In Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker writes under the keyword Cauldron:
Nine sisters were the same as the nine Goddesses of the Fortunate Isles ruled by Morgan le Fay, and the nine Muses of Greek myth, and the pre-Hellenic ninefold Goddess Nonacris, queen of the Stygian birth-gate. She, or they, came from Oriental traditions almost as old as civilization. During their Bronze Age Shang period, the Chinese represented the Great Goddess of birth by nine tripod cauldrons like the mixing-vessels of the Muses.1
The quote contains two interesting assertions that I want to follow up on; not because they are necessarily true, but because they make a good starting point for showing how the Fata Morgana might offer a perspective on telling stories against territorial bigotry, against a nationalistic search for an origin, against the misuse of the myth to legitimize cultic sites. Firstly, Walker refers to various myths from other regions and times, all of which are said to be related to Morgain, some of which predate her by several millennia. I would argue that in opposition to a transgeography that aims at finding roots or origin, like, for example, the German Nazis did in Tibet when suspecting some kind of ancient Aryan race there,2 Morgain offers a view that is free of a single origin to be claimed as true – that is, if understood in her fleetingness, as a Fata Morgana. Of course, this kind of view is not a given: Despite the myth itself proclaiming the isle of Avalon as unreachable and disappearing, the town of Glastonbury in England became a cultic site for people who imagined Avalon to be there. From esoteric publishing houses to the Glastonbury Goddess Temple that declares Avalon sacred, the fleetingness here seems frozen in a single place and worshiped. In the following I will show different threats, stories and beginnings, that, if accepted as all being part of the myth, put relationality, multiplicity and diversity at its core, not singularity, which means: not a single place to be worshiped.
The second assertion I find interesting in this context is Walker’s mentioning of “cauldrons” and “mixing-vessels.” Regardless of the level of truth this specific assertion of a Chinese legend may or may not have, the cauldron – as a mixing vessel – reminds me of a carrier bag and thus Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Although this might seem arbitrary at first glance, I think there are some similarities that allow for such a connection. First of all, the form: The cauldrons of interest resemble a bag due to the fact that both consist of a volume and handles. A short excursion: Some of the oldest cauldrons known for both food preparation and as sacrificial objects were the bronze cauldrons called ding from the Xia (2100–1600 BCE), Shang (1600–1045 BCE) and Zhou (1045–771/256 BCE) dynasties. According to sinologist Elisabeth Childs-Johnson, the character ding explicitly refers to the offering in the bronze version of the cauldron and not its ceramic predecessor.3 She describes the shape (differences) as follows:
[…] the major difference between the ceramic and bronze versions of ding vessels is that the former typically do not have prominent handles, whereas the latter typically do.4
As the character for ding with the meaning “to sacrifice meat offered in the ding bronze vessel” was consistently drawn with two handles, Childs-Johnson deduces that their use as sacrificial containers became prominent, especially with the advent of the bronze version – and in this two-handle version, they are quite similar to the bag, if one leaves away the legs (as indicated in the red drawing):
Maybe more important than the form: Le Guin starts by proclaiming the bottle to be the hero* but uses “bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.”5 For her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Le Guin refers to Elisabeth Fisher’s Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution, according to which the bag or some kind of container is one of mankind's oldest inventions and tools, far older than (hunting) weapons, for example. A container makes it possible to collect something in a quantity beyond what can be eaten immediately, for the next day when rain or hail might make further ‘harvesting’ more difficult. The theory thus shifts the view from a history of human culture and tool development dominated by the male gaze, in which weapons such as the spear, the knife, and the bone were central – that is, as Le Guin emphasizes, the long, hard thing that I can stick somewhere. Recognizing that these hard, long things are not the beginning of human culture allows a view of evolution and culture that does not devalue everything non-male but opens up for a human perspective that includes everyone. Le Guin takes Fisher's idea further and counters the male heroic novel (arrow-like, linear narrative perspective; conflict as a central concern; hero as a prerequisite for a good story) with the suggestion that a novel is like a bag or container: “A book holds words, words hold things. They carry meanings.”6 If the story is conceived from the bag and not from the hero, then the most diverse things lie together in it, so that traditional motifs of a narrative such as conflict do not serve as an end in themselves, but become part of processes. The way things lie in a bag is similar to how they lie in a cauldron: not aligned or clearly separated, but intertwined. A soup (think of a heterogenous mixture, not a purée) presents itself very differently from a steak lying next to fries lying next to a salad. Of the Breton lay and Arthurian romance, medievalist Lucy Allen Paton writes that it “consists essentially in the glorification of a single hero, and its incidents are strung, one after the other, upon the thread of his individual prowess.”7 The stories in which Morgain is embedded are exactly like the stories Le Guin criticizes. But if one were to take the information available in the sense of Le Guin’s carrier bag, if one were to tell the story of Morgain through the cauldron, one must realize that the linearity of the heroic novel is no longer present. One cannot tell this story in an arrow-like way, one cannot claim a single place to be original – be it Glastonbury, ancient China, ancient Greece, Mount Etna or wherever. They would all dissolve if one tried to claim them, like the Fata Morgana does. Could I have told of Le Guin without the cauldron? Maybe. But it connects the Fata Morgana to another way of storytelling and adds this narrative dimension to the relationship between territory and identity. Consequently, the Fata Morgana as a figure of thought includes the dimensions of narrative, landscape, and community and becomes productive in the work on alternative imaginaries to territorial bigotry. In the carrier bag, the hero no longer has a plateau, a mountain or a podium, just as the myth in the cauldron no longer has a clear origin; to accept that means to accept a different way of thinking, one that is then made “full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts.”8 The myth becomes visible again for what it is: a process without a clear beginning and without a clear end, a wandering and relational assemblage:
1 Walker 1983. Pp. 152.
2 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-58466528. (Jan. 15, 2025)
3 Childs-Johnson, Elisabeth. 2012. “Big Ding 溶 and China Power: Divine Authority
and Legitimacy.” In: Asian Perspectives 51(2): 164–220. DOI:10.1353/asi.2014.0001. Pp. 170.
4 Ibid. P. 171.
5 Le Guin, Ursula K. 2023 (1986). “Die Tragetaschentheorie des Erzählens.” In: Le Guin, Ursula K. 2023. Am Anfang war der Beutel. Klein Jasedow: thinkOya. P. 14.
6 Ibid. P. 19.
7 Paton 1903. P. 1.
8 Le Guin 2023 (1986). P. 20.
9 Busch, Kathrin. 2015. “Essay.” In: Badura / Dubach / Haarmann et al. 2015. Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch. Zurich: Diaphanes. P. 236.
