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