ABSTRACT
The evidence for a healer-goddess in Celtic Europe during the early first millennium AD is based almost entirely upon iconographical and epigraphic evidence. Certain concepts need to be introduced here in order that the role of the Goddess as healer may be better understood. First, there is a strong link between religion and medicine: this is something that is evidenced both in the classical and in the Celtic world. Sick people in antiquity relied upon the healing skills of the supernatural powers at least as much as upon empirical medicine (Allason-Jones 1989:156). Indeed, at many therapeutic sanctuaries in Gaul and Britain, doctors were present as well as priests, for example at Fontes Sequanae (Deyts 1985) and Bath (Cunliffe 1988:359-62); it is even possible that the two roles were sometimes combined in the one individual. Second, the perception of the numinous in water is important. There is abundant evidence in non-Mediterranean Europe from at least the later Bronze Age-say around 1300 BC-that water was a central focus of ritual activity (Bradley 1990; Fitzpatrick 1984). During the later Iron Age this activity began to manifest itself in the development of healing sanctuaries on the sites of thermal springs, a phenomenon which burgeoned in the Romano-Celtic phase in the Rhineland, Gaul and Britain (Green 1986:138-66; 1989:155-64).
