This is a mid-20th century magic cauldron from Romania, inscribed in Hebrew with the incantation משביע אני עליך השמש המאיר על הארץ (”I adjure you, O sun that shines on the earth”). This phrase first appears in Sefer haRazim (”The Book of Secrets”), a Jewish magical text from Late Antiquity, where it is part of a ritual to discover “what will be in each and every year,” involving inscribed slips of papyrus, oil, and the adjuration of angels and the sun to reveal the future (1.99). This ritual is repeated in Sefer Razi’el haMal’akh (”The Book of the Angel Raziel”), which was first printed in Amsterdam in 1701 and was incredibly popular across the Jewish world.
This cauldron, from the Gross Family Collection (027.003.013), was part of the Paris Museum of Jewish Art and History’s recent exhibition Magic: Angels and Demons in the Jewish Tradition... The museum catalogue describes this object as a cauldron for “casting lead,” a common magical practice for divination in various parts of Europe known as molybdomancy: lead (or tin) is melted and then poured into cold water, and the different shapes that it forms are then interpreted.
