The cauldron is a cast-iron pot on three legs used in modern Pagan and Wiccan ritual to hold fire, water, incense or offerings, and its presence draws on older folklore and myth.
Uses in the circle
Within ritual the cauldron serves as a vessel for whatever the working requires: fire is kindled in it, water or wine held in it, incense burned in it, and written petitions burned within it, so it is a general sacred container rather than a tool with one fixed function. It is often placed at the centre of the ritual circle or associated with a particular direction and element, and in seasonal rites it may hold the fire or the water that the ceremony centres on. Its use is practical and symbolic at once, a hearth and a vessel brought into the sacred space.
Myth and revival
The cauldron carries strong associations from Celtic and European myth and folklore, above all the cauldron of plenty and of rebirth and the cauldron of the goddess from which inspiration or renewal is drawn, and modern Paganism, a set of traditions largely shaped in the twentieth century, took the object up partly for those resonances. It has also gathered the folkloric image of the witch cauldron, which the modern traditions have reclaimed. The cauldron is therefore both a working vessel and a bearer of inherited symbolism, and its meaning in any given rite draws on that fund of myth as much as on its practical use.