People have always dreamed of dishes that look completely empty, which in itself can generate abundant food. They dreamed especially strongly during times of famine. And they believed that the gods must have such vessels, and sometimes they can even share magical objects with people.
Take, for example, the Greek cornucopia, which, according to legend, broke off at the nurse of Zeus, the goat Amalfea, during a trip to heaven, where she was supposed to become a bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga.
Endless capacities
The horn of Amalthea was found by the nymphs, who wrapped it in fragrant leaves, filled it with fragrant fruits and carried it to Olympus to Zeus. The main Greek god immediately thanked the honest nymphs: he gave them a horn, endowing it with magical properties - now from the horn it was possible to get everything that the nymphs would want. According to another Greek legend, a horn with the same properties was broken off by the mighty Hercules from the river god Aheloy, who took the guise of a bull. And also the same cornucopias were possessed by Plutos, Hades, Gaia, Fortune and other celestials.
And although Greece is far from a small green island in the north of Europe - Ireland, there was a legend about inexhaustible vessels. Only among the Irish they were not cornucopias, but cauldrons. The main cauldron belonged to the Irish god Dagda. This god was portrayed as a bearded giant of immense physical strength. He wore a brown hooded cloak and wielded four magic items: a spear, with which he could kill nine people at once; a magic stone that would start screaming if the true king of Ireland stood on it; a magic sword, before which, if pulled from its scabbard, no enemy can resist; and a magic cauldron in which porridge with pork never runs out. The Irish believed that it was possible to feed all the hungry from this cauldron, and the food in it still would not decrease. But only those who are straight-hearted and fearless can taste from the cauldron. But cowards, as soon as they want to taste the food from the cauldron, will find that their bowl is empty.
The cauldron of Dagda had another remarkable property: it could resurrect the dead, because it was taken from a place where death does not exist - the sacred city of the gods Murias. The cauldron of Renaissance, which was presented to the hero Bran, possessed the same qualities - he also raised the dead. True, for this they had to be immersed inside the boiler. This cauldron was located in Annona, and it was guarded by nine virgins. The goddess Keridwen had a cauldron that endowed with omniscience, as happened with the poet Taliesin, and the cauldron of Inspiration bestowed great wisdom. Moreover, Taliesin needed only a drop of brew from the boiler to become famous. In general, there are many magic cauldrons in Irish mythology.
Where did these legends come from?
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Archaeological finds
The Irish were not indigenous to the Green Isle. Ethnically, they belong to the Celts who settled the British Isles in the 5th-4th centuries BC. By that time, the islands already had huge megalithic structures dating back to the Neolithic era. We do not know who the builders of these structures and tombs were, but they lived about 3 thousand years earlier than the Celts. For the new inhabitants of the islands, of course, they were gods. And the finds that the Celts sometimes made inside the burial mounds undoubtedly amazed their imagination. There, in the tombs, they found huge stone containers. Probably, on the basis of these findings, the legends about magic cauldrons were born.
Modern archaeologists, examining ancient buildings, also found huge stone bowls or pools in them. According to them, these were ritual stone fonts. They made one of these finds in the town of Bru on the Irish River Boyne. The neolithic complex of Bru-na-Boyne, located 40 kilometers from Dublin, dates back to the III millennium BC. It includes 40 burial mounds and covers an area of over 10 square kilometers. Most of the mounds are small in size, but three huge tombs stand out - Naut, Daut and Newgrange.
Naut is a huge mound (its area is about a hectare), surrounded by 17 small ones. There are two corridors in the mound, oriented from east to west, which lead to the burial chambers. Around the mound are the so-called curb stones, most of which (120 pieces) are quite well preserved. They are decorated with spirals, rhombuses, crescents and serpentine lines. In one of the corridors, a stone was found with a deep recess, which was called the "pool from Nauta". A second similar basin, with the same ornament in the form of concentric circles and a spiral, was found in the burial chamber. The tombs were plundered in ancient times. They tried, obviously, to drag this stone "pool" away, but they threw it inside the mound because of its enormous weight. When the Celts settled on the island, the latter used Naut as a local cemetery - many Celtic burials in stone boxes were found there.
The Daut mound is 85 meters in diameter and 15 meters high. It also has corridors leading to burial chambers. But it survived much worse, although it is "younger" by about a thousand years. In this the mound was "helped" by the Vikings, who thoroughly plundered it, and in some places broke through the ceiling. Like Naut, the mound is surrounded by curbs. The entrance is decorated with drawings in the form of bowls, spirals and flowers. Dowth also has a stone pool, it is the largest and most massive in the entire Bru-na-Boyne complex.
In Newgrange, the same age as Dauth, the third large mound of the complex (85 meters in diameter and 13.5 meters high), a 19-meter long corridor leads to the burial chamber. It contained human remains, grave goods and as many as four stone basins. There are also 97 curb stones around the mound, which are decorated with zigzags, spirals, concentric circles and triangles. Interestingly, the ancient Irish incorporated Newgrange into their mythology, making it the abode of the god Dagda, his wife and children. And the mound itself received the name from them the mound of fairies.
Of course, the mysterious stone fonts inside the tombs turned from the Celts into mystical cauldrons, which were owned by the gods.
Transformation of the font
The last transformation of a prehistoric font from megalithic tombs happened already in Christian times. Thanks to the knightly romances of the 12th century, the legend of the Holy Grail spread throughout Europe. It was a cup into which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of Jesus Christ. True, Chrétien de Trois, the author of the novel "Perceval", placed this cup in the castle of the mysterious Fisher King, contemporary of King Arthur. And this bowl looked just like a Celtic magic cauldron.
However, in more enlightened times, the Grail began to be presented as a richly decorated church bowl or goblet. And the Grail could no longer have such an impressive size as its progenitor - the Celtic cauldron. And the cauldrons belonging to the Celts have not yet been found either. However, now we know how the cauldrons looked like, in which the noble Celts cooked food. These were real works of art.
One of these items was discovered at the end of the 19th century in a peat bog near the Danish village of Gundestrup. It received the name "the boiler from Gundestrup". It is a very small silver artifact with a diameter of 69 centimeters and a height of 42 centimeters. It was probably made in Thrace in the 1st century BC and is richly decorated with scenes from Celtic mythology. Some plates of the artifact have traces of gilding, the eyes of the figures on the plates are made of glass, there was an iron rim around the cauldron, and the craftsmen used tin for soldering. According to scientists, the cauldron was made by order of the leaders of the Celtic tribe of the Scordisks, from whom the cauldron was taken as a trophy by the Germanic tribe of Cimbri. And this is not an isolated find. In the same place, in Denmark, in Rinkeby, a fragment of a Celtic bronze cauldron was found, and also with a mythological plot.
No one knows whether the reliefs on them are connected with the god Dagda, or whether the legends about Dagda appeared later, after the Celts settled Ireland. But just as the Celtic mythology was influenced by the finds on the Green Isle, so the Christian Grail legend was influenced by Celtic myths.
Nikolay KOTOMKIN