Fontes Sequanae

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The springs at the source of the Seine at Source-Seine, Côte-d’Or, where the sanctuary of Sequana stood. Thesupermat, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Forty kilometers north of Dijon, in a fold of the Burgundian uplands, water comes up cold through the limestone and stands in a basin no wider than a room. There is little to see: a stone grotto of the nineteenth century, a reclining nymph carved in pale stone, a thread of water that slides away north and west. The river it becomes is the Seine, and it will be five hundred kilometers and the whole of France before it reaches the sea. But here, at the head of a marshy combe, it is only a seep — and for the better part of six centuries the seep was a sanctuary. The Romans called the place the Fontes Sequanae, the springs of Sequana, and the sick came up the valley to it carrying images of their own broken bodies.

The place keeps two things that almost never survive together: the buildings of a Gallo-Roman healing shrine, dug out of the ground over a century and a half, and the soft offerings the worshipers left in it — carvings of oak that should have rotted to nothing and did not, because the same wet ground that made the spring holy also sealed them from the air.

Genealogy: the head of the valley where the Seine begins

The source lies in the commune now named, for it, Source-Seine, formed in 2009 from the merger of Saint-Germain-Source-Seine and Blessey, in the Côte-d’Or department of Burgundy, roughly thirty to forty kilometers northwest of Dijon. The water rises at about 470 meters above the sea, in several closely clustered hollows at the head of a quiet, marshy valley. It is the kind of place the older Celtic world held holy before any wall was raised: not a built temple but a feature of the land where the unseen pressed close — a spring, a confluence, a bog, a grove. Across Gaul the rivers were powers with names, and the headwaters and the sacred wells were attended where the water first came out of the earth. The Marne was Matrona, the divine mother; the Saône was Souconna; and here the source of the Seine was the place of Sequana, the goddess who is the river made a person, her name and the river’s the same Gaulish word.

Worship at the spring began in the late Iron Age. Pilgrimage to the source can be traced from about the first century BCE, in the generations around the Roman conquest of Gaul, and the earliest substantial offerings — the carved woods — were already being given before the buildings existed. In those first centuries the shrine seems to have been the simplest of structures: a small square chamber, presumably to house a figure of the goddess, set within an open porch beside the welling water. The Gauls of the continent left almost no religious texts of their own, and what we know of how they worshiped here we read not from a scripture but from the ground and from a handful of later inscriptions, one of which, cut with the words DEA SEQUANA, fixed the goddess’s name to the site when the buildings were first traced.

Under Rome the sanctuary was rebuilt in stone and grew into a healing establishment. From around the middle of the first century CE a masonry channel was led from the spring to feed a catchment basin, and the complex spread out around it to a length on the order of three hundred feet — a seven-room building thought to have lodged the priests, a monumental four-pillared entryway, a covered colonnade with a porch, and three steps descending to the water and its basin. It is the architecture of a Gallo-Roman sanctuaire des eaux, a sanctuary of the waters: a built precinct laid out so that a sick traveler could approach the spring, bathe and drink, lodge while the cure was sought, and leave the goddess a token of the request. The springs come first; the river comes after. Only here, at this quiet upland seep, does the Seine begin as a holy place before it begins as a river.

The valley sat within a country the Romans knew well by the time the masonry rose. To the southeast lay the territory whose people took their name from the river itself — the Sequani of the upper Saône and the Jura — and beyond the mountains the Helvetii, whose great westward migration Julius Caesar turned back in 58 BCE in the campaign that made the conquest of Gaul. The shrine at the source belonged to a province being absorbed into the empire, and the cult that flourished there is Gallo-Roman through and through: a Gaulish water-goddess of the deep past, served in Roman buildings, by worshipers whose Latin was often imperfect, into the late centuries of the empire.

Teaching: the cure at the spring and the bodies left for it

What the sanctuary holds is the record of a cure. The water of the spring was the medium of the healing, and the sick traveled to the source to seek it — to bathe in it, to drink it, to lay their petition before the goddess present in it, and to leave behind a token of what they had asked. Within the world of the shrine, the cold water rising from the limestone was not merely clean: it was Sequana herself, and to enter it was to put oneself into her hands. The offering was the act of worship made solid. To carry to the spring an image of the ailing part, and to leave it in the wet ground, was to name the trouble before the goddess and to give the naming into her keeping.

The offerings survive in the thousands of fragments, and they survive because of the water that drew the pilgrims. The marshy ground at the head of the valley, sealed beneath a later terrace, kept organic material from the air; and so the carvings of wood — which everywhere else in Gaul decayed and vanished — were preserved where they had been laid. Excavations spread across more than a century, from 1836 into the 1960s, recovered on the order of fifteen hundred votive offerings in stone, bronze, and wood. The great recovery of the woods came late, when Simone Deyts drew the first of them out of the waterlogged layer in 1963, and again in 1966 and 1967 — about three hundred sculptures of oak, the oldest substantial body of Gaulish wooden carving known anywhere. Dendrochronology, the dating of the wood by its growth rings, placed the felling of the trees between roughly 40 BCE and 30 CE: these are offerings of the conquest generation and the one after it, carved while the sanctuary was still passing from Gaulish into Roman hands.

A carved oak ex-voto from the springs of the Seine, preserved in the waterlogged ground; Musée archéologique de Dijon. Michel-georges bernard, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The pattern in the deposit is unmistakable: these are bodies, and parts of bodies. The afflicted brought to the goddess a model of the affliction. Among the wooden and the metal votives were counted on the order of seventeen hundred legs and feet, several hundred hands and arms, and well over a hundred heads and busts; in stone and bronze there are eyes, breasts, and the inner organs, and trunks carved open to show what lay within. A pilgrim with a failing limb left a carved limb; one with a disease of the eyes left a pair of eyes; a woman left a breast; a sufferer left an image of the internal parts. These are the ex-votos, the votive offerings — the thing vowed and given in exchange for the cure, a model of the suffering body delivered into the goddess’s keeping. From the catalog of what was offered the medicine of the place can almost be read backward: the troubles brought up the valley included the diseases of the eyes, swellings of the throat, hernias, the failure of a mother’s milk, the pains of the joints, infertility, and the simple breaking of bones. Whether a given carving was given in petition, before the cure, or in thanks, after it, the deposit does not always say; both are surely present in the trove, the hope and the gratitude lying together in the same wet ground.

Beside the parts came the whole persons. Among the carvings are full-length figures of the pilgrims themselves — draped and hooded against the cold of the upland valley, and carrying what they had brought into the presence of the goddess: a coin, a piece of fruit, in one case a small dog held in the arms, a bird in another. They are a cross-section of the country come to the spring: slaves and free citizens, men and women, the named and the nameless, each rendered standing with an offering in hand. Many of the body-part votives, by contrast, were mass-produced — turned out in numbers, it seems, to be bought ready-made at the shrine, the apparatus of a busy and well-worn pilgrimage rather than the labor of each sufferer.

Set against the multitude of the broken is the goddess herself, recovered from the same ground in a single small bronze that has become her image. It was found in 1933, together with a figure of a faun, and it stands now in the Musée archéologique de Dijon: a draped woman about a foot in height, belted and cloaked, a diadem on her head, her arms opening outward as if to receive those who came to her. She stands erect in a boat whose prow rises and curves back into the head of a duck, the bird looking back over its shoulder toward the goddess with a round fruit or cake held in its beak. The river-bird and the river-craft are her signs, and both belong to the water she rules. In a sanctuary given over to the suffering, the goddess alone stands whole and upright, borne on the element that is her own body, her hands held out to the sick who had come so far to find her at the place where her river is born.

The cure given at the source was the cure of the spring, and the shrine belongs to a wider sacred landscape. The healing waters were a marked feature of religion across Gaul, and the spring-goddesses to whom the afflicted appealed were many; the insular Celtic world kept its own healers of well and stream, such as Brigid, in a kinship of family resemblance rather than identity. Under Rome the powers of such places were often turned toward the gods of the conqueror — the interpretatio Romana that set a Gaulish healer beneath the name of Apollo, the healer-god, or a local lord beneath Mercury. Sequana largely escaped that absorption. She kept her own name on her own river, at her own source, and the dedications cut into the stone of her sanctuary call her by it.

Reception: the dug-up shrine and the source of a great river

The sanctuary did not end quietly. In the late fourth century the emperor Theodosius ordered the closure of the temples at the source of the Seine, as elsewhere across the empire, and the property of the shrine passed to the Christian church; the offering of carved bodies at the spring ceased, and the buildings fell into ruin and silence. Yet the place did not lose its hold. A Gallo-Roman inscription from the sanctuary survives reused in the fabric of the parish church of Notre-Dame nearby — the old holy stone built into the new holy wall — and the source kept its character as the famous beginning of the river that had made Paris.

The recovery of the ancient shrine came in the modern age, and in two layers. In the mid-eighteenth century the foundations of a great rectangular building were traced in the valley near the spring, and with them the inscription naming the goddess. In the nineteenth century the source became a piece of civic mythology for the city downstream. Paris officially bought the source of the Seine in 1864, and under the Second Empire the main spring was dressed in an artificial grotto and given a reclining stone nymph to personify the river. The nymph is a creation of the age that built her; she is not Sequana, but she stands where Sequana stood, and the impulse to give the water a face proved as durable as the water itself.

Beneath the landscaped park lay the older sanctuary, and the long campaign of excavation that ran from 1836 into 1967 gave up its contents. The Iron Age phase was identified in the 1960s as the Roman buildings were dug, and it was then that the waterlogged layer surrendered the great trove of wooden votives. The corpus was cataloged in detail — the woods, stone, and bronze of the sources of the Seine published by Simone Deyts in 1966, and the carved stone pilgrim-images studied by Miranda Green in Pilgrims in Stone. From these the working of the cult can be read closely: who came, what they suffered, what they could afford to leave, and how a healing pilgrimage was conducted at a Gaulish spring under Roman rule.

That is what gives the site its standing among the holy places of the Celtic world. The literary record of Gaulish religion is the work of outsiders — Greek and Roman ethnographers, several of them the Gauls’ conquerors, writing of a people whose temples they were closing or whose lands they were taking. The Fontes Sequanae is the counterweight. Here the worshipers speak in their own hands and their own offerings, not through a hostile traveler’s pen: the carved limb, the pair of eyes, the hooded figure with a coin in its fist, the felled oak shaped into a body and laid down at the water’s edge in hope of a cure. It is among the fullest documents anywhere of how a Gaulish healing shrine actually worked, and the Gauls themselves made it.

The contents are at Dijon now, the bronze goddess in her case with her arms held out and the oak bodies in their vitrine beside her. The shrine itself is gone from view beneath the park of the sources of the Seine, a small protected heritage place where a visitor can stand at the grotto and watch the river’s first water gather in its basin. The reclining nymph keeps, in a later idiom, the old instinct that raised the sanctuary: to give the source a body and a name. And the spring still runs cold from the limestone, as it did when the sick came up the valley carrying images of their wounds — the river of Paris honored not at its bridges but at the quiet pool in the hills where a goddess once received them, and shared with the water her single beginning.

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