May 27, 2023 • 42 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 06/16/2022)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Part four of our
series on the Cauldron. In today's vault episode, this one
originally published June sixteenth, twenty twenty two. Is there any
reason to delay? I don't think there is. Let's go
straight to it.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Let's jump right in and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Cauldron's Part four. This
is really the last Cauldron's episode, right.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, for now, but no, no, this is the last one.
Even my son when he asked what I was doing today,
I said, Oh, we're going to record a fourth Cauldron's episode.
He's like, really, y'all are still doing those Cauldron episodes?
So yeah, yeah, some more exciting stuff. And you know,
there's so much we're not even going to be able
to cover in these episodes, but this is an exciting
one because we're going to roll through a few more myths.
(01:09):
We have some more content about just how cauldrons factor
into our history and our beliefs, and you know we'll
get into the inferno a bit as well.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Rob, I am ready to be boiled.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
All right, Well, let's basically we've alluded to this. We've
all along, we've mentioned that you have some strong Celtic
traditions that involve the cauldron, and they end up having
an influence over European traditions of the cauldron in general.
So let's roll through just a few of these different myths.
I'm not going to go into super detail on these,
(01:45):
though a number of these are the subject of epics
and longer tails and of course treatments and retreatments over
the years. So let's start with the Dogda's Cauldron. So
Dogdo or the Dogda was the most powful of all
the too apha to done. And you know these are
the magical folk, the ancestors of Ireland and so forth.
(02:10):
Docta was the master of the battle club, the magic harp,
and the cauldron. He was sometimes called the good God
because he was simply good at everything.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Today you'd call him a Mary Sue.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
As Patricia Monaghan explains in the Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology
and folklore, he was kind of a god of not
only fertility, but also kind of exaggerated male desire. So
he's round, you know, kind of a rotund individual. His
tunic is a bit too short to cover his genitals
in some depictions. Anyway, he wields a mallet that's so
(02:47):
huge that he has to drag it behind him in
a cart. So he's kind of this exaggerated cartoon character
in many respects.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
I like him already.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
He also has a pair of self replenishing pigs that
you can just keep eating. I'm not sure how the
details of that work. I'm assuming it's like you cook
them up, or I don't know if you're slicing pieces
off of them. I'm not sure, But any rate, I
don't know that the pigs really mind. They're magical, after all,
but even more magical than the pigs. He also has
(03:17):
a magic cauldron that can never be emptied. It overfloweth
with goodness, so he has many romantic adventures. He has
many children. He's eventually slain in battle by the ceph Leon,
a wife of the great Femorian king Baaler, and then
he goes on to party forever in the other world.
(03:37):
Sustained by his bottomless cauldron that he gets to bring
with him into the afterlife.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Oh that's lucky.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah now, Bonagan, who also wrote the Encyclopedia of Goddesses
and Heroines, wrote that the Irish cauldron is of course
not only a mundane item for cooking and stewing, but
also quote a place where new life was brewed and stewed.
It was a symbol of great power for the Celts.
(04:07):
The Roman writer Strebo describes a great cauldron sent to
Caesar by Simbri and claims that the Celts ritually sliced
open the throats of prisoners over such a cauldron. And
these traditions, to whatever extent they are accurately reported here,
may connect to the Gunstrip cauldron that we talked about
in the last episode that was unearthed in Denmark, but
(04:29):
burying Celtic symbols, etc. Other cauldrons monagan rites have been
found in bogs and lakes and are suspected to have
been offerings to the other world.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Yeah, that'll actually connect to an archaeology paper I want
to talk about in a minute.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
In general, though, she contends that the Irish cauldron means
fullness and abundance, and Dogda's cauldron is just a great
example of this, a never ending supply of good eats.
The Welsh goddess Sertowin also uses a cauldron to make
a bra that imbues one with great wisdom. So it's
interesting how we're getting into talking about just sustaining the self,
(05:07):
sustaining the body via the contents of the cauldron. But
then we kind of take that into another dimension as well,
sustaining the mind. And this will have ramifications on other
storytelling and mythic traditions. All right, we'll come back to
some of these ideas, but let's let's move on to
the next myth here. This is another one from Celtic traditions,
(05:29):
but it takes the idea of the cauldron as life
bringer and kind of puts a different spin on it.
This is the story of the pair Da Denni, the
cauldron of rebirth. Now, there are already some accounts that
indicate that the Dog's cauldron, in addition to overflowing with
great and miraculously healing foods, in some cases, could also
(05:49):
raise the dead if they were lowered into the cauldron.
And yeah, that leads us into what is perhaps the
most noteworthy necromantic cauldron. This is the cauldron of Rebirth
from Welsh mythology and literature, along with the Cauldron of Dogda.
It's a key mythic cauldron to understand the artifact's place
in European traditions. It's also the primary inspiration for the
(06:12):
black cauldron that shows up in the novels of Lloyd Alexander.
It factors into a few different tales, including Branwyn daughter
of Leir, a legendary tale from medieval Welsh literature, and
the second of four branches of the mobin Ogion collection
of tales. So this is a pretty interesting one, and
(06:33):
again I'm just giving you the broad strokes here. Again,
this one has received a much more expansive treatment in
works of literature, but it concerns the mythic conflict between
the Welsh and the Irish and involves the exploits of Ethnisian,
the half brother of Bron the Blessed, who has been
described as an easily offended troublemaker or even as a
(06:56):
psychotic anti hero. Oh okay, so this is a guy
who does things like mutilate horses inside wars, burn people alive.
So he's not presented as a good guy. It doesn't
even seem like it's one of these cases where you
can say, well, today we wouldn't like him, but we
have to put him look at him within the context
(07:17):
of the time. No, it seems like everyone seems to
think that he's supposed to be a crazy, dangerous fellow.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
He's not Snake Pliskin. He's Darth Vader.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah yeah, but like Darth Vader, he has a redemption
arc of sorts. He ends up engaging in a little
bit of self sacrifice to bring balance to things. So
it comes to light that the Irisher using the magical
cauldron of Rebirth to resurrect their dead warriors so that
they can keep on fighting. And so you know, the
(07:48):
Welsh forces are concerned about this. This is an unfair advantage,
right if you're bringing your own debt back to life
onto the battlefield. So what does Ethnician do Well, he
hides himself among the enemy Irish dead, and then the
Irish hall all those dead bodies back. They take them
to the cauldron of Rebirth and one by one they
throw them in the cauldron, and then one by one,
(08:10):
each warrior emerges once more to fight. Eventually they come
to Ethnician, who again is pretending to be a dead irishman.
They throw him into the cauldron alive, and this seems
to sort of short circuit everything. You know, the cauldron
is not designed or made, It does not exist to
resurrect the living. It totally just screws up everything. And
(08:35):
somehow Ethnician is then able to destroy the cauldron from within,
but in doing so, not only does he shatter the cauldron,
but he dies in the process. Oh and there's some
wonderful illustrations of this.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I want more detail here. Did like, did he know
that was going to happen to him or what did
he expect was going to? Like it just did it
not cross his mind that like, oh, yeah, I can't
be resurrected because I'm not dead yet.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I think he knew. I mean, otherwise it's not that
I mean, the self sacrifice is diminished if he doesn't
know that this is probably going to destroy him. So
I think the general vibe is the y he knows
that this will be the end, but it's the only
way to stop the Cauldron of rebirth.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Okay, he's not just being like dude, I'd love to
be resurrected from the dead.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
No, no, no, all right, I'm going to run through
a few other cauldrons. Of note, there's the cauldron of Drenwich,
the Giant. In medieval Welsh tradition, there are thirteen treasures
of the Island of Britain, entailing various horns and chariots, knives, rings,
and more. But there's also a cauldron owned by the
giant Drenwich, which can tell brave men from cowards because
(09:44):
it will not boil meat for a coward, but will
quickly boil meat for a brave man. Now I'm not
sure if there was a vegetarian option, but basically it's
said to just be massive enough to cook an entire
wedding feast within It eventually falls into the possession of
King Arthur and some tellings. But yeah, I guess it's like,
if you're not sure if somebody is brave or cowardly,
(10:07):
you just have them bring forth their chicken Cutlets throw
them into the cauldron here and see what happens.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
Here's another one where I wonder about the mechanics of
exactly what that means. So you put the meat in,
does it mean if you're a coward. The water won't
come to a boil. Or does it mean even if
it boils, the meat won't get tender.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I don't know. I'm just imagining it like, Okay, you
put the meat in and maybe the water looks like
it's boiling, but the meat's not cooking. You just got
some raw chicken cutlets in there, just bobbing around.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Well, it reminds me of those stories of people up
on mountaintops trying to cook food, like boiling potatoes in
a pot on Mount Everest, where your potatoes don't get
cooked because when you go higher and higher into the atmosphere,
the boiling point of water goes down. So you can
be there boiling a pot on the stove and it
(11:00):
is actually boiling, like it's bubbling and turning into steam,
but the boiling point is so low that the water
is actually not hot enough to cook your food. So
you can boil potatoes at the top of a mountain
for a long time, take them out, and they're basically
still raw.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah. I don't have an answer for that, but it
does make me wonder to what extent experiences with different
altitudes and attempts to boil stuff in the cauldron. How
that might affect this because they would clearly notice, you
would know that, well, here it seems to take longer
to cook our food. Why might that be?
Speaker 4 (11:36):
I haven't done the math. I don't know if there
are peaks in Britain high enough for that to happen.
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Maybe though, perhaps word of this had traveled, who knows.
Let's see, here's another cauldron. This one comes from Norse mythology.
Heimer is a giant and the father of two Acera gods.
According to Carol Rose, he was said to live on
the eastern edge of the universe and had a brewing
pot or cauldron so large that the heavens could fit
(12:03):
inside it. So we mentally alluded to something like this
earlier in one of the other episodes about the cauldron
becomes kind of like a model, a technological model for
the cosmos itself, And here we have a cauldron so
vast that the universe itself fits inside it. Where's the cauldron?
While you're thinking too hard about this myth, or maybe
you're not, I mean, maybe that's ultimately kind of the
(12:24):
goal of one of these stories is to sort of
give you a real head spinner about the nature of
the universe. So that's the cauldron itself, but there are
some stories attached to it. So at one point, the
gods decide they're going to have a great feast, but
they need some sort of vessel to put all the
mead that they're going to drink. And they're the gods,
(12:45):
they can drink a lot of meat. So they send
Thor to borrow a Heimer's brewing cauldron. So Thor shows
up and Heimer says, no, you can't borrow this, but
they start discussing it and they agree, well, well, let's
settle this have a fishing contest, and there are apparently
many different versions of what follows next. In one version,
(13:06):
Heimer uses two bowls to as bait and then catches
two whales, but then Thor, not to be outdone, catches
the midguard storm itself, the world serpent. In some versions,
the results are inconclusive or they're disputed, so they move
on to a drinking contest after the fishing contest, and
(13:26):
in some tales, Thor wins and takes the vessel with him,
or finally just steals it and Heimer chases after him
with an army of giants. And Thor has to smite
all of them with his hammer, but at any rate,
Thor usually ends up with the cauldron. And the cauldron's
power again is that it's just super big.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
So maybe this is a good place in the discussion
to talk about an interesting paper. I was reading an
archaeology paper. This was published by the Proceedings of the
Prehistoric Society, Cambridge University Press in twenty fourteen, and it's
called fire Burn and Cauldron, Bubble, Iron Age and Early
Roman Cauldrons of Britain and Ireland by Jody Joy. The
(14:15):
author of this paper, Jody Joy, is a senior curator
at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University
of Cambridge. And the paper begins with a quote I
really like it says. It's an old Cosakh saying that
a man can live to fifty, but a cauldron will
live to one hundred. Oh wow, I think you go
compare yourself to a cauldron now. But anyway, so Joy
(14:38):
begins with some sections examining the archaeological record of cauldrons
in Britain and Ireland from the Iron Age and the
Early Roman period, and the early parts of this paper
go into a sort of catalog of all these different
cauldron artifacts and a discussion of their manufacture and physical characteristics.
One of the main things about the section is that
(14:59):
cauldron of the time took a lot of skill to produce.
But the part of this paper that really got my
attention was his section on the use and significance of
cauldrons from this period. Now, it's obvious from the prominent
role of cauldrons in myths and legends like the ones
we've just been talking about, and as magical items in
(15:20):
early medieval literature from Ireland and Wales, that these objects
were charged with mythical significance, particularly associated with resurrection and sacrifice.
But if you think about it, why would just a
big metal pot have any particular symbolic or mythic significance. Now,
(15:41):
Rob we've already talked about some ideas we've had on
that that maybe it has something to do with the
way that cauldrons transform foods when you cook them, though
of course that's strit of smaller pots as well. You know,
cooking transforms, and thus it may be is symbolic of
transformation in some way. But there are other ways that
they could acquire magical significance as well, and Joy argues
(16:05):
that some of the significance might be related to how
these objects were actually used and their role in the
culture of iron Age Britain in Ireland. So how were
they used? This is a good question because there are
several lines of evidence pointing to the conclusion that these
huge pots were primarily used to cook food, particularly soups
(16:26):
and stews containing meat. Now we've already sort of been
assuming the soup and stew connection, but technically, you know,
just a big metal pot could have been used for
all kinds of things, So it is good to examine
what the actual evidence is. And we know of examples
where large metal vessels were used for other things that
might have been just decorative, or they might have been
used to make burnt offerings to the gods or something
(16:48):
like that. But no. In the case of these cauldrons
from iron Age and early Roman Britain in Ireland, first
of all, it seems they were clearly designed to hold liquid,
and we can tell because almost all of the cauldrons
from this period in this place shows signs of having
been through repairs, which in itself is interesting because it
(17:11):
indicates a long social life for each individual cauldron, you know,
they're being used long enough that people have to like
go in and fix them up after they get damaged.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, it kind of takes us back to that quote. Right,
you may live to be fifty, but your cauldron will
live to be one hundred.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Nowadays humans may live to be a hundred, but like
these cauldrons, you'll probably have to have some holes patched.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Here and there. That's true. And so why do we
think that these cauldrons were designed to hold liquid. It's
because when you look at the repairs that were done
to them, we see that they're essentially repairs that would
function to keep the cauldron's water tight. And if these
were just decorative or if they were used for say
like making a burnt offering to the gods or something,
(17:55):
they wouldn't need to patch tiny holes and keep the
vessel water tight. It's obvious that they wanted to prevent leaks.
Second line of evidence, they were clearly designed to be
suspended over fires. So this can be seen from the presence.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
Of supplemental materials like chains, handles, and frames that would
all serve to hang or suspend the cauldron over a hearth,
and also many cauldrons have layers of soot caked onto
the outside surface, showing that a fire was applied to
them from the outside.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Third, you've got organic residues. Few artifacts from this period,
for example, a group known as the Chiselden cauldrons have
been sampled for organic residues on the inner surfaces, and
chemical analyzes indicate the presence of animal fats, which points
to soups or stews containing meat. However, some cauldrons from
(18:51):
Northwest Europe also show traces of honey, probably indicating their
use in serving honey based meads, which would be an
alcoholic beverage.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, which brings us back to the myth of the
giant's brewing cauldron. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yeah, So these cauldrons were almost definitely used mostly for
cooking food, usually meat based soups and stews, but sometimes
alcoholic beverages as well. But can we infer anything else
about how they were used? Well, Joy argues yes we can,
and points specifically to the fact that these were big boys.
(19:25):
These cauldrons are huge. Quote, the cauldron from Hochdorf could
hold five hundred liters. The cauldrons examined here had more
modest capacities. Ranging from thirty to eighty leaders. Even taking
into account the fact that they are unlikely to have
been filled to the brim and probably only ever two
thirds full, even the smallest cauldrons still probably contained twenty liters.
(19:49):
This is a substantial quantity of food and drink. And
I agree, I don't think I could eat twenty liters
of soup in a single sitting.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
But that alone that you can easily imagine this becoming
extrapolated into myths of cauldrons that are just so full
of goodness that you cannot empty it. You cannot possibly
eat all of this food.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Now combine the bigness of these boys with another factor,
which is that cauldrons are relatively scarce in the archaeological
record compared to other types of household items, even those
made of similar materials. And from these facts, Joy infers
that cauldrons were not used for everyday cooking, but instead
(20:30):
they were used for the community based practice of feasting.
And I believe the argument is that this is sort
of what gives cauldrons their special power, what makes them
fit for use as a recurring magical item in myths
and legends and literature. Joy writes as follows At their heart,
(20:51):
feasts involve the creation and maintenance of social relationships and
can be used to redistribute wealth, mobilized labor, create alliances
between or exclude different groups, celebrate marriages, commemorate deaths, and
compensate for transgressions. As objects used during feasts, cauldrons help
facilitate these activities, and that is where much of their
(21:13):
significance and value derives. So Joy is arguing that feasting
was this incredibly important tradition in the cultures of Iron
Age Europe, and it had this complex suite of social utilities.
And the paper invokes the work of a different scholar
named Michael Dietler, who has created three different categories of
(21:34):
sort of the social roles of feasting, which are empowering,
the patron role, and the diacritical. So empowering feasts quote
allow people or groups to acquire prestige without necessarily requiring
the existence of fixed social hierarchies. By hosting a feast,
debts or obligations are passed on to guests, thus making
(21:58):
feasts arenas for negotiations of social influence. But empowering feasts
can also be viewed as celebrations of community identity. So
there's a lot that's going on here in this first category,
Like you could host a feast and serve people out
of a cauldron, and this is this is a powerful
community activity and in one sense it maybe makes everybody
(22:19):
who's at the feast feel more united. It's, you know,
it cements this idea of community identity, but it also
sort of puts guests in your debt. It is, you know,
empowering to the host in terms of enhancing their perceived
social prestige, maybe even making them feel temporarily like some
kind of king or something. And then there are a
(22:40):
couple of other types of feasts, one of the patron
role feasts, where there is sort of an it's sort
of like without the strings attached. It's an expectation that
the social elite must host, but not necessarily the obligation
for reciprocation by the guests. And then finally, there's what
is called called a diacritical feast, and this is where
(23:03):
subgroups of a culture consume different types of food or
drink to emphasize their difference from other people.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Interesting. I mean, I don't know if this is a
useful exercise, but I can't help but try and take
these categories and apply them to modern communal feasting situations,
like I do feel like the patron role feast does
sound a lot like the office Christmas party, you know,
where you know, it's kind of expected that the boss
(23:31):
powers will provide you with some sort of a food
or you know, some sort of wine from plastic cups
at least, but there's no it doesn't mean that we
need to host the next feast for our prisses.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It doesn't put you any more in the boss's debt
or service than you were already.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Right, But then if they don't know the first category,
the empowering feast, if your CEO was to suddenly, out
of the blue, say hey, why don't you and your
family come over to my house for a little get together.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
We're going to have you wonder what they're going to
hit you up for.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, yeah, that might be some sort of situation where
there are strings attached.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
I'm not sure exactly how best to apply the diacritical
one because I don't know exactly like to what extent
that would apply to religious rituals, like say, like Christian
communion or things like that. I mean, that's where my
brain went, But maybe that doesn't really apply. I'm not sure.
It does make me wonder, like I don't know, you know,
you know, they're like eggnog people and non eggnog people,
(24:27):
and I wonder if oh, that's going nowhere.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, the only thing that comes to mind is pot
luck for some reason, like I'm imagining different people bringing
their different dishes and yeah, and maybe missing the mark
on this.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
I don't know if that really serves to emphasize difference.
This may just be a sort of a category that
doesn't really show up in American culture today.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Maybe it will. Maybe it's the food court at them all,
celebration of differences. Everybody can get what they want. You
don't have to like the other person's food. It's just
about whatever you eat. Maybe not, Maybe.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Does that emphasize your difference? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Is there anything more divisive than the mall food court?
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
I have vivid memories of walking through my mall food
court when I was a kid, because there was a
there was a Japanese place where they would have somebody
out with a tray handing out little bites of chicken taraaki,
and it was so delicious. They would oh, man, sometimes
I would walk by multiple times. Oh but anyway, So
(25:27):
to come back to the idea of like the magic
power infusing the cauldron as a symbol being in some
way related to the role of cauldrons in feasting traditions,
it strikes me that in many ways the cauldron could
be seen as a symbol kind of like a crown
with this view, because it's you know, it's symbolic of power,
of power over the social order, of like possessing the
(25:49):
kind of the wealth and abundance that you can freely
give out to others by hosting a feast, but also
being symbolic of the ties that bind a community. Another
thing that this paper highlights is the way that cauldrons
are often apparently deposited intact in some deliberate and perhaps
(26:10):
ritual manner in the ground or in the water. They're
sort of buried, seemingly given as offerings to gods or
to ancestors. This would be though it's sort of confusing
because there were some people saying it's not a cauldron.
But this was the case with the Gundestrup cauldron, right
that it was apparently deliberately deposited in the bog. This
(26:32):
also appears to be something that happens with things that
are definitely actually cauldrons used for cooking, and joy makes
a connection between this kind of ritual use and the
use of the cauldron in feasting, saying quote, the use
of cauldrons as receptacles for symbolic food stuffs is drawn
upon in deposition, and they are instead used as containers
(26:53):
for another kind of offering, this time to deities or
ancestors rather than attendees at feasts. So at the end,
Joyce summarizes and says, yeah, probably a major reason why
cauldrons are such a such a respected and fearsome magical
object in all these stories is that they are socially
(27:13):
powerful objects. They represent social power, and they're used in
powerful social customs, mainly feasting, because feasting is something that
establishes hierarchies, that is used as expressions of individual power
or used to strengthen the identity of a community.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
And it's interesting how this seems to apply rather broadly,
like this could have been a quotation from any of
the papers we are looking at concerning the cauldrons in
Eastern traditions as well. The idea the cauldron is a
thing that can produce a massive quantity of food. It
can be made to use, to make a sacrifice. It
(27:53):
as a symbol of power those who possess the cauldron.
It means something, It stands for something.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
I mean, I'm trying to think how this compares to
modern things, like what's a type of serving vessel or
some type of food related thing that you wouldn't really
use just for you and your own household. You only
break out to certain like when you're hosting a party.
I guess maybe a punch bowl, or maybe a fondue
set or something like that. These other things that would
(28:22):
serve a similar function. They're like an object that symbolizes
your your power to host.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah. Yeah, I guess you could also get into the
whole realm of like the fine china, the good silverware,
and so forth, which is kind of the the cauldronization
of your entire dining room. I guess. I mean sometimes
that is part of it. It's like, it's not it's
the special dining room, the place where we don't normally
eat dinner, but.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
This is a special event.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
So at this point we're gonna finally come around to
something that a number of you may have been thinking about,
and that is the Holy Grail. So, given all of
these associations with cauldrons and rebirth, it's notable that connections
have certainly been made between pre Christian traditions of sacred
cauldrons and the medieval legacy of the literary concept of
(29:18):
the Holy Grail. The grail, after all, is not a
product of biblical texts, but rather emerges during the medieval period,
with our earliest mention of it coming from a work
by Crechian D'stois, a twelfth century French poet. It's thought
that the concept of the Holy Grail, the goblet which
collects the blood of Christ, is a combination of pre
(29:39):
existing cauldron traditions and the right of Eucharist. While generally
depicted as a cup, especially in more modern renditions, you know,
this is the thing you're going to see Indiana Jones holding,
this is the what you're going to see in the
clouds in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Still other
times it seems to connect with the id. Certainly, when
(30:00):
you get into the etymology of the word, it connects
with this idea of a bowl or some other serving
vessel of varying materials, so it doesn't necessarily need to
be made of solid gold or whatnot. So very loosely speaking,
there seems to be a connection between Celtic legends involving cauldrons,
thirteenth century romances and that end up involving the Grail,
(30:25):
and then centuries worth of tails to follow. I also
think it's interesting that while the right of immersion baptism
and Christian traditions has its roots in the use of
rivers and streams, modern churches often use artificial baptism tanks
that wind up feeling more in line with some of
these ideas of immersion within a cauldron. Did you think
(30:47):
about any of that as we were rolling through this stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
No, I did not really make that connection, though. Yeah,
obviously it is a broader theme, the idea of immersion
in some kind of liquid being a transformative process, the
process of baptism, which, of course baptism actually you know,
predates Christianity even in the Bible. John the Baptist was
baptizing people in the River Jordan before Christianity was invented.
(31:11):
So you know, this is an idea that goes way
back and is applied in many different contexts. Yeah, and
so we see it. We see it again in the
imagery on the Gundestrup cauldron. There is something going on
there where there's some kind of baptism like event where
a god is like dunking slain warriors headfirst into a cauldron,
and this is somehow transforming them into some other state.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, all right, speaking of other states, it's time to
go to Hell once more. So, you know, we mentioned
in one of the previous Cauldron's episodes that Western connections
to divine cauldrons may have prevented their use in some
depictions of hell in later Christian traditions, and despite the
fact that certainly many of those myths involve people being
(31:56):
immersed in said cauldrons, and the fact that death by
cauldron was very much a thing in parts of Europe
as well. This in talking about European ideas and medieval
ideas of Hell, of course, there's one place we end
up having to go to, and that of course is
Dante's Inferno in the Divine Comedy.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
A lot of modern ideas about the Christian Hell are
from Dante there. You know, you can't find them anywhere
in the Bible.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Right, right, And beyond hell. I mean you get into
the idea of purgatory, et cetera. I mean, Dante's work
was incredibly influential. And if you start looking around though
for examples of death by cauldron or cauldron immersion or
you know, cauldron torture in Dante's Inferno, you do find
a few interesting things. So in Canto twenty three, in
(32:46):
which it depicts the torment of hypocrites who wear cloaks
with hoods, bright colors and lead linings, yeah, we see
a reference to death by cauldron. This is in the
city trench of the Malibolga. I'm going to read from
a translation here. Outside these cloaks were gilded, and they dazzled,
(33:07):
but inside they were all of lead, so heavy that
Frederick's capes were straw compared to them, a tiring mantle
for eternity. We turned again, as always, to the left,
along with them, intent on their sad weeping. But with
their weights the wary people pace so slowly that we
found ourselves among new company each time we took a step.
(33:29):
And then the Dante comes back to this, and one
of them replied, the yellow cloaks are of a lead
so thick their heaviness makes us the balances beneath them creak. Now,
the illusion here apparently is to death by cauldron, and
I was looking into this in the notes to the
Durling and Martinez edition of Donte's Inferno that I have.
(33:52):
There was apparently a guelf propaganda campaign against Holy Roman
Emperor Frederick, who lived eleven ninety four through twelve fifty,
that charged him with him having punished traders by encasing
them in lead and then roasting them. At least in
some tellings, this was achieved by placing the lead cloaked
(34:12):
individual inside of a cauldron. Now, the Guelphs were a
political faction who supported the papacy against the Holy Roman Emperor,
and they were opposed by the Ghibelines, who basically had
the opposite values. Now, on top of this, there are
boilings in the Inferno. There are boilings of plenty. Most
notably there is the River of Plegathon, which is literally
(34:35):
a river of boiling blood in which the souls of
the damned writhe Here, those who perpetrated violence against other
humans are tormented. You have centaurs patrolling the banks of
the river, pelting anyone with arrows if they try to
rise above their station in the river.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
I seem to recall Virgil and Dante end up talking
to these centaurs a good bit.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
I've forgotten the kind of with the centaurs, but they
have so many wonderful conversations. Now elsewhere, at the back
of the Maliboga, the evil ditches of torment. The fifth
trench consists of a river of burning pitch, and here
the demons of the Malabraca use cruel skewers to make
sure the grafters punished here stay immersed and don't escape.
(35:21):
And Durling and Martinez translate part of this as follows
quote not otherwise do cooks have their servants push down
with hooks the meat cooking in a broth so that
it may float. So here once more we have cooking imagery,
and the authors discuss this at length. They have a
little bit in the back where they break this down
(35:41):
a bit more so. Dante was essentially building upon various
well established metaphors here, especially for frauds, counterfeits, and other
false individuals who are tormented in this particular portion of
the inferno. Various of the parts of the Maliboga feature
quote sharply focused parodies of cooking and digestion. So this
(36:03):
part of the Inferno is kind of like they say,
a great spider web, but also it is kind of
like the belly or the winding intestines of Hell. There's
a lot here about the consumer being consumed. Cooking metaphors
were often wound up in discussing the fraudulent, and we
see that today as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cooking the
books there also the scheme is cooked up if we're
(36:28):
tricked into following it, you know, we're eating it up,
or we're being fed a lie or a fedicon that
sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
M Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
So Dante, as always is painting with a number of
paletts here, but touches on various elements that we've discussed
already in this series. Cooking is digestion, cooking as transformation,
cooking as torment. There are also various depictions of Hell
outside of Dante's work of Hell as a Cauldron, though,
(36:56):
of course Dante's layout for the Inferno is far more
common complex than that, not geared around a single technological metaphor,
but a larger mix of influences and illusions. You can't
you can't tie Dante down and just ask him to
compare all of hell to just one thing. That's that's
not the game he's playing. Though, of course Christian Hell
(37:17):
and Dante's version of it in Inferno, we have to
remind ourselves this is not a transformative realm like we
see in Eastern traditions of hell, where it's about the
soul being transformed into something else. No, it doesn't. Even
these versions of Hell don't even accomplish transformation via annihilation. Now,
(37:38):
certainly within the Divine Comedy you get into purgatory, and
that is about transformation, and certainly that concept, the concept
of purgatory that we see within the Divine Comedy has
more in common with Eastern traditions of the afterlife. Anyway.
There still, on top of this, there are certainly visual
and literary depictions of hell cauldrons in Christian and your traditions.
(38:01):
I don't imagine you could keep them out of Hell
if you wanted to, even if you have, you know,
say again like a Celtic tradition in the background, in
which the cauldron seems a little too holy and know,
a little too special to be a part of some
sort of delirious hell. Painting. Somebody is going to be like, oh,
but what if you were cooked in a soup? Or
(38:22):
how about that guy that we boiled last week for
making fraudulent coins. Like, the idea is going to worm
its way in there. There's no way you're going to
keep that image out of your imagined afterlife.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
None of this hell imagery really seems to have anything
to do with with hosting or feasting, does it.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
No? But but I mean it does have a lot
to do with with eating and digestion. So I mean
everything's seated at the same table one way or another.
Speaker 4 (38:51):
Here, I'm still thinking about modern analogies for the cauldron
as a symbol of hosting power. So I said the
punch bowl earlier be the fun due said, if it
was the I don't know, the seventies or eighties whenever
that was. But the one that just came to me
is like the really nice smoker, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Oh yeah, the green ones and so forth.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to host a barbecue and look
all the look at all the meat I can make.
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Big grills in general, Yeah, I think totally. A really
nice charcoal grill or gas grill is very much in
keeping with the tradition of the cauldron, and I mean
the idea of a low country boil, or it's variations
of the low country boil, in which you know, essentially,
essentially you have a cauldron and you're going to cook
(39:36):
up a whole bunch of shrimp and a few veggies
and so forth. You know, that's very much in the tradition.
Spill it all out on the table and let's all
have a feast. I don't know that that would really
be a special pot, but I mean just sometimes when
we're talking about special, we could be talking about an
ornate vessel. But sometimes it's just the fact that it
is large. I have a pot large enough to create
(39:59):
a low country boiled. That's in and of itself is impressive.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
You've got family in Louisiana, right, or.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Do you down in that area? Yes, southern Mississippi?
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah, okay, you do crawfish boils or have you done that?
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Oh? Yeah? Yeah? So basically a big, a big metal
cauldron in the front yard with gas flame underneath it,
cooking up a bunch of shrump.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
Some older man telling like scolding you for not sucking
the heads on you. You gotta suck the heads experience.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
That's what they say. Yeah, with the with the crawl dads,
the mudbugs.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Okay, I think maybe we're done.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, but I mean, obviously we'd love to hear from
everyone out there about very certainly this question, like the
special thing in your household or a household you grew
up in, or or just you know, cultural tradition surrounding you,
like what is what is your version of the sacred cauldron,
the sacred vestival for feasts? What is the or or
(40:53):
what is the dish that is central to your experiences
that the matches up with all of this. We'd love
to hear thoughts on that, about anything we've discussed in
these four episodes on the Cauldron. So we'll be back
next time with something new, something non cauldron related. So
we hope you'll join us. Core episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the
(41:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays we
usually do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays we usually
do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
on Fridays we do weird house Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a strange film.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would love 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 stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
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 listen. Two favorite shows
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Part four of our
series on the Cauldron. In today's vault episode, this one
originally published June sixteenth, twenty twenty two. Is there any
reason to delay? I don't think there is. Let's go
straight to it.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Let's jump right in and see what happens.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Cauldron's Part four. This
is really the last Cauldron's episode, right.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, for now, but no, no, this is the last one.
Even my son when he asked what I was doing today,
I said, Oh, we're going to record a fourth Cauldron's episode.
He's like, really, y'all are still doing those Cauldron episodes?
So yeah, yeah, some more exciting stuff. And you know,
there's so much we're not even going to be able
to cover in these episodes, but this is an exciting
one because we're going to roll through a few more myths.
(01:09):
We have some more content about just how cauldrons factor
into our history and our beliefs, and you know we'll
get into the inferno a bit as well.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Rob, I am ready to be boiled.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
All right, Well, let's basically we've alluded to this. We've
all along, we've mentioned that you have some strong Celtic
traditions that involve the cauldron, and they end up having
an influence over European traditions of the cauldron in general.
So let's roll through just a few of these different myths.
I'm not going to go into super detail on these,
(01:45):
though a number of these are the subject of epics
and longer tails and of course treatments and retreatments over
the years. So let's start with the Dogda's Cauldron. So
Dogdo or the Dogda was the most powful of all
the too apha to done. And you know these are
the magical folk, the ancestors of Ireland and so forth.
(02:10):
Docta was the master of the battle club, the magic harp,
and the cauldron. He was sometimes called the good God
because he was simply good at everything.
Speaker 4 (02:22):
Today you'd call him a Mary Sue.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
As Patricia Monaghan explains in the Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology
and folklore, he was kind of a god of not
only fertility, but also kind of exaggerated male desire. So
he's round, you know, kind of a rotund individual. His
tunic is a bit too short to cover his genitals
in some depictions. Anyway, he wields a mallet that's so
(02:47):
huge that he has to drag it behind him in
a cart. So he's kind of this exaggerated cartoon character
in many respects.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
I like him already.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
He also has a pair of self replenishing pigs that
you can just keep eating. I'm not sure how the
details of that work. I'm assuming it's like you cook
them up, or I don't know if you're slicing pieces
off of them. I'm not sure, But any rate, I
don't know that the pigs really mind. They're magical, after all,
but even more magical than the pigs. He also has
(03:17):
a magic cauldron that can never be emptied. It overfloweth
with goodness, so he has many romantic adventures. He has
many children. He's eventually slain in battle by the ceph Leon,
a wife of the great Femorian king Baaler, and then
he goes on to party forever in the other world.
(03:37):
Sustained by his bottomless cauldron that he gets to bring
with him into the afterlife.
Speaker 4 (03:44):
Oh that's lucky.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah now, Bonagan, who also wrote the Encyclopedia of Goddesses
and Heroines, wrote that the Irish cauldron is of course
not only a mundane item for cooking and stewing, but
also quote a place where new life was brewed and stewed.
It was a symbol of great power for the Celts.
(04:07):
The Roman writer Strebo describes a great cauldron sent to
Caesar by Simbri and claims that the Celts ritually sliced
open the throats of prisoners over such a cauldron. And
these traditions, to whatever extent they are accurately reported here,
may connect to the Gunstrip cauldron that we talked about
in the last episode that was unearthed in Denmark, but
(04:29):
burying Celtic symbols, etc. Other cauldrons monagan rites have been
found in bogs and lakes and are suspected to have
been offerings to the other world.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Yeah, that'll actually connect to an archaeology paper I want
to talk about in a minute.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
In general, though, she contends that the Irish cauldron means
fullness and abundance, and Dogda's cauldron is just a great
example of this, a never ending supply of good eats.
The Welsh goddess Sertowin also uses a cauldron to make
a bra that imbues one with great wisdom. So it's
interesting how we're getting into talking about just sustaining the self,
(05:07):
sustaining the body via the contents of the cauldron. But
then we kind of take that into another dimension as well,
sustaining the mind. And this will have ramifications on other
storytelling and mythic traditions. All right, we'll come back to
some of these ideas, but let's let's move on to
the next myth here. This is another one from Celtic traditions,
(05:29):
but it takes the idea of the cauldron as life
bringer and kind of puts a different spin on it.
This is the story of the pair Da Denni, the
cauldron of rebirth. Now, there are already some accounts that
indicate that the Dog's cauldron, in addition to overflowing with
great and miraculously healing foods, in some cases, could also
(05:49):
raise the dead if they were lowered into the cauldron.
And yeah, that leads us into what is perhaps the
most noteworthy necromantic cauldron. This is the cauldron of Rebirth
from Welsh mythology and literature, along with the Cauldron of Dogda.
It's a key mythic cauldron to understand the artifact's place
in European traditions. It's also the primary inspiration for the
(06:12):
black cauldron that shows up in the novels of Lloyd Alexander.
It factors into a few different tales, including Branwyn daughter
of Leir, a legendary tale from medieval Welsh literature, and
the second of four branches of the mobin Ogion collection
of tales. So this is a pretty interesting one, and
(06:33):
again I'm just giving you the broad strokes here. Again,
this one has received a much more expansive treatment in
works of literature, but it concerns the mythic conflict between
the Welsh and the Irish and involves the exploits of Ethnisian,
the half brother of Bron the Blessed, who has been
described as an easily offended troublemaker or even as a
(06:56):
psychotic anti hero. Oh okay, so this is a guy
who does things like mutilate horses inside wars, burn people alive.
So he's not presented as a good guy. It doesn't
even seem like it's one of these cases where you
can say, well, today we wouldn't like him, but we
have to put him look at him within the context
(07:17):
of the time. No, it seems like everyone seems to
think that he's supposed to be a crazy, dangerous fellow.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
He's not Snake Pliskin. He's Darth Vader.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Yeah yeah, but like Darth Vader, he has a redemption
arc of sorts. He ends up engaging in a little
bit of self sacrifice to bring balance to things. So
it comes to light that the Irisher using the magical
cauldron of Rebirth to resurrect their dead warriors so that
they can keep on fighting. And so you know, the
(07:48):
Welsh forces are concerned about this. This is an unfair advantage,
right if you're bringing your own debt back to life
onto the battlefield. So what does Ethnician do Well, he
hides himself among the enemy Irish dead, and then the
Irish hall all those dead bodies back. They take them
to the cauldron of Rebirth and one by one they
throw them in the cauldron, and then one by one,
(08:10):
each warrior emerges once more to fight. Eventually they come
to Ethnician, who again is pretending to be a dead irishman.
They throw him into the cauldron alive, and this seems
to sort of short circuit everything. You know, the cauldron
is not designed or made, It does not exist to
resurrect the living. It totally just screws up everything. And
(08:35):
somehow Ethnician is then able to destroy the cauldron from within,
but in doing so, not only does he shatter the cauldron,
but he dies in the process. Oh and there's some
wonderful illustrations of this.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
I want more detail here. Did like, did he know
that was going to happen to him or what did
he expect was going to? Like it just did it
not cross his mind that like, oh, yeah, I can't
be resurrected because I'm not dead yet.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I think he knew. I mean, otherwise it's not that
I mean, the self sacrifice is diminished if he doesn't
know that this is probably going to destroy him. So
I think the general vibe is the y he knows
that this will be the end, but it's the only
way to stop the Cauldron of rebirth.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Okay, he's not just being like dude, I'd love to
be resurrected from the dead.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
No, no, no, all right, I'm going to run through
a few other cauldrons. Of note, there's the cauldron of Drenwich,
the Giant. In medieval Welsh tradition, there are thirteen treasures
of the Island of Britain, entailing various horns and chariots, knives, rings,
and more. But there's also a cauldron owned by the
giant Drenwich, which can tell brave men from cowards because
(09:44):
it will not boil meat for a coward, but will
quickly boil meat for a brave man. Now I'm not
sure if there was a vegetarian option, but basically it's
said to just be massive enough to cook an entire
wedding feast within It eventually falls into the possession of
King Arthur and some tellings. But yeah, I guess it's like,
if you're not sure if somebody is brave or cowardly,
(10:07):
you just have them bring forth their chicken Cutlets throw
them into the cauldron here and see what happens.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
Here's another one where I wonder about the mechanics of
exactly what that means. So you put the meat in,
does it mean if you're a coward. The water won't
come to a boil. Or does it mean even if
it boils, the meat won't get tender.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I don't know. I'm just imagining it like, Okay, you
put the meat in and maybe the water looks like
it's boiling, but the meat's not cooking. You just got
some raw chicken cutlets in there, just bobbing around.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
Well, it reminds me of those stories of people up
on mountaintops trying to cook food, like boiling potatoes in
a pot on Mount Everest, where your potatoes don't get
cooked because when you go higher and higher into the atmosphere,
the boiling point of water goes down. So you can
be there boiling a pot on the stove and it
(11:00):
is actually boiling, like it's bubbling and turning into steam,
but the boiling point is so low that the water
is actually not hot enough to cook your food. So
you can boil potatoes at the top of a mountain
for a long time, take them out, and they're basically
still raw.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Yeah. I don't have an answer for that, but it
does make me wonder to what extent experiences with different
altitudes and attempts to boil stuff in the cauldron. How
that might affect this because they would clearly notice, you
would know that, well, here it seems to take longer
to cook our food. Why might that be?
Speaker 4 (11:36):
I haven't done the math. I don't know if there
are peaks in Britain high enough for that to happen.
I'm not sure.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Maybe though, perhaps word of this had traveled, who knows.
Let's see, here's another cauldron. This one comes from Norse mythology.
Heimer is a giant and the father of two Acera gods.
According to Carol Rose, he was said to live on
the eastern edge of the universe and had a brewing
pot or cauldron so large that the heavens could fit
(12:03):
inside it. So we mentally alluded to something like this
earlier in one of the other episodes about the cauldron
becomes kind of like a model, a technological model for
the cosmos itself, And here we have a cauldron so
vast that the universe itself fits inside it. Where's the cauldron?
While you're thinking too hard about this myth, or maybe
you're not, I mean, maybe that's ultimately kind of the
(12:24):
goal of one of these stories is to sort of
give you a real head spinner about the nature of
the universe. So that's the cauldron itself, but there are
some stories attached to it. So at one point, the
gods decide they're going to have a great feast, but
they need some sort of vessel to put all the
mead that they're going to drink. And they're the gods,
(12:45):
they can drink a lot of meat. So they send
Thor to borrow a Heimer's brewing cauldron. So Thor shows
up and Heimer says, no, you can't borrow this, but
they start discussing it and they agree, well, well, let's
settle this have a fishing contest, and there are apparently
many different versions of what follows next. In one version,
(13:06):
Heimer uses two bowls to as bait and then catches
two whales, but then Thor, not to be outdone, catches
the midguard storm itself, the world serpent. In some versions,
the results are inconclusive or they're disputed, so they move
on to a drinking contest after the fishing contest, and
(13:26):
in some tales, Thor wins and takes the vessel with him,
or finally just steals it and Heimer chases after him
with an army of giants. And Thor has to smite
all of them with his hammer, but at any rate,
Thor usually ends up with the cauldron. And the cauldron's
power again is that it's just super big.
Speaker 4 (13:53):
So maybe this is a good place in the discussion
to talk about an interesting paper. I was reading an
archaeology paper. This was published by the Proceedings of the
Prehistoric Society, Cambridge University Press in twenty fourteen, and it's
called fire Burn and Cauldron, Bubble, Iron Age and Early
Roman Cauldrons of Britain and Ireland by Jody Joy. The
(14:15):
author of this paper, Jody Joy, is a senior curator
at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University
of Cambridge. And the paper begins with a quote I
really like it says. It's an old Cosakh saying that
a man can live to fifty, but a cauldron will
live to one hundred. Oh wow, I think you go
compare yourself to a cauldron now. But anyway, so Joy
(14:38):
begins with some sections examining the archaeological record of cauldrons
in Britain and Ireland from the Iron Age and the
Early Roman period, and the early parts of this paper
go into a sort of catalog of all these different
cauldron artifacts and a discussion of their manufacture and physical characteristics.
One of the main things about the section is that
(14:59):
cauldron of the time took a lot of skill to produce.
But the part of this paper that really got my
attention was his section on the use and significance of
cauldrons from this period. Now, it's obvious from the prominent
role of cauldrons in myths and legends like the ones
we've just been talking about, and as magical items in
(15:20):
early medieval literature from Ireland and Wales, that these objects
were charged with mythical significance, particularly associated with resurrection and sacrifice.
But if you think about it, why would just a
big metal pot have any particular symbolic or mythic significance. Now,
(15:41):
Rob we've already talked about some ideas we've had on
that that maybe it has something to do with the
way that cauldrons transform foods when you cook them, though
of course that's strit of smaller pots as well. You know,
cooking transforms, and thus it may be is symbolic of
transformation in some way. But there are other ways that
they could acquire magical significance as well, and Joy argues
(16:05):
that some of the significance might be related to how
these objects were actually used and their role in the
culture of iron Age Britain in Ireland. So how were
they used? This is a good question because there are
several lines of evidence pointing to the conclusion that these
huge pots were primarily used to cook food, particularly soups
(16:26):
and stews containing meat. Now we've already sort of been
assuming the soup and stew connection, but technically, you know,
just a big metal pot could have been used for
all kinds of things, So it is good to examine
what the actual evidence is. And we know of examples
where large metal vessels were used for other things that
might have been just decorative, or they might have been
used to make burnt offerings to the gods or something
(16:48):
like that. But no. In the case of these cauldrons
from iron Age and early Roman Britain in Ireland, first
of all, it seems they were clearly designed to hold liquid,
and we can tell because almost all of the cauldrons
from this period in this place shows signs of having
been through repairs, which in itself is interesting because it
(17:11):
indicates a long social life for each individual cauldron, you know,
they're being used long enough that people have to like
go in and fix them up after they get damaged.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, it kind of takes us back to that quote. Right,
you may live to be fifty, but your cauldron will
live to be one hundred.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Nowadays humans may live to be a hundred, but like
these cauldrons, you'll probably have to have some holes patched.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Here and there. That's true. And so why do we
think that these cauldrons were designed to hold liquid. It's
because when you look at the repairs that were done
to them, we see that they're essentially repairs that would
function to keep the cauldron's water tight. And if these
were just decorative or if they were used for say
like making a burnt offering to the gods or something,
(17:55):
they wouldn't need to patch tiny holes and keep the
vessel water tight. It's obvious that they wanted to prevent leaks.
Second line of evidence, they were clearly designed to be
suspended over fires. So this can be seen from the presence.
Speaker 5 (18:10):
Of supplemental materials like chains, handles, and frames that would
all serve to hang or suspend the cauldron over a hearth,
and also many cauldrons have layers of soot caked onto
the outside surface, showing that a fire was applied to
them from the outside.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
Third, you've got organic residues. Few artifacts from this period,
for example, a group known as the Chiselden cauldrons have
been sampled for organic residues on the inner surfaces, and
chemical analyzes indicate the presence of animal fats, which points
to soups or stews containing meat. However, some cauldrons from
(18:51):
Northwest Europe also show traces of honey, probably indicating their
use in serving honey based meads, which would be an
alcoholic beverage.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Yeah, which brings us back to the myth of the
giant's brewing cauldron. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yeah, So these cauldrons were almost definitely used mostly for
cooking food, usually meat based soups and stews, but sometimes
alcoholic beverages as well. But can we infer anything else
about how they were used? Well, Joy argues yes we can,
and points specifically to the fact that these were big boys.
(19:25):
These cauldrons are huge. Quote, the cauldron from Hochdorf could
hold five hundred liters. The cauldrons examined here had more
modest capacities. Ranging from thirty to eighty leaders. Even taking
into account the fact that they are unlikely to have
been filled to the brim and probably only ever two
thirds full, even the smallest cauldrons still probably contained twenty liters.
(19:49):
This is a substantial quantity of food and drink. And
I agree, I don't think I could eat twenty liters
of soup in a single sitting.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
But that alone that you can easily imagine this becoming
extrapolated into myths of cauldrons that are just so full
of goodness that you cannot empty it. You cannot possibly
eat all of this food.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Now combine the bigness of these boys with another factor,
which is that cauldrons are relatively scarce in the archaeological
record compared to other types of household items, even those
made of similar materials. And from these facts, Joy infers
that cauldrons were not used for everyday cooking, but instead
(20:30):
they were used for the community based practice of feasting.
And I believe the argument is that this is sort
of what gives cauldrons their special power, what makes them
fit for use as a recurring magical item in myths
and legends and literature. Joy writes as follows At their heart,
(20:51):
feasts involve the creation and maintenance of social relationships and
can be used to redistribute wealth, mobilized labor, create alliances
between or exclude different groups, celebrate marriages, commemorate deaths, and
compensate for transgressions. As objects used during feasts, cauldrons help
facilitate these activities, and that is where much of their
(21:13):
significance and value derives. So Joy is arguing that feasting
was this incredibly important tradition in the cultures of Iron
Age Europe, and it had this complex suite of social utilities.
And the paper invokes the work of a different scholar
named Michael Dietler, who has created three different categories of
(21:34):
sort of the social roles of feasting, which are empowering,
the patron role, and the diacritical. So empowering feasts quote
allow people or groups to acquire prestige without necessarily requiring
the existence of fixed social hierarchies. By hosting a feast,
debts or obligations are passed on to guests, thus making
(21:58):
feasts arenas for negotiations of social influence. But empowering feasts
can also be viewed as celebrations of community identity. So
there's a lot that's going on here in this first category,
Like you could host a feast and serve people out
of a cauldron, and this is this is a powerful
community activity and in one sense it maybe makes everybody
(22:19):
who's at the feast feel more united. It's, you know,
it cements this idea of community identity, but it also
sort of puts guests in your debt. It is, you know,
empowering to the host in terms of enhancing their perceived
social prestige, maybe even making them feel temporarily like some
kind of king or something. And then there are a
(22:40):
couple of other types of feasts, one of the patron
role feasts, where there is sort of an it's sort
of like without the strings attached. It's an expectation that
the social elite must host, but not necessarily the obligation
for reciprocation by the guests. And then finally, there's what
is called called a diacritical feast, and this is where
(23:03):
subgroups of a culture consume different types of food or
drink to emphasize their difference from other people.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Interesting. I mean, I don't know if this is a
useful exercise, but I can't help but try and take
these categories and apply them to modern communal feasting situations,
like I do feel like the patron role feast does
sound a lot like the office Christmas party, you know,
where you know, it's kind of expected that the boss
(23:31):
powers will provide you with some sort of a food
or you know, some sort of wine from plastic cups
at least, but there's no it doesn't mean that we
need to host the next feast for our prisses.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
It doesn't put you any more in the boss's debt
or service than you were already.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Right, But then if they don't know the first category,
the empowering feast, if your CEO was to suddenly, out
of the blue, say hey, why don't you and your
family come over to my house for a little get together.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
We're going to have you wonder what they're going to
hit you up for.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yeah, yeah, that might be some sort of situation where
there are strings attached.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
I'm not sure exactly how best to apply the diacritical
one because I don't know exactly like to what extent
that would apply to religious rituals, like say, like Christian
communion or things like that. I mean, that's where my
brain went, But maybe that doesn't really apply. I'm not sure.
It does make me wonder, like I don't know, you know,
you know, they're like eggnog people and non eggnog people,
(24:27):
and I wonder if oh, that's going nowhere.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, the only thing that comes to mind is pot
luck for some reason, like I'm imagining different people bringing
their different dishes and yeah, and maybe missing the mark
on this.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
I don't know if that really serves to emphasize difference.
This may just be a sort of a category that
doesn't really show up in American culture today.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Maybe it will. Maybe it's the food court at them all,
celebration of differences. Everybody can get what they want. You
don't have to like the other person's food. It's just
about whatever you eat. Maybe not, Maybe.
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Does that emphasize your difference? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Is there anything more divisive than the mall food court?
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
I have vivid memories of walking through my mall food
court when I was a kid, because there was a
there was a Japanese place where they would have somebody
out with a tray handing out little bites of chicken taraaki,
and it was so delicious. They would oh, man, sometimes
I would walk by multiple times. Oh but anyway, So
(25:27):
to come back to the idea of like the magic
power infusing the cauldron as a symbol being in some
way related to the role of cauldrons in feasting traditions,
it strikes me that in many ways the cauldron could
be seen as a symbol kind of like a crown
with this view, because it's you know, it's symbolic of power,
of power over the social order, of like possessing the
(25:49):
kind of the wealth and abundance that you can freely
give out to others by hosting a feast, but also
being symbolic of the ties that bind a community. Another
thing that this paper highlights is the way that cauldrons
are often apparently deposited intact in some deliberate and perhaps
(26:10):
ritual manner in the ground or in the water. They're
sort of buried, seemingly given as offerings to gods or
to ancestors. This would be though it's sort of confusing
because there were some people saying it's not a cauldron.
But this was the case with the Gundestrup cauldron, right
that it was apparently deliberately deposited in the bog. This
(26:32):
also appears to be something that happens with things that
are definitely actually cauldrons used for cooking, and joy makes
a connection between this kind of ritual use and the
use of the cauldron in feasting, saying quote, the use
of cauldrons as receptacles for symbolic food stuffs is drawn
upon in deposition, and they are instead used as containers
(26:53):
for another kind of offering, this time to deities or
ancestors rather than attendees at feasts. So at the end,
Joyce summarizes and says, yeah, probably a major reason why
cauldrons are such a such a respected and fearsome magical
object in all these stories is that they are socially
(27:13):
powerful objects. They represent social power, and they're used in
powerful social customs, mainly feasting, because feasting is something that
establishes hierarchies, that is used as expressions of individual power
or used to strengthen the identity of a community.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
And it's interesting how this seems to apply rather broadly,
like this could have been a quotation from any of
the papers we are looking at concerning the cauldrons in
Eastern traditions as well. The idea the cauldron is a
thing that can produce a massive quantity of food. It
can be made to use, to make a sacrifice. It
(27:53):
as a symbol of power those who possess the cauldron.
It means something, It stands for something.
Speaker 4 (27:59):
I mean, I'm trying to think how this compares to
modern things, like what's a type of serving vessel or
some type of food related thing that you wouldn't really
use just for you and your own household. You only
break out to certain like when you're hosting a party.
I guess maybe a punch bowl, or maybe a fondue
set or something like that. These other things that would
(28:22):
serve a similar function. They're like an object that symbolizes
your your power to host.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
Yeah. Yeah, I guess you could also get into the
whole realm of like the fine china, the good silverware,
and so forth, which is kind of the the cauldronization
of your entire dining room. I guess. I mean sometimes
that is part of it. It's like, it's not it's
the special dining room, the place where we don't normally
eat dinner, but.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
This is a special event.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
So at this point we're gonna finally come around to
something that a number of you may have been thinking about,
and that is the Holy Grail. So, given all of
these associations with cauldrons and rebirth, it's notable that connections
have certainly been made between pre Christian traditions of sacred
cauldrons and the medieval legacy of the literary concept of
(29:18):
the Holy Grail. The grail, after all, is not a
product of biblical texts, but rather emerges during the medieval period,
with our earliest mention of it coming from a work
by Crechian D'stois, a twelfth century French poet. It's thought
that the concept of the Holy Grail, the goblet which
collects the blood of Christ, is a combination of pre
(29:39):
existing cauldron traditions and the right of Eucharist. While generally
depicted as a cup, especially in more modern renditions, you know,
this is the thing you're going to see Indiana Jones holding,
this is the what you're going to see in the
clouds in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Still other
times it seems to connect with the id. Certainly, when
(30:00):
you get into the etymology of the word, it connects
with this idea of a bowl or some other serving
vessel of varying materials, so it doesn't necessarily need to
be made of solid gold or whatnot. So very loosely speaking,
there seems to be a connection between Celtic legends involving cauldrons,
thirteenth century romances and that end up involving the Grail,
(30:25):
and then centuries worth of tails to follow. I also
think it's interesting that while the right of immersion baptism
and Christian traditions has its roots in the use of
rivers and streams, modern churches often use artificial baptism tanks
that wind up feeling more in line with some of
these ideas of immersion within a cauldron. Did you think
(30:47):
about any of that as we were rolling through this stuff.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
No, I did not really make that connection, though. Yeah,
obviously it is a broader theme, the idea of immersion
in some kind of liquid being a transformative process, the
process of baptism, which, of course baptism actually you know,
predates Christianity even in the Bible. John the Baptist was
baptizing people in the River Jordan before Christianity was invented.
(31:11):
So you know, this is an idea that goes way
back and is applied in many different contexts. Yeah, and
so we see it. We see it again in the
imagery on the Gundestrup cauldron. There is something going on
there where there's some kind of baptism like event where
a god is like dunking slain warriors headfirst into a cauldron,
and this is somehow transforming them into some other state.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Yeah, all right, speaking of other states, it's time to
go to Hell once more. So, you know, we mentioned
in one of the previous Cauldron's episodes that Western connections
to divine cauldrons may have prevented their use in some
depictions of hell in later Christian traditions, and despite the
fact that certainly many of those myths involve people being
(31:56):
immersed in said cauldrons, and the fact that death by
cauldron was very much a thing in parts of Europe
as well. This in talking about European ideas and medieval
ideas of Hell, of course, there's one place we end
up having to go to, and that of course is
Dante's Inferno in the Divine Comedy.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
A lot of modern ideas about the Christian Hell are
from Dante there. You know, you can't find them anywhere
in the Bible.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Right, right, And beyond hell. I mean you get into
the idea of purgatory, et cetera. I mean, Dante's work
was incredibly influential. And if you start looking around though
for examples of death by cauldron or cauldron immersion or
you know, cauldron torture in Dante's Inferno, you do find
a few interesting things. So in Canto twenty three, in
(32:46):
which it depicts the torment of hypocrites who wear cloaks
with hoods, bright colors and lead linings, yeah, we see
a reference to death by cauldron. This is in the
city trench of the Malibolga. I'm going to read from
a translation here. Outside these cloaks were gilded, and they dazzled,
(33:07):
but inside they were all of lead, so heavy that
Frederick's capes were straw compared to them, a tiring mantle
for eternity. We turned again, as always, to the left,
along with them, intent on their sad weeping. But with
their weights the wary people pace so slowly that we
found ourselves among new company each time we took a step.
(33:29):
And then the Dante comes back to this, and one
of them replied, the yellow cloaks are of a lead
so thick their heaviness makes us the balances beneath them creak. Now,
the illusion here apparently is to death by cauldron, and
I was looking into this in the notes to the
Durling and Martinez edition of Donte's Inferno that I have.
(33:52):
There was apparently a guelf propaganda campaign against Holy Roman
Emperor Frederick, who lived eleven ninety four through twelve fifty,
that charged him with him having punished traders by encasing
them in lead and then roasting them. At least in
some tellings, this was achieved by placing the lead cloaked
(34:12):
individual inside of a cauldron. Now, the Guelphs were a
political faction who supported the papacy against the Holy Roman Emperor,
and they were opposed by the Ghibelines, who basically had
the opposite values. Now, on top of this, there are
boilings in the Inferno. There are boilings of plenty. Most
notably there is the River of Plegathon, which is literally
(34:35):
a river of boiling blood in which the souls of
the damned writhe Here, those who perpetrated violence against other
humans are tormented. You have centaurs patrolling the banks of
the river, pelting anyone with arrows if they try to
rise above their station in the river.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
I seem to recall Virgil and Dante end up talking
to these centaurs a good bit.
Speaker 1 (34:58):
I've forgotten the kind of with the centaurs, but they
have so many wonderful conversations. Now elsewhere, at the back
of the Maliboga, the evil ditches of torment. The fifth
trench consists of a river of burning pitch, and here
the demons of the Malabraca use cruel skewers to make
sure the grafters punished here stay immersed and don't escape.
(35:21):
And Durling and Martinez translate part of this as follows
quote not otherwise do cooks have their servants push down
with hooks the meat cooking in a broth so that
it may float. So here once more we have cooking imagery,
and the authors discuss this at length. They have a
little bit in the back where they break this down
(35:41):
a bit more so. Dante was essentially building upon various
well established metaphors here, especially for frauds, counterfeits, and other
false individuals who are tormented in this particular portion of
the inferno. Various of the parts of the Maliboga feature
quote sharply focused parodies of cooking and digestion. So this
(36:03):
part of the Inferno is kind of like they say,
a great spider web, but also it is kind of
like the belly or the winding intestines of Hell. There's
a lot here about the consumer being consumed. Cooking metaphors
were often wound up in discussing the fraudulent, and we
see that today as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cooking the
books there also the scheme is cooked up if we're
(36:28):
tricked into following it, you know, we're eating it up,
or we're being fed a lie or a fedicon that
sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (36:35):
M Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
So Dante, as always is painting with a number of
paletts here, but touches on various elements that we've discussed
already in this series. Cooking is digestion, cooking as transformation,
cooking as torment. There are also various depictions of Hell
outside of Dante's work of Hell as a Cauldron, though,
(36:56):
of course Dante's layout for the Inferno is far more
common complex than that, not geared around a single technological metaphor,
but a larger mix of influences and illusions. You can't
you can't tie Dante down and just ask him to
compare all of hell to just one thing. That's that's
not the game he's playing. Though, of course Christian Hell
(37:17):
and Dante's version of it in Inferno, we have to
remind ourselves this is not a transformative realm like we
see in Eastern traditions of hell, where it's about the
soul being transformed into something else. No, it doesn't. Even
these versions of Hell don't even accomplish transformation via annihilation. Now,
(37:38):
certainly within the Divine Comedy you get into purgatory, and
that is about transformation, and certainly that concept, the concept
of purgatory that we see within the Divine Comedy has
more in common with Eastern traditions of the afterlife. Anyway.
There still, on top of this, there are certainly visual
and literary depictions of hell cauldrons in Christian and your traditions.
(38:01):
I don't imagine you could keep them out of Hell
if you wanted to, even if you have, you know,
say again like a Celtic tradition in the background, in
which the cauldron seems a little too holy and know,
a little too special to be a part of some
sort of delirious hell. Painting. Somebody is going to be like, oh,
but what if you were cooked in a soup? Or
(38:22):
how about that guy that we boiled last week for
making fraudulent coins. Like, the idea is going to worm
its way in there. There's no way you're going to
keep that image out of your imagined afterlife.
Speaker 4 (38:34):
None of this hell imagery really seems to have anything
to do with with hosting or feasting, does it.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
No? But but I mean it does have a lot
to do with with eating and digestion. So I mean
everything's seated at the same table one way or another.
Speaker 4 (38:51):
Here, I'm still thinking about modern analogies for the cauldron
as a symbol of hosting power. So I said the
punch bowl earlier be the fun due said, if it
was the I don't know, the seventies or eighties whenever
that was. But the one that just came to me
is like the really nice smoker, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Oh yeah, the green ones and so forth.
Speaker 4 (39:11):
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to host a barbecue and look
all the look at all the meat I can make.
Oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Big grills in general, Yeah, I think totally. A really
nice charcoal grill or gas grill is very much in
keeping with the tradition of the cauldron, and I mean
the idea of a low country boil, or it's variations
of the low country boil, in which you know, essentially,
essentially you have a cauldron and you're going to cook
(39:36):
up a whole bunch of shrimp and a few veggies
and so forth. You know, that's very much in the tradition.
Spill it all out on the table and let's all
have a feast. I don't know that that would really
be a special pot, but I mean just sometimes when
we're talking about special, we could be talking about an
ornate vessel. But sometimes it's just the fact that it
is large. I have a pot large enough to create
(39:59):
a low country boiled. That's in and of itself is impressive.
Speaker 4 (40:02):
You've got family in Louisiana, right, or.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
Do you down in that area? Yes, southern Mississippi?
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah, okay, you do crawfish boils or have you done that?
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Oh? Yeah? Yeah? So basically a big, a big metal
cauldron in the front yard with gas flame underneath it,
cooking up a bunch of shrump.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
Some older man telling like scolding you for not sucking
the heads on you. You gotta suck the heads experience.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
That's what they say. Yeah, with the with the crawl dads,
the mudbugs.
Speaker 4 (40:31):
Okay, I think maybe we're done.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Yeah, but I mean, obviously we'd love to hear from
everyone out there about very certainly this question, like the
special thing in your household or a household you grew
up in, or or just you know, cultural tradition surrounding you,
like what is what is your version of the sacred cauldron,
the sacred vestival for feasts? What is the or or
(40:53):
what is the dish that is central to your experiences
that the matches up with all of this. We'd love
to hear thoughts on that, about anything we've discussed in
these four episodes on the Cauldron. So we'll be back
next time with something new, something non cauldron related. So
we hope you'll join us. Core episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind air on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the
(41:15):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. On Mondays we
usually do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays we usually
do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
on Fridays we do weird house Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a strange film.
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would love 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 stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
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 listen. Two favorite shows
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.