The Roman name of modern Bath was Aquae Sulis which means “Water of Sulis”.
Sulis was a goddess of the Celtic Brythons. They had constructed a shrine at a large natural hot spring which was dedicated to Sulis. The Romans identified Sulis with their goddess Minerva and started building a temple complex around this shrine in the early second half of the first century. Oak piles were driven into the mud to provide a stable foundation and the spring was surrounded with a stone chamber lined with lead.
During an excavation of the Sacred Spring under the King’s Bath between 1979 and 1980, 130 lead tablets were discovered. These tablets were deposited in and around the Sacred Spring.
While many of the Bath tablets were folded, a number of tablets does not show any folding or rolling marks (or cracks) but instead piercing holes are preserved. It is likely that these tablets were pierced to a wall, open to be read by anyone who could, and then were later depostited in the spring.
The “curse” tablets from Aquae Sulis (Bath, GB) are actually donations with a plea for justice.
“It is convenient to call them “curse tablets”, although it will be seen that they are not typical defixiones; and in any case, we do not know what they were called by their authors.
The word defixio is only attested in a bilingual gloss, and its use must be deduced from the verb defigere
(“to fasten” or “fix”, and hence “to curse”). Defigere is found in only three British curse tablets (…).The cognate verb configere is found at Bath, but, if asked to define what they were composing, the authors of the tablets from Bath might well have used the word devotio, execratio or donatio (…).
Donatio is much the most likely term. (…) A better term for most of the texts (…) is “juridicalprayer”. But “curse tablet”, if imprecise, is too convenient and
familiar to be discarded.”R.S.O Tomlin, Tabellae Sulis – Roman inscribed tablets of tin and lead from the sacred spring at Bath (1988), 59 and note 2.
Did you find this article useful and would you like to read more about the archaeology of ancient magic? I am a freelance archaeologist making academic research accessible for free to a broad audience. You can support me with a one time donation via paypal (paypal.me: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/kirstendzwiza) or get access to more content and my monthly live online Thoth & Maat Lectures on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ancientmagic