The cauldron: Symbol of life and death

Cauldron cake by The Cake Store – click on any of the images in this blog post to find the sources

As it’s Halloween, I thought I would take a look at the witch’s cauldron in history and myth. It turns out that as well as being an ancient household cooking vessel and a witch’s potion pot, the cauldron has been a mystical symbol of life and, in some stories, an instrument of death…

At its most basic a cauldron is a large metal container for boiling or heating liquids over an open fire. Some cauldrons had a handle for hanging up, some stood on feet. The word comes from the Old French caudron, from the Latin caldarium, meaning a hot bath, from calidus, meaning hot.

But it was once much more than this. As well as being probably the most important family possession for cooking, brewing and holding hot or cold water, the cauldron gained ritual significance. Many beautifully crafted cauldrons have been found in wells, lakes and springs as offerings to the gods of water – and who knows what else the Celtic druids used them for…

The druid Getafix from the Asterix the Gaul cartoons – in France he is known as Panoramix

Here are some of my favourite cauldrons…

The Battersea cauldron, England, late Bronze Age/early Iron Age

The Battersea cauldron was found in the River Thames in London

The Battersea cauldron dates from around 800BC to 700BC, around the time the Bronze Age was moving into the Iron Age. It is made from seven curved sheets of bronze riveted together.

It has the traditional cauldron shape, narrowing at the top, presumably to stop hot liquids splashing out, and a flared lip. It would have been used for feasting – important for chiefs to make an impression – and probably flesh hooks would have been used to lift meat from the pot.

The cauldron was found in the River Thames during dredging in 1861 and it’s now on display at the British Museum in London.

The Gundestrup cauldron, Denmark, early Roman Iron Age

The Gundestrup cauldron was found in a Danish bog

Richly decorated and made from silver, the Gundestrup cauldron was obviously not a practical vessel. It probably dates from between 200BC and 300AD, in the early Roman Iron Age. Although it was dug out of a peat bog near the hamlet of Gundestrup in Denmark in 1891, most people think its origins are Gaulish (modern France) or Thracian (modern Bulgaria).

The cauldron’s plates were taken apart before it was deposited in the bog and it is assumed the very rich object was some kind of ritual offering. Images on the cauldron show elephants, lions, human faces and a character believed to be Cernunnos, the horned god. Read more about the images here.

I saw this cauldron on a visit to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen while on an archaeological field class in 1976. I was so impressed I bought the postcard! Photography has improved since then. It didn’t seem nearly as shiny…

A 1970s postcard showing the Gundestrup cauldron

The Mušov cauldron, Roman

The Mušov cauldron, cast from bronze in Roman times

The so-called Mušov cauldron, made of bronze, is a Roman object found in a Germanic chieftain’s grave in Mušov, in the Czech Republic, in 1988.

It dates from the 2nd century and is decorated with four heads showing Germanic men with their hair tied in a Suebian knot, decorating the handles.

To read more about the finds in the chieftain’s grave at Mušov click here.

Cauldron of rebirth, Celtic myth

Warrior reborn from a Celtic cauldron by lemonade8 on DeviantART

There are several magical cauldrons in Celtic folklore. My favourite is Pair Dadeni – the Cauldron of rebirth – also known as the cauldron of Bran the Blessed, which features in The Mabinogion, a famous collection of Welsh myths.

There’s a lot of fighting in Wales and Ireland and the cauldron changes ownership several times, but the key point is that it can be used to revive dead warriors, who return alive but mute.

Read more about this Celtic cauldron story and others here.

Cauldron of death – Ishikawa Goemon

The execution of Ishikawa Goemon shown in a late 19th century picture by Toyokuni Ichiyōsai

Ishikawa Goemon was a Japanese Robin Hood. Living from 1558 to 1594, he was a semi-legendary outlaw hero who stole gold and valuables to give to the poor.

He was boiled alive (but eventually dead!) along with his son in public in Kyoto after a failed assassination attempt on the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The gruesome story says at first he held his young son high above his head to protect him, then plunged the boy deep into the pot to kill him quickly, then held the boy’s boiled body above his head again to defy his enemies as he succumbed to his injuries and sank into the cauldron. Nice…

Cauldron survivor – St Vitus

St Vitus surviving the cauldron, painted around 1450 and currently in the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland

St Vitus was a Christian saint from Sicily, one of several persecuted and martyred by the Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian. He died in the year 303 after being tortured in Rome.

He is represented as a young man in a cauldron, because there is a legend that he was thrown into a cauldron of boiling tar and molten lead, but miraculously escaped alive and unscathed. Clearly not for long, though?

The name “Saint Vitus dance” was given to the neurological disorder Sydenham’s chorea, which causes sudden jerking movements. This is because in the late Middle Ages some people celebrated the feast of Vitus by dancing in front of his statue. When I was a child in less politically correct times my parents used to ask if I had Saint Vitus dance if I wouldn’t stop fidgeting.

Chinese cauldrons

Bronze ding from the Chinese Shang dynasty, 1300-1046BC, on show at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada

The ancient Chinese cauldron or ding stood on legs, had two facing handles and often a lid. These ritual bronzes came in two shapes – round with three legs and rectangular with four. They were used for cooking, storage and ritual offerings to gods or ancestors. The earliest examples found are ceramic, but they came into their own in the Bronze Age.

A bronze fanding (rectangular cauldron) found in Hunan. Unusually it shows human faces. It dates from the 11th century BC

This next one looks more like a plant pot and is not a ding. It is a large iron cauldron used to store water in case of fire in the Forbidden City (the old imperial palace in Beijing). In winter hot coals were placed under the cauldron to stop the water freezing…

Cauldron in the Forbidden City, Beijing

The witch’s cauldron

The Three Witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth depicted in Georgian dress by Daniel Gardner in 1775

Double, double toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

That’s what the three witches say in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Not, you will note, “Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble”. See the full witches’ chant here.

I do wonder if all our mental images of witches with their cauldrons are based on that single scene where the Weird Sisters cast a spell to prophesy the future of Macbeth? But let’s face it, if you think of a witch you have to think potions and spells, and to mix them up you would need some kind of pot. In the days of open cooking fires, the cauldron just happened to be the cooking container of the time. If we created the idea of witches in our folklore now they would no doubt use a saucepan, casserole or wok – or even a microwave dish!

But traditional witches still prefer a cauldron and this is where Harry Potter and friends would have bought theirs…

Potage’s Cauldron Shop in Diagon Alley, on the Harry Potter set of Warner Bros Studio, London

The industrial cauldron

The word cauldron is used for a container for molten iron in an ironworks – this old one is in Russia

The sporting cauldron

The ceremony of the lighting of the Olympic torch on Mount Olympus in Greece with the rays of the sun focused by a parabolic mirror

It’s a bit of a journalistic cliché – football and rugby arenas are often described as cauldrons when they are full of thousands of rival fans cheering on their opposing sides. But of course there is a physical manifestation of the cauldron every time we have the Olympic Games. In this case the fire is INSIDE the container.

The lighting of the Olympic cauldron in Seoul in 1988

The flaming torch carried all over the world to the host city of the modern Olympics commemorates the stealing of fire from the gods by Prometheus in Greek mythology. The big moment when the games start is the lighting of a huge cauldron with that torch. These simple bowls and dishes of fire have changed a lot over the years as designers have used their imaginations…

The Olympic cauldron in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics

Who can forget the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London and the lighting of the remarkable cauldron made of 204 individual “petals” representing each of the competing nations?

The cauldron at the London Summer Olympics in 2012, designed by Thomas Heatherwick

The volcanic caldera

The word caldera is Spanish for cauldron and we use this word to mean a large volcanic crater.

The lake-filled caldera of Mount Kaguyak, Alaska, an extinct volcano

That caldera lake looks an ideal setting for a ritual offering of a precious metal cauldron to symbolise life and death, written in fire and water…

Here are some of my Halloween offerings from previous years

Jack o’lantern and Will o’ the wisp

Designer birds: Owl

Some colourful skulls for Halloween