goddesses and sheela-na-gigs

I can find numerous ways to procrastinate, all of them based in research on other topics than what I'm supposed to be spending my time on. This has been true my entire life. It is one of the reasons I know a little bit about a lot of things (I am either a renaissance person or a dilettante). Here is a tangent I went on today, after yesterday having visited the Rock of Cashel, the seat of secular and religious power in all of southern Ireland (Munster) for centuries, and seeing both a Goddess image and a sheela-na-gig there. Enjoy (this is especially for you, Anna, Valerie, Nick, and Morwen,and for Kristen R's mom).

30 years ago, my good friend Morwen and I undertook a trip together, to Ireland, Wales, and England, in an attempt to visit and learn about Goddess-related sites. While Morwen focused her research on the glimpses of the Great Goddess –in her many guises—to be found within the Arthurian legends, I zeroed in on a place that fascinated and called to me: the Somerset area of south-western England, with Silbury Hill, Avebury Henge (much, much larger than Stonehenge, and older) and Bath at the center. Silbury Hill is over 4,000 years old, and is the tallest human-made hill in Europe (not as tall as the pyramids, but built about the same time, and by a much less technologically advanced culture, who built it with pick-axes made from antlers. Avebury Henge is one of the largest in Europe, and is 5000 years old. They are both in the Kennet River valley, and the name of the Kennet River is related to words that mean wisdom and knowledge—ken and cunning—and to a word that is today considered an obscene or pornographic word for female genitalia, but that centuries ago was a respected word for the same body part). Back then, I did a lot of research on the history, legends, and name-changes of these three places, which were part of a complex of a natural and human-made landscape that represented the Goddess, whose name in that area was Sil, or Sulis, whose name tells us she was both a sun and an eye-goddess (eyes =wisdom and all-seeing, just like the sun). Sulis turns out to be, for the Romans who conquered Britain in the early centuries after Christ, fairly equivalent to their Goddess Minerva (goddess of wisdom and knowledge, of medicine and of magic), and they renamed her sacred hot springs in Bath after the two of them: Sulis-Minerva. Sulis was a Goddess who was worshipped in that area of Celtic Britain and in north-western France, where Celtic culture still flourished in standing stones and stone circles, too. In France the Christian church of Our Lady of Rocamadour—a Black Madonna—is built on the site of a shrine sacred to Sulis.

Sulis, or Sil, is a name that is related to many other words. One of my favorite etymological findings was its relationship to the word “silly,” which used to mean “wise.” So a Silly Woman, which was a term used through the late Middle Age in this way, was a Wise Woman, a Wise Crone, a local healer/charmer/witch, in Gaelic, a cailleach, old woman. Interestingly (she says :)), the Celtic etymology is the same for the terms for both the Fairy Folk in Ireland (the sidhe, pronounced shee—remember Glenshelane, the glen of the fairies?) and those fascinating and inexplicable stone carvings on churches all over Ireland and Britain: the Sheela-na-Gig. For those of you not familiar with sheela-na-gigs, they are carvings of female images who are usually grotesque in some way, and who are posing in such a way as to focus attention on their open vulva. They are often holding themselves open, and sometimes vegetation—vines, flowers, fruit— emerging from their open vulva. They are clearly symbols of life and fertility, and what is especially fascinating about them is that they were carved during the Middle Ages (12^th through the 16th centuries) throughout Ireland, in northwestern France, and in parts of England, and were usually at the entrance to Churches (I have seen other female figures in churches, often on baptismal fonts, but sometimes on the side wall of the church, near the altar, but these are not sheel-na-gigs; they are mermaids or other females with bare breasts—usually showing centuries of having been rubbed—but not bare genitalia). The rise of Puritan religious power in England and Ireland in the early 1600s put an end to their being carved, and many disappeared during that era, too, but many survive, and are still being discovered, amazingly!

The Irish spelling of the word is Sile na gCioch (really!). Sheela or Sile in Gaelic means femininity, but, according to researchers, also means a special kind of woman: a hag or spiritual woman (Mom Devey: I know you have a hard time with the words hag and crone. The fact is that in the past, many cultures believed that once a woman stopped bleeding and her hair turned white or gray, she came into her full power. Before that, her power was life and fertility, but once she is no longer fertile, she is wise, magically powerful, and is she who should be listened to and obeyed. Many cultures around the world had old women on their ruling councils, and the old women often had a powerful say in decisions. These are the crones, the hags, the women whose physical beauty is no longer important, but whose inner strength and wisdom give them power).

The word gig (the Gaelic gioch or giob)is translated as meaning either the breasts or the buttocks (I know, it seems weird that it could be both or either), but it MIGHT be related to the word “gui,” which means to pray or to dance (as in the jig). I think it’s awesome, by the way, that the word for pray also means to dance. I’ve always felt that dancing was a form of praying, and certainly the Whirling Dervishes and the Shakers (as well as others) have agreed. So maybe we have a name for these carvings that tells us they are powerful old women whose dancing is a prayer for the people. Maybe their genital-revealing is their dance, as there are reports of old Irish customs of the women dancing and jumping over ritual bonfires, giving genital power to the fire and also taking the fire’s power into themselves. Who knows?

Additionally, Celtic gods and goddesses were often depicted in grotesque and scary forms, in order to “impress mortals with their power.” A common stance of both Celtic deities and of sheela-na-gigs is the one-legged stance and staring eyes, which is the stance of The Magician in medieval art and tarot. The focus in the sheela-na-gigs is NOT a pregnant belly or the breasts, as it is in many ancient fertility or mother goddess images throughout the world, but is the genitals, which typically meant life, death, and regeneration. Additionally, the female in her hag, or crone, form, was always seen as possessing supernatural power. Those sheela-na-gigs who were locally named after Christian saints, such as St. Buidhe or Gobnait, were actually named after those saints who were most clearly pagan goddesses who had been Christianized.

Many of the sheela-na-gigs were important to local clans, and so local chiefs also had them in their castle walls. At Moycarkey Castle, she was known as Cathleen Owen, which throughout Ireland means the Hag of the River. All over Ireland people thought the sheela-na-gigs could turn the evil eye, and they would rub the vulva on the carving for good luck and protection.

Okay, so why am I writing about this? Well, one reason is because it is a fascinating question why these carvings were part of Christian churches. Why on earth were they put into churches during the Middle Ages? Were they a continuation of an older tradition in older churches (no one knows) or even of more ancient pre-Christian practices, or a newer development at that time? The fact that they were made in three different countries in Celtic areas makes me think that they must have been part of an older, very Celtic tradition. But why this tradition flourished during a time of great Catholic ecclesiastical power is beyond me—and everyone else, since they don’t seem to have been written about at that time. I assume it’s because they were important to the luck and good fortune and power of the land and clan, and were identified strongly WITH the land and clan, but that’s just a guess, and no one else seems to know.

A second reason is because we saw a female goddess stone carving at Cashel yesterday, which had been at the base of a column in the Choir building there, as well as one of two sheela-na-gigs in downtown Cashel. One is in the Protestant church there (which was built as a Protestant church in the 1700s, and so the sheela-na-gig must have been taken from the originally-Catholic church on top of the Rock) and the other is in the Palace of the Protestant Archbishop (which is now a hotel), on a wall in the basement. It, too, was taken from the church on the Rock when they built the palace in the 1700s. This means that the Catholic religious complex at Cashel—which was the center of the Church in all of Southern Ireland and the center of secular power for that region, too—had two sheela-na-gigs and a female goddess-carving, which were kept and saved by the Protestant religious hierarchy. I don’t know about you, but I find this so intriguing that I wish I were an historian, and not a sociologist, so I could spend all my time researching this.

It turns out that Cashel (Caisel in the Gaelic) was known as Caisel Muman, with Muman being the great Goddess of Munster (southern Ireland), and Munster’s original name actually being Mhuman. It was second only to Tara in terms of being a royal site in the early middle ages, and second only to Armagh, the center of the cult of St Patrick, in terms of religious status. And Muman, the goddess of the Rock and of the Munster people and land (and of the local clans), continued to be important enough that her image remained in this very important church/cathedral.

This goddess-figure is viewed by contemporary researchers as having cat-qualities (I’m not so sure about this myself. If forced to find animal features in it, I would have said owl. That, of course, would have brought me right back around to Minerva and Sulis). She has her legs entwined, as if in a Celtic knot, and she has very large eyes and what look like they could be whiskers. She also has a rounded stomach and breasts.

The cat was seen (by Celtic and other peoples) as the guardian to the Otherworld, and to mystic knowledge. Cats were believed to possess knowledge about the mystic realms that humans can only know if they let cats be their liaison. Therefore, cat symbolism mixed with Goddess-symbolism (especially a Goddess whose characteristics seem to link with the power over life and death that other Celtic goddess such as the Morrigan and Medb possess) would seem to suggest that Muman (sometimes called Mugain) held this kind of power, guarded the Otherworld (not a thing to be treated lightly) and, from myths, practiced a particularly open form of sexuality that may have appealed to early Celtic senses, even post-Christianity. Given Celtic mythology in general, she was likely the Queen of Munster-Muman, whom kings of Munster had to symbolically marry in order to rule the {her} land, a form of the Sacred Marriage that shows up in most European mythic history.

I am wearing a pair of silver earrings with the image of Muman. Yes, when I get home you can borrow them, Anna :)