Sulis: Celtic Goddess of the Sacred Hot Spring at Bath

In the west of England, in a valley of the river Avon, hot water rises out of the ground at about 46°C (115°F), well over a million liters of it every day, winter and summer alike. On the coldest mornings of the year the spring steams like a cauldron. Long before there was a city on the spot, people threw coins into that water. The Romans built a temple beside it, and they named the town after the goddess they found there: Aquae Sulis, the Waters of Sulis.

What survives in the words of her own worshippers is a few carved altars and a pile of small lead sheets pulled out of the spring mud in 1979 and 1980. Most of those sheets are letters to the goddess about stolen cloaks, gloves, and purses, asking her to punish the thief. Those letters, a gilded bronze head, and one strange line in a Roman geographer hold most of what anyone knows about the goddess of the hot spring.

Overview of Sulis

Sulis (pronounced SOO-liss) was the goddess of the thermal spring at Bath, in what is now Somerset. Her name appears on inscriptions found at the spring, on the curse tablets thrown into it, and in the Roman name of the town. Outside Britain it turns up only once, on an altar at Alzey in Germany.

When the Romans arrived, they paired her with their own Minerva, and around AD 60 to 70 they enclosed the spring in a stone reservoir and built a classical temple beside it, dedicated to Sulis Minerva. The temple faced a paved courtyard with a great altar, where sacrifices were made in the open air. Next to it rose a large complex of heated pools and bathing halls fed by the spring. Retired soldiers, local people, and visitors from across the province came to the site, and some of them left behind their altars, their tombstones, and their offerings.

The spring itself was the center of the cult. Excavators found more than 12,000 Roman coins in it, along with jewelry, carved gemstones, pewter and silver vessels, and the curse tablets. Underneath the Roman material lay 18 Iron Age Celtic coins, which many archaeologists read as a sign that the spring was a sacred place before the Romans came.

Titles

Her names on stone and lead show how her worshippers addressed her:

• Sulis, her own name, on altars and curse tablets
• Sulis Minerva, the paired Romano-British name used in the temple’s dedications
• Dea Sulis, “the goddess Sulis,” the form on many curse tablets
• Dea Sanctissima Sulis, “most holy goddess Sulis,” on one tablet
• Aquae Sulis, “the Waters of Sulis,” the Roman name of the town

Characteristics

How the evidence portrays her:

• A goddess of the hot spring, whose waters rose from the ground at the same heat all year
• A healer, in the reading of most historians, since the sick and injured came to her waters
• A judge and recoverer of stolen property, to whom wronged people wrote for justice
• A goddess who could be asked to take away sleep, health, and sight from a wrongdoer
• In Roman form, a helmeted goddess like Minerva, known from her gilded bronze head

Symbols

• The hot spring: her home, and the place where offerings were made
• Coins: thrown into the water by the thousands
• Lead tablets: rolled or folded letters to the goddess, dropped into the spring
• The altar fire: a perpetual fire in her temple, according to one ancient writer
• The helmet and the Gorgon: Minerva’s attributes, carried over to her Roman temple

Legends associated with Sulis

The stories of Sulis that survive were told by other people about her spring, from a Roman geographer in the third century to a medieval historian in the twelfth, each one explaining the hot water and the ruins around it.

The fires that turned to stone

The Roman writer Gaius Julius Solinus, probably working in the third century AD, included Britain in his collection of wonders of the world. He wrote that the island had hot springs, richly furnished for human use, and that Minerva was their patron. In her temple, he said, perpetual fires burned, and as each one wasted away it turned into stony lumps.

Solinus leaves the town unnamed, and most historians identify his springs with Bath. Many also read his stony lumps as burnt coal, which leaves hard cinders where wood leaves pale ash, the detail that made the fire a wonder. Coal outcrops in the hills near Bath, and archaeologists have found that the Roman temple burned it. If that reading is right, Solinus gives one of the earliest written descriptions of coal fire in Britain, preserved because a traveler found it strange enough to call a wonder.

Bladud, the king who founded Bath

Around 1136, the historian Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History of the Kings of Britain, a long account of British rulers that modern historians treat as mostly legendary. In it, a king named Bladud, the father of King Leir, builds the city of Kaerbadum, which became Bath, and makes its hot baths for people to use. He dedicates them to Minerva and sets undying fires in her temple that turn into balls of stone. Geoffrey had read Solinus, and his account carries the Roman geographer’s strange fire into a British founding story.

Geoffrey’s Bladud also practiced magic. He made himself wings, tried to fly over the city of Trinovantum, now London, and fell to his death on the temple of Apollo there.

A later version, added centuries after Geoffrey, gives Bladud leprosy. In this telling the young prince is banished from court and works as a swineherd near Bath. His pigs wallow in the warm mud around the springs and come out free of the skin disease that troubled them. When Bladud bathes in the same mud, he is cured, returns home, and founds the city. The pigs and the leprosy belong to this later layer. The story was promoted heavily in the eighteenth century, when Bath became a fashionable spa and its architect John Wood celebrated Bladud as its founder. A statue of Bladud still looks down on the King’s Bath, directly above the Roman reservoir.

The ruined city of the poem

An Old English poem known as The Ruin, copied into the Exeter Book in the late tenth century, describes a fallen city of stone. Its roofs have collapsed, its towers have tumbled, and its builders have been gone a hundred generations. The poet dwells on its baths: hot streams flowing over gray stone into a round pool, a place that was once full of light and laughter.

The poem leaves its city unnamed. Many scholars have identified it with Bath, because of the hot water and the baths, and others have suggested Roman sites such as Chester or Hadrian’s Wall. In either reading, The Ruin shows how an English poet of the early Middle Ages looked at the remains of Roman Britain. On the Bath reading, it is the first glimpse of Sulis’s spring after the temple fell.

Who was Sulis?

The evidence for Sulis is all archaeology and inscriptions, and scholars have built several pictures of her from it. Two questions come up again and again: how she related to Minerva, and what her name meant.

Sulis and Minerva

The temple at Bath was dedicated to Sulis Minerva, with her name placed first. Of the dedicatory altars and bases found at the site, about half name her as Sulis Minerva and others name Sulis alone. An altar found in the Cross Bath in 1809 was set up by Gaius Curiatius Saturninus, a centurion of the Second Legion Augusta, to “the goddess Sulis Minerva and the divine spirits of the emperors.”

Most historians read the pairing as the Roman practice of interpretatio, in which a local god was recognized as a version of a Roman one. On this reading, the local goddess of the spring was honored first, and the Roman name was added to make her legible to newcomers. Others point out that the pairing is unusual. Celtic goddesses were rarely merged with Roman ones, and why the Romans chose Minerva, a goddess of wisdom, craft, and war, for a hot spring is an open question. One answer looks to Minerva’s role in healing elsewhere in the Roman world. Another looks to the Gorgon on the temple pediment, a symbol tied to Minerva’s shield.

That pediment, found in 1790, is one of the most argued-over sculptures from Roman Britain. Its central face has wild hair, snakes, and wings, which point to a Gorgon. It also has a thick mustache, and Gorgons are female. Some historians see a water god, like the Oceanus on Roman silver from Mildenhall. Others see a Celtic sun god, or a blend of the Gorgon with a local spirit of the spring. Each reading suggests a different idea of whom the temple served.

Eye or sun?

The meaning of the name Sulis has been debated for more than a century. One long-standing reading links it to a Celtic root for the sun, related to the Latin sol. On that view Sulis was a solar goddess, and the hot water rising from the earth was the sun’s heat stored underground. This idea became popular in modern writing about her, and it explains the old association of Sulis with light and fire.

Many linguists now favor a different reading. They connect Sulis with Old Irish súil, meaning “eye” or “sight,” and with related words in other Celtic languages. On that view her name speaks of seeing. The curse tablets, in which petitioners ask her to find a thief who is unknown to them and sometimes to take away the thief’s eyes, fit that reading, and the French scholar Pierre-Yves Lambert has suggested a form meaning “the good seer.” Linguists who doubt the solar reading also point out that the Celtic words for the sun used in Britain, such as Old Welsh heul, differ from Sulis in their sounds and endings. The two readings remain in conversation, and both have defenders.

Sul or Sulis

Older books call her Sul, because her name was usually found in forms that could be read either way. In 1979 the excavators found a curse tablet that names her as dea Sulis, “the goddess Sulis,” in the simple subject form, and since then most scholars have used Sulis. A few still argue for Sul, and the medieval Welsh name Sulgen and the Breton name Sul are sometimes brought into the case.

A related group of goddesses, the Suleviae, appears at Bath and elsewhere in Britain and on the continent. A sculptor named Sulinus, son of Brucetus, dedicated a statue base to them at Bath, and his own name seems to carry hers. Some historians see the Suleviae as a plural form of Sulis, and others see separate mother goddesses with a similar name.

Letters to the goddess

The curse tablets are the closest thing to the voices of Sulis’s worshippers. About 130 of them came out of the spring during the excavations of 1979 and 1980, and the historian Roger Tomlin, who deciphered them, published them in 1988. In 2014 they were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World register for the United Kingdom.

What was stolen

The tablets were cut from sheets of lead alloyed with tin, scratched with a stylus, and usually rolled or folded before being thrown into the water. They date from the second to the fourth century AD. Most are in the everyday Latin spoken in Roman Britain, some are written backwards or in jumbled order, and two may be in the British Celtic language, and their decipherment is still unsettled.

Almost all of them are about theft, and the stolen things are small: a cloak, a hooded cape, a tunic, a pair of gloves, a ring, a few coins. Many were probably taken from the changing rooms of the baths while their owners were in the water. Most of the writers seem to have been ordinary people, and the losses mattered to them.

What they asked for

The tablets follow a formula. The writer names the goddess, describes what was stolen, and often gives the stolen goods to Sulis herself, so that the thief is now holding the goddess’s property. Then comes the request. Docilianus, son of Brucerus, writes to “the most holy goddess Sulis” about his hooded cloak, asking that whoever took it, “whether man or woman, whether slave or free,” be denied sleep and children until the cloak is brought back to her temple.

Docimedis, who lost two gloves, asks that the thief lose his mind and his eyes in the goddess’s temple. Solinus gives the goddess his bathing tunic and cloak and asks that the wrongdoer be denied sleep and health until the goods are returned. Some tablets name suspects in a list, and others ask for punishments up to death.

Read together, the tablets show a goddess people trusted to see what was hidden from them. The thief was a stranger to the writer, and Sulis was trusted to find him. Most tablets ask first for the stolen thing to come back to the temple. Some historians read the tablets as a form of justice open to ordinary people with nowhere else to turn. Others emphasize their anger and their wishes for harm. The lead sheets hold both.

Whether pagan or Christian

One tablet, written in the fourth century, comes from a man named Annianus, son of Matutina, who had lost a purse of six silver coins. His list of possible thieves begins with a pair new to the tablets: “whether pagan or Christian.” By then Christianity was spreading through the Roman world. Tomlin has suggested the phrase may be a tribute to the reach of Sulis’s power, extending her judgment over believers of the new faith too. It also shows that people were still bringing their troubles to her spring in the age when the old temples were closing.

The people of the spring

Beyond the tablets, the stones at Bath preserve the names of a few of the people who served Sulis or came to her. Each one gives a different angle on her cult.

A tombstone found at Bath commemorates Gaius Calpurnius Receptus, “priest of the goddess Sulis,” who lived to 75. It was set up by his wife, Calpurnia Trifosa, who was also his freedwoman, a formerly enslaved woman whose Greek name may reflect her origins. A statue base names Lucius Marcius Memor, a haruspex, a diviner who read the future in the organs of sacrificed animals. He is the only haruspex known from Roman Britain, and his presence suggests that Roman divination was practiced in the courtyard of Sulis.

Then there are the soldiers, like the centurion Curiatius Saturninus, and the many tombstones of people who came to Bath and died there. Historians have read these as signs that the sick and the injured, including veterans, came to the spring for healing.

The temple fell in late antiquity. The cult statue appears to have been deliberately broken, and only its head survived. Workmen digging a sewer under Stall Street in 1727 struck it with a shovel. The head is slightly larger than life, covered in gold leaf over bronze, and small holes along the hairline once held the rivets of a tall helmet, now lost. It is one of only three gilded bronze sculptures known from Roman Britain.

Sulis and her neighbors

Sulis belongs to a wide family of Celtic goddesses tied to water and to healing. Some of them were paired with Minerva too, and others kept their own names.

Across Britain and Gaul, springs, rivers, and wells carried the names of goddesses. In Ireland the river Boyne was the goddess Boann, whose story tells how a forbidden well burst out to become the river. In northern Britain the goddess Brigantia was carved in the armor of Minerva, and many writers link her to the Irish Brigid, a healer and keeper of sacred wells and of a perpetual flame at Kildare. The parallel with Solinus’s undying fire at Bath has been noticed for a long time, though the connection comes from modern writers.

If the solar reading of her name is right, Sulis also stands among the sun goddesses of the world, a company of female suns from many cultures. If the “eye” reading is right, she belongs among the goddesses of seeing and judgment. Her hot spring, rising out of the dark earth with the warmth of the sun, holds both possibilities.

Final thoughts

The spring at Bath still rises at the same heat it did when the Romans arrived, and on a December morning it still steams in the cold. The temple is a set of foundations under a museum, and the goddess’s face survives as a gilded head pulled out of a sewer trench. Most of her voice comes from strangers: a Roman collector of wonders, a medieval historian, an English poet looking at ruins, and about 130 people who lost something and wrote to her about it.

What survives shows a goddess with more than one face. She was a healer to the sick who bathed in her water, a judge to the people whose cloaks were stolen, a Minerva to the Roman soldiers, and perhaps a sun or an eye to the people who named her first. Given one letter to drop into her spring, what would you ask Sulis to find?

Bibliography

• Tomlin, R. S. O. “The Curse Tablets.” In Barry Cunliffe, ed., The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, vol. 2, The Finds from the Sacred Spring. Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988 (also issued as Tabellae Sulis). The full edition of the curse tablets; the theft formula; Docimedis’s gloves; Solinus’s bathing tunic and cloak; the possible British Celtic texts.
• Tab. Sulis 10, Tab. Sulis 5, Tab. Sulis 32, and Tab. Sulis 98. Roman Inscriptions of Britain online. Docilianus’s hooded cloak and “the most holy goddess Sulis”; the gloves of Docimedis; Solinus’s tunic and cloak; Annianus and “whether pagan or Christian.”
• RIB 146, RIB 151, RIB 155, and RIB 3049. Roman Inscriptions of Britain online. The centurion Curiatius Saturninus’s altar to Sulis Minerva; Sulinus the sculptor and the Suleviae; the tombstone of the priest Calpurnius Receptus; the haruspex Lucius Marcius Memor.
• Cunliffe, Barry, and Peter Davenport. The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, vol. 1, The Site. Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1985. The temple, reservoir, courtyard, and altar; the dating of the Roman complex.
• Cunliffe, Barry, ed. The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, vol. 2, The Finds from the Sacred Spring. Oxford University Committee for Archaeology, 1988. The coins (including the Iron Age coins), vessels, and other offerings from the spring.
• Cunliffe, Barry. Roman Bath Discovered. Revised edition. Stroud: Tempus, 2000. The history of discovery, including the gilt bronze head (1727) and the pediment (1790).
• Solinus, Gaius Julius. Collectanea rerum memorabilium 22.10. Minerva’s hot springs in Britain and the perpetual fires that turned into stony lumps.
• Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain 2.10. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Penguin, 1966. Bladud, the founding of Kaerbadum, the baths dedicated to Minerva, the undying fires, and the fatal flight.
• Clark, John. “Bladud of Bath: The Archaeology of a Legend.” Folklore 105 (1994): 39-50. How the Bladud legend grew after Geoffrey, including the later leprosy and swineherd tale.
• The Ruin. In the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501), late tenth century. The Old English poem of a ruined city with hot baths, often identified with Bath.
• Henig, Martin. Religion in Roman Britain. London: Batsford, 1984. The temple’s coal-burning altar fire and the cult of Sulis Minerva.
• Green, Miranda. “The Celtic Goddess as Healer.” In Sandra Billington and Miranda Green, eds., The Concept of the Goddess. London: Routledge, 1996, 33-35. Sulis as a healing goddess.
• Lambert, Pierre-Yves. “Gaulois Solitumaros.” Études celtiques 36 (2008): 89-101. The derivation of Sulis from a root meaning “seeing.”
• Delamarre, Xavier. Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. 2nd ed. Paris: Errance, 2003, 287. The connection of Sulis with Old Irish súil, “eye.”
• Cousins, Eleri H. “An Imperial Image: The Bath Gorgon in Context.” Britannia 47 (2016): 99-118. The pediment’s imagery read against Roman imperial art.
• “Roman Curse Tablets from Bath”. UK National Commission for UNESCO. The tablets’ inscription on the Memory of the World register.
• “Sulis”, “Bath curse tablets”, “Roman Baths (Bath)”, and “Bladud”. Wikipedia. Overviews of the etymology debate, the Alzey altar, the coin count, the spring’s temperature and flow, and the King’s Bath statue.