November Stirs Celtic Vessel of Change
By C. Austin
The rain drums on a dull landscape under a low, leaden sky. It is
November and Nature has exchanged her green livery for the dark cowl
of the Cailleach. The Winter Hag stirs her cauldron once, twice,
three times; the brew is potent.
A witch and her cauldron might represent a tired leftover of
Halloween, but the imprint of contemporary society rarely does justice
to the numinous nature of primitive symbols. Our cauldron is brimming
with secrets to tell.
In 1880 near the village of Gundestrup in Denmark, a remarkable
artifact was recovered from a peat bog. The object, a cauldron of 96%
silver composition, had been purposefully dismantled and deposited in
the watery bog. Originally gilded, it stands 14 inches in height,
25.5 inches in diameter and holds approximately 28 gallons.
The Gundestrup cauldron is considered a Celtic "Rosetta Stone"
for interpreting Celtic mythology and literature because of the highly
decorated plates that form the cauldron. Depicting male and female
deities, rituals, infantry and other animals and symbols common and
uncommon to the Celtic world, the cauldron offers us a stunning
glimpse into the extraordinary world of our predecessors.
Cauldrons have been recovered from bogs, waterways and burials
throughout Celtic Europe. Archeological and literary evidence concur
that the cauldron was a tool of great household and ritual
significance as well as a representation of water, transformation and
regenerative symbolism. In short, cauldrons are the
"quintessential Celtic vessel of lore and magic."
Magical cauldrons percolate throughout Celtic mythology. In Branwen,
the second branch of the Welsh Mabinogi, a Cauldron of Rebirth
restores dead soldiers -- a scene many believe is depicted on the
Gundestrup cauldron. Each Otherworldly sidhe possessed a limitless
cauldron and in the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, Culhwch must
obtain the magical cauldron of Ireland, where apparently, the better
magical cauldrons are forged.
The Dagda, chief god of the Tuatha de Dannan, possessed the Cauldron
of Abundance. The cauldron possessed the power to heal and proved an
inexhaustible source of food and poetic inspiration. As mythologist
Joseph Campbell points out, "such a cauldron suggests, however,
derivation from a Goddess' [and] betrays the appropriation by a
patriarchal deity of matriarchal themes."
Looking at Welsh mythology, the hag Cerridwen kept a Cauldron of
Wisdom at the bottom of Llyn Tegid in Wales. Into it she stirred
magical herbs for a year and a day so that her homely son Morfran
might receive beauty and poetic inspiration. When the potion was
finished, three drops flew from the cauldron onto the thumb of
Cerridwen’s servant Gwion Bach, thus ensuring the future of Gwion Bach
as the great poet Taliesin after his flight from Cerridwen.
But Cerridwen’s origins are pre-Celtic and the word "hag" is a
derivative term of the Greek hagia which meant sacred or
sanctuary. The three drops that flew from her cauldron are the
mystical Awen ("ah-oo-en"), Divine Inspiration
considered similar to the eastern "Aum." Beloved of the Druids,
a shape-shifting, triple goddess of the moon, Cerridwen is the Great
Mother, a prophetess and the Nurse of Seeds.
Cerridwen’s vessel unites the four elements of Life; fire to heat the
vessel, water to fill it, the green herbs of the earth to cook within
and elemental air that rises with steam. Her bubbling round pot is
the womb of the Goddess, the feminine principle through which all
things are transformed and reborn.
In the Celtic era, heroes embarked upon quests to obtain the magical
cauldron - the strong but still disappearing feminine. With the
debasement of the feminine in the Christian era, the cauldron itself
transformed into a grail, the sacred blood within it now that of a
man, instead of a woman.
Today the cauldron appears from time to time in popular culture --
from a Thanksgiving horn of plenty, to the vessel from which the
infamous Lord Voldemort of Harry Potter fame is reborn to its disguise
as the grail in novels such as "The Da Vinci Code."
The work of our age is to tend that great vessel once again. To
celebrate feminine creativity and masculine energy and to understand
the mystery of mixing, waiting and beginning again, even in the
darkest of times. The cauldron bubbles quietly, the Cailleach awaits.
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