Cauldrons

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S3E34 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one. Mark.

Yucca: and today we are talking about Cauldrons.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: yes, and welcome to October. We're here all in. The wonderful aut month, the our kind of spooky hollows is coming and here we are. So we're gonna have some great episodes this, this month.

Mark: Yeah, I'm really excited about it. We've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about for the witchy month and can't wait to get started.

Yucca: Yeah. So speaking of witchy, there's probably three symbols which are most associated with witch broomstick, pointy hat and cauldron.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: No one will make any mistake about what you are trying to represent. If you've got those three things with you

Yucca: Yep. And oh please.

Mark: Well, I was gonna say, we don't have enough to say about a pointy hat to turn it into an episode, but there's plenty to talk about with a caldron.

Yucca: there is, Yes. So I think a good place to start would probably be, you know, the history. What is a coldron, what's the history and why? Why it really matters, why we're interested in this symbol.

Mark: Mm-hmm. well. From my standpoint, I, I think you, you really identified the main reason why we're interested in it. I mean, for those of us that gravitate towards Paganism and it's aesthetic and it's iconography in our ritual practice, those. Those standard symbols, like the cauldron become very potent.

They become very influential when, when you're, when you're brewing something over a cauldron, there is very much this sense that you're doing magic, right.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and I, and I think that the association with the witch, a witch is a powerful figure. Right. And they're, they can be represented in different ways in terms of the morality of them in stories, right? Depending on who's telling the story, whether they're, you know, the good guy or the bad guy. But they're always powerful, right?

They're always, they have agency. But that agency also usually is coming from them and the home. And the cauldron has this association with the home because it's a tool of the. , whether that's an outdoor kitchen around the fire or whether that was your kitchen in the home at the Hearth.

Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, Among the very earliest implementations of of any kind of cooking equipment that we're familiar with are ceramic pots that were used for cooking. Things in hot stones would be put inside a ceramic pot. And then Cereals or meat or and water or whatever. It could be stirred in that and it would boil which would sterilize it of course, but would also break down proteins in the food to make it easier to digest.

And we have evidence of that going back thousands and thousands of years.

Yucca: Right. Well, because there's a lot of foods that, There's a lot of plants that you might be digging up that you can't eat.

Mark: right.

Yucca: Right. It's not gonna, you have to cook them. And so if we were gonna be doing that, then we needed to cook them.

Mark: Right, and we've had. Thousands of generations to do the experimentation to figure those things out. I mean, people talk about, you know, indigenous knowledge and indigenous healing. Well, think about all the trial and error that went into figuring that stuff out. It's like, all right, who's gonna eat the mushroom?

All right, Bob's gonna eat. Oh, Bob's gone. 

Yucca: Okay. Let's remember that measure.

Mark: Right, But how did they ever get to the point of feeding the mushroom to reindeer and then gathering their urine?

Yucca: Yeah.

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