Celebrating Sheela na Gig!

Monday - Stories from the studio

Today is the 17th March, St Patrick’s Day, but i much prefer the spelling I’ve spotted a few times - ‘Patty’s day’ which brings to mind an image of Peppermint Patty (of Peanuts), sitting in a dive bar with a pint of Guinness, swirling with green glitter and a mint liqueur chaser.

You can keep St Patrick, I’m all about celebrating Sheela (who I also read was St Patrick’s wife - causing me to snort my peppermint tea over my keyboard). Sheela has her very own day, but I would rather bring her back to reign, rather than just for a day!

A lot has been written about these hags, naked, often skeletal in shockingly stances of legs akimbo displaying their exaggerated and mythical vulvas!!!

Sheela’s are all about celebrating everything FEMALE, the ties between women, the community, the healing in community, the everyone-gets-looked-after, the-no-one-gets-left-out - healing in all its multitude of forms.

Take Sheela as you meet her. She’s a symbol of life, death and rebirth. A reminder that we once lived as being part of the earth, rooted into the spiritual bedrock. When we die, we return to the embrace of the great mother. She’s a symbol of women, of physical birth and death and all the blood and rituals that go with these life portals. She’s about women’s ways, women’s wisdom, rituals - of sitting together and remembering what’s been erased. Of welcoming the babies into the world and preparing the journey for the midwifing at the end of life.

She’s our ancient connection to all that which has been taken away from us - the right of choice for our bodies, our power, our stories and voices, sisterhood and our connection to the sacred, our relationship to the land. Our rage and grief, our keening and healing!

Sheela is a powerful figure to help us remember!

To me, Síle has become more than a relic; she is a powerful symbol of cultural remembrance and a living ancestor. She embodies the oppressed, the silenced, the hidden feminine that has been overlooked throughout history.

Síle is not merely an object; she is an icon steeped in memory. The stone that forms her bring holds the stories of those who came before us.

In these devastating times, where feminine sovereignty is under siege and the rights women fought so hard to achieve are being slashed and burned, the relevance of Síle’s existence grows ever more critical. The fragile gains we have made towards equality are at risk; nothing can be taken for granted. We must reclaim our narratives and those of our ancestors, remembering that each artefact carries a history that demands recognition and respect.

.- Dee Mulrooney

My needle felted Sheela na Gig

A Sheela na Gig altar - A ritual of protection for a young woman

Sheela na Gig - Kildonnan Church, Isle of Eigg

Walking the Road of Death to Meet Sheela

On the Gather the Keeners Retreat on the Isle of Eigg we walk an ancient coffin road, the route that the coffin would have been carried, over the few miles to the cemetery at Kildonnan. In this ancient old roofless church sits a Sheela na Gig, protected from the elements by a glass plate las she looks out to a congregation of tall (healing) weeds swaying in the breeze as a chorus of bees and insects collecting pollen sing old hymns to the earth.

We walk this death road, walking towards her, walking to this ancient female who gives life. She takes that life, for when we die we travel through the same portal we came into the world through. We return back into the place of beginning, the place of reforming - the great mystery, the womb of the goddess, the cosmos.

Some say she isn’t a true Sheela - but for all the Sheela’s that were destroyed or sit in shelves in museums I reclaim this Sheela for we need to reclaim our stories, our rituals and our healing!

A Sheela ritual for the protection of a young girl