Castlederg bronze cauldron, 700-600 BC

A HISTORY OF IRELAND IN 100 OBJECTS:Christianity was not the first Mediterranean religion to find its way to Ireland.

The most famous Irish legend, the Táin Bó Cualinge, centres on the struggle for control of a magical bull. It thus brings us distant echoes of the presence in Bronze Age Ireland of a bull cult that itself originated millennia before in the eastern Aegean Sea. Versions of this cult spread through much of western Europe, and it is not surprising that it should find a home in Ireland’s cattle-rearing society.

This magnificent bronze cauldron, found in a bog in Castlederg, Co Tyrone, is crafted from offset bands of sheet bronze held in place by rows of conical rivets. Like about 15 others of this type found in Ireland, it is based on a Greek or oriental prototype. It could be seen simply as an expression of a chieftain’s bounty in feasting his followers. But it almost certainly had a ritual as well as a social significance.

The cauldron is best understood in association with two other kinds of objects from the same period that also feature in a huge hoard found at Dowris, Co Offaly. There are bronze horns that, when blown, produce “a deep bass note, resembling the bellowing of a bull”. There are also so-called crotals, pear-shaped bronze objects that look like hand grenades but were surely meant to represent the bull’s scrotum. Together, horns, crotals and cauldrons were objects sacred to the bull cult.

Cauldrons like this one are at the root of the folk tales of “cauldrons of plenty” that survived for millennia in Europe. But that plenty depended on the reign of the proper king. Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland suggests that the bull cult in Ireland was closely associated with the choice of king.

The bull was sacrificed and the meat cooked in the cauldron. A priest ate the flesh and went into a sleep in which he dreamed the identity of the proper king.

What we don’t know is whether this cult went as far as it would do later on – including human sacrifice. A cauldron found in Gundestrup, in Denmark, but probably originating in France, comes from about 500 years after the one from Castlederg. But is has detailed representations of the Irish deities Manannán, the Dagda and Medb, and shows an elaborate bull-slaying ritual. It shows a giant god holding a human upside-down over a cauldron. The action has been variously interpreted as the human being drowned, having his or her blood drained and collected, or being plucked from the cauldron to be reborn.

We can’t know whether these rituals are precisely the same as those used earlier in Ireland. But the basic meaning of the cauldron is clear. It unites the big forces of the world – power, fertility, proper kingship – with the most basic fact of life: the need to eat. A ruler who can’t guarantee the one has no right to claim the other.

With thanks to Eamonn Kelly

Where to see it National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, 01-6777444, museum.ie