Baths of Sulis-Minerva,
Bath, Somerset, England
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<--- Gold plated bronze head of the Celtic Goddess Sulis who was thought by the Romans to be their own goddess Miinerva, a member of the Roman Triad by another name. Thought to have been the head of the cult statue in the temple that was next to the Roman Baths complex at Bath, now in the museum at the site. |
| Model of the Roman
built baths a the pool sacred to the Celtic goddess
Sulis. |
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Bath city is still known today for its hot-spring healing waters. Bathing in and drinking the water of the ancient springs cures all ills, according to city and national publicity agents.
The city lies in the valley of the River Avon 97 miles (156m) west of London and 11 miles (18 km) southeast of Bristol and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is also recognized as one of the "Great Spa Towns of Europe". Bath is the Largest city in Somerset.
18th Century Pulteney Bridge, Bath, Somerset, England, is one of four bridges worldwide with shops on both sides from end to end, a national and is a local landmark second only the the Hot Spring and remains of the Roman Baths as a reason tourists and patients visit the city. |
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| An old picture of the actual Aquae Sulis hot spring, from which the hot water comes that filled the cups that acolytes historically handed out to tourists and the occasional actual cure-seeker. Runoff from the spring, what didn't go into the cups, filled the several Roman-built bathing rooms, including the Great Bath in the complex with the copious excess draining into the Avon River. None of those rooms are now considered safe for bathing, much less drinking. You can experience naturally heated hot spring water at the nearby modern Thermae Bath Spa or the The Gainsborough Bath Spa, or at several smaller spas in town. They take water from two other big hot springs in central Bath.
The historic Roman built baths are a fascinating site to visit and to see the original spring said to be sacred to Sulis and to Minerva, an Etruscan goddess that was first welcomed to make up the Roman Capitoline Triad with Jupiter (aka Jove, Veioth before she was also identified with Sulis. When the Romans came to Britain they willingly syncretized their own gods and goddesses with local ones (they did this everywhere) and Sulis was identified with Etruscan/Romanized Minerva. |
 Above, resealing the Sulis spring. Below, newer view with tacky statuary.  The spring was encircled by the Romans with a stone tank, sealed with lead to prevent leakage. Only two ways for water to flow out, into the baths or through a big drain to the Avon River. The Roman plumbing (and the Latin word for lead is plumbum) still works. |
Judging by the artifacts that have been dredged up from the site and its surrounding, the hot spring at Bath has had religious significance for at least 7,000 years, which would place the beginning of its known "sacredness" shortly after the withdrawal of the last ice age glaciation.
The "holiness" of lakes, pools, rivers, wetlands, and springs, and certainly hot springs in the cold environment of just melting glaciers, is well attested by the well known custom of votive offerings of valuables, useful objects, and weapons at those sacred sites by indigenous populations, a custom that continued when the indigenes adopted the Celtic La Tene culture after interacting with European mainland Celts more than half a millennium before the Roman invasions.
In the Roman period, the most common offerings appears to have been coins, but what seems most to fascinate today's tourists are "curse tablet" appeals to the cojoined goddess to cause distress to a person or persons, sometimes known but maybe unknown who cause loss or anguish to a long ago petitioner. A curse tablet would be a small lead sheet with an inscribed imprecation that would be rolled tightly and tossed into, ideally, the spring or, if the spring itself was closed for the day, the tablet could go into into the biggest immersion pool that was accessable. Presumably the offended petitioner would also be cursing under his or her breath.
But a lot of votive or donative stuff was also tossed in: you would try to please the goddess(es) to gain favor.
A link to a 3D interactive model of the Roman Baths site at Bath can be found on the Internet page at https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/walkthrough
| Almost everything on permanent display at the site museum is from the period of the Roman occupation, although much more including pre-Roman artifacts are in the Museum storerooms and archives. The Roman period bias is understindble: the Bath bureaucracy and the city fathers are pushing the "Roman Experience" to tourists looking for the same. |  |
In fact, the situation was obviously the same during the Roman occupation period. There were plenty of natural hot springs back home in volcanic Italy, and the constructed thermae with rooms heated by hypocausts that could imitate hot springs were available in any Roman community worthy of its name.
But notoriously superstitious Romans (from throughout the Empire) might believe that a particularly benign far away Goddess that could be syncretized with one of "our own goddesses" might arrange a cure or grant us a social wish or even help curse an enemy. The Roman reason for aggrandizing Aquae Sulis-Minerva was to attract that kind of tourist.
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At any modern museum or Roman Bath site you need to find your way around. The Aquae Sulis-Minerva site has gone high-tech with push-button consoles that light your way. |
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| But the artifacts that
most intrigue most museum visitors are the 130
"Curse Tablets" (or defixiones, in Latin)
that were discovered in the baths in 1978/1980. Many follow the same rubric: I (petitioners name) call on (the goddess) to cause (something detrimental) to (you and perhaps all your relatives and friends and maybe even your animals, etc.) because you (some how) did (something bad) to me. Roman curse tablets,whether found at Aquae Sulis or elsewhere are usually inscribed small lead sheets that are tightly rolled and put somewhere where they will be available the the god or goddess, like into the waters sacred to Sulis-Minerva. The earliest known practice of throwing curses (or petitions or "thank you notes") into sacred waters was Egyptian. The ancient Greeks passed it to the Romans, and it still is a fairly common practice worldwide today -- think of "wishing wells". The Aquae Sulis samples vary in quality and readability. The best ones are clearly professional -- good Latin script, coherent content, straight lines, store bought lead sheet, archaic Latin like what the pantheon speak among themselves, bespoke with a pro specialist. But there are also low quality home made models made from a manually hammered-flat chunk of scrap lead, poor Latin, out of context, etc., sometimes pseudo script line of xxxxx or ///// or just a blank sheet. It really didn't matter: the all-knowing deity would know your intention. |
 Curse tablets at
Aquae Sulis:
the lead might be alloyed with copper or tin for durability, that was more expensive, but it showed the goddess you were serious. Ditto if you showed up with an entourage, or threw in some cash with the tablet, and it might be a good idea to slip the priest/attendant a tenner or treat him to a beer or invite him, maybe his family, to lunch. That kind of stuff still works. I once took a Mother Superior to lunch in Rome, after trying to chat up one of her young nuns (in mufti) and ended up going with her and the young nun to a very private audience with Pope Paul VI. |
| The Great Bath (modern
name) at Aquae Sulis-Minerva is what many
day-trippers see, having up to three other stops
before returning by train or bus to their 8 PM
London Hotel dinner. They can then add Bath to
their list of travels and tell their neighbors back
home that it had a metallic smell -- lots of iron in
the ground. If they, perchance, got to see the
actual hot spring they would have seen that there
was an orange rusty ring around its edge. What would have amazed a Roman visitor, used to built Roman Baths, would have been the huge amount of hot water on show. Those built baths they grew up with would have had a heated with a small hot plunge, often just a big bathtub, and a maybe outside cold swiming pool. Truly amazing, still today -- 93 degrees hot, having already cooled halfway down. |
 But look at that water. And you can smell it. There are signs here and there telling you not to even touch it. There are also adverts for the treated, filtered, cleaned up spas in town,which are really quite nice: pix above. |
 A fairly standard male gorgon head was in the roundel at the center of the Sulis Temple pediment. Gorgons had snales for hair, and, like Medusa, could turn you into stone with a glance. The pediment, like all Roman sculpture, was originally brightly painted. |
The low ruins of
the Sulis Temple are out in back. There's not
much to see since it fell down from lack of care
centuries ago. The temple pediment, the
triangle above the front door, was interesting, and
reassembled pieces that were excavated are in the
on-site museum.  |
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Called today, for obvious reasons, The Round Bath, this room is adjacent to the Great Bath, and is one of several subsidiary rooms in what are now labeled the east and west wings. Rooms in this wing were heated by hypocausts on a lower level. The waters came pre-heated from the spring, but, in cold weather, heating the air in the room by platforming the floor and clay pipes in the wall was also essential. |
Drawing showing the shallow round ended plunge in a room heated by a lower-level hypocaust furnace. The drawing shows the hot air circulating under the raised floor supported by stacked bricks or tiles, and then the heat would rise through ceramic flues(only two show, but all around the room) to heat the walls. It was a nice comfortable arrangement -- except for the unfortunate slaves stoking the hypocaust. |
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| Flow from another of
the three main springs that outflow under the center of the city of bath. The iron oxide deposit of centuries is obvious.  About 345 thousand gallons of water containing more than 42 minerals and trace elements (and lots of it is iron) rise through the three main springs daily. The three springs' hot waters of Bath smell and taste like what we, as children visiting the ancestral family farm, called "well water". The metallic flavor and smell, we were told, came from old iron pipes that dipped below the water table and that brought the water to the surface, if you pumped the well handle long enough. Or you could walk back into the kitchen and turn the tap to get sweet city "city water" piped many miles into the sticks by the city of Chicago after being piped six more miles from the man-made island out in Lake Michigan. The farm house is now well inside the Chicago's suburban ring, but the hand operated pump is still there and workable, if you pump long enough. |
The iron-age Celts
were already exploiting iron ore from the Mendip
Hills well before the first Romans arrived. And for hundreds of millennia before that, water from rainfall on those hills south and west of what became Bath was percolating down through the Mendep limestone ridge to a depth of perhaps 2.5 kilometers and flowing down toward Bath where it encountered rock that, according to geologists who had many times drilled to investigate, was heated by pressure not vulcanism. The underground heat forced the now heated water up through fissures until it surfacedmostly through three springs that would locate Bath. One of those springs formed the pool that became sacred to the Celtic goddess Sulis, a pool filled with dangerously steaming hot water. |
The Romans, when they arrived in town and heard about the steaming pool sacred to Sulis, knew just what to do: they would identify Sulis with Minerva and build a tourist attraction.
Their bright idea was suspended after the Romans left Britain, but after a few centuries the attraction was revived and it's still going as of today -- with some modicum of British restraint.
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Think you might visit? If so, there is a fairly comprehensive official visitors' guide on the Internet at https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/visit.
One of the first things you will see at this web site is how to "buy tickets" -- it is, of course, more pleasant, both for you and the ticket agent, if you're sitting in your recliner chair at home than to have you stand in line at a tourist attraction. But, if you want to order from home, you really have to plan ahead and know exact dates and times that you expect to arrive at that particular tourist attraction. You have to decide whether you are a plan-ahead person or if you are more ad hoc.
And like at every tourist attraction in the world, there will be free-lance guides wandering the streets waiting to take you, willingly or not, to a probable relative's place to see, buy, or, in Bath, dip into or drink the best/most authentic whatever. Don't. Better arrangements can be made through your hotel concierge in London or in Bath. The actual Aquae Sulis Baths site has self-guiding gadgets (multiple languages) that will take you around and show you what you want to see there. You can get your souvenirs, etc., at the store at the site, and the store will tell you the truth: your purchases will be replicas.
If you actually want to bathe in Bath, also have your concierge arrange that. Warning: legitimate spas treat the water, but it still is iron rich "well water", but may smell more like chemicals than iron.