The Temple at Bath

Surrounded by seven hills, Bath, like Edinburgh and Rome has a secret history. The founding legend of the city is attributed to King Bladud, a swineherd whose leprosy was healed by the warm mud of the hot springs.

For John Wood the Elder, the eighteenth century architect behind the masonic and druidic inspired Circus, he felt King Bladud was comparable to Abaris the Hyperborean, a great healer and priest of Apollo from Classical Greek sources. Whatever the truth, the wooded valley which led down to the sacred spring was once believed to be a gateway to the Otherworld.

Healing and the goddess have long been linked with the Otherworld, and pigs too. From the herd of swine that fell into the underworld when Hades abducted Persephone, to the pigs kept by Circe and the enchantress Ceridwen, from Welsh mythology.

In Bath, the goddess of the sacred healing spring was once known as Sulis, later called Sulis Minerva by the Romans. Sulis’s name comes from the “same Indo-European root as Baltic Saule, Germanic Sol, Slavic Solntse, and all the other Indo-European names for the Sun, as does the closely related Irish Gaelic suil, which means “eye” ie the sun, the eye of heaven. In Arab tradition the Sun is a fiery spark which is quenched in the sea at night, while among the Balts the Sun and her daughters descend into the western ocean and sometimes have to be rescued from drowning. Evidently, it would be nothing unusual for the Celts of Aquae Sulis to think of their goddess going down into the Spring and like a kind of celestial immersion heater, warming up the bath water.”

Quote from Eclipse of the Sun by Janet McCrickard.