Goddesses as Consorts of the Healing Gods in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae: Forms of Cult and Ritual Practices

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Healing gods have traditionally been analysed on their own within their sanctuaries. Moreover, few scholars have paid attention to their feminine consorts in the western part of the Roman Empire, and even fewer have studied the Northern provinces, such as Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae. In these provinces, which counted hundreds of feminine deities, six goddesses can be identified as consorts of the healing gods.
This article identifies the function of the god, the kind of uncovered offerings made to the god, the organisation of the sanctuary, and the presence of thermal facilities where water was utilized in the healing process as criteria which we can use to determine whether a goddess was a consort of a healing god or not. In the course of my argument, several realities of the consort of the healing gods become apparent. For instance, divinities can be goddesses of the spring, highlighting the remarkable characteristics of the water or of the spring, or can be goddesses embodying the recovered health, i.e the Salus -although there are very few in this case.
Moreover, this article helps us to prove that the consorts of the healing gods were mainly from Celtic origins. Despite their Celtic origins, however, the forms of the cult, the rites, and the structural organisation of the sanctuaries and temples were Roman. I argue that this is because the dedicants understood, and had appropriated, Roman habits -both in terms of their ritual practices and in the names they had -as well as the fact that most of them had Roman citizenship. Populations in the Graeco-Roman world were always attached to gods that embodied specific and remarkable characteristics of nature. So, gods and goddesses linked to water and springs raised substantial interest for the dedicants all over the Empire during the Roman period, and the provinces of Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae were no different. Indeed, worshippers were attracted by the fact that such deities represented the specific attributes of water -the heat and/or the striking colour of the water, its ability to heal, and so on -or those of the landscape such gods and goddesses contributed to creating (Scheid, 2007-8). Although gods and goddesses of water and springs were numerous during this period only a few were believed to possess the specific ability to heal, performing such healing actions either alone or with a consort. In the latter case, the divine couple personified the entire process of healing, with the god acting as the healer and the goddess representing either the recovered health or the embodiment of the water or the spring.
In this article I will focus on the feminine consorts of the healing gods whose water or spring was used by the god in the healing process and/or who were considered as embodying the Salus, i.e. recovered health. Before any further remarks or investigation, it is worth warning readers that not all the gods and goddesses considered to be living close to water or to a spring had the ability to heal and not all the sanctuaries that were close to water were in fact sanctuaries dedicated to water and to healing gods. This remark has already been made by J. Scheid (Sheid, 2007-8) and S. Deyts (Deyts, 2003: 19) who suggests that: 'un sanctuaire, tout comme un village ou un établissement agricole, ne peut s'installer qu'à proximité d'un point d'eau. De ce fait, la liaison entre vital et sacramental ne peut être pris comme un postulat' ['A sanctuary, as a village or a villa (i.e. a large country house belonging to the elite who owned the estate composed of lands, a farm and a housing arranged around a courtyard), cannot be settled far from a natural water supply. So, liaising vital and sacramental cannot be used as a postulate.']. Moreover, being a deity who represented water or a natural spring did not imply that this goddess had the ability to heal, to be a part of the healing process, or to be the consort of a healing god. All of this reveals the need to define precise and specific criteria to identify the consorts Ferlut: Goddesses as Consorts of the Healing Gods in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae 3 of the healing gods, such as the architectural pattern of the sanctuary, the recovered offerings uncovered during archeological campaigns, or the characteristics associated with the divinity (as, for example, revealed in altar inscriptions). With regards to the latter, we also need to make a preliminary remark: the feminine consorts of the healing gods were not properly healers: the god was the medicus, but the female consorts played a key role along with the god. 1 Few articles have focused on these goddesses in the past 50 years, but their presence was central to many dedicants' practices, especially in the Northern provinces of the Roman Empire. These provinces have various similarities. Conquered and organised at the time of Caesar or Augustus, they were all merely a single province until the Flavian times when they were separated in Gallia Belgica and the two Germaniae. They had also a Gaulish and/ or a Germanic background that maybe could have had an influence on the names, practices and geographical spread of both the deities and the dedicants.
In order to categorise the deities, the ritual practices and the dedicants, we need to rely on sources that we can be certain about, i.e. epigraphy and sculptures when they accompany inscriptions, archaeological remains of offerings, and the sanctuaries themselves. All these materials can be dated mainly from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, and sometimes from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD in the case of the sanctuaries. This does not mean that traces of the cult cannot be found after those periods, but the process of confirming materials after this time is far more complex. This is because inscriptions and sculptures were no longer available after the 3 rd century AD and archaeological traces of offerings are very difficult to find in sanctuaries that were investigated decades ago when archaeology of ritual practices was not a crucial question.
These preliminary remarks and the analysis of the sources raise several questions: who were the goddesses clearly identifiable as consorts of healing gods? What 1 As this article focuses on the feminine consorts of the healing gods, I have based my survey of the healing gods on previous works and lists made by historians (Duval, 1956;Hatt, 1967;Van Andringa, 2001

I. Identifying the goddesses as consorts of the healing gods
In Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae, thirteen goddesses of water and springs can be identified but only a few were consorts of healing gods and even fewer represented the Salus. In order to identify them, several criteria must be taken into account. First, their masculine consort must be a healing god and clearly recognised as such. Second, the temple in which the goddess was worshipped must have a clear bipartition of its inner space between a sacred space in which water gushed out and a profane space in which the humans could use water.
Third, some attributes in the goddess' representations had to highlight her role, such as the caduceus found on sculptures figuring Maia or Rosmerta (see inscription nr. 15 in Appendix 1). Fourth, the inscriptions must mention the existence of a request to protect someone or to make him recover his health and some offerings must be monetary and/or anatomic, symbolic of real healings (Scheid, 1992: 31). Other offerings may be present, and I will consider some in this article, but their presence must function as the key to identify a sanctuary where a god heals. Finally, some goddesses could have thermal facilities in which their water can have a specific characteristic that the god can utilize to heal. But this last criterion has to act in conjunction with some of the previous criteria, since having thermal facilities with specific water characteristics did not always mean that the goddess was the consort of a healing god, as Brixta in Luxueil-les-Bains proves. Indeed, Brixta was a goddess of water, Luxouius' consort but, so far, it has been impossible to find clues of worship dedicated to his ability to heal.
None of the criteria is sufficient alone but in combination they allow us to assert that a goddess can be established as the consort of a healing god.

Goddess Consort Characteristics Sanctuary
Damona Apollo

Boruo
Boruo was a healing god Sanctuary with a thermal facility in Bourbonne-les-Bains where inscriptions for the Salus of a member of a family and where monetary offerings were found.
The sanctuary was bipartitioned between sacred and profane spaces.  personifying recovered health, i.e. the Salus. Indeed, a caduceus was consecrated to her by a dedicant (see inscriptions in Appendix 1) which proves that she was a part of the medical process. She was also represented a few times with a caduceus in her hands (see Appendix 1). These kinds of representations are similar to the depictions of the divine couple Asclepius/Hygia about whom we know that the god healed and the goddess was the representation of recovered health.

Hygia
Another couple had its cult spread across the provinces during this period: Apollo/Sirona. Sirona was rarely worshipped without Apollo but this association cannot be linked only to the healing function of the god. The representations we have of the goddess are too damaged to be a real help. However, several inscriptions were discovered in Niedaltdorf, which we know to be a water and spring sanctuary. In this case, we can assert that the goddess participated in the healing process, probably as the embodiment of the spring and of its characteristics utilized by the god to heal.
The other consorts of the healing gods had a much more localised cult, such as the cults to Inciona and Damona. The latter goddess was the Boruo's consort, a Gaulish god for whom some inscriptions were recovered in two sanctuaries: Bourbonne-les-Bains in Belgica and Bourbon-Lancy in Lugdunensis -this last sanctuary is beyond the range of my study but it will help us to narrow down some conclusions. In Bourbonne-les-Bains, the god had the epithet Boruo and formed a topic couple with his consort Damona. Boruo has already been defined by historians as a healing god and the aspect of the sanctuary and the offering uncovered there -which I will examine more closely later in this article -proved that real healings were made by the gods. In Gallia Belgica, Boruo was a Gaulish interpretation of Apollo as the inscription nr. 1 (Appendix 1) proved (Vaillat, 1932: 27, 95-111 is not certain that she represented recovered health. More probably, she was just a goddess of the spring whose power Veraudnus utilized to heal (Kuhnen, 1996).
Looking at the origin of the goddesses, it is worth pointing out that just one inscription concerns a non-Celtic goddess, Hygia who had a Graeco-Roman origin, whereas all the other goddesses were of Celtic origin. An explanation emerges when we look at the geographical spread of the goddesses ( Table 2). 5 The only case of a Graeco-Roman goddess was in Germania inferior in a Roman colony. By contrast, all of the other deities' inscriptions are spread all over the provinces in both rural and urban centers, although rarely in the largest cities or in capitals of the provinces, apart from a few inscriptions in Metz. This is likely attributable 5 For the inscriptions, see the epigraphic corpus in (Ferlut, 2011), available online (https://scd-resnum. univ-lyon3.fr/out/theses/2011_out_ferlut_a_annexes.pdf).
Ferlut: Goddesses as Consorts of the Healing Gods in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae 9 to the fact that the sanctuaries dedicated to water and springs in the provinces we study were generally in rural areas. Gallia Belgica was also known to privilege Celtic goddesses over Roman or Greek deities (Ferlut, 2014)   Dedicant with a Celtic cognomen.

Evidence of interpretatio indigena:
Roman attributes mainly used for spring and water goddesses.
In this case, people may have preferred to worship goddesses with a local origin or to make an interpretation in order to be better healed by the local water or spring used by the god, or to have a better chance to find the Salus. We can also assume that water and spring, and their divine impersonations, were named and utilized by the Celts long before the Roman conquest, which could arguably offer an explanation for the persistence of Celtic names -even if such an interpretation cannot be proven. However, interpretatio was rare -six inscriptions among fifty four -which proves that people from Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae decided to worship goddesses according to their original nature. This was not uncommon at the time since the Romans generally adopted foreign pantheons. Moreover, these Celtic goddesses became more visible with Roman modes of worship, but they kept their Celtic nature and the worshippers made vows to them for their specific functions.
Identifying the gods' feminine consorts and their functions is therefore a challenge but it is an important scholarly undertaking since it allows us to focus on the different kinds of rituals practised at the time, in the deities' sanctuaries.

II. Roman rituals and temples dominate
According to analysis of the inscriptions, the uotum was the main ritual -thirty seven inscriptions among fifty four. As in any other provinces of the Empire, in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae dedicants had no obligation of faith but to adhere to a strict practice of the rites with an extreme respect for religious prescriptions. I therefore do not accept the idea sometimes evoked -even during the Roman period -that the Romans, and more broadly the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, did not believe in their gods and only performed rituals as part of a mechanical ritual routine for social or political purposes.

The uotum, a Roman ritual commonly used
The uotum was largely accomplished by people believing in its power and practising it according to strict ritualistic procedure. It was a full rite followed by worshippers in This act was addressed both to the goddess and to the entire ciuitas. It also proved that the goddess was kind to the worshipper: it proclaimed her powers but also demonstrated to the rest of the community that the dedicant had the ear of the gods.
Finally, it aimed at perpetuating the transient offering, by naming or representing it.
In our epigraphic corpus (Appendix 1), only one inscription represents the offerings as I have described them and few explicitly name them ( Table 4).
In the case of Celtic goddesses, the uotum was particularly significant for the      Table 4 shows us, in order to fulfill their vow some worshippers made evergetism by building chapelsaedes -with statues and, in one case, a hospitalia to host people traveling to the sanctuary. Such ex-voto were very expensive and became part of evergetism when the dedicants were a soldier and his family or a tabularius, sevir augustal and his family who were people highly marked by Romanity and involved in the life of the ciuitas and their sanctuaries.
The rituals I have discussed in this section were performed in those sanctuaries offered by the city or by the dedicants. In the case of consorts of the healing gods, however, the temples and sanctuaries had a specific form and use since the goddesses were goddesses of water and spring.

Sanctuaries with bipartition of the space
J. Scheid  proved that sanctuaries dedicated to water and springs are identifiable because of a bipartition between the sacred and the profane spaces as well as by the way in which water was used in each part of the sanctuary. In the sacred space water gushes out and no human uses of water should be made in this part of the sanctuary -except for monetary offerings -which was clearly and strictly separated from the profane space where water was utilized for human purposes. This Ferlut: Goddesses as Consorts of the Healing Gods in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae 16 bipartition is applicable to some of the sanctuaries we have been able to identify among our survey (Table 5).
Presently, as most of the aedes have not been recovered but are only mentioned in inscriptions, it is difficult to be sure that all the sanctuaries were marked by the spatial bipartition J. Scheid mentioned. Only two sanctuaries can provide us with sufficient information to conduct an analysis, because we have architectural plans Studies of them available: Bourbonne-les-Bains (Maligorne, 2011) and Niedaltdorf-Ihn (Nr. 36 in Appendix 1). I propose to study these two 'sanctuaries,' even if the use of the term can be questioned for those two locations. Inscriptions in Bourbonneles-Bains were discovered in a large thermal complex but the water springs out in a

III. Dedicants, mainly men touched by romanity
Many assumptions and hypotheses can be made concerning the kind of people who revered these deities. As they were mainly Celtic and feminine divinities, this raises the question: were the dedicants also primarily women and Celts? Although we may anticipate that the dedicants of such Celtic goddesses were Celtic women, the results of my survey would suggest otherwise.
Women were few W. Spickermann (1994) has already revealed that women were not very visible among the dedicants in the Galliae, the Germaniae and in Retia. But, as I extend the study of dedicants to include the dedicants to goddesses, we might be justified in wondering whether women were more likely to be present among the dedicants to female deities than in any other cults. Only three of the seven consorts of healing gods were concerned with women's dedications ( Table 6). This is a confirmation of what I have already explained in previous published work examining other deities (Ferlut, 2014).
In the case of the consort of the healing gods, women made 17.5% of the dedications which is a higher proportion than for the Celtic goddesses in general -in my previous research (Ferlut, 2014) I have proved that women made up only 9.5% of the total number of dedications to Celtic goddesses. Maybe this is due to the fact that they participated in the healing process and/or represented recovered health so that women might be more inclined to participate in the cult. In any case, women did not constitute the majority of dedicants, even for goddesses. It also seems that when they offered a dedication women mainly performed this act alone.
Furthermore, analysis of their names reveals that most of the time these women belonged to the families of Roman citizens -90% of the women. We can take this to mean that women who participated in the cult belonged to families where romanitas was deeply integrated. So, the women who made these vows came from families that were largely educated in Roman manners and habits. This is worth noting because many of the sanctuaries were situated in rural or suburban areas where people only came into contact with Romanity later on in the period of the Roman Empire. It can also be assumed that those women educated in Roman habits were aware of the powers of the healing gods and chose to enter the sanctuaries in order to access these divinities. Finally, dedicating an altar and performing a sacrifice were very expensive undertakings, which means that the women with whom we are concerned enjoyed a high standard of living, and certainly high enough to be financially independent in some ways.  Belgica and the Germaniae, these skills touched more and more people. Because our archaeological material dates mainly from the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries AD, it is not surprising to see fewer and fewer people with Celtic origin among the dedicants, since many people became Roman citizens in the later years prior to the Antonine constitution. 7 Insofar as most of the dedicants had Roman names and were Roman citizens, I need to look deeper into this question to ascertain whether the consort goddesses of the healing gods had dedications made by single individuals or whether ciuitates, uici and pagi also offered dedications. The participation of the priests, the municipal 7 The Antonine constitution was enacted in AD212 by the Roman emperor Caracalla, who granted Roman citizenship to almost all of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire.
Ferlut: Goddesses as Consorts of the Healing Gods in Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae 21 elite, the men from the Equestrian order, and senators should be studied as well (Tables 7 and 8).
Dedications to the healing gods and their consorts from the higher class and from the orders of Roman imperial society were non-existent and those of the high Roman ciuitas society were rare. This is the conclusion we must draw for the uicus as well. We have no sign of a dedication made by a colony or any other kind of ciuitas in the three provinces of Gallia Belgica and the Germaniae that I have studied. What are the reasons for the dearth of inscriptions to the consorts of the healing gods among people and communities in Roman imperial society? The first hypothesis could be that people and communities of the imperial centres were more attracted by Roman goddesses. However, as far as we know, this was not the case since Hygia, a Graeco-Roman goddess, had only one inscription, proving that the dedicants did not privilege Graeco-Roman deities. The second hypothesis is that the number of senators and members of the equestrian order were not numerous enough in the provinces to be major actors into the goddesses' cult. But, if this explanation is valid for such men, it is not the case for the municipal elite which was far more widespread across the three provinces. It is worth noting that they concentrated their dedications upon Graeco-Roman goddesses and on tutelary goddesses from their ciuitas as Auentia (Ferlut, 2012). As for the priests and cult servants, only two seuiri augustales were mentioned in the inscriptions and dedications were clearly attached to the imperial cult, as the inscription contained

Municipal magistrates Men from the equestrian order and senators
Rosmerta (one decurio and one priest, seuir augustal) and Visucia (one decurio). Table 7: Goddesses worshipped by municipal elite, men from the equestrian order and senators.

Number of uicus
Rosmerta 2 and priests, only the goddess Rosmerta was worshipped, proving either that her impact was higher than that of the other consorts of healing gods, or that some suburban sanctuaries were more largely integrated in the civic cult. It is, however, complicated to assert this hypothesis with certainty. As we study the provinces of Germania superior and Germania inferior, in which soldiers had a significant impact upon religion, we need to look at the dedications they made. Surprisingly, only one appears: an inscription from a veteran and his wife. So we must conclude that consorts of the healing gods were not attractive to soldiers who preferred goddesses that protected them in their duty and provided supplies and the necessary strength and courage in the battlefield (Ferlut, 2012).
In conclusion, we can assert that consorts of the healing gods in Gallia Belgica and in the Germaniae were largely Celtic and, for a few, sometimes interpreted by the means of the interpretatio indigena. These six goddesses mainly represented the Salus, i.e. the recovered health, but some were just the divine incarnation of the water whose characteristic formed part of the healing process, as perhaps in the case of Inciona. Nevertheless, although these goddesses were primarily Celtic they were worshipped using Roman rituals, principally the uotum, in sanctuaries or complexes that adopted a Roman structure of spatial bipartition. The dedicants also match the general pattern of social and gender distribution I have found in my research into goddesses, i.e. men with a Roman citizenship, well aware of Roman habits.