Maybe the Angry Women -2

 

Sheela-na-gig!

A 12th-century Sheela na gig on the church at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England

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Why is Sheela Na Gig making her comeback now?

written By Debra Hall

You’ve been called the witch in the wall, castle hag, whore,

Evil eye, devil incarnate,

a hideous historical oddity,

a medieval sermon against sin,

the “grossest idea of immorality

and licentiousness”

to ever be placed on a house of worship!

You’ve been reviled by Patriarchy,

destroyed in your hundreds by puritanical Christianity.

With no records kept

from when you manifested

between the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries

your meaning is shrouded in mystery.

You’ve been projected on endlessly.

You’ve been a birthing stone,

your mound rubbed smooth by women praying for their wombs to be filled

and labour eased.

You are fascinating and confronting,

humorous, terrifying and comforting.

You are an exhibitionist, vulva splayed,

bony ribs, a face like death, rows of tiny teeth,

breasts pointing to your knees

you are a carnival of grotesque

opening your flaps

like a circus tent.

You are the juice, the feist,

the guardian of the land

and the land itself.

You are a survivor, a shapeshifter, a shamanic prayer.

Your Earth magic and apotropaic powers are rivers in spate.

You are Priestess

of birth, regeneration and death.

Creator and destroyer.

Entrance into the Mysterium.

You are a direct descendant of the neolithic frog goddess,

of vulvas on cave walls

the most prevalent motif

of creativity and creation ever known.

As we rewild ourselves

you are an icon of our potency,

a vital pulse of feral energy

actively suppressed for millennia

but never lost.

You give us freedom, permission to be ourselves,

to inhabit our bleeding, birthing,

menopausing, ageing and death-bed bodies,

to lead with wisdom, joy and resistance.

You mirror our Earthiness, our innate wholeness,

the atavism of our imaginations.

We are claiming, reimagining

and making you in a multitude of media.

Originally carved by masons

You have always belonged to ‘the folk’

and now we are taking you to our hearts again

and wearing you there.

Sheela Na Gig,

You are trending.

Why are you making your comeback now?

What do you want to tell us?

Sheela Na Gig speaks:

I have coming back because time is running dry.

Femicide, Ecocide, Mass Extinction and Global Poverty are all intertwined.

The Earth needs a Hera

and so do women and girls,

the trees and creatures

and everyone else

who does not fit the white, heteronormative, Imperialist mould,

who is treated with the same violent disregard,

who urgently needs a voice.

I have come back to help you

take back the hallowed ground.

I am a bridge

to bring the ancient back to yourselves

from the deep well

of your collective consciousness

when Culture thrived.

I am a demand

that history and art history go back far enough

to the time when societies were peaceful and just.

when Colonialism, Hierarchy and weaponry did not exist

So that you may know your truest roots

and provenance

Far, far deeper than fake news

and distorted norms

that told you to include yourselves

in the false belief that ‘Mankind’ is inherently violent,

Wars inevitable,

Women and men ‘as bad as each other.’

Archaeology, science and statistics-

Nothing supports it.

I have come back

when you need me most

My message is this:

Power to kill, enslave, destroy and dominate is nothing.

Potency to share and create from the heart of the Earth,

with the Earth

and all that is all life

and the life of life- Love

is everything.

Wikipedia gives this:

Feminist scholarship has reinterpreted the concept of the sheela na gig especially in terms of the image as evil or embodiment of sin. Feminists have adopted the image as an icon with feminist authors viewing the sexuality of the sheela na gig more positively as an empowering figure. Reverence for female sexuality and vulvas can be seen in the art of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party and The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. In Wide-open to Mirth and Wonder, Luz Mar González-Arias argues that the creative re-imagining of this medieval female figure can "encourage contemporary women to stop perceiving their own corporeality as a heavy, awkward and shameful burden of guilt".  Irish writer Molly Mullin's essay Representations of History, Irish Feminism, and the Politics of Difference claims that the image of the Sheela na gig has almost become emblematic of Irish feminism as a force for hope and change. Scholar Georgia Rhoades argues that for many contemporary feminists the gesture of the Sheela's unapologetic sexual display is "a message about her body, its power and significance—a gesture of rebellion against misogyny, rather than an endorsement of it".

SOURCE: Rhoades, Georgia (2010). "Decoding the Sheela-na-gig". Feminist Formations. 22 (2): 167–194.

Ecuador heraldic woman and Irish Sheela na Gig

Hail Sheela na gig!

Big moon energy

Sheela-Na-Gig

Strange History 

This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the Church and aristocratic moralists. So important was virginity to a woman’s value that we can find a variety of Medieval sources telling a woman how she could fake her virginity.

First of all, you could just *act* like a virgin, which one text says would mean showing “shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, [and] casting eyes down before men . . . .”.

The eleventh-century Trotula (an important gynaecological text) has some more practical, if cringe-worthy, advice: “the day before her marriage [the woman who wants to fool people about her virginity], let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man”.

Thanks Jenny Mendes on FB

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There are many more images of Sheela na gigs, but apparently the images aren't being published at this time. It's curious how many are at entranced to Christian churches!

To clarify in case you don't understand a Patriarchal System...

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Winter Solstice is 7 days away

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Happy Hanukkah!

Hanukkah in 2025 begins at sundown on December 14 and lasts until sundown on December 22. It is an eight-day festival celebrating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days.