In the year 43 A.D., the Roman legions that had crossed the Channel and begun their slow conquest of Britain arrived at a spring in the west of the island that the Celts who lived there had already considered sacred for centuries before Rome existed as a city. The spring produced water that came out of the ground at a constant temperature of 46 degrees Celsius — hot enough to steam in the cool British air, hot enough to feel like the earth itself was alive and breathing beneath the surface, hot enough to convince any reasonable person who stood at its edge that something extraordinary was happening here and that the something had a name. The Celts had given it the name Sulis. The Romans, when they arrived and understood what they were looking at, did not replace the name with one of their own. They did what the Roman religious tradition did at its best: they added their own goddess, Minerva, to the existing one, and called the deity of the spring Sulis Minerva, and built the most elaborate Roman bath complex in all of Britain around the water that had been sacred before the first Roman soldier had ever heard of Britain. The spring that Sulis had claimed was too powerful to rename. The Romans were practical enough to understand that.
The sacred spring at Bath — Aquae Sulis, the Waters of Sulis — was the site of one of the most sustained acts of devotion in the ancient world. For nearly four centuries, from the Roman conquest until the legions withdrew in the early fifth century, people came from across Britain and from the continent to stand at the edge of the spring and offer Sulis what they wanted her to receive in exchange for what they needed her to provide. They threw coins into the water — over 12,000 have been recovered by archaeologists, representing every denomination that circulated in Roman Britain. They threw jewelry: rings, bracelets, hairpins, the small personal objects that cost enough to represent a real sacrifice but not so much that the offering was impossible. They threw gemstones — carved and uncarved, set and loose, the mineral wealth that the earth produces from the same underground heat that produced the spring itself, returned to the water as a gesture of acknowledgment that what comes from the earth belongs to the earth and that Sulis, as the consciousness of the earth's heat, had the first claim on it. And they threw lead tablets on which they had inscribed their prayers — over 130 of these curse tablets have been found in the spring, making Aquae Sulis the single richest source of curse tablets in the Roman world, which tells you something about the specific quality of Sulis's power: she was not only a goddess of healing. She was a goddess of justice, of the righting of wrongs, of the restoration of what had been taken from those who deserved it back.
The oyster shell that opens at the center of this piece is the shell of the spring — the geological chamber that the water of Aquae Sulis emerges from, the place underground where the rainwater that fell on the Mendip Hills 10,000 years ago has been traveling through limestone and heat and mineral patience until it arrives at the surface as something transformed: no longer cold rainwater from a Celtic hillside but hot mineral water from the center of the earth, carrying in its temperature and its chemistry the record of the journey it has made through the rock that Sulis inhabits. The flower at the center of the shell is the offering — made not of lead or coin or personal jewelry but of the gemstones that the earth produces from its own interior: jade green as the moss that grows at the edge of the spring, turquoise blue as the mineral-rich water itself, amethyst purple as the light that falls on the Bath stone in the late afternoon when the steam rises from the surface and the air around the spring takes on the quality of a place where the boundary between the material world and the one beneath it is thinner than usual. The stem of amethyst and the jade leaves are Sulis's garden — the plants that grow in the place where the earth's heat reaches the surface and makes possible a microclimate that does not exist anywhere else on the hillside.
The cluster of spiral shells at the base of the oyster is the collection of prayers that Sulis has received and not yet answered — held in the spring's hot water in the way that the Roman devotees believed their petitions were held, preserved in the mineral-rich environment until the goddess had considered them and decided what each one deserved. The circular resin base of deep blue and nacre fragments is the pool of the sacred spring seen from above — the surface that the Romans lined with lead sheets to contain the water and that the devotees stood around and looked into when they threw their offerings, watching the steam rise from the surface and understanding that what they were seeing was the goddess breathing, the evidence that Sulis was present in the water and receiving what was given to her. The small tortoiseshells and stones embedded in the resin are the votive objects that did not sink to the bottom but stayed at the surface, floating in the mineral-rich water, waiting for the current that would carry them to the place where Sulis kept what she had been given.
Sulis is not a goddess of the past. The neopagan and Wiccan traditions that have grown throughout the English-speaking world in the last century have reclaimed her as one of the primary Celtic deities of water, healing, and sacred justice — a goddess whose spring is still flowing, whose temple foundations are still visible in Bath, whose name is still spoken at the edge of water by people who understand that the heat that comes from the earth's interior is not a geological phenomenon but a conversation, the earth speaking to those who are willing to stand at the place where it surfaces and listen to what it has been saying since before there was a language old enough to contain it. The flower in the shell is the most recent offering. The spring is still warm. Sulis is still listening.
"To the goddess Sulis Minerva, Lucius Marcius Memor, haruspex, gives this gift."
— Inscription on a bronze hand found at Aquae Sulis (Bath), Roman Britain, c. 2nd century A.D.
Artist's Note
The flower came first — the arrangement of jade and turquoise and amethyst on the amethyst stem, the specific geometry of petals made from stones that each carry a different frequency of the earth's mineral intelligence. I placed it inside the oyster shell because the shell is the only container that deserves it: the material that the sea uses to make something precious from what enters it as an irritant, the chamber that transforms over time, that requires patience and pressure and the specific chemistry of the water it lives in to produce what it is capable of producing. Sulis's spring works the same way. What enters it as rainwater exits it as something the earth has claimed and changed and made into evidence of its own interior life. The flower in the shell is that evidence. I assembled it. The earth made it possible.
At CuepoxyGift, the most sacred pieces are the ones that were already offerings before the artist understood what they were making. "The Flower of Sulis" is for those who understand that the most powerful prayers are not spoken but placed — set at the edge of the water with care and released, and trusted to reach the one they are intended for.
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A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Flower of Sulis" is part of the artist’s private collection and is not currently available for sale.
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— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift