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.”

So for those of us who see the mandate of the new paganisms as becoming modernity's spiritualities of “Nature,” the flaming cauldron—for all its creative genius—remains an articulate, but bittersweet, symbol.