him. Well, the scuy gory, Yeah, it
gets gory, and hurry this story, Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
We got to remember what was said at the beginning.
The Taoist wizard promised him none of this is going
to be real, it's just visions. Just don't say anything.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Right, So then tuzu Chun's soul passes on and he
and he comes before the King of the Dead, who
identifies him. He says, hey, you're that heretic and orders
him cast into the hells. Quote Zuchun tasted the torments
of hell to the fullest molten bronze, the iron rod pounding, grinding,
(21:03):
the fire pit, the boiling cauldron, the Hill of Knives
the Forest of Swords, but he kept the Wizard's words
firmly in mind and bore the pain without letting a
moan pass his lips. Then the tortures reported to the
king that the punishments were completed, and at this point
the King of the dead says, okay, that's good. He
can go on and be reincarnated. Now, let's have him
(21:25):
reincarnated as a woman. And so he's born again as
a small female child. And now the female Tuzuchun, as
an infant, still doesn't cry out, grows up a mute.
Mary's has a child herself at this point, and then
her husband finally has an episode and accused and accuses
(21:49):
her of being improper by refusing to speak to him,
and murders their child before her. So finally, after a
life and yet it's brutal, and after a life time
of silence, now she finally breaks her vow and unleashes
a cry of anguish, and at this point the whole
vision collapses, and once more, here's tuzu Chun himself again,
(22:11):
still seated in the Wizard's pavilion with an empty wine
flask in his hand, and the Wizard's just cursing at
him for failing. He tells him, if you'd only remain
silent a little longer, you would have been able to
purify yourself of all your passions. You'd already purified yourself
of all your passions except for love, and you blew it.
And now you're not going to be immortal.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
That is harsh. No, he already he got killed. He
had watched all his people get killed. He got killed,
He got sent to hell, tortured in hell, then lived
a whole other life. But the Wizard is like, you
just had to hold out a little bit longer. How
was he supposed to know how long it would be?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
He had no idea. He was just supposed to keep going.
But supposedly he was close, like this was the last
test and he was not able to overcome it.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Remember how this started with this guy like blowing all
his money on parties.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, yeah, it is a it's a weird story. What
I may I may have to look into more to
see if I can, uh, you know, grasp some of
the the deeper meanings involved here, But on the surface level,
like coming back to cauldrons, it does feature cauldrons, twice,
and both of them in a very threatening manner. Uh,
(23:21):
the idea that if you don't speak, I'm going to
boil you alive, and then once you're in Hell you
may be boiled as well.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
A well, this would not be the only vision of
hell or negative afterlife that involved boiling, and in fact,
there are some famous boiling puddles, ponds, and rivers in
Dante's Inferno, though I don't recall there ever being a cauldron.
Maybe there is. I think they're just various boiling rivers
and puddles.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Well, Paul Mirapole mentions this. I thinks this as a
brief aside, because you know, I think for starters, the
papers mostly mostly dealing with Asian visions of hell, but
mentioned that there are certain saints who had visions of
hell and they might mention boiling, but they don't mention cauldrons.
And part of that could be the legacy of sacred
(24:10):
cauldrons in some of the European traditions, the pre Christian
European traditions that we'll discuss in the future, like the
idea being that if the cauldron is sacred, you would
not find that in hell, and of course that might
you might well ask, well, what are you guys talking about?
You You've already talked about sacred cauldrons in Chinese traditions,
and here they are popping up in Chinese. Hell, what's
(24:31):
going on there? Well, I will get back to that,
and I think it'll ultimately wind up making sense.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
But yeah, clearly, whatever its particular religious significance, I think
it's also got to be highlighted in this story just
because it's like a horrific way to threaten somebody with death.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Right. And you know, certainly when we start talking about
weird forms of capital punishment and execution, I mean the
line between that and and sacrifice is often a bit blurred.
You know, both spectacles are doing something beyond simply killing
an individual or burning a piece of meat, that sort
(25:11):
of thing.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, and sometimes in history they appear to have been
sort of the same thing that, like some human sacrifice
in history was clearly carried out on people who were
believed to have committed some kind of crime or people
who were like prisoners of war.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right, And so death by boiling pops up many times
in global tales and traditions, often as a means of
state execution. For all sorts of things like sorcerers, bandits, counterfeitters, poisoners,
and traders. Some accounts maybe legendary, but there are plenty
of very believable historic cases of boiling executions, and it
(25:50):
was practiced into the sixteenth century in France and Germany
as a punishment for clipping coins. This is when you
would scrape the edges off of coins and then melt
those scrapings down to new coins, a practice that was
finally defeated by milling the edges of coins.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, several of the main examples I found of actual
use of capital punishment by boiling took place in England
in the sixteenth century, where it was apparently used as
a as a punishment for poisoning. There was famously a
guy named Richard Rouse who made some porridge that they
I think he was a cook, and he made some
poison porridge that poisoned like a bishop, and then just
(26:29):
a bunch of other people who happened to eat it,
and at least a couple of people died, and he
was put to death through a public boiling.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It was pretty gruesome, very gruesome. It's interesting, like I guess,
with the with the with the clipping of coins. There's
sort of a hey, if you boil clippings from our money,
will boil you, sort of a thing like you melt money,
you get melted. I'm not sure exactly what the poisoning
thing is, except that like poisoning was just something they
(26:56):
really wanted to to to to draw a line on,
you know, and say, look, this is really bad, and
therefore you get boiled if you do it.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah. I can't prove this, but I have a gut suspicion,
and it's that poisoning is a type of crime that
is especially horrifying to kings and royal people. You know,
It's the kind of thing they could imagine happening to them.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Right, don't mess with the king's money or the king's food.
Both must be deterred in the strongest sense. It's also
interesting looking at the European use of boiling executions because
you would see this tradition later on, as you know,
(27:41):
tales were being told of what is surely going on
in various foreign parts of the world, be at Africa
or Asia. You know, there would be the especially in
like sort of the pulp era. This idea of boiling
people is something that the other does whereas history tells them.
I mean, certainly they are examples of boil in various cultures,
but clearly there was a long history of it occurring
(28:04):
in Europe as well.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Oh yeah, clearly you can see that as just part
of a fiction that sort of exoticizes other parts of
the world by imagining like horrific, horrific things that might
happen there, probably without any evidential basis.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah. Now, turning briefly to Greek mythology, of course, we
have to remember that this is a boiling alive is
the way that the master artificer datalist kills King Minos,
trapping him in a bath that boils him alive. Clever,
(28:41):
and it seems like the very sort of revenge that
datalists would use against his enemy.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh, I didn't remember that part of the story.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's interesting. I believe it is depicted in one of
the Jim Henson Greek Storyteller episodes. They have, I think
two different ones that involve datalists back to Eastern depictions
of Hell. So there's that line in Big Trouble in
Little China. I believe it's from the character Eddie who
says the Chinese have a lot of hells, and indeed
(29:12):
you'll find Eastern depictions of hell often will include generally
eighteen different die you or underworlds. And the exact nature
of these hells or underworlds vary from text to text,
but each one has a different flavor. They're a different
like this is where you'll encounter the hill of knives,
(29:35):
or this is the one where you'll encounter the boiling feces,
that sort of thing. Several of them were listed in
that passage I read earlier from the story of the
Wizard's Lesson.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And I actually don't know the answer here. Would these also,
like in some of the classic Christian depictions of hell,
have specific tortures for people who's depending on their characteristic sin.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yes, absolutely, and in case in this case the hell
of oil cauldrons would be reserved for thieves and a
few other kind of related transgressions. Now, at this point,
I'd like to come back to that Paul Marabul article
Visions of Asian Hell, in which he discusses Asian visions
of hell at length, and as mentioned previously, he singles
(30:18):
out the alchemical nature of cauldrons and Chinese traditions which
it seems very key here. So on the mundane level,
it is a piece of technology that allows us to
transform the nature of various ingredients into food, and then
on the sacred level, it allows us to transform flesh
into something befitting of a god. And so Mirabile discusses
examples of boiling cauldrons and the hells of Tibetan Buddhism, which,
(30:43):
to remind everyone, does center around the continuation of souls
within the wheel of Samsara, which is a karma based
system in which souls tumble through incarnations that may be
human or animal, but may also be incarnations such as
hungry ghosts, heavenly and power devas, or indeed, you might
be reborn into the hell realms of Naraka. And the
(31:07):
goal is, ultimately, in the grand scheme of Buddhism, to
remove oneself from this endless wheel and attain freedom from
the cycle of death and rebirth, because that's the only
way to just sort of win. I guess you would say, like,
if you keep playing the game of Samsara, you're just
gonna pinball around, you know, so you might ascend on
(31:28):
high into the form of a demi god, a deva
but then perhaps all that power and wrath you have
at your disposal that ends up corrupting you and propels
your soul back down into the hell realm. So the
hell's in this case, they're not really, It's not about
permanent suffering like you encounter in some interpretations of Western
(31:48):
depictions of Christian hell, where it's like, well, you screwed up,
you went with the wrong side, now you're in hell.
For let's say, ever, No, in this case, hell is
a place you are moving through. Your soul is moving
through here, and you'll in all likelihood be reincarnated into
a different incarnation in one of these other realms. So,
(32:10):
as Mirabola discusses these visions often depicted in art, they
already have this feel of transformation or purging to them.
So demonic beings might be cooking human souls, but to
what end? Right, we have to remember that cooking again
is a transformation, and the form of cooking in the
cauldron of sacrifice is supernaturally so.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Oh interesting, So I think I see the connection he's
making here, the same way you might say. In some
Chinese traditions use a ding or a cauldron to make
a burnt sacrifice to the gods in order to appease
them to improve your fortune. In for example, this Buddhist
vision of hell, you may also be put into a
(32:54):
cauldron yourself, but in a similar way are transformed into
something potentially holier.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yes, And this ends up being reflected in Dallas traditions
as well, which in Daoism is perhaps more concerned with
transformation of the soul or self and immortality, but it
ends up being influenced by Buddhism when Buddhism enters into
China from India roughly two thousand years ago. And so,
(33:21):
in considering images of cauldrons in Hell and the Chinese
temple of ching Wang in Linza Shu in western China,
Mirabule says quote, in fact, we could interpret the Dallast
Hell as some enormous cauldron into which have been poured
the ingredients necessary to permutate the present state of imperfect
(33:41):
beings into their possible perfection by long and painstaking alchemical assimilations.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, so I really love that idea. And again it
comes back to again question You might ask, well, if
some Europeans were hesitant to take a sort of divine
legacy of the cauldron and then place it in depictions
of hell. Even if you're dealing sort of different religious traditions,
why would you see it in Chinese traditions? And I
(34:10):
think it is because you have this different view of
what Hell is doing, this idea that these depictions of
torment are not about like in game suffering, they are
about changing you into something else, which is the purpose
of the daying, the purpose of the cauldron, whether you're
dealing with the process on Earth or something more celestial,
(34:31):
or indeed something in one of the hells. And I
should also point out, yeah, that you also see these
visions of hell outside of Chinese traditions and outside of
Indian divisions. It also pops up in Japanese views of
hell and so forth. All Right, we're going to go
ahead and close out this episode then, but i'd love
to hear from everyone out there if you have additional
(34:53):
things you'd like to add about Chinese traditions of cauldrons,
be they the Nine cauldrons of You the Great or
these various depictions of Dallast and Buddhist Hell. I'd love
to hear from anyone out there. Likewise, any sort of
pop culture and fiction related treatments of cauldrons that kind
(35:16):
of match up with what we've discussed here today totally.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
those episodes and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we publish our core episodes. Those
are the main episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
and then on Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays
we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode
(35:38):
in on Fridays, we cut loose, We put aside most
serious concerns and we just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. It's vault time.
This is an older episode of the show that originally
published May twenty six, twenty twenty two, and it's part
two of our series on the Cauldron. Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
two of our series about cauldrons.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
That's right. In the last episode, we talked about cauldrons
and mostly an introduction into the idea of the cauldron
is both a mundane tool for heating water and making soup,
but also getting in a little bit to the idea that, okay,
this is something that also ends up taking on sacred
and supernatural characteristics in various traditions. But for the most
(01:06):
part we talked about soup technology, which in and of
itself is pretty fascinating.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, we pondered the foggy distant prehistory of salmon soups
in Japan.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, so a lot of this episode is going to
look at the cauldron in Chinese traditions and in Chinese history,
in mythology. So in Chinese culture and history, the ancient
cauldron is known as the ding, a cooking cauldron with
two looped handles and three or four legs. The three
(01:43):
legged ones tend to have a more of a circular pot,
while the four legged ones tend to have a rectangular
pot and appear more like what we might think of
as a chest or something in Western traditions. It's maybe
a little less recognizable as a cauldron if you're basing
your expectations on cauldrons in Western traditions.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it made me wonder, like, wait a minute, why
are pots always round? I mean, they don't have to be.
So this is a pot that's got corners and it
looks like something that link would pop open and pull
a treasure out of. Oh it's the hook shot.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah. Well, I mean these are ultimately artifacts that have
a number of supernatural associations with them. But in terms
of the actual Chinese cauldrons or ding that have survived.
For instance, one example that came up in my research
is from the Warring States period around This is from
(02:40):
around four to thirty three BCE found in the Leodoun
Tombs in central China. Upon its discovery, it still had
ox bones inside it and soot on its base, meaning
that it was apparently used for cooking, perhaps as part
of a funerary feast. It was made of bronze and
also include did lifting hooks and a ladle lifting hooks?
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Does that mean something you'd like put some hooks in
to move it out of the fire?
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Correct in this In this case, now, when we get
into later discussions of cauldrons, you also get into the
idea of flesh hooks for your cauldron. They have to
do with, obviously, for the manipulating a flesh, you know,
some sort of meat that you're cooking inside of said cauldron.
But these I believe, Yeah, we're just to move the
cauldron around while it was heated.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Okay, So a cauldron, we know, can be used for
the chores that sustain everyday life, cooking food and washing
and so forth. But in Chinese traditions, cauldrons have a
much more culturally and religiously charged significance. Even though they
could be used for those same mundane tasks, they might
also decide the very fate of your existence.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
That's right. And I do want to stress that a
lot of this will also end up lining up with
traditions in the West as well. That will get into
much later. But yeah, this thing that for all intents
and purposes is about heating water for soup or maybe
for laundry or something like that ends up taking on
greater significance. So in Chinese tradition, the ding became associated
(04:15):
with power and land ownership, and it was used not
only for food production and also for storage. It was
also used to make sacrifices to the gods.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
And the idea of gods here might also well include
ancestral spirits, right, the sort of a blurring of the
distinction there that, like appeasing one's ancestors, was believed to
play a role in determining your fortune right now.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
One of the sources I was looking to for this
episode is an article titled Visions of Hell in Asia
from twenty eighteen published in the Journal of the Oriental
Society of Australia by scholar Paul Morablai, and in it
the author rites quote in ancient China, the cauldron was
the alchemical recipient par excellence for the sacrifices animals and
(05:05):
humans required in order to transmute them into immortal creatures
when mixed with certain minerals and metals. Now, I want
to stress that he's talking very broadly here. This is
not to imply that all of these various cauldrons, including
the specific one I just mentioned, was used for anything
like human sacrifice. But of course, human sacrifice is something
that one encounters in the ancient traditions of every human culture.
(05:30):
Just about so. But yeah, this idea that we touched
on very briefly in the last episode, that what is
a cauldron, what is a cooking pot? But other than
something that transforms one thing into another state.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Right, so, it might transform say a tough piece of
game meat into a nutritious broth and a much more
tender piece of meat. And it might transform various ingredients
living and dead into a bunch of fumes, a pillar
of smoke, or a burnt offering that would be seen
as pleasing to the gods or to one's ancestors.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Correct. Now, when it comes to the sacred thing, there is,
like we mentioned earlier, it also has this prestige with it.
It signifies power, and it can also signify divine right
of rule. And in this there's no greater example than
the nine cauldrons of You the Great. Now we've discussed
(06:26):
You the Great before and stuff to blow your mind.
See as the legendary ruler of the Shia dynasty of
the second and third millennium BCE. Born from the belly
of his father's corpse, he's said to have quelled the
Great floods and established dynastic rule in China. His control
of the flood is attributed differently in different tales, but
(06:49):
I think we can summarize it as entailing the defeat
of monsters, the possible Promethean theft of the sacred self,
renewing soil from the gods, the help of various gods,
and also the use of damn and irrigation technology. So
he's you know, he's a culture bearer. And oh, he's
also said to have measured the earth, and in some
(07:11):
accounts he stands eight feet tall. But the other feet
attributed to You the Great is that he also cast
the nine cauldrons upon rising to power, as yang An
and Turner discussed in the Handbook of Chinese Mythology quote,
those cauldrons had the divine function to teach people to
distinguish between faithfulness and treachery, and to keep evils and
(07:32):
demons from harming people. So they were treated as national treasures.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And I believe it's that this story is related to
the idea that the cauldron itself is a sort of
symbol of power, both in a literal and metaphorical sense,
like that in the literal sense that you would have
to be a rich and powerful person in ancient China
to own one or more of these cauldrons, and also
that the cauldron was kind of like a symbol of
(07:59):
some one's power or political dominance.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Right, right, And in this case, there are nine of them,
because there were nine cauldrons for the nine provinces, but
then nine also had cosmologically important connections as well. There's
also this tradition of saying that the nine cauldrons sometimes
are scattered and lost, and it was said that whoever
(08:24):
wished to claim imperial power and rain by the mandate
of heaven would need to collect all these nine cauldrons.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah, I think I recall reading somewhere that there's an
expression means something like seeking after cauldrons, or something that
means like ambition for power.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah yeah. There are a number of different sayings in
Chinese tradition that allude to cauldrons and make use of
the motif. In the book Chinese Mythology and Introduction and
Burial ads that while you the Great forge the vessels,
they are said to have been cast by feeling the Dragon,
god of wind. The cauldrons could and would change weight
(09:03):
and size, or even vanish completely or reappear at will
quote according to the virtue or decadence of the dynasty
possessing them. Whoa, so yeah, this gets pretty interesting. For instance,
if a dynasty is virtuous, then the cauldrons would become
so massive that they would be almost impossible to lift.
It was said that when the child people over through
(09:25):
the shung, the child's virtue was such that it took
ninety thousand men to lift a single cauldron. But then
when the chin overthrew the chow, one of the cauldrons
just like immediately flew into the river.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Oh so the inanimate objects have a will of their own.
It's almost like the one ring, except that yes, way,
the cauldrons are virtuous, whereas the ring is wicked.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah yeah, it's also specifically noted that it is the
weight that is important, not the size. So you might
have a dynasty that is corrupt, and the cauldrons might
look enormous, but they weigh little, and thus signifying that
you know that they are morally impoverished. But then the
(10:07):
opposite is also true. You might have a noble dynasty
and the cauldrons are very small, but it would take
like ninety thousand men to lift a single one of them,
because such is the virtue of these rulers.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Oh, that resonates in a very pleasing way, because you imagine,
like an evil dynasty having these giant cauldrons that are
easily blown over by the wind. Yeah, big surface area
and very little mass.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Yeah, yeah, I think it works on so many levels.
They are said to have been cast in iron and
also said to be illustrated with images of the gods
and forged from metals offered up by the nine regional stewards.
There is also discussion of them being important to distinguish
malign creatures, which are sometimes translated as goblins and trolls.
(10:51):
So I'm not sure if that's meant to mean that
the cauldrons also depicted these quote unquote adverse beings, but
because it doesn't seem like it's explicitly stated. But at
the very least they had images of gods on them. Now,
as for the use of cauldrons and sacrifice, an burl
includes a wonderful passage from the ancient text the Book
(11:13):
of Songs or the Classic of Poetry. The passage in
question is celebrating the agricultural culture hero and god Huji
aka Lord Millet. Here is part of it, in translation,
of course, describing the sacrifice, our sacrifice. What is it
like some pound, some baiale, some sift, some tread. We
(11:36):
wash it soaking, soaking wet. We steam it, piping, piping hot.
Then we plan with thoughtful care, gathering southern wood, offering
rich fat. We take a ram to make the wayside sacrifice,
roasting and broiling to usher in the new year. The
bronze pots filled the brim, the bronze pots and cauldrons.
(11:57):
As soon as there aroma rises up odd on high.
Enjoys it with pleasure. The rich fragrance is right and proper.
For Hoji inaugurated the sacrifice with no fault or blemish.
His people have continued it to the present day.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I like the line on here about as the aroma
rises up, God on high enjoys it with pleasure. Because
that that is not unique to this poem or to
Chinese religious traditions. That it's a it's a common feature
of many religions mentioning God enjoying God, or God's enjoying
the smell of a burning sacrifice.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of this that is
that is ultimately a universal. It's fascinating. Now for the
second episode in a row, I'm going to also cite
a children's book. This is another children's book. This one
(12:54):
is titled Two of Everything, and Chinese American author Lily
toy Hong wrote this It's fun, and she credits it
is being based on a Chinese folk tale, and I'd
love to read another telling of it, but I haven't
been able to find one. I'm sure it's out there.
But it does involve some sort of a magical pot
or cauldron in this story, which is which has some
(13:18):
some wonderful illustrations an elderly couple in China. And this
has a historical setting, by the way, so it's not
I don't think it's supposed to be like modern China.
But this elderly couple, they happen to happen upon this
pot or this cauldron, and they quickly find out that
anything you drop or place inside the cauldron comes out duplicated.
So you can imagine how this story goes. You know, food,
(13:41):
gold gets duplicated, and finally somebody's going to fall in
that cauldron. The old man falls in the cauldron, and
now there are two old men. So the story ultimately
ends on a happy note, with the couple deciding, Okay,
we're going to put the pot away. We're not going
to use it unless we absolutely have to. But by
this point they're living side by side with their own
doppelgangers who have a replica of everything that they have.
(14:05):
So I was looking around to try and find another
version of this story and I was not able to.
But in the process, I found another story that includes
cauldron's as a key plot point that I think will
transition into something else we're going to talk about in
a bit. It's a wonderful little story called the Wizard's Lesson.
This story appeared in the book Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies,
(14:29):
edited and translated by Moss Roberts, a professor of East
Asian Studies at NYU. The original title is Tuzu Chun
and it is included in the Suswan Kwi Lu, an
early ninth century CE collection compiled by Li Fu Yin,
though there seemed to be some disagreements on the exact
(14:50):
date of when this original text was published or written.
This story is awesome, yeah, I think at times per play.
I've seen some online like some sort of blog style
discussions where people are like, what is this about? But
it has some wonderful wizardry in it. So basically the
(15:10):
story goes like this. We have this character too, Zuchun,
and he's a scoundrel. Basically, he's spent all his money,
He's burned all his friends and family members, you know,
borrowing money and so forth. So he finds himself on
the street with nothing, and then up comes an old
man and ask him, hey, look there, buddy, how much
money would it take to set you right? Like how
(15:32):
many strands of coins will it take? And tuzu Chun
names a sum and the old man just kind of scoffs,
and he's like, oh, you should probably go higher than that,
and he gives him another sum, and the old man agrees,
and he gives him enough cash on the spot for
a night's rest somewhere and says, meet me tomorrow in
the market and I'll give you the full amount. So
(15:53):
this goes exactly as promised, and the next day he
receives his first millions from the old man. Like it's
it's a true fortune, enough for him to have a
real proper start at rebuilding everything in his life, and
then some. But you can imagine what happens next. He
immediately blows it all on a lavish lifestyle, and before
(16:13):
long he's back on the street again. Then here comes
the old man approaches him again, and this basically the
same thing happens once more, only this time he squanders
an even greater fortune. The third time, however, the old
man warns him that if an even greater fortune won't
do the trick this time, then there's clearly no helping him.
(16:33):
So finally Tuzu Chun has a change of heart. He
finally realizes, Okay, this old man has been so kind
and patient with me and just overly generous, and I've
done nothing for him. He has this change of heart
and realizes that he shouldn't be spending this all on himself.
He should try and do some good in the world.
And he tells the old Man that he is going
(16:56):
to do this. He's going to go help the widows
and the orphans, he's going to make men's with family members,
and then at the end he's going to meet up
with the old man wants more and do right by
him as well.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Oh okay, so you might expect this to be the
end of the story. He's learned his lesson.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
But no, it keeps going and I I, you know,
this might be a situation where you have sort of
combined stories, you know, to become one at some point.
But what happens next is the old man he he
you know, he goes out in the world, he does
all the things he's going to do, and then he
meets up with the old Man again. The old Man
takes him up to the mountain to a splendid residence
(17:32):
and inside here's an alchemist furnace, guarded by a white
tiger and a black dragon. It's written that jade white
fairy women stand by. And the old man is no
longer dressed like the old man that he met in
the market. Those those three times. No, now he's dressed
in yellow and scarlet robes. He's dressed as a dallist wizard.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Oh so immediately at this point, I'm like picturing him
as played by Chinying Lamb from the Mister Vam movies.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, yeah, that would be a wonderful stern performance of
this character. So at this point, he presents tuzoo Chone
with a beaker of wine and three white pills. He
tells him to take the pills, and no matter what happens,
no matter what he sees and the visions that are
about to hit him, he must not speak. Okay, I'm
(18:23):
gonna read a quote from the story here. Take care
not to speak. The wizard cautioned, be it a revered spirit,
vicious ghost, demon of hell, wild beast, hell itself, or
even your own closest relatives, bound and tormented in a
thousand ways, nothing you see is truly real. It is
essential that you neither speak nor make any movement. Remain
(18:43):
calm and fearless, and you shall come to no harm.
Never forget what I have said. With that, the wizard departed.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Okay, so none of it's going to be real as
long as you keep your mouth shut, You'll be all.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Right, right, And then the visions begin to hit him.
So it's it's just kind of like one way of
the visions after the other. So first a swarming army
rides up on him in a ten foot tall general
in armor it's just referred to as the General comes
up on an armored horse and demands that he to
identify himself. He remains quiet. The general leaves in a rage.
(19:17):
And then and then to Tusu Chun is tormented by
snakes and spiders and other beasts. There's a there's he's
a rasped by storms.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
This is the devil rides out, this is the Christopher.
Lee is like, he's got him in the circle.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, yeah, instead, only this time it's the circle is silence.
He cannot break that silence.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Tuzu Chune. I'd rather see you dead than speak.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So after the storms, the general returns, and this time
he has his men place a great cauldron in front
of tuzu Chun. And in the story it's written the
general return this time leading an ox headed sergeant and
his soldiers of Hell. Together with the other weird faced ghosts,
they placed a huge cauldron of boiling water before tuzu
(20:05):
Chun enclosed in on him with spears, swords and pitchforks,
and so at this point they threaten him, they say, look,
identify yourself or we're going to boil you alive. He
doesn't speak, So then they drag his wife before him
and they start beating her, and he still refuses to speak.
So they chop her up into little pieces, and he
still doesn't say anything, and finally the general denounces him
(20:25):
as a quote master of the Black Arts and has
his soldiers behead him. Well, the scuy gory, Yeah, it
gets gory, and hurry this story, Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
We got to remember what was said at the beginning.
The Taoist wizard promised him none of this is going
to be real, it's just visions. Just don't say anything.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
Right, So then tuzu Chun's soul passes on and he
and he comes before the King of the Dead, who
identifies him. He says, hey, you're that heretic and orders
him cast into the hells. Quote Zuchun tasted the torments
of hell to the fullest molten bronze, the iron rod pounding, grinding,
(21:03):
the fire pit, the boiling cauldron, the Hill of Knives
the Forest of Swords, but he kept the Wizard's words
firmly in mind and bore the pain without letting a
moan pass his lips. Then the tortures reported to the
king that the punishments were completed, and at this point
the King of the dead says, okay, that's good. He
can go on and be reincarnated. Now, let's have him
(21:25):
reincarnated as a woman. And so he's born again as
a small female child. And now the female Tuzuchun, as
an infant, still doesn't cry out, grows up a mute.
Mary's has a child herself at this point, and then
her husband finally has an episode and accused and accuses
(21:49):
her of being improper by refusing to speak to him,
and murders their child before her. So finally, after a
life and yet it's brutal, and after a life time
of silence, now she finally breaks her vow and unleashes
a cry of anguish, and at this point the whole
vision collapses, and once more, here's tuzu Chun himself again,
(22:11):
still seated in the Wizard's pavilion with an empty wine
flask in his hand, and the Wizard's just cursing at
him for failing. He tells him, if you'd only remain
silent a little longer, you would have been able to
purify yourself of all your passions. You'd already purified yourself
of all your passions except for love, and you blew it.
And now you're not going to be immortal.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
That is harsh. No, he already he got killed. He
had watched all his people get killed. He got killed,
He got sent to hell, tortured in hell, then lived
a whole other life. But the Wizard is like, you
just had to hold out a little bit longer. How
was he supposed to know how long it would be?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
He had no idea. He was just supposed to keep going.
But supposedly he was close, like this was the last
test and he was not able to overcome it.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Remember how this started with this guy like blowing all
his money on parties.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, yeah, it is a it's a weird story. What
I may I may have to look into more to
see if I can, uh, you know, grasp some of
the the deeper meanings involved here, But on the surface level,
like coming back to cauldrons, it does feature cauldrons, twice,
and both of them in a very threatening manner. Uh,
(23:21):
the idea that if you don't speak, I'm going to
boil you alive, and then once you're in Hell you
may be boiled as well.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
A well, this would not be the only vision of
hell or negative afterlife that involved boiling, and in fact,
there are some famous boiling puddles, ponds, and rivers in
Dante's Inferno, though I don't recall there ever being a cauldron.
Maybe there is. I think they're just various boiling rivers
and puddles.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Well, Paul Mirapole mentions this. I thinks this as a
brief aside, because you know, I think for starters, the
papers mostly mostly dealing with Asian visions of hell, but
mentioned that there are certain saints who had visions of
hell and they might mention boiling, but they don't mention cauldrons.
And part of that could be the legacy of sacred
(24:10):
cauldrons in some of the European traditions, the pre Christian
European traditions that we'll discuss in the future, like the
idea being that if the cauldron is sacred, you would
not find that in hell, and of course that might
you might well ask, well, what are you guys talking about?
You You've already talked about sacred cauldrons in Chinese traditions,
and here they are popping up in Chinese. Hell, what's
(24:31):
going on there? Well, I will get back to that,
and I think it'll ultimately wind up making sense.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
But yeah, clearly, whatever its particular religious significance, I think
it's also got to be highlighted in this story just
because it's like a horrific way to threaten somebody with death.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Right. And you know, certainly when we start talking about
weird forms of capital punishment and execution, I mean the
line between that and and sacrifice is often a bit blurred.
You know, both spectacles are doing something beyond simply killing
an individual or burning a piece of meat, that sort
(25:11):
of thing.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
Yeah, and sometimes in history they appear to have been
sort of the same thing that, like some human sacrifice
in history was clearly carried out on people who were
believed to have committed some kind of crime or people
who were like prisoners of war.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right, And so death by boiling pops up many times
in global tales and traditions, often as a means of
state execution. For all sorts of things like sorcerers, bandits, counterfeitters, poisoners,
and traders. Some accounts maybe legendary, but there are plenty
of very believable historic cases of boiling executions, and it
(25:50):
was practiced into the sixteenth century in France and Germany
as a punishment for clipping coins. This is when you
would scrape the edges off of coins and then melt
those scrapings down to new coins, a practice that was
finally defeated by milling the edges of coins.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, several of the main examples I found of actual
use of capital punishment by boiling took place in England
in the sixteenth century, where it was apparently used as
a as a punishment for poisoning. There was famously a
guy named Richard Rouse who made some porridge that they
I think he was a cook, and he made some
poison porridge that poisoned like a bishop, and then just
(26:29):
a bunch of other people who happened to eat it,
and at least a couple of people died, and he
was put to death through a public boiling.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
It was pretty gruesome, very gruesome. It's interesting, like I guess,
with the with the with the clipping of coins. There's
sort of a hey, if you boil clippings from our money,
will boil you, sort of a thing like you melt money,
you get melted. I'm not sure exactly what the poisoning
thing is, except that like poisoning was just something they
(26:56):
really wanted to to to to draw a line on,
you know, and say, look, this is really bad, and
therefore you get boiled if you do it.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Yeah. I can't prove this, but I have a gut suspicion,
and it's that poisoning is a type of crime that
is especially horrifying to kings and royal people. You know,
It's the kind of thing they could imagine happening to them.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Right, don't mess with the king's money or the king's food.
Both must be deterred in the strongest sense. It's also
interesting looking at the European use of boiling executions because
you would see this tradition later on, as you know,
(27:41):
tales were being told of what is surely going on
in various foreign parts of the world, be at Africa
or Asia. You know, there would be the especially in
like sort of the pulp era. This idea of boiling
people is something that the other does whereas history tells them.
I mean, certainly they are examples of boil in various cultures,
but clearly there was a long history of it occurring
(28:04):
in Europe as well.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Oh yeah, clearly you can see that as just part
of a fiction that sort of exoticizes other parts of
the world by imagining like horrific, horrific things that might
happen there, probably without any evidential basis.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah. Now, turning briefly to Greek mythology, of course, we
have to remember that this is a boiling alive is
the way that the master artificer datalist kills King Minos,
trapping him in a bath that boils him alive. Clever,
(28:41):
and it seems like the very sort of revenge that
datalists would use against his enemy.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Oh, I didn't remember that part of the story.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
That's interesting. I believe it is depicted in one of
the Jim Henson Greek Storyteller episodes. They have, I think
two different ones that involve datalists back to Eastern depictions
of Hell. So there's that line in Big Trouble in
Little China. I believe it's from the character Eddie who
says the Chinese have a lot of hells, and indeed
(29:12):
you'll find Eastern depictions of hell often will include generally
eighteen different die you or underworlds. And the exact nature
of these hells or underworlds vary from text to text,
but each one has a different flavor. They're a different
like this is where you'll encounter the hill of knives,
(29:35):
or this is the one where you'll encounter the boiling feces,
that sort of thing. Several of them were listed in
that passage I read earlier from the story of the
Wizard's Lesson.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And I actually don't know the answer here. Would these also,
like in some of the classic Christian depictions of hell,
have specific tortures for people who's depending on their characteristic sin.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
Yes, absolutely, and in case in this case the hell
of oil cauldrons would be reserved for thieves and a
few other kind of related transgressions. Now, at this point,
I'd like to come back to that Paul Marabul article
Visions of Asian Hell, in which he discusses Asian visions
of hell at length, and as mentioned previously, he singles
(30:18):
out the alchemical nature of cauldrons and Chinese traditions which
it seems very key here. So on the mundane level,
it is a piece of technology that allows us to
transform the nature of various ingredients into food, and then
on the sacred level, it allows us to transform flesh
into something befitting of a god. And so Mirabile discusses
examples of boiling cauldrons and the hells of Tibetan Buddhism, which,
(30:43):
to remind everyone, does center around the continuation of souls
within the wheel of Samsara, which is a karma based
system in which souls tumble through incarnations that may be
human or animal, but may also be incarnations such as
hungry ghosts, heavenly and power devas, or indeed, you might
be reborn into the hell realms of Naraka. And the
(31:07):
goal is, ultimately, in the grand scheme of Buddhism, to
remove oneself from this endless wheel and attain freedom from
the cycle of death and rebirth, because that's the only
way to just sort of win. I guess you would say, like,
if you keep playing the game of Samsara, you're just
gonna pinball around, you know, so you might ascend on
(31:28):
high into the form of a demi god, a deva
but then perhaps all that power and wrath you have
at your disposal that ends up corrupting you and propels
your soul back down into the hell realm. So the
hell's in this case, they're not really, It's not about
permanent suffering like you encounter in some interpretations of Western
(31:48):
depictions of Christian hell, where it's like, well, you screwed up,
you went with the wrong side, now you're in hell.
For let's say, ever, No, in this case, hell is
a place you are moving through. Your soul is moving
through here, and you'll in all likelihood be reincarnated into
a different incarnation in one of these other realms. So,
(32:10):
as Mirabola discusses these visions often depicted in art, they
already have this feel of transformation or purging to them.
So demonic beings might be cooking human souls, but to
what end? Right, we have to remember that cooking again
is a transformation, and the form of cooking in the
cauldron of sacrifice is supernaturally so.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Oh interesting, So I think I see the connection he's
making here, the same way you might say. In some
Chinese traditions use a ding or a cauldron to make
a burnt sacrifice to the gods in order to appease
them to improve your fortune. In for example, this Buddhist
vision of hell, you may also be put into a
(32:54):
cauldron yourself, but in a similar way are transformed into
something potentially holier.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yes, And this ends up being reflected in Dallas traditions
as well, which in Daoism is perhaps more concerned with
transformation of the soul or self and immortality, but it
ends up being influenced by Buddhism when Buddhism enters into
China from India roughly two thousand years ago. And so,
(33:21):
in considering images of cauldrons in Hell and the Chinese
temple of ching Wang in Linza Shu in western China,
Mirabule says quote, in fact, we could interpret the Dallast
Hell as some enormous cauldron into which have been poured
the ingredients necessary to permutate the present state of imperfect
(33:41):
beings into their possible perfection by long and painstaking alchemical assimilations.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Yeah, so I really love that idea. And again it
comes back to again question You might ask, well, if
some Europeans were hesitant to take a sort of divine
legacy of the cauldron and then place it in depictions
of hell. Even if you're dealing sort of different religious traditions,
why would you see it in Chinese traditions? And I
(34:10):
think it is because you have this different view of
what Hell is doing, this idea that these depictions of
torment are not about like in game suffering, they are
about changing you into something else, which is the purpose
of the daying, the purpose of the cauldron, whether you're
dealing with the process on Earth or something more celestial,
(34:31):
or indeed something in one of the hells. And I
should also point out, yeah, that you also see these
visions of hell outside of Chinese traditions and outside of
Indian divisions. It also pops up in Japanese views of
hell and so forth. All Right, we're going to go
ahead and close out this episode then, but i'd love
to hear from everyone out there if you have additional
(34:53):
things you'd like to add about Chinese traditions of cauldrons,
be they the Nine cauldrons of You the Great or
these various depictions of Dallast and Buddhist Hell. I'd love
to hear from anyone out there. Likewise, any sort of
pop culture and fiction related treatments of cauldrons that kind
(35:16):
of match up with what we've discussed here today totally.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you can find
those episodes and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we publish our core episodes. Those
are the main episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
and then on Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays
we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode
(35:38):
in on Fridays, we cut loose, We put aside most
serious concerns and we just talk about a strange film.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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