Sirona

In Celtic polytheism, Sirona was a goddess worshipped predominantly in East Central Gaul and along the Danubian limes. A healing deity, she was associated with healing springs; her attributes were snakes and eggs. She was sometimes depicted with Apollo Grannus or Apollo Borvo. She was particularly worshipped by the Treveri in the Moselle Valley.

Sirona's name

The name of the goddess was written in various ways: Sirona, Đirona, Thirona, indicating some difficulty in capturing the initial sound in the Latin alphabet. The symbol Đ is used here to represent the Tau Gallicum, an additional letter used in Gaulish representing the cluster ts which was interchangeable with st- in word-initial position and it is not a form of the letter "D". The root is a long vowel Gaulish variant of proto-Celtic *ster- (*h₂ster) meaning ‘star’. The same root is found in Old Irish as ser, Welsh seren, Middle Cornish sterenn and Breton steren(n). The name Đirona consists of a long-vowel, o-grade stem tsīro- derived from the root *ster- and a -no- suffix forming adjectives of appurtenance in many Indo-European languages. Alternatively it may be an augmentative -on- suffix found in many Celtic divine names and epithets. To this is suffixed the Gaulish feminine singular -a, the usual feminine variant of o-stem adjectives and nouns. So *Tsīrona would seem to have meant ‘stellar’ or ‘astral’.

116 Sirona

116 Sirona is a somewhat large and bright-colored main-belt asteroid that was discovered by the German-American astronomer C. H. F. Peters on September 8, 1871, and named after Sirona, the Celtic goddess of healing.

Photometric observations of this asteroid gave a light curve with a period of 12.028 hours and a brightness variation of 0.42 in magnitude. It has the spectrum of an S-type asteroid.

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