S2 Ep48: Sulis, Goddess of the Boiling Spring

Beneath the green hills of what is now Somerset, England, a wound in the earth has been pouring out scalding, mineral-red water for over ten thousand years. Long before Rome ever set a sandal on British soil, the people who lived beside that wound believed a goddess lived inside it, one who could heal a dying body and curse a thief's soul in the same breath. Her name was Sulis. 

In this episode, we descend into the sacred spring at Aquae Sulis to meet a goddess of sun, water, sight, and vengeance; a deity so rooted to her one square mile of earth that even the Romans, who renamed every god they met, could not fully rename her. We trace her murky lineage, the cosmology of the Iron Age Britons who first knelt at her waters, the curse tablets that still whisper the grudges of ordinary Roman-British people, and the strange, patient way she disappeared and never quite left. 

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