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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in cauldron

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Cauldrons

Important tools used in magic rituals, cauldrons are typically iron kettles. You can make a symbolic cauldron, however, out of any concave or bowl-like object, such as a large stone or crystal geode.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

If you build the candy cottage, the kiddies will come.”

 —FCM

 

What do you do when standard-issue libation-bowls just aren't big enough?

We'll be pouring three different libations for the Many-Named and Many-Colored Lady of Spring on Opening Night at this year's Paganicon, so—a hotel ballroom being our temporary temple—we'll need a pretty capacious receptacle to catch them all.

(After the ritual, of course, we'll pour out the mingled offerings on the Earth, giver of all good gifts.)

So a friend of mine offered to bring her largest cauldron.

“Just how big is this cauldron?” I email, ever the conscientious organizer.

(You don't have to be anal-obsessive to make a good ritualist, but it sure helps.)

From several hundred miles away, I can far-See the glint in her eye as she fires off the response.

“Big enough to boil three babies,” she writes.

Ah, my people. Some size cauldrons by quarts and gallons.

 

A cowan walks into a witch store.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

My Favorite Witch Cartoon

 

Frame the First:

Rainbow. At one end, a pot of glittering gold. At the other, a witch, hands held up in amazement, looks with surprise and delight at the pot of gold.

Frame the Second:

Witch runs to pot.

Frame the Third:

Witch dumps out gold onto ground.

Frame the Fourth:

Rainbow. At one end, a pile of gold glitters on the ground. At the other, the witch happily stirs her new cauldron.

 

Riveted, Not Cast

 

Unlike the solid-cast cauldrons of today, the original cauldrons were made up of sheets of copper (later bronze) riveted together. The famed cauldrons of mythology would all have been of this sort.

Cauldron is a Norman French word, related to the Modern French chaud, “hot.” The original Tribe of Witches, the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, knew a metal cooking-pot as a cytel (modern kettle). Cognate with Norse ketill and Gothic katils, this, in turn, derived (circa 500 BCE) from an unattested Common Germanic word *katilaz, ultimately from Latin catillus, “small bowl or dish,” a diminutive form of catinus, “small bowl, dish, pot.”

 

A Study in Threes

 

The cauldron stands among its lambent coals on three legs. Three legs are steadier than four.

Legs, pot, handle. Coals, cauldron, steam.

Underworld, Earth, Heaven. The cauldron is a microcosm, a World in Little.

 

The Cauldron Revolution

 

Ceramic cannot withstand direct heat. Before the cauldron, cooking was a laborious and dangerous process of heating stones and dropping them into the stew. The coming of the cauldron revolutionized cooking.

 

First Harvest

 

Among the Indigenous peoples of the Upper Midwest, the first trade kettles also revolutionized sugaring. Prior to their coming, the year's first harvest, gift of the benevolent maple, was a matter of hollowed log troughs and boiling stones. The cauldron changed all that.

Still, the life of those living on wild harvests is a migratory one: within a given territory, throughout the year you travel to wherever the food's in season. It's not a way of life conducive to lugging around big, heavy items like cauldrons.

So here's what you do. At the end of tapping season, you bury your cauldron somewhere on your family's inherited sugaring territory. Then, come sugaring season, you dig it up and scour it out.

 

Family Size

 

After years of looking, a friend of mine—owner of one of the local witch stores—finally found a good, reliable source of well-made, classic three-legged cauldrons, complete with lids, from a dealer in West Africa, where cauldrons are still a going concern and, in many places, still in daily use.

What the dealer couldn't fathom was the size of the cauldrons that she wanted.

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 Classic Potato Pancakes Recipe Recipe | Epicurious

 

I was born in a time (and place) where men didn't learn how to cook.

Here's the story of how I did.

Now, let me mention from the outset that raising men incapable of preparing their own food violates ancestral precedent. In the old tribal days, every war party or hunting party would take along a few youths—men-in-training—to cook for them. These would already have learned to cook in the Boys' House, where you made your own stew, stir-about, and oat cakes, or went without.

For numerous reasons—personal affinity foremost among them—I became vegetarian at 18. (It is, admittedly, a very freshman year kind of thing to do.) In those days, that made eating out difficult.

One night as, for the umpteenth time, I was cobbling together (at a steak house, no less) a meatless meal for myself from the “Sides” menu, sitting with my baked potato, tossed salad, cottage cheese, and glass of tomato juice in front of me, I had my Scarlett O'Hara moment.

“As the Goddess is my witness,” I vowed, “I'll never piece together a meal out of 'sides' again!”

So I learned to cook.

Even my father, who (you could tell) for years felt kind of ambivalent about his gay son who liked to cook, learned—after my mother stopped cooking (surely after 50+ years, she'd earned the right)—to love the fact. When I came to visit, he would always have suggestions.

“So, how about potato pancakes on Friday?” he would say.

Friday it was. Indeed, my potato pancakes are some of the best.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Round about the cauldron go...
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    There is a Methodist church north of the James river that sells homemade Brunswick Stew for a few days each year. My parents love

The bonfire is a universal symbol of human celebration.

The flaming cauldron is a distinctive symbol (in the English-speaking world at least) of the new paganisms.

Here's the story that marries these two divergent facts.

 

Bonfires are really pretty impractical things. For one, they're a waste of wood. They're of no use for cooking; a bed of coals is much better for that purpose. Likewise, a small fire is a much better means of keeping warm. You can't really get close enough to a big fire for long enough to warm yourself through.

That's why, universally, a bonfire means: something special, out-of-the-ordinary, spendthrift. That's why a bonfire means: celebration.

 

In the normal way of things, cauldrons have fire on the outside, not the inside. Generally, fire in a cauldron means a burned dinner.

Yet, by virtue of this very unusualness, the flaming cauldron has become a distinctive symbol of Wicca: so much so that, from within the movement, its self-contradictory nature has gone largely unremarked.

Why?

 

Here's the story. In the beginning, modern revival witchcraft insisted on skyclad ritual. For practical reasons, both meteorological and sociological, this mostly meant indoor ritual.

But you can't have a bonfire indoors.

Enter the flaming cauldron.

At this remove of time, we no longer know who lit modern paganism's first flaming cauldron. A likely candidate would be “Aunt” Doreen Valiente who, as a novice, was tasked with creating Wicca's first Yule ritual. (“Emeth, dear, write us up a nice Yule for tonight, would you? There's a good girl.”) The rite that she crafted on the fly that afternoon in December 1953, with the flaming cauldron at its very heart, has become the Book of Shadows' quintessential rite of Yule.

The cauldron-as-indoor-firepit is a brilliant use of available resources. Though historically an intimate attribute of the witch—being shorthand for potion-brewing—the cauldron otherwise has (with one exception) little presence in classic Wiccan ritual, an odd fact directly attributable to Wicca's rootedness in Ceremonial Magic. (Few, if any, historic witches would have had even the slightest idea what a "pentacle" was.) Most lists of Wicca's sacred tools don't even include the cauldron.

 

Modern Paganism has an Indoor Problem. “Nature religion aside,” as Bast observes in Rosemary Edghill's Bowl of Night, “most pagans are indoor people.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Cauldron Quest

The good news: there's finally a good (i.e. historically trustworthy) book about the Grail.

The bad news: if you're looking for deep pagan mysteries, there aren't any. The Grail is entirely a product of the Christian imagination.

To put it differently: in the seething cauldron that is the human imagination, Grail lore is a stew made from Christian ingredients, with only the merest hint of pagan seasoning.

In medievalist Richard Barber's masterful The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Barber traces the origin of the Grail, term and motif, from its entirely orthodox Christian beginnings in late 12th century northern France to its transubstantiation into a secular (and, latterly, new pagan) symbol in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's a fascinating ride.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Living cultures have the wisdom to learn from one another. So far as I can tell, that's how we've always done it. Come to think of
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Well, that's actually quite refreshing. I thought it was a stretch to link the grail to Cerridwen's cauldron. Why not Dagda's ca
Eriu, returning to the great cauldron.

 

Arthurian tales tell us of the Holy Grail, not the cup of Christ, but a sacred vessel, a symbol of the goddess at the heart of the land, the sacred womb which sits in the centre of Annwfn- ‘the deep place’ of Welsh myth.  In earlier tales it was a cauldron as mentioned in Preiddeu Annwn ‘The spoils of Annwn’, a poem by Taliesin as a great vessel at the heart of the land which was ’kindled’ by the breath of nine maidens, or priestesses. Here we find the sacred source, the well of Segais in Irish myth, the place where life and wisdom spring eternal and renewed. A sacred place at the centre of things.

...
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