Sheila Na Gig
Carved on churches in Ireland, Sheila Na Gig is one of my favorite Goddesses, because, to modern eyes, at least, she's so outrageous. Our culture has tons of pictures of women's vaginas, selling those pictures is a multi-million dollar industry. But pictures of old women's vaginas? Well, there are far fewer of those.
Thalia Took tells us that: The Sheila-na-gig is a figure from medieval stone carvings of the British Isles (mostly Ireland), of a grinning woman holding open Her vulva. She is regarded by some as a gargoyle-like figure meant as a medieval allegory of lust, or as a magical figure meant to cure infertility in women, but others have seen in Her an echo of the ancient Irish earth mother.
The word "gyg" is Norse for giantess, in other words, a supernatural or deified female, while "Sheila" is a woman's name, or used as a word for "girl".
The vulva as holy symbol of birth and life is a very ancient idea that symbolizes the life-giving and regenerative powers of the Earth Mother. The image of the vulva has a long history of being carved in stone, and is found all over Europe from the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages. Passage graves were built in the shape of the Goddess, with the passage the vagina, and the tomb chamber itself representing Her uterus. "Tomb" and "womb" were equated, thus ensuring regeneration and continuity after death, in the same way that a "dead" seed is planted in the fertile earth and sprouts up to grow into a complete plant.
Despite the fact that to modern eyes Her pose is "obscene" the Sheila-na-gig is most predominantly found carved in the decoration of churches.
Barbara Walker wrote that: Sheila-na-gig figures closely resembled the yonic statues of Kali which still appear at the doorways of Hindu temples, where visitors lick a finger and touch the yoni "for luck." Some of the older figures have deep holes worn in their yonis from much touching. The protruding ribcage on many examples of the sheila-na-gig imitates the figures of Kali as the death-goddess, Kalika, evidently
remembered in Ireland as the Caillech or "Old Woman," who was also the Creatress and gave birth to all the races of men. Celts generally protected doorways with some female-genital fetish, which is why they settled on the horseshoe, classic Omega-sign of the Kalika. In India it stood for the feminine cosmos within which Shiva ever performed his creative sexual dance, although he was assimilated to the Kalika and given her title of Destroyer.
Derivation of the term sheila-na-gig is obscure. It meant something like "vulva woman." Gig or giggie meant female genitals and may have been related to the Irish "jig," from French gigue, in pre-Christian times an orgiastic dance. In ancient Erech a gig seems to have been a holy yoni; the sacred harlots of the temple were known as nu-gig.
Amy Sophia Marashinsky says that: Sheila Na Gig grins at you provocatively and invites you to join her in opening. Now is the time to open to new experiences, people, places,and things. Now is the time to begin new projects, forge new directions, venture out boldly. The universe invites you to come out and play. Perhaps you've had to contract your energy to deal with a wounding, a grieving, an ending. Or you haven't felt [that] it was safe to to open up. You may have needed a time of seclusion, sorting out, and focusing inward. Sheila Na Gig is here to remind you that a period of contraction is followed by expansion and opening. It is time to nurture wholeness by integrating what the stretching, expanding, and opening will bring.
I find that Sheila Na Gig is a good goddess for Yule. Her thin, wasted, Crone's body almost perfectly symbolizes this dark time of the year. Her open vulva seems to me to be the opening to the underworld, just as the open vulva of our younger mother was the opening to this world. "Come," Sheila Na Gig seems to me to be saying, "Go on out the way that you came in. Step back into the darkness, regenerate, and re-emerge later in a new form." She represents the Mother Earth, that will receive our used-up bodies and turn them into something new; her vulva represents Cerridwen's cauldron. With that understanding of her, i don't find it strange, at all, that she would have been carved over the doors of churches by the still-somewhat-Pagan Celts.
And, via watertiger, we have this.
5 comments:
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There was a horseshoe under the eaves of this house when we moved in. I've had two boys here and we've had many pets, most remarkably long-lived.
And yes, most cultures have common elements to their mythology - see Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" or any of his other wonderful works.
All hail Goddess Sheila! Long may she jig!
Dear left rev.,
Google Sheila Na Gig, or course!
It's fascinating how the Sheila na gig figures, like the Greek Baubo effigies, have been suppressed by patriarchal religions that hate sex, hate the body and hate the feminine. But these ancient images also prefigure much modern erotic art and photography, which by conventional standards are pornographic if not "obscene." Here's some thoughts on that subject. Maybe if we pay more attention to our cultural roots we can embrace both sexual and spiritual sides of our human natures. They don't have to be at war.
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