Síle na gCíogh Conundrums in Stone the infernal consequences of illicit sex SATAN IN THE GROIN exhibitionist carvings on mediæval churches by male exhibitionists on mediæval churches beard-pullers in the silent orgy Anthony Weir author of "Images of Lust" From Sermons in Stone to the Petrified Hag female figures - part I horn-blowers images of Luxuria the columnswallower mystery ireland & the phallic continuum field guide to megalithic ireland The Wealthy Man or Moneylender clutching and weighed down by his moneybag on the right-hand side of the church-doorway at Jazeneuil (Vienne), France. click to enlarge In turbulent, violent 12th century Europe irish sweathouses the earth-mother's lamentation "images of lust" beasts and monsters of the mediæval bestiaries LINKS sitemap the two most dangerous and pernicious sins were considered by the pious (especially in Western France, ravaged by Plantagenet princes at war with each other, and in Northern Spain, victim of a genocidal land-grab in the name of Christ) to be WEALTH (Avaritia) and the SPENDING of wealth on goods, services and sensuality (Luxuria). These were the two most tangible manifestations of the overriding sins of PRIDE (Superbia) and VAIN-GLORY (Vanitas). Nine hundred years later, these most insidious sins, so widely condemned by both offical and heterodox Christianity, have ousted every god and virtue to become the two pillars of Capitalism, the thronged portal of Mammon's New Jerusalem Mall. Almost no-one now believes that money is the devil's seed. Especially not in fundamentalist America. But the sin of avaritia was, especially from the 11th to the 14th centuries, 'the sin of Judas'. Listen to an illuminating 45-minute discussion on the Twelfth-century Renaissance and / or download the mp3 file > Map of most figures in England, Scotland and Wales feedback A 'moneybags' on the West front, Saint-Fort-sur-Gironde (Charente-Maritime) List and distribution map of Irish exhibitionists AVARITIA TRIUMPHANT The New Europe: 1200 to the present The bloody, war-torn twelfth century was economic and artistic boom-time for Europe, despite the pillage of warring princes who devastated huge areas where rape, mass-murder and starvation stalked the land. At the same time the monastic movement underwent spectacular expansion, making the Romanesque the greatest art movement in history. A large part of the expanding wealth of the monasteries derived from their control in the 11th century of the main routes which criss-crossed Europe: the many Pilgrimage roads to Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. There was also the important factor of a century or two of global warming which allowed a great increase in general cultivation - and grape vines to flourish even in Ireland - before the "mini-Ice Age" arrived in the 14th century, bringing The Black Death in its train. Small 'sheela-na-gig' above a doorway in Moate (Westmeath), Ireland. She is wearing a band just below her breasts. from The Seduction of Morality by Tom Murphy (1994) , one of a succession of novels and plays written since Irish The rise of the monasteries itself came with the great sigh of relief that Armageddon had not come on the year 1000 A.D. (though of course Homo sapiens is itself Armageddon extinguishing the rest of the natural world). This was followed by the rise of the papacy under Urban II, and his genocidal proclamation of the terrible First Crusade, which attracted all the most vicious and racist people in Western Europe, and set thrm on their way pillaging and burning all the way to a blood-bath in multi-cultural Jerusalem, followed by the establishment of (relatively tolerant) principalities in Palestine. The beginning of a nine-hundred-year war against (and, latterly, humiliation of) Islam, went with the promulgation of the celibacy of the clergy in the Western (Catholic) church, mainly to distinguish it from both the Eastern church and Islam. At a time when armies, and some individuals - including stonemasons - travelled huge distances by foot or horseback (Eleanor of Aquitaine covered thousands of miles every years with or without her husband Henry II of England, Ireland and Anjou), the Pilgrimage to Santiago became the greatest 'tourist' industry ever. The pilgrimages to Compostela and Jerusalem were symbolic of the pilgrim's progress through life to the Eternal City. They were undertaken mainly to attain merit or to expiate sin: even eating fat meat during lent could be sufficient reason to go (or be directed to go) to Santiago as penitence. In our own times the autobahns of Germany have produced the Autobahnkirche (Catholic and Lutheran), open at all times to service the 'spiritual requirements' of fraught travellers. These pit-stops for the pious and frazzled are pale and sad imitations of the churches which lined the routes to Rome and, especially, Santiago. Catering for poor pedestrians as well as the rich on independence about Irish poverty, economic and spiritual: "She withdrew her arm and then took her hand upwards to stroke the curve of her belly, then downwards again, through the hair, turned the fingers in between her legs to find the it of the girl, the what, the quem, gee, the job, the word that offended her, the font, the nothing, the everything, the hole, to find it wet. Good. When fishes flew and forests walked and whatever the rest of it is." ["the rest of it" is contained in G.K. Chesterton's poem The Donkey. The underlining is mine and indicates the correct modern pronunciation and meaning of 'gig'.] horseback or in carriages, they were, of course, far more frequent than the service-stops on modern motorways. This servicing of the Pilgrim Roads from the Baltic and the Hungarian Plain to Atlantic Spain brought - and distributed - riches throughout Europe: wealth and the means to move it unknown since Roman times. This wealth, of course, attracted all sorts of unwelcome attachments, such as entertainers, jongleurs and whores, pedlars of all kinds, and people displaying deformities or strange animals. Even now, in France, the last survivors of a disgusting tradition of exhibiting doped piglets and kids in cages for children to stroke, attract no opprobrium from a population brought up to regard animals as stupid machines. Concupiscent and/or adulterous woman being dragged to Hell by a devil, a capital at SaintBenoît-surLoire. Female acrobatic exhibitionist mouth-puller on the corbeltable at Fontaines d'Ozillac (CharenteMaritime) click to enlarge It also created many thousands of craftsmen, including stonemasons and sculptors. The latter could not have failed to observe that the richer people become, the meaner they generally get: to become rich you often have to be mean in all senses of the word. Where money was newest, during the land-grab of the Reconquista in Spain, it seems that the arriviste nouveaux-riches often cheated or short-changed those who built the churches that they endowed, for very many churches there show signs of incompletion, with scaffolding holes not filled in. But boom ensured the slow economic demise of the monasteries, due to the rise of the cities which used money, and the new monarchies which they serviced. The monasteries used almost no cash, the economy being largely one of deferred payment by goods, services, labour and agricultural produce. However, the economy that they stimulated was a cash economy based on import (mainly spices and other luxuries from the East) and export (such as wool and textiles from Yorkshire, Northern France and modern Belgium). The centres of power shifted from the great abbeys to towns which were centres of pilgrimage in themselves - Limoges, Tours, for example, and towns which were natural hubs of trade and intellect - Poitiers (with its mythical Courts of Love and six Romanesque churches), Toulouse, Paris, Laon, Bologna, Salamanca, Pisa, London and Oxford. The monastic dislike of money and resentment of the rising rich new towns with their luxuried class and their squalid underclass, fed into the iconography of sin, notably in depictions of Wealth (avaritia) - even on large urban churches such as Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux. A very fine example of a rich man or moneylender tortured by hellish monsters can be seen on an interior capital at Lucheux (Somme). (For more on monsters click here.) And how well-founded their fear of money turned out to be. Luxury largely depends on usury (moneylending). Because usury remained a criminal sin (forbidden also to Muslims), the lending economy (necessary for most enterprises beyond monastery lands) was initially forced upon the Jews, who were then reviled for this as well as for being 'Christ-killers'. The business quickly passed to professional bankers (mostly from Lombardy) - while the Church itself sold not just benefices to the second sons of counts, princes and merchants, but pardons and indulgences to the masses. This, of course, eventually formed the basis of anti-Christian capitalism - and sowed the seeds of the Reformation which encouraged it. Wealthy man or money-changer with moneybag, Rots (Calvados) As power slipped away from the Benedictines and Cistercians to the fat clergy of the new cathedrals based in in the burgeoning towns - and the powerful order of Dominicans who used their control of the Holy Inquisition as an instrument of terror, Europe descended into what we now think of as mediæval superstition, often (and still) obsessed with blood. All sorts of horrors erupted out of Christianity - notably the 'Blood Libel' invented by the clergy of Norwich cathedral in order to acquire a prestigious and lucrative boy-saint at the expense of the 'Christ-killers'. The Blood Libel - the cleverly-insane calumny that Jews used the blood of (usually crucified) boys to make Passover matsos - spread all over Europe. The last official case, in Kiev in 1911, was instigated by an extreme monarchist group and, despite nobbling of the judge and jury by the Tsarist authorities, set free the Jewish scapegoat who soon afterwards emigrated to America. In America today the Blood Libel is still promulgated by video, and latterly, of course, Arabs (notably the Defence Minister of Syria) have started to re-invigorate the story. The Crusades linked Christian 'spirituality' to violence and ethnocide: the church militant was born - and in no time created the Inquisition. (It took Islam nearly a thousand years to descend to the same level and attempt a payback.) With the decline of the non-urban monasteries and the accompanying rise of Gothic cathedrals centered in the cities, came a complete change in the art and the iconography echoing the change in outlook or Zeitgeist. The whole richly meaningful, and complex and sometimes earthy iconographic repertoire of the Romanesque became oldfashioned like the churches. The Romanesque was very firmly and sanely installed between Heaven and Hell, whereas the unhinged Gothic attempted to float to Heaven on its pinnacles and spires and Inquisitional unreason, despising the earthy, folksy, grounded qualities of the Romanesque. As a result, it served the illiterate badly, driving them to superstition. Towards the end of the twelfth century a crucial shift in the Western European (but not Eastern Orthodox) perspective on the crucifixion occurred. Whereas from early Roman Christian times Jesus was portrayed as standing triumphant (like a latter-day Apollo) on his cross, conquering death, by the 13th century Jesus was shown in gruesome suffering, hanging from the cross in agony. This might have had something to do with the rise of the mendicant orders, and of the new cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary introduced by St Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians. The triumph over death's dark dominion was no longer due directly to the single event of the crucifixion, but, instead, to the agony and suffering of the crucifixion. Suffering in itself became meritorious, as Western Europe became richer - and more war-torn. Romanesque sculpture features remarkably few Biblical themes. Adam and Eve (almost always with their 'private parts' covered by hands or fig-leaf) are common on capitals; Daniel and the Lions a little less so, but in greater and marvellous variety. Occasionally there are Noah and his Ark, Tobias (carrying the huge fish) from the obscure book of Tobit, and, from the New Testament, Lazarus and his dog under the Rich Man's table. Most Romanesque sculpture is moralistic (e.g. the Psychomachia or War between the Virtues and Vices), or minatory: 'these things you may not do if you wish to escape damnation'. Many of the latter type occur on corbels, though in some places they were deemed important enough to be placed on doorways and interior capitals. Doorways very often illustrated also the punishment of sin in Hell, often symbolically as a person being swallowed by a lion or monster: the jaws of Hell. Illustrations of Luxuria almost always show the punishment thought to be meted out eternally to those living 'La Dolce Vita': snakes, toads or even tortoises forever suckling/biting their desiccated dugs, or entering/emerging from their vulvas. This simple representation of Luxuria, low down on the archivolt of the 12th century church at Olcoz (Navarra, Spain), is being tormented by one snake climbing up her right leg, while another has slid over her shoulder, down below her breast, and is heading for her genitals. St Bernard famously protested (around 1125) about the fabulous monsters and other frippery which diverted the attention of the (illiterate) people from their imminent damnation. Indeed, he said, "there is seen everywhere such a arvellous diversity of forms that people read with greater pleasure what is carved in stone than what is written in books, and would rather gaze all day upon these singular creations than to meditate upon the Divine Word." Then he reveals himself as the mean cleric he was by adding: "O God! if one is not ashamed of the childishness of these carvings, why does not one spare the expense ?" And expensive they could be. The façade of Notre-Dame-La-Grande in Poitiers could not be carved today for less than tens of millions of pounds sterling. Romanesque churches feature creatures such as these on a 5th century mosaic from Jerusalem showing Orpheus charming not just real beasts but a centaur and the god Pan as well. Some authorities consider that the Orpheus figure here (with Phrygian cap that survives symbolically today on the head of Marianne, who personifies France on French stamps, etc.) is Jesus as Lord of Beasts - and Gods and Monsters. Compare with Adam, Lord of the Beasts in Eden, on a 5th century ivory, and with other 12th century carvings. Ancient, pre-Classical beast-motifs prefiguring Romanesque themes. One of the greatest banes of the Church in the Middle Ages was the Fairs - always drunken, riotous - often murderous - attended by conmen and pickpockets - hence the French expression : S'entendre comme larrons en foire (to be as thick as thieves at a fair). Figurative Romanesque corbels for the most part represented two groups of subjects: beasts and monsters; and images of sinners mostly on the margins of society, including entertainers: jongleurs, acrobats, tumblers, buffoons, performing animals, contortionists, mummers, ventriloquists, 'freaks', exhibitionists, 'musical' farters, and, of course, musicians. Le Puch (Gironde) : Performing Bear and musician-tumblers. The outside walls of churches lent themselves to didactic art, where the ideas of the sculptors and the intentions of the patrons could meet. The patrons regarded the figures as a gallery of sinners, while the artists drew from their own lay and popular culture in carving the detail: what Glenn W. Olsen has suggested as a coming-together of the preoccupations of monks and the voice of the countryside. A somewhat similar situation occurred in late 18th century England, when the great artist Hogarth sold his prints and engravings of low life and debauchery (Gin Alley and so on) in quantity for people to hang to amaze and amuse and smugly instruct each other in the drawing-rooms (originally withdrawing-rooms) that had recently come into fashion. Bewhiskered shawm-player, Cénac (Dordogne) But in the thirteenth centurycorbel-tables disappeared from outside the churches (where most social and economic activity took place) or moved inside, making them less visible. At the same time, the images of entertainers became stereotyped as well as much less frequent. In addition, the virtual disappearance of Romanesque images of monstrous creatures points perhaps to an urban society that was more smug and less imaginative. The symbolism and meaning attached to corbels degenerated into mere grotesquerie, and was largely banished to barely-visible roofbosses and gargoyles, and to amusing misericords approachable only by the élite. With the rising of lofty cathedrals which expressed the worldly power of the Church, religious art in Europe began a terminal decline into the sickening sentimentality of Christian Realism which continues to this day in its obsession with crucifixion, martyrdom, saintly masochism, and hysteric or ascetic hallucination. There seems to be an innate human tendency to revere if not worship images, and the monotheisms have fought a losing battle against this wired-in weakness (which no non-humans have) - as against other evolutionary errors. Perhaps the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic (with its roof-bosses and misericords and gargoyles), as between the Sermons in Stone and the Petrified Hags is illuminated by the following quotation from Mircea Eliade's book on hermaphroditism, The Two and the One: "When the metaphysical significance of symbols is lost, people perceive symbols at increasingly cruder and crasser levels." Rathcline Church (Longford) photographed by Gabriel Cannon. With the rise of the Papacy from its lowest point in the 10th century, and the rise of the Gothic cathedrals, came the anti-Christian obsession with money. The corruption and venality that the Benedictines, Augustinians and Cistercians abominated turned into an industry - in fact a new economic engine. The monasteries had created wealth through bringing marginal land into productive cultivation - and reducing the forests of France, Italy, Northern Spain and England by nearly a third. They had established safe trade-routes along the Pilgrim Roads, so that the towns could create wealth through import and export. The difference between the world-views of the 12th and 13th centuries can hardly be exaggerated. It is something like the difference of German experience between the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. Or, perhaps, from another point of view, like the difference between Hungary in the 1980s and in the 1990s. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 permitted heterosexual marriage in churches thus reversing the teaching of St Augustine. This allowed the parish churches and cathedrals to impose charges for the wedding and related services, which previously had been held (if at all) outside the church. This same Council promulgated the incredible doctrine of Transubstantiation and instituted the practice of Confession. The Second Lateran Council in 1139 (when the papacy and hierarchy were still relatively weak) had been much more concerned with behaviour, excommunicating jousters and urging the 'repression of marriage and concubinage among priests, deacons, subdeacons, monks, and nuns'. In this council also, the rising power of princes was reflected in Canon 20, wherein kings and princes were commanded to dispense justice in consultation with the bishops, whose power was growing more or less in step. Loot from Constantinople and the many other places pillaged during the various Crusades (which were financed by merchants who expected a good return) also fuelled the new economy. Contacts with Arab and Muslim cultures brought new ideas - for example the quasi-Sufic/neoPlatonic idea of Chivalry, which was the direct opposite of the behaviour of the Crusader thugs and war-lords. The highly-sophisticated and tolerant culture of Moorish Spain, victim of the socalled shameless and terrible Reconquistà during the 12th century, provided new tools for scholarship and learning. The first universities were set up...and so on... The first capitalist enterprise involving shareholders occurred also in the 12th century near Toulouse, when a group of merchants teamed up to build water-mills on the river Garonne, and distributed the resulting profits as interest on investment. This capital at Piacenza in Italy shows a squatting female a little like the later, insular sub-class known as sheela-na-gigs - but the bulbous eyes of her and the devouring monsters are distinctly oriental. Avaritia and Luxuria quickly lost their status as the two most terrible sins. The brief experimental window of Christian community in the West, which was carried from Egypt via Spain (where it died out under the Vizigoths) to Ireland and thence eventually (with the travelling saints such as Columbanus, Gall, Fiacra etc.) to the Frankish kingdoms, ceased in the 12th century, when the Roman Church became married to wealth. The last pillar of Jesus' fragile teaching, which had been shakily re-erected for 600 years, was toppled. Eight hundred years later, wealth, luxury, vainglory and carnality are the cornerstones of our culture. Now, la luxure means 'lechery' (from lècher, to lick) in French - while 'luxury' is le luxe. The modern French word for Luxuria is la crapule. (For more on the Egyptian Connection, click here.) So the serious monks' minatory corbels became decorative heads and beasts, jokey/lampooning roof-bosses and gargoyles to amuse the merchants and bishops who were the economic and moral backbone of increasingly town-based religion. Unlike the didactic and minatory Romanesque sculptures, roof-bosses and misericords are caprices and satires carved for a kind of freedom-zone within a church. The post-Romanesque sub-class of exhibitionists known (for peculiar historical reasons) as sheela-na-gigs ) are, however, desperately serious, as their hideous appearance and crude execution demonstrate. They are much more likely to have been placed on the walls of churches to acquire status rather than to 'paganise' or colonise Christianity with 'old magic'. In Ireland they moved onto castles, and, as their significance was lost they ended up on gateways all over Europe (e.g. Antwerp, Milan, Barcelona), then on town houses (e.g. Drogheda), and, at their last gasp, on the baroque handles of flintlock pistols. However, a few exhibitionist images of Satan can be found on or in Spanish Plateresque churches. (By the fifteenth century Satan was generally thought of as a king - the king of Hell - following 300 years of the rise, and rise, of monarchies.) Exhibitionist and hermaphrodite Satan on the 18th century doorway of the church of San Pedro, Soría (Spain). click for a Satanic Luxuria figure. click here for more hermaphrodites Sculptors began to be employed in carving elaborate tombs for princes and princes of the church. Eventually, images of carnality and venality degenerated into lampoons such as are found on misericords and pew-ends - and into the bizarre and usually very crude female exhibitionists which to this day defy explanation: the so-called Sheela-na-gigs, originally named from the grotesque figures found in Ireland. These figures have neither the wit nor skill of the Romanesque corbels and capitals, and impress mainly by a kind of bleak paranoia emanating from them. Over a hundred have been claimed for Ireland, of which 12 have disappeared and a further dozen do not display genitals. There is less than half that total in Britain - where more Romanesque exhibitionists are discovered as time goes by. Whereas even the most rustic Romanesque images of carnality had a certain folksy charm, Ithyphallic male as load-bearing corbel (cul-de-lampe) inside the porch at Virville (Seine-Maritime) the post-Romanesque images more resemble in their shrill insistence the mural paintings that appeared and disappeared in Belfast in recent years. photos by Gabriel Cannon click for a high-resolution photo compare the figure on the right with a picture of Satan in a Spanish manuscript Two vulva-pulling exhibitionist females from county Cavan, as displayed in the County Museum, Ballyjamesduff. Yet the Romanesque figures were not all tucked away in their minatory context oncorbel-tables and nave-capitals. As we have seen, some were on the capitals of doorways where all who entered could see them. One particularly large and striking example is the concupiscent, lascivious woman - naked except for her shoes - falling into Hell, unavoidable on one of the four pendentives of the dome of the richly-sculptured church of Civray (Vienne) - overlooking the altar. click to enlarge On the other pendentives are: a squatting, naked but not exhibitionist bearded male figure with arms raised; a naked non-exhibitionist male bending forward with his hands on his knees; and a bull's head. Another female exhibitionist in the company of other sinners and of snakes can be seen on a remarkable rustic Romanesque font at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire. At this point it is important to point out that concupiscentia (what we would now call 'sex') was not only the act of penetration act: all 'lewd' and lecherous behaviour, from frottage and interfemoral/-crural to oral and anal sex were also condemned. For an insight into the Christian ascetic approach to sex, click here. All the elements that were to be found in the thousands of Romanesque corbels can be found in the dozens of the post-Romanesque sheela-na-gig figures that survive - but disturbingly exaggerated: some dire message is being screamed out with neither wit nor art to help - but surely not a warning against the sins of the flesh ? And whereas there are more male than female Romanesque figures, males are extremely rare after the 12th century. Couples were not uncommon in the 11th and 12th centuries, but rare thereafter - the only example known to me being at Aldsworth in Gloucestershire. Acrobatic figures are also extremely rare, most Sheela-nagigs being portrayed more or less the stance of the figures above - legs splayed and usually bent, feet out-turned and hands pulling enormous vulvas, often with labia and sometimes with clitoris shown. Several (such as Ballynahinch Castle, county Tipperary - one of a few showing its anus) look as if they are dancing. A few (mostly in Ireland) have one hand to their heads in a kind of salute, while the other passes above or beneath a thigh to pull or indicate the vulva, while the out-turned feet are at different heights, strangely reminiscent of oriental dance - in particular the images of the god Shiva dancing. Compare the sheela-na-gig on Kiltinane Church, county Tipperary (left), with a bronze statuette of Shiva on a Lotus, from Aligarh. Note the hand on the thigh. click for an image of the dancing Shiva. And compare the Sheela above with a 17th century wooden statue of Kali menstruating. Note the hand to the head. click the photo to enlarge An Indian input into the phenomenon is, however, hardly likely. Although it has recently been shown by Mercia MacDermott in her book Explore Green Men that the motif of the "Green Man" came to Europe through trade with India, where they originated as kirttimukhas and makaras motifs of mythical creatures some 2000 years old - and although it is well-established that Assyrian and Babylonian motifs came into Romanesque art via the Christian art of Armenia and Georgia, the female exhibitionist motif moved from the ancient West to the relatively modern East. H.D. Sankalia has shown that pre-Christian Baubo-figurines from Greece and Asia Minor became the headless, splay-legged, arm-raised Shameless Woman talismanic figures of Maharashhtra and Uttar Pradesh in the first centuries of the Christian Era. Sheela-na-gigs themselves bear strong resemblance to the ancient Greek Baubos, as well as to the 8th century BC Kushite figurines of the dwarf-goddess Beset (who had an ithyphallic male consort, Bes) found in modern Sudan. Figurines of Baubo (and other 'un-Christian' themes such as lovers) seem to have been plentiful in France, for one is on display at the museum in Agen (Gers). Such figures were on-the-spot inspiration for Romanesque church-carvings of unChristian types and behaviour. photo by Julianna Lees Foliate masks and "Green Men" are found all over Europe in both Romanesque and postRomanesque contexts. There is even a Romanesque female almost-exhibitionist foliage-spewer on a nave-capital of the church at Melbourne in Derbyshire. Sheela-na-gigs, on the other hand, are found only in Britain and Ireland: so far, I have found just two sheela-figures (one doubtful) in France. Moreover, the famous South Asian female exhibitionist figures (such as in the Bhimsen Temple of Kathmandu, illustrated in Andersen's Witch on the Wall, 1977, page 132) date from the 17th century and are, with their feet-to-ears vulva-pulling posture, Hindu versions of Romanesque sculptures. Other figures illustrated by Sankalia are even more modern, more like sheela-na-gigs, and are even to this day being carved in Indonesia at least. Long before that, however, squatting naked female figures featured in the Indus Valley civilisation of the second and third millennium BC, as shown by this small cylinder-seal featuring a ritual scene involving two sheep and another horned animal. The curious awkward stance of sheela-na-gigs whose hands pass underneath a thigh to indicate or pull the vulva has Romanesque antecedents, a good example of which is at Rochester Cathedral (Kent), where the (hacked) exhibitionist not only performs this contortion while sticking out her tongue, but also brandishes two fish. This combined motif occurs in a few other churches - while an early 11th century carving in the church of San Ididoro in León shows a female suckling snakes while holding up sea-monsters which resemble Indian makaras. click to see this figure in context Interestingly, there seem to be no intermediate carvings - though a late-Romanesque tongueprotruding exhibitionist at Tugford in Shropshire also has something of the sheela-na-gig about it - perhaps it is the legs which just fade away into nothing. Tugford (Shropshire) photographed by John Harding. And the 16th century figure on Ballinderry Castle (Galway) - otherwise crudely carved - has elaborate and asymmetric braids which recall the tresses and hair-styles of the Romanesque figures. A recently-discovered figure from Rahara Church has symmetrical ones, likewise beautifully carved, and - uniquely - good enough to be Romanesque. Rahara (Roscommon) photographed by Gabriel Cannon. female figures - part II Sheela-na-gigs (even the Rahara figure above) are quite different from the highlysophisticated and fine carvings that appear on misericords, which very often are satires on people and morals: defecating monks, talking donkeys, as well as depictions of fruit and vegetables (even the humble turnip), foliate masks, labours of the months and so on - but almost never genital exhibitionists. Crucially, they were not for public view but commissioned (or gratuitously carved) by men out of whimsy or out of a desire to make a comment upon society, morals or the deacon who was to use the misericord. In the very late Romanesque churches of Poitiers, exhibitionist and other minatory carvings have moved to internal corbel-tables. Then they disappeared altogether or translated to roof-bosses, misericords and bench-ends, losing their instructive qualities to become jeux d'esprits, satires and whimsies. Anal exhibitionist misericord (male), Rodez Cathedral (Aveyron): this carving is as near as misericords get to Romanesque exhibitionists. Compare with a truly Romanesque-inspired misericord at Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat (Haute-Vienne) Female head-to-ears anal exhibitionist acrobat on the Romanesque church at Montmoreau (Charente) Sheela-na-gigs, however - apparently carved by people who were not stonecarvers and perhaps not male, but chosen for other (magical ?) reasons - inhabit another world altogether: a world of whose ethos we can now only be dimly and patchily aware. For example, some Irish figures are, interestingly, placed sideways, on quoins (e.g. Kiltinane Church, above) and some Irish figures are on castles (e.g. Tullavin Castle) - again, sometimes on quoins. The sideways placing goes back to the 12th century, when a (non-exhibitionist, seated, cloaked) figure from the 10th century was re-used in the church on White Island, county Fermanagh, and another (a female exhibitionist) was placed as if it were an abacus without a capital in the doorway of Liathmore church, county Tipperary. This symbolic position in Romanesque art indicated vanquishment and humiliation, and it is quite possible that this symbolism was consciously retained through the Middle Ages. Cloghan[e] Castle (Roscommon) photographed by Gabriel Cannon. This figure is at a height of some 8 metres. Note the oval object (or menstrual flux) between her legs, and the protruding tongue. Click for a larger photo. Several Irish figures are above or beside doorways (e.g. Ballinderry Castle), while others are from 5 metres (e.g. Ballynacarriga Castle) to around 20 metres above ground level, as at Garry Castle (below). click for more Other Irish figures were carved on free-standing stones (as at Tara), placed on old town walls, and, finally, incorporated into town-houses. Drogheda (Louth) before removal to the town museum. click to enlarge In Britain the figures are almost all on churches. On only one of those churches - at Rodel on the Hebridean island of Harris - is an exhibitionist figure placed sideways - but not in the same manner as the Irish carvings, and not on a quoin - and not female. In both Britain and Ireland many of them have obviously been crudely inserted into preexisting buildings, often being trimmed or cut away to do so. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is at Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire, where a stone panel has been refashioned to form a window-top. Whittlesford (Cambridgeshire). click for a high-resolution enlargement. Sheela-na-gigs were first noticed by the literate in Ireland (1840), and hence have been thought of as Irish in inspiration and 'Celtic' in origin. The term itself is shrouded in controversy, and a bogus Irish etymology - Síle na gCíogh (pronounced 'sheela-na-ghee' and meaning 'Sheela of the Paps') - was adduced. But the paps, though obvious in some examples, are not present in many, and the most obvious feature is the vulva. Gig or Geig is actually dialectal Northern English for vulva - and, elsewhere, for boat - so it is ironic though typical - that an Irish origin for the carvings as well as the name obsesses most people interested in this bizarre subject. Giglet was a word describing a giddy or wanton girl. When the first example (dancing a jig) was described in 1840 (on Kiltinane Church, county Tipperary) the term was already widely known and used. But it was not applied to all figures which had such names as Síle ní Dhuibhir (Sheela O'Dwyer), Sheela ní Gara, Sheila-na-giddy, and (on Moycarkey Castle) Cathleen Owen. Recently, an alternative origin has been suggested: Shee (Sídhe or its modern form Sí in Irish), lena (meaning 'with her') Gig (vulva or female genitalia). Unfortunately, not only is the construction awkward in Irish, but the primary meaning of Sídhe is Mound or Tumulus, where Otherfolk dwelt. Non-Irish-speakers have mistakenly assumed that the word meant fairy, goblin, sprite or earth-spirit. Barbara Freitag claims that Sheela-na-gigg was also a jig-like dance which began in Scotland in the 17th century, but did not get to Ireland until the 18th. It was a kind of slip jig, and, though by then not a dance (like the Volta of Elizabethan times and Waltz in its first years) considered obscene by the polite, it may well have been an Invitation to Lewdness amongst the peasantry, as it was generally in Shakespeare's time. The first Irish exhibitionist carving to be recorded - the figure on Kiltinane Church - is in a pose reminiscent of Indian (or MiddleEastern) dance. A more tangible connection with India may consist in the mysterious objects and ill-defined masses beneath the vulvas of several sheela-na-gigs (e.g. Dunnaman), which resemble the menstrual flux of the goddess Kali in many South Indian sculptures. Note the spelling: gigg. This indicates that the word was pronounced 'jig' and was thus pronounced in Ireland, and almost certainly with regard to the sheelas. But everyone pronounces the phrase with a hard g or a gh. Now compare the phrase jiggery-pokery, which was a word applied to rapid or desperate sexual liaisons. Jig-a-jig is a term which survives to this day in West Africa, from the sailors in days of yore and today, and to jiggle was Victorian slang for to fuck. In the 18th century there was an Irish ship out of Cork known as the Shelanagig. It later took part in naval action with the British West Indian fleet during the American war of independence. Think also of 'dirty postcards' (see page three)... Shelagh or Sheila was also the folkloric "wife of St Patrick" - but of course it was also used, as still in Australia, as a generic term for 'woman'. Since the quaint term used to describe these carvings does not yield up any information as to their origin or purposes, we must consider the attributes of the figures themselves. The most important - indeed cataclysmic - social event between the dawn of the second millennium and the religious wars which followed the Reformation was the Black Death, the plague which in its various forms killed a quarter of Europe's people. One of the results of the Black Death was that the Christian god began to be mistrusted, for ordinary people considered that the Church's doctrine that its teaching would save believers (or even just those who entered the portals of a church) was obviously false. Thus began the rise in importance of the Devil (a figure deriving as much from Persian as from Greek mythology) who could so easily become the ruler of the world in an antinomian struggle recalling the beliefs of the Manichæan Cathars who were wiped out in the terrible pogrom known as the Albigensian Crusade at the beginning of the 13th century, shortly before the infamous Fourth Lateran Council. With the new belief in the Devil came a belief in 'witchcraft', which could include any folkpractices which seemed to by-pass or cock a snook at the Church. So a decline in metaphysical awareness results, as Eliade remarked (above) in an increase in superstition. This in turn made the Church more hysterical in its fear of 'heresy'. During the Black Death a new motif became popular in European art: the Dance of Death most famously portrayed in our own day in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal. Sheela-na-gigs are mostly grotesque hags, often skullheaded, with ribs showing. Only one is clothed, and only the Whittlesford figure has an accompanying (not obviously punishing) beast. If some seem to be dancing, most of them resemble to a greater or lesser degree the skeletal figures of the Dance of Death so frequent in church murals and frescoes. Bunratty Castle (Clare) Many of the skeletal ones are, however, not dancing. And what about the huge vulvas even of those which are dancing ? They have nothing to do with the Dance of Death. On the one hand they derive directly from Romanesque female exhibitionists. On the other hand, they seem to be saying something about this life before death, perhaps life after death, and female fecundity - perhaps social anxieties surrounding female fecundity or the lack of it, or the high toll of still-births and deaths in labour. Moreover, whereas the torsos are emaciated or skeletal, some of the vulvas are anything but - though others are merely slits, grooves or holes. The very large vulvas might well indicate dilation prior to birth - in which case the figures might be 'birthing-stones' resorted to in order to help in childbirth. Right up to the twentieth century death of child and/or mother during or just after parturition was a common occurrence. But the question arises: when Romanesque exhibitionists occur all over Europe from Sicily to Denmark and Ireland to Bohemia, why do these late, crude figures hardly occur at all outside Britain and Ireland ? And if the large vulvas and labia do indicate pre-parturition dilation, this chimes with the Romanesque function of images of Luxuria as warnings against consequences - in this case unwanted pregnancy rather than Hellish torment. The Cavan figure (above) is one of only very few to have an open mouth and a tongue reminiscent of Romanesque tongue-stickers (which in turn recall Classical Gorgon/Medusa heads - see Ballintubber Abbey, county Mayo - and Indian representations of Kali). More germanely, it recalls the statue from Lusty More Island and the female side of the doublesided male-and-female statue at Boa Island not so far to the North. Caldragh Graveyard, Boa Island (Fermanagh): female side of double figure. The male side of this statue is ithyphallic, and there is a certain indefinable similarity between the Boa Island figure and the "Sky-Father/Earth-Mother" carving at Whittlesford. People have seen a connection between acrobatic feet-to-ears exhibitionist figures and this one - but it is more likely that the crossed limbs are arms. A more apparent similarity is that between the Boa Island figure and French Romanesque (12th century) carvings, like one at Bussières-Badil in Dordogne. The genital area of some accessible figures (but not those on Boa Island) has been rubbed. But other figures have not been touched. Were they carried about like statues of saints and shown to pregnant or barren women, as were figurines, statuettes, magic sticks, stones and pebbles ? Were the rubbed figures always rubbed, or did they acquire a new or secondary quality ? Some rubbed figures are not sexually exhibitionist but, like the Kilsarkan (Kerry) figure below, have been listed among the sheela-na-gigs in their many and lengthening inventories. Kilsarkan Church (Kerry. Several sheelas have small holes representing the anus. This is a feature of many Romanesque corbels, especially those that might be described as anal-exhibitionist acrobats or contortionists. The sheela from Seir Kieran (Offaly) has several holes into which the fingers of one hand can be inserted. A couple of carvings (Lavey Old Church shown above, Copgrove in North Yorkshire, Church Stretton in Shropshire) are holding circular objects which could be 'birth-girdles' instruments of sympathetic magic used world-wide to help ease childbirth by being unloosed and/or removed at the beginning of labour. Other figures (e.g. Ballinderry Castle) have indefinable masses between their legs - which have variously been interpreted as stools, phalluses, foetuses and afterbirths, but which I have already proposed as menstrual flow. Figures high up on walls could not, of course, be rubbed. Some cannot even be seen clearly. These are not all later inserts, so they were intended to be high up. click for a close-up The church at Stanton St Quintin (Wiltshire), whose sheela-na-gig on the tower is indicated in this photo by John Harding. An apotropaic (evil- or danger-averting) function has been suggested for such figures. But the tradition of gorgon-heads, penises and vulvas as seriously apotropaic seems to me to be more literary fancy than a reflection of actual practice, despite the perhaps unique male example at Bolmir, near Cervatos, who is making the "fig" gesture which is both obscene and apotropaic. Whatever lucky charms might be worn - or recited - few people could have imagined that a female exhibitionist would make a cruciform church even more apotropaic, or a castle less likely to be captured. And there is the simple matter of rape: how apotropaic is the vulva when rape is the commonest crime ? Clenagh Castle (Clare). Some lower figures were considered to have power to induce fertility. These include the sheelas at Rosnaree and Ardcath (Meath), Clenagh (above), and Holdgate in Shropshire. Cattle used to be driven past the carving beside the door of the now-wrecked Blackhall Castle in Kildare - just as cattle were driven between pairs of (male and female) standing-stones. The Pennington figure in Cumbria was locally known as Freya - the Norse goddess of fertility though this might have originated as an antiquarian's conceit. Merovingian (7th century) bronze buckle-plate from Picardy: a talisman or fertility-charm - or machismo-enhancer ? The obvious insertion (and trimming) of some in churches has led people to suggest that the local clergy had decided, in a long tradition going back to Roman times, to incorporate them and their 'power' rather than vainly to challenge or fight against whatever purpose(s) they served against the Church's perceived interests. Worshipped wells were christianised throughout Europe, and quite a few standing-stones, too, especially in Brittany. As already mentioned, the sheelas adopt various stances and attitudes. Some have their right hand to their right ear (Tullavin Castle, Clonmacnois 2, Portnahinch Castle and the redpainted figure from Behy Castle). Behy Castle (Sligo) photographed by Gabriel Cannon. Some raise their left arm to touch the left side of the head (Ballynaclogh Castle, Kiltinane Church, and Kirkwall in Orkney). Some raise their left arm to brandish a slim object (Killeagh, Fiddington - and compare the fish brandished in both raised hands at Rochester). Some hold an object in an unraised left hand (Tugford, Seir Kieran) or on their left arm (Lavey) or under their left arm (Lixnaw). Small figure from Lixnaw (Kerry). To try and categorise them in the hope that something thereby will be revealed is pointless. Categorisation was an obsession with Victorians and Edwardians, and has merely lost the study of sheela-na-gigs in a maze of anomaly and puzzlement - recently vitiated further by 'students' of 'Gender Studies'. However they might be grouped (and the distribution of the various types that people have assigned is remarkably even across the British Isles), there are doubtful members and exceptions. And if some might tentatively be designated as magical aids to fertility or labour, others cannot - especially the remarkable Whittlesford sculpture. But serious and significant they all were, and had absolutely nothing to do with pleasing the eye. Are they 'ugly as sin' or 'help from beyond' - beyond the bounds of ordinary experience, beyond the grave ? Or both ? Or more ? Adam and Eve on a capital of the late 12th century church of Sainte-Radegonde in Poitiers (Vienne), France... ...and the well-known exhibitionist corbel on the same church. (Compare with Adam and Eve of similar date from Korcula off the Dalmatian coast.) How do exhibitionist (and Luxuria) figures relate to images of Eve, sometimes portrayed as (modestly) indicating 'the source of her shame' - given that (as I showed in Images of Lust pp. 66-7) Luxuria suckling Snakes derives from classical depictions of Terra (Earth) giving succour to her most-symbolic creature ? In the same publication I showed a female exhibitionist corbel suckling snakes at Archingeay, thus establishing the iconographic link between Terra, la femme aux serpents, and sheela-na-gigs. Click for more on Terra and snakes. click to enlarge Gorgon at Corfu (Greece) There is also an iconographic connection between sheela-na-gigs and snake-haired (or snakegirdled), tongue-protruding Gorgon-figures, via such carvings as the Poitiers (Saint-Hilaire) capital and a magnificent toothy snake-spewer at Ballintubber Abbey in county Mayo. At Chalais (Vienne) a feet-to-ears anal and vulva-pulling exhibitionist acrobat is placed beside a capital of two heads, one of which is spewing snakes - likely to be a depiction of calumny or blasphemy. A head on a decorative frieze at Siones (Burgos) in Spain dramatically spews a fat and semicircling serpent. click to enlarge It is surely no coincidence that the biggest concentration of Romanesque carvings of wealth/luxury/sin motifs occurs in Western France, as above - specifically Aquitaine. This is precisely the area where the Romantic-Chivalric Troubadour fantasies of 'Courtly' Love were fostered and purveyed. It seems to me that the Benedictines and Augustinians were pointing out that the Romances were deceptions by Satan : Sex is Sex, but Love belongs to God. The idea of the damned person suckling (or in the case of males, having his genitals attacked by) snakes throughout eternity produced variations. Other 'unclean' beasts appear on representations of the punishment of Luxuria: specifically, toads and tortoises. In the Musée Fenaille at Rodez (Aveyron) is a statue described as a Gallo-Roman "Dancing Venus" which could date from any time between the 5th century BC and the 5th century of the present era. She wears clothes resembling those of a Roman matron and holds her long tresses in the manner of many sheela-na-gigs and Romanesque exhibitionists. To her left is a serpentine monster. On one of the narrow sides of the stele or slab is an almost-effaced standing male figure. Such a carving is a very likely source of inspiration for Romanesque sculptors. click for more Given that a great deal of Romanesque sculpture is not grotesque or anatomically distorted, realistic Classical models were, of course, also available. In this late-Classical Coptic ivory in Ravenna representing Apollo playing his lyre to Daphne as she is turned into a tree, the mediæval mind (not so very different to, though less corrupt than, that of Southern Baptists and other puritan Protestant sects) would have seen blatant nakedness (associated with the playing of an instrument and elaborate hair-styles), a pecking bird, and the ubiquitous Romanesque motif of the human ensnared by vegetation. For a book-length discussion on the survival of Roman antiquities see "THE SURVIVAL OF ROMAN ANTIQUITIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES", by Michael Greenhalgh, who deplores these pages as "mere smut" celebrating "egregious and assiduous exhibitionism". On the other hand, post-Classical, "pagan" motifs were incorporated into Romanesque art, especially North of the Alps. The Irish "Scripture Crosses" borrow motifs from Norse mythology (as do the Pictish stones and English crosses), and this can also be seen in such Romanesque works as the tympanum of Parwich and the remarkable capital at Payerne in Switzerland which features both the infant Jesus and a Norse hero vanquishing a dragon. Any General Theory of Sheela-na-gigs must include most of them - and it must explain why they are hardly to be found outside the British Isles. No theory so far produced can plausibly account for even a third of them. (Nor, for that matter, why a few isolated and solitary, torso-less, mouth-pulling heads are to be found in Ireland, one at least on a castle.) click for more Castletown Castle (Louth So it must be concluded that the figures fulfilled different functions. In Images of Lust I showed that some figures were remarkably like Romanesque carvings to be seen on or close to the Pilgrim Roads from Ireland and Britain to Santiago de Compostela, along which thousands of pilgrims from the British Isles travelled. Were these few figures like postcards in stone, put up on castles to impress (or cow) the neighbours who might also be enemies ? I have not mentioned the Celtic Deity theory fashionable among the fashionable Celtophiles of the last 40 years of the 20th century. Needless to say, only a few - and not even definitely exhibitionist - figures (on pillars like those at Tara and from Swords) could possibly date from pre-Christian times. This one has been interpreted as Lugh of the Long Arm. click for a recent picture by Simon Dowling Figure on standing-stone at Tara (Meath). Theories which insist on an Old Religion surviving into mediæval times complete with stone idols are not only unprovable, but, frankly, ludicrous - since Celtic religion was very phallocentric, and the landscapes of the British Isles which feature rounded hills in the form of reclining women or their breasts are littered with phallic rather than cunnic or egg-shaped stones. (The Turoe Stone in Galway has ornamental sperm undulating over it.) Even holed stones are rare. And why would goddess images suddenly appear out of nowhere, when the Catholic church had realised as early as the 12th century that it was lacking in this respect, and had instituted a rapid and successful campaign to make the Virgin Mary into an allpowerful quasi-goddess, a direct intercessor with God ? Since human figures in attitudes of sexual display occur world-wide in cultures ranging from Neolithic Malta, the Neolithic Northern Balkans and the Baltic, Classical Greece (the 'Baubo' figures) to mediæval and modern India, SE Asia and modern Africa, these forerunners and parallels are something of a red herring, and do nothing to explain why they are so widespread in late-mediæval Britain and Ireland. However, recent finds of small gold figurines at Smørenge on the Baltic island of Bornholm bring the motif a little nearer. The fragile object below is of pressed gold foil, and weighs only 0.1 g. But the hands are significantly resting on the knees in a more or less regal position, so it is highly likely to be a votive offering or an amulet. As for another - but solid - gold object found close by, it seems to be an item of jewellery, possibly a hair-clip, bearing little relationship to the sheela-na-gigs of the British Isles. Other finds at Smørenge include trousered male figurines in pressed foil. All are thought to be from around 500 AD. So far, I have simply summarised the problems associated with any attempt to 'interpret' sheela-na-gigs - which are, perhaps, to be compared with what used to be termed 'junk' DNA: an inexplicable part of our inheritance. female figures - part III: THE CONUNDRUM ENDURES Abbeylara (Longford): is this a sheela-na-gig ? The conundrum of sheela-na-gigs in Ireland curiously echoes the enigma of Irish Sweathouses - which may hark back to the same period. Sweathouse, Killadiskert (Leitrim) Sweathouses are curiously concentrated in the area where counties Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh meet, while the sheela-na-gig heartland is the counties of Tipperary and Offaly. Scarcely any more is known about the use of Irish Sweathouses than the meaning(s) or function(s) of sheela-na-gigs. In both instances/phenomena, the peripheral areas of Ireland have hardly any examples. The re-use of exhibitionist figures, sometimes cut or altered to fit another building or another part of a chuch (e.g. Whittlesford and many other insular carvings), echoes the re-use of Mass Dials on churches. These were stone sun-dials (dating from 1100 to the late mediæval period) placed on the south sides of churches to indicate when Mass should be said. Some have been placed - like exhibitionists - the wrong way round or upside-down, and others in porches or other places where the sun cannot reach. The parallel with sheela-na-gigs is significant, and suggests that exhibitionist figures might have been re-used without any particular purpose at all. In Britain, there is a concentration of sheela-na-gigs around the Welsh Marches - but not particularly in Wales. The distribution - of, it must be remembered, surviving examples - does not chime with any of the popular theories of their origins and functions. If some descendant or form of the 'Celtic Hag Goddess', why are there so few in the most 'Celtic' areas of the British Isles ? If they are apotropaic figures to ward off danger and enemies, why are they not on castles of the Welsh Marches, and why are they on so few castles of the western and northern fringes of the Irish Pale, and on no really important strongholds ? The distribution of the Western and Northern Scottish figures suggests an Irish influence - but it could have been the other way round, remembering that the 'Book of Kells' was created on Iona, where there are two female figures and a male, dating from the thirteenth century. Two of the Iona figures are clearly warnings of punishment in Hell for carnal pleasure in this life. click for another view Oaksey (Wiltshire) If they were aids to fertility or parturition, why are some so high up as to be almost invisible, and why would they, in any case, be static figures of stone on castles rather than more portable figures ? Female exhibitionists are often cadaverous and look barren rather than fertile. A very good example of a fertility amulet was found in the Rhondda valley in Wales. The belly is obviously pregnant, and the bored hole shows that it was worn round the neck. It is probably not more than 200-250 years old. click to see Rhondda amulet As I have said earlier, any theory must cover more than 50% of the known figures. The apotropaic theory might be considered to do this - but it is too vague and woolly an idea to be a real explanation. Who exactly would need to be warned off a church or a castle by such means ? People deemed to be evil or a serious threat are usually definable: Protestants, foreigners, English-speakers, Irish-speakers, Welsh-speakers, epileptics, syphilitics, lepers and other 'unclean' beings... In which case, why not phallic carvings associated with virility and uprightness ? click for a larger photo Kilpeck (Herefordshire) So the apotropaic theory falls through lack of specificity. Another suggestion is that they are tokens or badges or signs of solidarity - but again one is at a loss to be more specific. Certainly there must be some meta-Christian connection with the Pilgrimage to Santiago, because the routes from England and Ireland (apart from a direct and dangerous sea-crossing to the Asturian coast on the Bay of Biscay) took pilgrims through lands in which Romanesque exhibitionists were a noticeable feature on churches both great and small. The snag with this theory is that while most Romanesque exhibitionists were male, most later ones were female. And it does not explain the insular distribution. One might, however, combine these two theories into the Insurance Theory: they were signs that certain helpers were at hand if the castle or the church were attacked by heresy or plague or a war-lord. In other words, they were like the Fire Insurance plaques which were placed on buildings before municipal Fire Services were set up, to indicate that the owner could pay for the fire to be extinguished. This theory has the merit of diverse application, and it would explain why sheela-na-gigs do not appear on important strongholds (though one is on the important abbey of Holy Cross) - but it does not explain why most of the figures are crudely carved, by non-sculptors. Ardcath (Meath) If the non-sculptors were men, the figures might be talismanic, or represent some kind of Mystic Bride (or meta-Christian union with Mother Church) in hag- or corpse-disguise. Could the church figures even represent Mother Church ? In which case - what about the Irish castle-figures ? If the virgin-sculptors were women (intactæ or not - or midwives), some magical apotropaic function would be certain. This would not be inconsistent with the building of castles (beneath which the bones of ritually-slaughtered oxen, horses or dogs might be buried, as still occurs for example in certain French vineyards whose viticultors are followers of Rudolf Steiner) but it is hard to see why women - or indeed any non-mason - would be required to carve such figures for a church, unless they were signs that Wise Women - sanctioned by priests - lived locally. On a visit to Bunratty Castle by sheela-na-gig hunter James Clancy, a guide averred that touching the sheela inside the castle enhanced the chances of a woman conceiving. On hearing this, an American turned to his wife and said 'Don't even LOOK at it, Mavis!' Spanish commentators on the Romanesque exhibitionists have put forward the theory of Necesidad Reproductora: the Reconquest of Spain and the Crusades left Western Europe short of males, so lewd carvings were placed on churches in order to excite the passions of the peasants in order to get them to reproduce. This theory takes no account of the larger number of exhibitionist figures in Western France, where there was no population decline. Exciting the passions of the peasantry would merely increase rape and children born out of wedlock: something not encouraged by Mater Ecclesia. But, more obviously, placing auto-fellating males or exhibiting females or copulating couples on the corbel-tables of churches is hardly going to boost the population. Soft porn has not produced a baby-boom, but the general relief at the end of the Second World War did. Moreover, there is slim evidence that the reconquest of Spain resulted in serious depopulation, nor was there any noted in Aquitaine where many exhibitionists of both sexes are found. But the decline of exhibitionist carving after the end of the twelfth century might be related to the establishment during that century (to the horror of the Eastern church) of Confession/Absolution and the certain existence of Purgatory. Tayac, Gironde An exhibitionist female gropes the 'manhood' of the man behind her, while he seems to grope her labia.. On the other hand, this could be a portrayal of sodomy, which, in times when there were no contraceptives, was very much more a hetero- than a homo-sexual act. photo by Julianna Lees There are probably more male than female exhibitionists on Romanesque churches - which could well be because the male anatomy offered more scope for the sculptors. Carvings cost money - a point that most commentators seem to overlook - and were paid for by the yard. They weren't carved (except in extremely poor areas) by local masons or handymen, but by the equivalent of modern jet-setting I.T. specialists who were highly paid, and who, in Spain, often upped and left the churches unfinished, and/or the scaffolding holes unfilled because of some disgruntlement or sheer pressure of demand. These guys were a kind of artisanal élite, and as such, patrons, priests and Benedictine abbots would have been begging, bribing or threatening them to come and carve. So exhibitionists cannot reasonably be seen as merely rustic, philoprogenitive pornography. The keynote of Romanesque figure carving is Iconic Metamorphosis. Motifs morph into other motifs, partly because the motif-bank was not very well controlled by the church, and partly because it is a natural tendency. (Jurgis Baltrušaitis' books on the subject show this admirably.) Pattern-books may not have been very common, and might even have had only rough sketches open to misinterpretation. Sculptors sometimes did not know the significance or symbolism of what they were carving, sometimes they merged two motifs (e.g. drunkenness and licentiousness), and sometimes they simply misinterpreted what they had seen elsewhere. Whittlesford Church (Cambridgeshire) and Kilkea Castle (Kildare) Each of the British islands has one particularly striking exhibitionist group: Whittlesford (ithyphallic bearded male on all fours approaching vulva-pulling female) and Kilkea (ithyphallic boar penetrating a bearded male with helmet and quilted jacket). If the latter quite astounding - sculpture is indeed, as has been convincingly shown by Dr Peter Harbison, The Temptation of St Anthony, then there is no intrinsic problem in ascribing a meta-Christian religious significance to sheela-na-gigs. In which case something like Mater Ecclesia/Mother Church in some kind of trial or torment (from the Reformation ?) is a possible interpretation, and sheela-na-gigs are - far from being harkings-back to a dubious Great Celtic Hag Goddess (Medbh, Banbha, Morrigán, etc.) - obscure expressions of Catholic piety. Certainly there is considerable circumstantial evidence for sheela-na-gigs being Christian objects - to wit, their presence on churches dating from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. There is no evidence whatever either for the 'paganist' viewpoint which dates (like so much of British and Irish 'tradition') from the death-of-God, post-Romantic, latter half of the 19th century, or for a 'folkloric' interpretation beyond the vaguely apotropaic. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that English churchyards were used for many more events than burials right up to the end of the mediæval period. What the Church of Rome could not discourage, 'England's Saddam Hussain' - King Henry VIII - and his successors, as heads of the Church of England, could stamp out at will. Aghagower (Mayo) - photographed before it was stolen. In all cases the question remains: why are there so few sheela-na-gigs elsewhere in NW Europe (though one has been reported at the German North Sea port of Marienhafe, and one in Holland) ? And again, particularly with respect to the remarkable male figure at Painswick in Gloucestershire, why are there so few post-Romanesque male exhibitionists, when males outnumber females on 12th century churches ? And why are so few churches and even fewer castles adorned with these grotesque figures, if they had a 'folk' function ? Until 2007 I had thought that there were no post-Romanesque exhibitionists in France apart from one at Cleyrac (which might even be Romanesque, though it doesn't look it), and a pair at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val on a 16th century window. However, my colleague Jacques Martin sent me a photograph of a very fine male exhibitionist apparently contemporaneous with the early 14th-century House of the Master of Venery at Cordes-sur-Ciel (Tarn) not far from SaintAntonin. There may well be more: it is simply a matter of continuing the assiduous search which Jørgen Andersen initiated on the European mainland in the 1970s. An idea half-seriously suggested in my Images of Lust (1986) was that they were a kind of Souvenir Dirty Postcard in Stone, sketched on the Pilgrim Roads, and reproduced on churches and castles. This idea is greatly boosted by the female exhibitionist frieze-carving on a corbeltable of the church at Saint-Vivien, south of Soulac-sur-Mer (Gironde) on the tip of the Garonne Estuary, which was an important point of disembarkation from and re-embarkation to the British Isles. The (Romanesque) St-Vivien exhibitionist is 'classic sheela' even down to the baldness and crudely-indicated rib-cage, and if presented to anyone with a knowledge of the phenomenon would be assumed to be post-Romanesque Irish. photo © Julianna Lees, 2006. Click to see the context of the figure at Saint-Vivien (Gironde) It has been assumed with no evidence at all that the post-Romanesque use of exhibitionist female figures originated in Ireland. But there was only one period in history that anything originated in Ireland and moved East: the early megalithic period, when passage-tombs and large stone circles originated around Sligo, then moved gradually Eastwards. For the rest of history, Ireland has been something of an appendix, colon or rectum of Europe where people, trends and things tend to end up rather than originate. Considering the late Romanesque figures at Whittlesford and Kirknewton, I have an unsubstantiable feeling that the transformation of Romanesque figures of sin to the sheela-na-gig occurred in Britain - where Gig or Geig is actually dialectal Northern English for vulva, and the Jig was a 'lewd' dance originating from thereabouts. Moreover, not only does the earliest male exhibitionist in a Christian context occur on a late 8th (or early 9th) century Anglo-Saxon manuscript, but the earliest depiction in a Christian context of a damned female suckling (or trying to remove) an 'unclean' beast throughout eternity is on an Anglo-Saxon cross-shaft in Lincolnshire. Other questions also spring to mind. Romanesque sculpture was brightly painted like Greek and Roman sculpture and probably all sculpture before the effeminate and dead hand of the Italian Renaissance sculptors changed the concept of sculpture forever. (Imagine those superb Greek statues of kings and heroes coloured in like a child's colouring-book! Imagine those Satyrs with purple - or red - or green penises and scrota in a contrasting colour!) Were the later sheela-na-gigs also painted ? The Rosnaree Mill figure has been almost obliterated by whitewash, but all evidence of ancient paint would long since have been lost on other carvings apart from a couple of indoor figures (Bunratty Castle, Rattoo Round Tower) which, however, show no traces of paint. click for a large photo Dunnaman Castle (Limerick) It is possible that the post-Romanesque sheelas had (at least originally) something to do with the beginnings of the European 'witch-craze'. The first trial for witchcraft in Europe - of Dame Alice Kyteler - took place in Kilkenny in 1324, less than a century after the last Romanesque churches were built. The case against her was prosecuted by the Bishop of Ossory - the mediæval Irish diocese and pre-Norman lordship (covering parts of counties Kilkenny, Tipperary and Offaly or Queen's County) currently containing nearly a quarter of Irish sheelana-gigs. The case was a cause célèbre involving at different stages the burghers of Kilkenny, the parliament in Dublin and Edward III in London. Bishop Ledrede managed to browbeat the Irish parliament and seized Alice Kyteler's and her family's land and money. She was tried and found guilty, then managed to escape to London, leaving behind her personal servant to be burned in her stead. Edward III subsequently excommunicated the bishop and persuaded the pope in Avignon to confirm his action. Ledrede continued to fulminate against witchcraft, which he claimed the Irish were practising wholesale. Female witches were, of course, always accused of having sex with the devil: a favourite mediæval Christian fantasy alongwith drinking (baptised) babies' blood. Similar ridiculous and appalling calumnies were hurled at Cathars and other heterodox Christians, Templars and Jews. Redwood Castle (Tipperary) Though this was the sole and brief eruption of the witch-craze in Ireland, the hysteria subsequently swept England and other parts of Europe - and was as symbolic of the mind-set of the High Middle Ages as ethnocide is of the present day. I am almost certain that exhibitionists were signs rather than instruments, did not perform a function but indicated that a job had been done. Could sheela-na-gigs have assured rural people that they had in some (perhaps murderous) way been protected from Witchcraft - a subject which (along with the inter-penetrating subject of 'sex-orgies') "folk-talk" even today (especially in the tabloid newspapers) is eager to explore and exploit ? Such a link would account for their rarity in Scotland (which largely escaped the witch-craze) and in France - where the quickly-canonised Joan of Arc had been burned as a witch by the English. This theory, however unsubstantiable, has the great merit of being applicable to almost all the figures. It also distinguishes the two kinds of function (signal and instrumental) rather than discussing irrelevant and academic characteristics of the figures themselves, such as the position of the feet or the arms, the size of the ears or the vulva, the presence of hair or breasts or belly-button. Moreover, a majority of Irish figures are on the same (south) walls of buildings as the main doorways, suggesting that they were meant to be seen by visitors rather than by malevolent spirits. (For an essay on a remarkable mediæval Italian exhibitionist mural which, surprisingly, seems to be connected both with power-politics and the propaganda of witchcraft, click here.) The almost childish figure with characteristic ribs below the quasi-testicular breasts at Tullaroan (Kilkenny) photographed by Gabriel Cannon In one figure, however, there is a highly significant detail. The low-relief quoin-carving at Balleen Little (Kilkenny) has a rope around its neck and dangling down the left side of its torso - suggestive of a ritual hanging. click for a larger photo In his excellent and charming booklet "Sheela na gig" (a discussion of the Fethard and Kiltinan(e) figures published in Fethard in 1991) James O'Connor recounts one local tale linking sheela-na-gigs to female collaborators with Oliver Cromwell's forces, and another linking the place-name of Kiltinan(e) to a Father Tynan who hid from Cromwellians. Since puritan Oliver ineluctably gets the blame for the excesses of Tudor Thomas in both Britain and Ireland, there may just be a connection between sheelas and Henry VIII. Could the witch-motif have been conveniently adapted to represent Anne Boleyn, for example, the first 'heretic' queen of England ? A few of the later exhibitionists are in poses suggestive of dancing, e.g. a jig, notably the Kiltinane church figure which was first called sheela-na-gig. This harks back to the earlier (Romanesque) denunciations in stone of dance, tumbling and other public entertainments. As mentioned above, there is a certain connection between the English figures and the Hundred Years' War fought in the 13th and 14th centuries over a large area of Aquitaine, where dozens of exhibitionists survive, including the remarkably well-carved and wellpreserved corbel-carving below, which survives from an abbey almost certainly seen by the English, and sacked in the 16th century by Protestants during the Wars of Religion. click to enlarge Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val (Tarn-et-Garonne) Antony Beevor records in his monumental Berlin - The Downfall 1945, the shock of Hitler's secretary at behaviour during her employer's last days in the Chancellery: "An erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist's chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embraces. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts." Yet another small window of speculation is opened by the fact that almost all exhibitionists lack pubic hair. This was on the one hand a sign of the upper-class whore, and on the other a fashion in courtly circles - rather like the perverse shaving of armpits, legs (and faces of men) is in European society generally today. And why did the famous 16th century Swiss doctor Paracelsus prescribe (and illustrate) the engraving of a female exhibitionist upon one of his magical tokens for the cure of gout ? Did Langland's Lady Meede, a complicated female embodying luxury and mundane reward in his widely-circulated Piers the Plowman (written during the 100 years' war) feed into the folklore behind the English figures and those on English castles in Ireland ? Questions and suggestions could multiply like dragons' teeth or modern gadgets. (Another red herring is the Gnostic "Fallen Sophia", the Wisdom-that-is-God who ended up as a whore on the streets of Tyre.) The sad fact is that there is no theory that explains sheela-na-gigs convincingly - and, without startling new evidence from a hitherto unsuspected source, any future books claiming to interpret them will be exercises in futility. And just as candles can also be dildoes, so any one sheela-na-gig could have had a double or even triple significance. When, in 1975, I suggested the title THE WITCH ON THE WALL (London, Allen and Unwin 1977) to Jørgen Andersen for his groundbreaking study of the sheela-na-gig phenomenon (the first scholarly work on the subject now long out of print but available expensively through www.abebooks.com), I had no inkling that the castle figures might indeed plausibly be witches...or, for that matter, could even be meaningless kitsch borrowings like the huge fakestone birds that adorn the gateposts of modern Irish bungalows... There is no doubt, however, that the female exhibitionist image was some kind of inspiration to visitors and pilgrims travelling in Aquitaine, especially the area between Poitiers and the Pyrenees. The fact that some post-Romanesque insular carvings are very close copies of Romanesque carvings in such places as Saint-Vivien (Gironde), suggests that the latter were sketched by pilgrims/travellers (some of them at least being in holy orders) and later carved by British and Irish sculptors of greater and lesser talent, probably for apotropaic purposes on churches and (in Ireland) on castles. In the latter case, they were possibly a symbol of prestige. This view is enhanced by the unearthing in a Birmingham garden in 2006 of a modern (probably mid-twentieth century) copy, just 27 cms high, of the Kilpeck female exhibitionist. This repeats also the burying of "sheela-na-gigs" in the past, especially in Ireland. photo by courtesy of John Harding An even more remarkable example of a modern use of the motif is a pair of gateposts in county Donegal in north-west Ireland. These are covered by cement rendering, into which were incised - when wet - a male and a female exhibitionist figure facing each other, and ogam script. click for more Yet another explanation, less fanciful than it might seem at first, and able to account for both the Romanesque and most post-Romanesque figures, is an anthropological one. Serious and justified worries about the loose morals of the rich account for the scenes of licentiousness and concupiscence amongst other sins on church capitals and tympana. Modern minds, however, find it difficult to understand why the highly-exaggerated corbelcarvings were put up on churches - pieces of sculpture sometimes far more graphic than was doctrinally necessary.The carving of an exhibitionist (male or female) or any daring or dodgy motif on a corbel-table might well have been the culmination of the apprenticeship of a sculptor, literally a licence granted to him by his fellow-sculptors who certainly were an inspiration for the Freemasons in their confraternity. Masons' marks occur on churches all over Europe, and especially in Spain where the Romanesque 'art movement' invaded with the Christian reconquistà. Even today, masons and sculptors form exclusive teams and (like many co-operative tradesmen who feel undervalued) perform scabrous rites. In Romanesque times, to be a sculptor was as prestigious as being an international architect today. It is possible that sculptors were more powerful than priests on the ground, because they could simply take off from a site and find employment elsewhere without difficulty. So the carving at Girona (below) might have a different meaning than that which I advanced earlier in Images of Lust. The bishop may well not be overseeing the sculptors like some kind of art commissar, but merely skulking. The sculptors or masons take prominence in the scene, which might be telling us not that nothing went up on a church without ecclesiastical approval, but that what was sculpted went up on a church despite ecclesiastical qualms. So, in this theory, sculptors who met with the artistic approval of their fellows, had the privilege of carving one or more startling corbel - a kind of satire on the exhibition-piece which is required of skilled craftsmen in wood and stone even today, which then was either slipped past ecclesiastical approval or was placed defiantly or by right and rite. Some (very few) might have had to be placed very high or out of sight to avoid local trouble. But it is pertinent to this theory that many churches in Spain were not properly finished: unfilled scaffolding-holes abound, so teams of masons could up and off with an impunity very similar to the propensity for strike action enjoyed by trades unionists in post-War France and Britain. The drawback of this hypothesis is that some Romanesque and most post-Romanesque female exhibitionists are extremely crude efforts. So perhaps a combination of factors can account globally for the Romanesque and post-Romanesque figures: the "dirty postcard" and the initiation-, prentice- or master-piece of a sculptor fully received into his team, guild or confraternity. Cloister capital, Girona (Spain) click to enlarge However, some extremely well-carved gargoyles and other figures high up on church towers, out of sight except to the keenest eyes (which were not so common in mediæval times) are male exhibitionists, as at Ewerby (Lincolnshire) and even on secular buildings, as at Bruniquel (Tarn-et-Garonne). At Hecklington (Lincolnshire) - also quite high up - is this carving of a panting devil with protruding tongue pulling open a woman's vulva from behind. Hecklington (Lincolnshire) click to see the whole carving Visible only through binoculars (which of course did not exist in the 15th century), this remarkable carving is neither apotropaic (the woman is being sexually assaulted by a devil, not performing 'a lewd act' of her own volition) nor didactic (since it is hard to make out in detail, hence unlikely to be any kind of warning to the average parisioner or passer-by). HIDEOUS PROTECTRESS OR QUEEN OF HELL ? The mystery of the sheelas is more sociological than magical. Though some post-Romanesque ones (especially those on towers and by doorways) are likely to be apotropaic survivals from ancient times, the phenomenon was something of a fashion or craze not dissimilar to the Tulip Fever which much later hit the Netherlands - or as Double Glazing has done recently in the British Isles. Whether or not there were numerous wooden examples, some recall the AngloSaxon weoh. Even those which resemble "dirty postcards" from the Pilgrimage Santiago de Compostela - a journey made by hundreds of thousands from the British Isles alone - they were almost certainly put up at different places for different reasons, and those reasons were very likely local or particular, as with this powerful (and relatively recent ?) carving in the catacombs of Paris. photo by courtesy of Tom Smith-Vaniz In a recent book, Pierre-Louis Giannerini has tried to show that many 'erotic' Romanesque carvings were commissioned to encourage sex and procreation in depopulated areas such as Northern Spain, devastated by the Christian holocaust-cum-landgrab known as the Reconquistà. The carvings of disembodied phalluses and enthusiastically-coupling couples might lend credence to this theory (first advanced by Ángel del Olmo García in 1999) if it were not that the highest concentration of exhibitionist carvings is in Aquitaine, and that they so often occur with images of drunkenness, usury, other forms of sinfulness, and buffoonery. Giannerini cites Cervatos frequently in his book, without once mentioning that it is a collegiate church for the instruction of novice monks, few of whom were likely to go out and re-populate Northern Spain with Good Christian sperm! But it is certainly possible that some of these carvings - like some sheela-na-gigs - were resorted to at a later date as magical aids to fertility, and that the motif might have been adapted in parts of Northern Spain in a striking example of Jungian enantiodromia to encourage reconquistadores to inseminate as many hapless women as possible. There are obviously many historical, religious, art-historical, anthropological and pornographic strands in the skein of the exhibitionist motif, any, many or all of which could have fed into mediæval iconography. As to the vogue that they peculiarly enjoyed in the lowlands of the British Isles during the later Middle Ages, we may never know the several reasons, and must remain content with a kaleidoscopically-informed ignorance in this as in many aspects of social history. But it is very probable that female exhibitionists, like Priapic images, were intended to be attractive/protective or repulsive, according to the attitude of the viewer. North Porch, Hereford Cathedral The (generally) crude, ugly female exhibitionists were carved in the period between the end of the twelfth century and the start of the Reformation. During this period the cult of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven was promoted by the Catholic Church. Might the post-Romanesque sheela-na-gigs not be enantiodromic Queens of Hell ? Roof-beam carving, North Burlingham, Norfolk photo by Bob Mitchell 2019. List and distribution-map of Irish exhibitionists Map of most figures in England, Scotland and Wales SUMMARY OF THE TEXT See also: and Another Irish Sheela-na-gig Website > ESSENTIAL READING Reaktion Books, 1992. FURTHER READING Sheela-na-gigs - Unravelling an Enigma (a book with a vehemently-argued but very thin thesis, illustrated with 2 line-drawings and 16 fairly poor photographs) by Barbara Freitag click for cover illustration - of the sheela at Llandrindod Wells Routledge (London), September 2004 ISBN: 0 41534552 9 Price: UK£22.50 ••• Lifting the Veil: A New Study of the Sheela-Na-Gigs of Britain and Ireland by Theresa C. Oakley British Archaeological Reports - British Series, 2010 ISBN: 1407305891 Price: UK£48.00 see below ••• The Sheela-na-gigs of Ireland and Britain The Divine Hag of the Christian Celts - an Illustrated Guide by Joanne McMahon and Jack Roberts Mercier Press, Cork & Dublin, 2001 ISBN: 1 85635 294 3 - a book with pencil illustrations and no photographs between its covers. ______________ • SEE ALSO H.D. Sankalia: "The Nude Goddess or 'Shameless Woman' in Western Asia, India and South-eastern Asia" in Artibus Asiæ XIX, pp. 111-123 Lynn Meskell: "Goddesses, Gimbutas and 'New Age' archaeology" in Antiquity 69 (1995), pp. 74-86 (a fine critique of pseudo-feminist para-archæology) A very modern interpretation of the Female Exhibitionist Motif > An antique (probably Roman) brothel-token. I am especially grateful to Tina Negus, Julianna Lees, Jacques Martin, Kjartan Hauglid, Bob Trubshaw and John Harding for their generous help and donation of photos to this website. Figure from New Guinea, on display at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology,York, photographed by Tina Negus. female figures - postscript : THE VEIL UNLIFTED In 2009, British Archaeological Reports published the latest book on British exhibitionist sculptures (sheela-na-gigs, or shee-lena-gigs) under the title of: LIFTING THE VEIL: A new study of the Sheela-Na-Gigs of Britain and Ireland, by Theresa C. Oakley (B.A.R. British Series 495, £48) ISBN: 1407305891 - a volume without an index, and with the usual terrible photo-quality of British academic books (my own included). After ploughing through the tergid text of this doctoral thesis, I am amazed that it was accepted for publication. A large part of it is a graceless trashing of all previous studies. Another chunk consists of mind-numbingly academic spreadsheets, lists and pie-charts of yet another repertoire of categories and features of the insular sheelas. Dr Oakley repeatedly condemns 'Victorian attitudes' in previous works, as well as "anti-feminism" even accusing me of "androcentrism". But no proliferation of lists, references and obsessivelyfractal categorisation (the Victorian disease of reductionism), will elucidate the enigma, nor substitute for fieldwork. Amazingly, the author not only ignores the male and bestial exhibitionists of the British Isles, but also the hundreds of both male and female exhibitionists in France and Spain. In other words, she narrows down her 'study' to a self-defined category of figures, with no reference to or comparison with earlier carvings, some of which are (as shown on these web-pages) models for later examples. The bloodlessness of her text suggests that she has never set foot in a rural French church and marvelled at the capitals; nor stood outside and seen a coherent corbel-table illustrating various sins of appetite; nor yet given thought to the iconography of Romanesque doorways which show the hellish punishment which awaits sinners. Just as Barbara Freitag had one valuable contribution to add to the discussion of sheela-na-gigs (the origins of the word itself - see part 2), Dr Oakley has one solid idea which she doggedly pursues. This is the obvious iconographic connection between sheelas and apotropaic Gorgoncarvings - a connection which Dr Oakley insists is also functional. But she does not even try to explain why these should pop up in the British Isles and not elsewhere in Europe. Thus she fails even to approach the core of the enigma, the veil which occludes our understanding. She actually ensures her failure by her erection of an entirely unjustified distinction between sheelas (as she defines them) and other female exhibitionists, even though some Continental Romanesque church figures are almost identical and at least as 'crude', 'rude' and 'shocking' to Victorian and modern eyes. She quite rightly draws the reader's attention to the modern confusion between the obscene (which was originally the blasphemous or seriously immoral) and the sexual, but fails to realise that this confusion dates from the early centuries of the Christian church (and, indeed, Islam). These figures were obviously designed to shock, both by their gorgon attributes (which the author dwells on) and by their sexual apparatus and/or attitude. The myth of Perseus tells us that the sight of a Gorgon transfixed the beholders (turned them to stone), thus rendering them impotent. There is, therefore, no doubt that Gorgon figures were regarded as ugly, grotesque, monstrous, arresting nor that they fed into Romanesque iconography their monstrous appearance, their display of teeth, and their connection with snakes, which Medusa had writhing on her head instead of hair. click to enlarge Gorgon with protruding tongue, Corfu Archæological Museum (Greece) On the other hand, sheelas also have something in common with the (usually portable) Baubo figurines, who may or may not have been regarded as grotesque, but certainly were not apotropaic. Grotesque is an entirely subjective attribute, of course: I regard tabloid 'beauties' as grotesque, and pigs as beautiful. Other people have other opinions. At any rate, we don't know if sheelas or Baubos were regarded as ugly, monstrous or cute when they were created - after all, garden gnomes are considered cute by many! Note the large navel on this Baubo figurine offered on eBay. It is a feature of many sheela-na-gigs. Click the picture to see a rear view. While Dr Oakley follows the connection between sheelas and monsters, she does not even attempt to factor in the context of the Romanesque exhibitionists on corbel-tables - some of them extensive - where they are indisputably illustrating sins of the flesh. And in suggesting an entirely Insular upsurge in apotropaic figures, she ignores the phallic figures which we know symbolised power, property, liminality and warnings against trespass in 'Celtic' contexts. She even ignores the first male exhibitionist in a Christian context, the monk, shown in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript from the late 8th century, who clearly illustrates the temptations of the flesh. Vatican MS Barberini, Lat.570, detail In making an absolute distinction not only between sheelas and continental female exhibitionists on churches, but also between Romanesque insular exhibitionists and contemporaneous, continental Romanesque carvings, she puts herself beyond the Pale of intelligent research. While it is true that most Continental Romanesque female exhibitionists are feet-to-ears acrobats, whereas few post-Romanesque Insular figures are acrobatic, this merely suggests, however, that the opprobrium accorded to acrobats and entertainers in the 12th century had lessened by the 15th, so a double motif became a single one. It may also suggest a shift of function, but that is not disputed, given the length of time between the last Romanesque exhibitionists and the last postRomanesque ones: up to 400 years. photo © 2006 by Julianna Lees. Saint-Vivien (Gironde), a crude Romanesque example, with the emaciation and necklessness characteristic of sheela-na-gigs. There can absolutely no doubt to anyone who has studied the corbel-tables of Aulnay, Cervatos or Mauriac, that the Romanesque exhibitionists, male, female and animal, are, primarily, minatory carvings meant to illustrate the sins most deplored by 11th and 12th century Christians - despite the perhaps unique male example at Bolmir, near Cervatos, who is making the "fig" gesture which is both obscene and apotropaic. The problem of the sheelas is that they have little or no context, and were sometimes displaced and re-used. The question of why they are where they are is the fundamental question with which I and other investigators have concerned ourselves with. Dr Oakley's book is mostly an achingly abstruse and academic divagation on the anthropology of apotropaia and the connection between the apotropaic and the sacred. But she produces no evidence to justify a sacral function for the really quite small number of sheelas on Irish tower-houses. No sane person would call them 'sacred' in the modern meaning of the word. They might be 'sacred' in the loose sense that Masonic ritual, or the turning of cure-stones might be called sacred. Indeed it is well-known that some are or were rubbed or touched during certain rituals. But a ritual is not the same as a rite. The sacred can certainly be both fascinating and repellent - like menstrual blood to some. But what is fascinating and repellent - obscene in the original sense - is not necessarily sacred. Were public executions - hanging, drawing and quartering, disembowelling - sacred acts ? Only in the widest possible sense. However, Dr Oakley does quite rightly emphasise the obvious possibility that sheelas on castles were status-symbols like phallic gateposts, or ridiculous concrete sculptures in modern gardens, or so-called swimming-pools, electronic gates, etc. - or, indeed, like good-quality carvings on churches, on which all embellishment was displayed with pride. If they were not, they would have been 'marks of Cain', 'penalty-points', stigmas or curses placed upon the castles or their inhabitants - for which there is no evidence. I have already demonstrated the similarity of some sheelas to Romanesque exhibitionists on or near the Pilgrim Roads - of which Dr Oakley unbelievably makes no mention, despite her admiration for Meyer Schapiro and George Zarnecki. My own exposure to the Romanesque figures convinces me more and more that sheela-na-gigs on castles were semi-apotropaic 'status-statues' copied to a greater or lesser extent from 'obscene' (i.e. arresting) exhibitionists in France and Spain - though not from the particular male exhibitionist at Bolmir in Spain who is 'making the fig'. Those on post-Romanesque churches, it seems to me, combine elements of grotesquery (like misericords, bench-ends and roof-bosses), warning of the eternal punishment awaiting sexual transgressors, and apotropaia. Dr Oakley derides 'diffusionism' (the formulation of the chief characteristic of cultural interaction). Had she stopped to think of how the Roman Empire facilitated the westward movement of artefacts and motifs from Iran, the Middle East and Egypt (and the eastward movement of motifs to India), she would have not set herself up for ridicule. In our own time the Anglo-American empires have spread ideas and artefacts right across the world in all directions. Inconsistently, she then suggests that the exaggerated-exhibitionist motif might have actually originated in Ireland and travelled from West to East, without making any attempt to substantiate the idea, or citing the one example of an Irish stone carving which could support it: the Boa Island back-to-back figures - one of which is male, and the other (assumed to be) female. Very recently, two figures have been identified on a 12th century secular building at Oakham (Leicestershire, formerly Rutland), known as Oakham Castle though it is in fact the earliest surviving hall of any English castle (1180-90) and one of the best surviving Romanesque Great Halls. Some corbels are in situ but other carvings have been inserted into 'blank' walls in a fairly random way. One of these, very badly damaged and worn, is a figure with goat's feet and one hand to its groin. It might be a female - or a masturbating male. photos © 2011 by Tina Negus The other is a lion, definitely, but not exaggeratedly, male, with similarly curious back legs. click on a picture to enlarge These carvings pre-date any on Irish tower-houses, and indeed strongly suggest an iconographic link between continental Romanesque and Insular post-Romanesque figures. Broken Luxuria ? in a niche, Wells Cathedral It so happens that elsewhere in Oakham, above the 14th century church porch, there is an acrobatic anal male exhibitionist, apparently self-fellating. This is more likely to be a salvaged, reused Romanesque corbel rather than a copy. compare with a figure at Greyabbey, Ireland. After over thirty years of looking at stone iconography on Romanesque churches and at sheela-nagigs which are continually being identified, I am convinced that the latter, on castles, are a combination of 'dirty postcard', status-symbol and apotropaia. Dr Oakley evinces no sense of humour in her 'veil-lifting', but it is hard not to smile at some of these figures. This may seem to be a modern reaction, but there can be no doubt that 12th century sculptors (whether apprentice or mature) carved them with gusto and perhaps hilarity. The little tower-house lords may also have combined humour with their pride in these carvings, whether on doorways or (almost hidden from view) high up, below barbican or crenellation. The figure on the left is on a frieze of the 12th century church at Saint-Vivien (Gironde), a point of embarkation from France to Ireland. The figure on the right is high up on a quoin of the 15th century castle at Ballaghmore (Laois) in Ireland (now a pricey hotel). It seems to me that the Ballaghmore figure is a copy of the St-Vivien one. Is it a "dirty postcard from France" to frighten the locals, a declaration that someone has made the pilgrimage to Compostela, or an expression of allegiance to someone or some group ? We should also not overlook the possiblity of the unintended consequences of putting up funny little obscene carvings on churches. What might have appalled prudish monks might well have amused illiterate peasants, pilgrims and passers-by. The Irish castle figures are obviously an iconographic continuation of the church-placed figures but there are rather few of the latter in Ireland, whereas almost all the many figures in England are on churches. The Taghmon figure is on a fortified church. Political allegiance may be relevant. All history is political. It could be (for example) that an AngloNorman first put one on his castle to shock the 'natives', and the custom spread. Castles are political buildings by definition, so the distribution of sheelas may well reflect shifting political realities. It is noteworthy that there are so few castle figures north of the line between Dundalk and Sligo, the last area to be pacified by the British. The Riddle of the Sheelas hinges on how a Romanesque motif of sin, carved by talented sculptors on churches with ecclesiastical permission, ended up as crude depictions of exhibitionist females on Irish castles, whereas the 'tradition' in England continued to be ecclesiastical, though with added late-medieval grotesqueness. They certainly were not celebrations of femininity or the yoni in the aggressively-patriarchal and property-based Gaelic society whose last gasp is being heard only today. A small, undated lead amulet from Avignon, illustrated in Cooke (2002) p.192 which, though tiny and not carved in stone, fits one of the categories of sheela-na-gig. Of course, it might, conceivably, have originated in Ireland... SUMMARY OF THE TEXT LIST of PHOTOGRAPHS of MALE and FEMALE EXHIBITIONISTS on this site, outside this text. List and distribution-map of Irish exhibitionists Map of most figures in England, Scotland and Wales This PDF is dedicated to the late Martha Weir, who was amazed but unfazed by these carvings, and without whom "Images of Lust" would never have been researched or written. <previous page summary of text top of page map of Romanesque Europe next page>