The explication of Sheela-na-gig

Sheela-na-Gigs by Barbara Freitag, (Routledge, 2004) caught my eye at the AAR-SBL bookshow because it promised a thorough, cross-disciplinary methology, if not the answer to the origin of the puzzling carvings on old Irish and English churches.

You can buy a Sheela-na-Gig T-shirt too.

Author Barbara Freitag, who teaches at Dublin City University, crisscrosses through archaeology, literature, medieval history, and even a little military history while seeking the origin of these crude carving that usually show either a woman spreading her vagina or else squatting to give birth.

Even the etymology is tricky. Though “Sheela” or “Sheila” is an Irish form of “Cecilia,” (a name brought by the Normans), “gig” is a puzzle. It has variously been defined in dictionaries of slang as meaning the female genitals, a “wanton” girl or prostitute, or anything that whirls around. (The third gives us “whirlygig” as well as “jig,” the dance, plus “gigolo,” a paid dancing partner.)

The British West Indies fleet during the time of the American Revolution included a small ship called Shelanagig. Not exclusively Irish, the statues have also been recorded in Scotland, England, and Wales.

And in 18th and early 19th-century Irish folklore, Sheila was the wife of St. Patrick, not to mention one of the names used as personifying the nation of Ireland itself.

Freitag is reluctant to endorse the sweeping Margaret Murray-style “ancient Pagan goddess” interpretation of the statues, but she does conclude that it is possible “to place the Sheela-na-gig in the realm of folk deities in charge of birth.”

In Ireland particularly, she notes that they cease being carved and are even removed from churches during the reformation of manners (led by the now-legitimate Catholic clergy) that begins at the close of the 18th century and continues through the 19th. “Customary folk practices, wake amusements in particular, were curbed, marriage and sexual behavior were restrained and public order was controlled.”

Sheela-na-gigs is readable and interesting for the fun of following someone working out an intellectual puzzle. Freitag also includes photos of a large selection of Sheelas--they do not all look like the T-shirt image, not at all--plus a catalog of all the known such sculptures whether still extant or merely recorded in the past.