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