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Salacious or religious, or just plain dirty? Irish Sheelah-na-Gigs still abound
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Can this coexist with a Sheelah-na-Gig? (McBride photo)
Fans of the long-running TV series Ballykissangel might remember the episode in which the two dolts, Liam and Donal, discover a Sheelah-na-Gig. The little carving scandalized spinster shopkeeper Kathleen, but the rest of the town greeted the news with a bit more interest and admiration. (Episode 33: Rock bottom.) A Sheelah-na-Gig is a carving, most generally on a church, of a naked female figure with genitals not only exposed, but wildly exposed. (Alternate spellings are Sheila-na-Gig, Sheela-na-Gig and, in Irish, Sile-na-Ghig.)
For those not addicted to PBS reruns and Netflixes of BallyK, the series was filmed in a real Irish town, Avoca, south of Dublin. It doesn't actually have its own Sheelah-na-gig...or at least, there seems to be no evidence of one...but fiction is fiction. But all over the rest of Ireland, Sheelahs are the real deal.
But, you might reasonably ask, a naked female carving on a church? In Roman Catholic Ireland? Indeed. Also found on churches are carvings of the Green Man, a male face surrounded by leaves and flora. While these sometimes were carved contemporaneously, most researchers do not think they are simply male and female for the same thing. Indeed, the Green Man is a sort of sprite, a more simply spiritual creature. The Sheelahs…well, they are much, much more earthy, to say the least.
The term is pronounced Sheelah na Ghee, and the same name is applied to them whether they are found in Ireland (arguably, most of them) or England (which has a good many of its own, and a wonderful website where you can see the little ladies, here.)
There is no certainty about what the Sheelahs were meant for, or why they ended up so often on churches. But of course there are theories. Here are some:
The motif was started in France and Spain, moving later to Britain and then Ireland in the 12th century. In support of this theory is the fact that almost all surviving Sheelahs are in areas where the Anglo-Norman conquest was most keenly felt. Those areas that remained more Irish have relatively few carvings.
An allied theory is that they were ugly, also known as Divine Hags, in order to convince the population that female lust was ugly.
On the other hand, there are those that say the Sheelahs were, plain and simple, fertility figures. There is some support for that: after all, procreation was all about populating the kingdom of God in the early church, especially when it overlapped with remaining pagan religious practices. In addition, of course, earlier fertility figures, such as the Venus of Willendorf, were also ugly. While that figurine is so ancient few have posited its significance, historically, art teachers have considered it a fertility symbol.
Still others proposed that the carvings are pre-Christian fertility or Mother Goddess symbols subsumed into the Christian church, as was so much else (spring fertility rites=Easter, winter solstice celebration=Christmas, and so on.)
While academics are less entranced by the goddess theory, Maureen Concannon makes a good case for it in her book, The Sacred Whore: Sheela Goddess of the Celts.
Whether one theory or another is true, or whether no one has yet hit upon the real reason for the Sheelah-na-gigs, one thing is certain: You can have a great time in Ireland looking for some. You can design your own trip, using the listing on the right of this site’s home page. A great place to see a Sheelah up-close-and-personal is at the County Cavan Museum; you can preview it here.
Or, you can book a tour that will take you to see at least some Sheelah-na-Gigs; these companies have also, in the past, organized totally Sheelah tours.
Sacred Tours; Enchanted Ireland
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