Flesh And Fire: Sacred Pottery

Pottery is one of the oldest arts known to man, perhaps only eclipsed in its age by the chipping of bone or stone or wood. There are a lot of creation myths that cast humanity as the clay figures molded by a potter god or goddess who breathes life into them. In Babylonia, the Potter Goddess was Aruru; the “blood-clay” that she worked into human beings was called adamah, from whence Jehovah’s Adam got his name. In the Afro-Caribbean tales about the orisha (deity) Obatala, double-sexed creator on top of the high mountain, they tell of how Obatala got drunk one night on palm wine and made a bunch of clay figures that were horribly deformed. When s/he awoke the next day and realized that s/he had brought birth defects into the world, s/he was so remorseful that he renounced liqueur altogether, and is only offered coconut milk to drink today. All those with birth defects are under his/her protection.

Clay is a common symbolic metaphor for human flesh, anyway. Even in medieval times, people were still making clay poppets in order to work spells on other people. Clay pots with faces carved on them often “stood in” for human beings in graves and temples. Every pot made out of clay to hold a liquid symbolically mimics a lake or pond, the Goddess’s dishes of earth that hold water. Making your own clayware is a good way to make not only household but ritual dishes as well, or easily ensorcellable containers.- just carve whatever symbol you want onto them, and when it is fired, it “sets” the magic.

If you have the right kind of clay in your ground, you can try to dig for your own, but most clay is adulterated with other things. After you dig some up, run it through tests. Wet it down and let it dry; if it has a whitish scum, it has alkali in it and may not work. Drop a lump of it into pure vinegar; if it fizzes, it has too much lime. If it’s dark brown or black, it may have humus in it. Sand, however, is the worst offender; you can mix the clay with enough water to make it sloppy and semi-liquid and pour it through a fine mesh screen to get this out. Use the jar-of-water soil sampler method in the Beltane chapter to check out what’s in it as well. If you’re patient, you can sometimes use this method to sift out enough pure clay to work with. Wet clay will need to be left to sit and have the water that separates out siphoned off. However, there’s also a chance that if you dig deeper, under the unadulterated clay, you’ll find better stuff to work with. Once you’ve cleaned your clay, let it sit for two weeks to age in the open, because the bacteria in the air works on it in positive ways.

There are plenty of good plans available for hand-turned potter’s wheels; although it takes a bit to build one properly, one of the good things about it is that you don’t need any electricity to do this craft; in fact, if you have decent weather, you can do it outdoors. A potter’s kick-wheel starts with a square frame, usually made with 4x4 lumber, with high board splashguards on three sides and a seat on the fourth, usually tilted slightly forward to making wheel-turning less of a back-strain. A large and heavy wheel about a yard in diameter is made, usually out of cement poured into a cardboard mold, with a hole in the center. You can score the top to give it more purchase for your foot. This is set up on a beam across the bottom of the frame, with a steel rod and a bearing going through the hole. This goes though another beam at working level, and is attached to the actual potter’s wheel, which can be stone, cement, wood, or metal, as long as it is smooth and balanced.

The working of the clay itself is an art form best taught by experience, whether that comes from another human being or just from shaping it again and again. The good thing about pottery is that if it didn’t come out right, you can just crunch it up and try again. Like the earth from which it comes, it is infinitely flexible and adjustable...until it’s fired.

Fire and earth. Place those symbols on the frame of your potter’s wheel for meditative purposes. You can also put constellations or the signs of the zodiac on the lower wheel, perhaps scratched in while the cement is wet if you’re making your own, in order to draw energy for the wheel’s turning from that of the great sky-wheel that turns above us. Like turning the handle of a grain mill, a potter’s wheel can be turned with the chant, “I turn the wheel, the wheel turns around me.” Like spinning, pottery magic is a circular art, where you “spin” energy into a piece as you work it, imagining the energy coiling itself up into the clay as the wheel goes around, flowing through your hands and into the vessel you make, and being stored there to be slowly released, bit by bit, as it is used.

Glazes are made from metals and stones ground fine enough that they can pass through a linen handkerchief. They can be ground in a mortar and pestle if you’re really thorough and careful. One traditional recipe is 31 parts washing soda, 10.5 parts whiting, 12 parts flint, and 55.5 parts feldspar. There are lots of others, and plenty of books to help you find them. Some have moderately poisonous ingredients and shouldn’t be used on food dishes. Here’s another place where you can enspell a piece, or dedicate it to a particular deity; paint them with symbols or pictures or just colors that are appropriate.

Tilemaking is an adjunct to pottery, and one that is often forgotten about. Tiles are often thought of as a luxury item for floor and wallcovering, but that’s partly because they take a lot of labor to put in (which if you’re doing it yourself isn’t a luxury, it’s quite easy) and because painted tiles, not just the ordinary color-glazed ones, are expensive. Hand-painted ones from Mexico start at four dollars a tile around here, and really elaborate ones, such as tiles with relief patterns of grapes or face, start at around twelve. However, tile is an extremely simple sort of thing if you’ve got your own pottery system; you just make a frame out of four carefully angled pieces of wood, press clay down in it with a block of the right size, pop it out and fire it. If you want to decorate it with relief, it’s easy; I’ve seen beautiful Green Man tiles with projecting face coming out of the tiles, covered in overlapping leaves, and a Hestia face covered in flames made the same way. If you heat with wood, tiles are a good fireproof way to insulate a wall, and a tile floor can provide a built-in circle space, with whatever symbols you like. The great cathedral at Chartres was built with a tile labyrinth in the foyer which people could walk around at will.

You can build a homemade kiln out of bricks or stone; traditional kilns are updraft kilns, where the fire is built underneath and the heat drafts up through the hole in the top. Modern technological kilns are often downdraft, where the heat is brought down and around before being vented, but this is rather difficult for a homesteader to achieve. Your brick or stone kiln will probably be beehive-shaped, with a firebox in the bottom - dig down to the subsoil for the ash pit. There should be four openings: a door at the bottom, opening into the firebox for stoking the flame; a large door into the kiln proper for placing pottery; a peephole with a carved soapstone plug for checking on your items, and the draft hole in the very top for the smoke, which should have a flat metal damper installed. You’ll want firebrick shelves inside as well for stacking pottery on, which sit on a grate over the fire. Inscribe Ken, the rune of fire, or the Ogham letter Fearn, on the kiln, inside and out.

Next to pottery, the second oldest claycraft is that of brickmaking. Brick clay, which is the heaviest possible clay you can dig up, is mixed with sand at a rate of 2:1. Add water until it has the consistency of thick brownie mix. Brick molds are made from four pieces of 4x4 lumber that are put together with a brick-size rectangle of space in the middle. Generally they are mortise-and-tendon joined, or else carved with a groove around all four sides and wrapped with twine through the groove. You will want them to be disassembleable, and it’s best to make a whole lot of them.