Abstract EN:

There are many studies of this form of worship but they are based essentially on epigraphy which gives divinities’ names, and on folklore which might have retained memories of it. They are seldom based on realia. As for archeology, the offering of often modest but numerous ex-voto, according to their destination (whether they were made of wood, sheet metal or stone, anatomical or pathological, etc. ) or their function (ceramics, coins, etc. ) was the rite which left the greatest number of traces. Sanctuaries, as for them, may have been barely arranged springs (but neither rivers nor lakes) as well as monuments (fountains, divonnes, monumental fountains, a few "nymphees", etc. , but no wells), they were also numerous, varied and built according to a centered plan rather than against something. They were more often than not very modest and many of them were at least partly made of wood. Although there were also complex sanctuaries, in towns, often in the conciliabula, and in rural areas, running water always retained the main role. In the pantheon, some eighty divinities gathered, often local or water-related ones. There was no hierarchical organization among them even if they were less scattered than it could first seem : half of the acknowledgements were addressed to mother-goddesses and comparable divinities, among which the nymphs, a quarter to local male divinities, like borvo, and the last quarter to divinities bearing roman names, like Apollo, Mars, and Neptune. Usually, their iconography was classical. Most of them were healers or protectors. Finally, whereas this form of worship was natural, it was not naturalistic: Divona was the divinity of the fountain; she was not the water of the fountain. The relations with water, in a total freedom of worship, were sincere and often individual ones; the number and variety of the realia show it.