Sequana

← Encyclopedia

The cold springs in the Burgundian hills from which the goddess Sequana takes her name and her river its first water. Thesupermat, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

A river that runs five hundred kilometers to the sea, that bends through the heart of Paris and carries the barges and the bridges of a capital, was once thought to be a goddess. Her name is Sequana. It is the oldest name the Seine has worn, older than France, older than the city the river made, and the Romans who set it down in Latin understood it to mean at once the watercourse and the divine person within it. She is the Seine made a person — and where the line falls between the river and the power in it, between the named water and the named goddess, the sources never quite draw. That ambiguity is not a confusion to be cleared up. It is the substance of who she was.

She survives in three things: a single Gaulish word that is at once a river, a people, and a deity; a handful of inscriptions in worshipers’ own hands; and one small bronze, found in the wet ground at her source, that fixes her likeness for good. From those three the goddess can be recovered. The fuller record of her cult — the great deposit of carved bodies left at her spring — belongs to the place where she was met, and is told in the entry on the sanctuary at her source.

Genealogy: the goddess of the river that begins in Burgundy

Sequana is the divine person of the Seine. In Latin the river itself is Sequana, a name the Greek and Roman geographers used for the watercourse and Julius Caesar set down in his account of the conquest of Gaul. The form is Gaulish in origin; the digraph in Sequana probably stands for a full syllable, recovering something like Se-ku-wa-na, and the root has been connected to an old word for water that pours or trickles, though the precise meaning stays uncertain. What is clear is that the river-name and the goddess-name are the same word. The Seine of modern France is Sequana worn smooth by two thousand years of speech.

The same name attaches to a people. The Sequani, a Gaulish tribe of the upper Saône and the Doubs and the Jura, took their ethnonym from the river; the link suggests an old homeland along its waters, and their neighbors across the mountains were the Helvetii, whose great migration Caesar turned back in 58 BCE. The river, the people, and the goddess share a single Gaulish root — a tangle characteristic of the older Celtic world, where the water and the power in the water and those who dwelt beside it were not sharply divided. To name the Seine was to name her; to name the Sequani was to name the children of her stream.

In the form that survives, Sequana is a Gallo-Roman goddess: known from the sanctuary at her source, from a handful of inscriptions, and from a single famous image, all of them belonging to the centuries after Rome had taken Gaul. Thirteen surviving inscriptions name her — several with the small misspellings of dedicants whose Latin was imperfect, and one mentioning a sacerdos, a priest, of the cult; they are gathered in the great epigraphic catalog of the Latin inscriptions of the empire. Of any older, pre-Roman cult the written record says nothing, for the Gauls of the continent left almost no religious texts of their own. The literary notices of Gaulish religion come from outsiders — Greek and Roman ethnographers, several of them the Gauls’ enemies — and Sequana is barely a literary figure at all. No myth of her survives, no story of her deeds, no hymn. She is reconstructed not from any text about her but from the worship offered at her water, where the dedicants speak in their own hands rather than through the pen of a Caesar or a Strabo.

That source is a real place. The springs rise in the commune now named, for them, Source-Seine, in the Côte-d’Or department of Burgundy, roughly thirty kilometers northwest of Dijon, at about 47°30′N, 4°42′E. The sanctuary there grew up around the welling of the water — a pool fed by the spring, with temple buildings and a colonnaded precinct laid out in the Roman manner, the cult developing through the last centuries before the common era and flourishing under the empire. The Seine begins as a sacred site and only afterward becomes a river. The goddess is met not in the river’s broad reaches at Paris but here, at the quiet upland pool in the Burgundian hills where it first comes out of the ground.

Sequana belongs to a whole company of such powers. The waters of Gaul were divine persons with names, and the rivers ran under the protection of goddesses. The Marne was reverenced as Matrona, the divine mother; the Saône bore the name Souconna; the Yonne, the Aude, and others carried the names of the deities who dwelt in them, and the headwaters and sacred wells were attended as Sequana’s spring was. These were goddesses of the kind of site the older Celtic world held holy — not, in the first place, a temple raised by human hands, but a feature of the land where the unseen pressed close: a spring rising from the rock, a meeting of streams, a bog, a sacred grove. Sequana’s source is exactly such a place, a seep at the head of a marshy valley that became holy before it became architecture. Among these water-divinities she is among the best known, because her spring kept what the others lost, and because the worshipers who came to her left behind, in the wet ground, the fullest account anywhere of who reverenced a Gaulish goddess and why.

Teaching: the healer of the waters and her duck-prowed image

What Sequana did for those who came to her was heal. The water of her spring was the medium of the cure, and the sick traveled to the source to seek it — to bathe, to drink, to pray, and to leave behind a token of the request. Within the world of the shrine the cold water rising from the limestone was not merely clean: it was the goddess present, and to enter it, to drink it, to lay one’s pain beside it, was to put oneself into her hands. She is, before all else, a healer of bodies, and the proof of it lies in what the afflicted brought her.

They brought their bodies, carved. The mass of offerings recovered at her spring is overwhelmingly anatomical — limbs and eyes and organs rendered in wood and stone and bronze, each one a model of a particular affliction laid before the goddess. A pilgrim with a failing leg gave a carved leg; one losing the sight gave a pair of eyes; a woman gave a breast; a sufferer of some inward trouble gave an image of the parts within. The logic is plain: to make an image of the ailing part and give it to Sequana was to name the disease before her and to leave the naming with her at the water, whether in petition for a cure or in thanks for one already granted. What this great deposit reveals about the goddess is the shape of her power — that she was appealed to body by body, organ by organ, by ordinary people who trusted the spring to mend what was broken in them. The deposit runs to something on the order of fifteen hundred objects, and the full catalog of it — the carved corpus, the diseases it records, and the excavation that recovered it — belongs to the sanctuary at her source, where it is told in full.

The bronze statuette of Sequana, crowned and robed, standing in a duck-prowed boat; Musée archéologique de Dijon. Romainbehar, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

If the carved limbs are the worshipers, the bronze is the goddess. One image of Sequana survives in the round, and it has become her portrait: a small statuette, drawn from the same ground that held the votives, recovered in 1933 alongside a figure of a faun, and kept now in the Musée archéologique de Dijon. It shows a woman of about a foot in height, fully draped — a chiton fastened with round brooches and belted at the waist, an ample cloak laid over it, and a diadem set upon her head. The pose is the heart of the image. Her arms are not folded or held to her body but opened outward, spread as if to gather in those who have come to her, the gesture of a goddess receiving the sick. And she does not stand on the ground: she rides upright in a little boat. The craft is the second half of her iconography, for its prow lifts and curls back upon itself into the head of a duck, and the bird turns to look over its shoulder at the goddess behind it, a round object — a fruit, perhaps, or a small cake — gripped in its beak.

These two figures, the water-bird and the water-craft, are the signs by which she is known. The boat sets her upon the element she rules — she travels on the water that is her own body. The duck is the creature of that same water, of the still pool and the moving current; in the art of the Celtic world the water-bird recurs on cauldrons, on standards, on the prows of model boats, a being of the watery places that opened onto the powers, and here it carries the goddess of the greatest river of northern Gaul. The whole small bronze is a compression of her domain into one object: the bird that lives on the river and the vessel that crosses it, both given to the goddess who is the river. Where the votives in their hundreds show broken bodies, the bronze alone shows a whole one — Sequana standing upright and unhurt, borne on her own waters, her open hands held out toward the afflicted who came so far to find her at the head of her stream.

Her kinship runs to the other healing waters of the Celtic world. The springs and rivers where the sick sought a cure were a marked feature of the sacred landscape of Gaul, and Sequana stands among the divine waters to whom the afflicted appealed; the insular Celtic world echoes the same instinct in its own goddesses of healing well and stream, such as Brigid, though the resemblance is one of family likeness and not of identity. What sets Sequana apart is what she kept. When Rome absorbed the gods of Gaul it commonly folded them into its own — the practice called interpretatio Romana, by which a Gaulish healer might be drawn toward Apollo, the healing god of the Greeks and Romans, or a local power set beneath the name of Mercury. Across the province this happened freely. Sequana, for the most part, slipped the net. The inscriptions do not rename her; they call her by her own name, the name of her river, at her own source — Dea Sequana, the goddess Sequana, and nothing borrowed.

Reception: the named goddess of a great river

The springs were never wholly forgotten. The site held its sacred character into the Christian centuries — a Gallo-Roman inscription from the sanctuary survives reused in the fabric of the parish church nearby — and in the nineteenth century the source of the Seine became a piece of civic mythology for the city the river had made. Paris bought the source in 1864, and under Napoleon III the architect who had built the iron halls of the central markets, Victor Baltard, dressed the main spring in an artificial grotto and set within it a reclining stone nymph to personify the river. The nymph is a creation of the Second Empire’s romance with its own origins; she is not Sequana, but she stands where Sequana stood, and the impulse to give the water a face and a body proved as durable as the water itself. The goddess and the nymph are not the same figure, yet they answer the same old need — to meet the river not as a current but as a person.

Sequana’s name came back to the world of learning along with her offerings. The waterlogged sanctuary gave up its contents over a long campaign of excavation, and the cult that surrounds the goddess can now be read closely — who came to her, what they suffered, and what they could afford to leave. The wooden, stone, and bronze ex-votos of the sources of the Seine were published by Simone Deyts in 1966, and the carved stone images of the pilgrims treated by Miranda Green in Pilgrims in Stone; through that scholarship the goddess of the spring stepped out of near-total silence into one of the best-documented healing cults of Gaul. What makes the documentation extraordinary is its source. The literary record of Gaulish religion was written by outsiders, the Gauls’ conquerors and observers; the record of Sequana was made by her own worshipers, in the bodies they carved and the names they cut, preserved in the very water they had come to seek.

So the goddess stands on two grounds at once. She is the divine person of one of the great rivers of the Celtic world — named in the inscriptions, figured in the bronze, the deity of the Seine met at the quiet pool in the Burgundian hills where the river is born rather than in its broad reaches at Paris. And she is the recipient of the prayers of the otherwise voiceless: the ordinary sick of Gaul, who could leave no writing of their own, reached her through the carved limbs and organs they laid down at her water, and through those offerings they reach across two thousand years to the healer they trusted with their bodies.

The duck-prowed bronze still stands in its case at Dijon, the goddess upon it with her arms held open, exactly as the dedicants saw her. The springs in the Burgundian combe still run cold from the rock, as they did when the lame and the diseased came up the valley to be met by her. And down through the heart of France, past every bridge and embankment that has forgotten what she was, the river goes on carrying her name to the sea.

→ Related: Fontes Sequanae · The Helvetii · Cernunnos · Taranis · Teutates · Esus · Gournay Sur Aronde · Roquepertuse · Entremont · Gaul · Druidism · Druids · The Celts · Brigid Goddess · The Morrigan · The Dagda · Mercury · Apollo · Mars · Reincarnation · Soul · Immortality · Sacrifice Ritual