Sheela na Gig Vision Quest
Climb through Sheela's portal for 2025
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A Chairde, Friends,
How are you feeling under this full moon? It’s a bit of a whopper below the sky here in Dublin so I’m sharing a creative ritual this month that is able to hold this potency. This is an audacious one as it’s a guided visualisation with Sheela na Gig, where you will literally climb through the portal of her regenerative vulva.
‘In her, the masons saw the duality of their goddesses who had powers of both creation and destruction as conceptualized by the display of her immense vulva—an image of regeneration and death. The vulva, while a portal for new life, is also an image of return, witnessed by the burial practices of interring the dead in the womb of Mother Earth to, in some way, be born again. That awareness that death is near is mirrored in her haglike appearance of dried-up old age, with withered breasts, emaciated ribs, and skull-like face.’
Starr Goode, Sheela na Gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power
The ‘Sheela na Gig’ or Síle na Gig is a carved stone image of a naked female figure with her hands emphasising her exposed genitals. Her vulva offers a ripeness, a fullness, a portal. And yet her upper body is usually depicted as grotesque. She is native to Ireland and the British Isles. As of 2007, there were 121 Sheelas in Ireland, 47 in England, 6 in Scotland, and 4 in Wales (there’s likely been more discovered since). Most Sheelas are found on church walls, often above doorways, on castles, and then rarely like the Sheela at the Hill of Tara, on a menhir, a lone standing stone.
She has been called by many names—a whore, a witch, a hag, the devil, an evil-eye stone, a healer and the Goddess. And yet she remains elusive, which I sense is how she likes it. Some Sheelas like the Ballyvourney Sheela in Co. Cork were seen by women as guardians of fertility. A woman would rub her handkerchief on Sheela’s vulva then shake the stone dust from her handkerchief into water and drink it. Sheela holds the regenerative essence of the Old Goddess, of nature and her eternal cycles. Working with the symbology of Sheela invites us back into alignment with nature, the mystery, the sacred feminine, and our bodies.
This photo was taken of me a couple of years ago by
. We, along with our beautiful friend, Sarah Richardson, went on a sacred pilgrimage to Ballyvourney (from the Gaelic, Baile Bhuirne meaning ‘Town of the Beloved’) in Co. Cork. Here I am with my Brat Bhríde (Brigid’s Cloak), my little piece of cloth, carefully and gently touching Sheela’s vulva as a blessing of fertility for my creative life.
Sheela na Gig Vision Quest
This month’s practice also links us back to our explorations of the Great Mother archetype in December, well worth a revisit here:
The Great Mother
We see this in Ireland with the first recorded account in 1840 of a Sheela na Gig with her exposed vulva whose male surveyors describe her with an ‘attitude and expression [that] conspire to express the grossest idea of immortality and licentiousness’ and that she ‘owe[s] its origins to the wantonness of some loose mind.’