If Sheela Na Gig Could Speak!
Thinking aloud, March 2026
Hello dear Wayfinders
March is doing a lot of lifting for women! We’ve had International Women’s Day, this year’s Commission on the Status Women is coming to a close (I was a UNWomen UK participant for the third year, but whilst there are inspiring people and projects, the lack of progress, and now rolling back of rights for women and girls feels bleaker each year), it is Women’s History Month and yesterday was Sheela Na Gig day!
Artwork by Naomi Cornock
Sheela Na Gig
There is little actually known about these self-exposing stone hags, found on church walls and in cemeteries, near sacred wells and on castles, but it is easy to feel that she represents a transgressive and transformative energy.
As so often has happened in history and archaeology, these carvings were frequently interpreted through a patriarchal and misogynistic lens and attributed meanings of lust and grotesquerie.
In The Language of the Goddess (1989), Marija Gimbutas traces vulva imagery across pre-Christian Europe as a consistent sign of regeneration. She says:
The main theme of Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life.
She states that these sacred images were never truly uprooted; that they could only have disappeared “with the total extermination of the female population.” Sheela Na Gig is still here with us, hiding in plain sight!
Georgia Rhoades, argues in Decoding the Sheela-na-gig (Feminist Formations 2010), that these unapologetic carvings are empowering representations of female sexuality and agency, and suggests there are connections to pagan crone goddesses.
Starr Goode spent over twenty-five years researching Sheela na Gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power (2016), tracing the figure from Palaeolithic cave art through Celtic and Classical traditions to the church walls of Ireland, England and Wales. She explores Sheela Na Gig as a liminal entity guardian of doorways and thresholds, a folk deity called upon to help women survive childbirth, an embodiment of the Dark Goddess's power over sex, life, death and rebirth.
That these images survived the rise of Christianity, retaining their positions on sacred sites, is itself evidence of something that could not be fully enclosed or erased.
Sheela Na Gig is "an antidote to the war on women, the war on nature, and the war on the imagination." In these times when all three wars are visibly ongoing, this is the energy we need, and I have no doubt she could ward off evil spirits if needed!
This intentional cultural reclamation and rehabilitation is a vital form of sacred activism.
Women’s History Month
On International Women’s Day River and I watched Gentle, Angry Women, a documentary about the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. I’m ashamed to say that despite the fact as a Gen Xer it happened in my lifetime, I knew very little about the movement or the women.
So, if that is the same for you, let me share a little!
In August 1981, 36 people, mostly women, walked 120 miles from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest the decision to store US cruise missiles on British soil. It was the beginning of a protest that would last nearly twenty years.
In December 1982, an estimated 30,000 women encircled the nine-mile perimeter of the base, holding hands. Tens of thousands or women passed through the camp. Some went for a day. Some stayed for years, living in the peace camp.
Gentle, Angry Women follows three young activists as they retrace the walk 40-years on and meet with women who were part of the peace camp. These young women also knew nothing about Greenham Common. The stories of these women had not been passed on, and within a generation, their legacy could have been lost (this documentary is a part of wider work to remember their stories).
And sadly, this is not unusual. What women know, how women gather, how women sustain life collectively: these things are treated as domestic and unremarkable. Women’s stories are not considered of general interest, their crafts are not considered high art, and their knowledge is not considered worthy of archiving.
The epistemology, the question of whose knowledge counts, gets preserved and institutionalised, consistently excludes women.
We can go back further in time, to the enclosures of the commons - the shared land and resources that sustained collective life, particularly for women and the poor.
In Caliban and the Witch (2004) Silvia Federici argues that the enclosure of the commons and the witch hunts were not separate events but concurrent and connected.
Women who had gathered on the commons, who held knowledge about plants and women’s bodies and birth, who organised outside the household and the market, became a problem. They were demonised, prosecuted, hung and burned as witches.
Silvia Federici argues convincingly that the destruction of women’s collective life and knowledge was not a by-product of early capitalism, but it was a precondition for it.
That logic: enclose, privatise, criminalise women’s collective power, was then exported around the world.
Vandana Shiva’s work on the commons and biopiracy shows the same pattern repeated through colonisation: the theft of collective knowledge, particularly women’s knowledge, of seeds, land and sustenance, framed as progress and development, but enacted as dispossession.
In Staying Alive (1988), she documents how women in the Global South were the primary stewards of biodiversity and subsistence knowledge, and how development systematically destroyed both.
The demonising of how women gather and know and tend, is not ancient history. It is ongoing.
But women keep gathering anyway, as we always have, to tend what needs tending. We do so, not because care is a feminine attribute, but because women have historically understood (been forced to understand) that the welfare of a community cannot be separated from the welfare of each person within it, and the welfare of each person cannot be separated from the welfare of the community.
This is a political philosophy, rooted in a very long practice.
The words I sat with last night in the space of New Moon, Sheela Na Gig Day and the approaching Equinox were from The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog (2010). Patricia Monaghan writes:
Like every woman, I am turning into her, into the wild creative hag who has always lived in my soul…the Sheela and the Cailleach all whisper to me the same secret: that there is more passion in a woman’s heart than her body can contain. That survival means not stasis but endless renewal. And that to live fully we must learn to dance, naked and laughing and wild.
Indeed I am; and indeed we must!
If my thinking aloud has stirred something in you, and you want to know more about women’s history, a pull towards your own lineage, a sense that you want to gather with other women and understand both the joy and the challenges of community, you might consider joining my year-long Circle called The Commons. We begin with the Equinox this Saturday (our first gathering is on March 29th).
The inspiration and framework for our time together is rooted in our shared herstory, and shaped by a wide range of feminist, decolonial, and relational traditions. It draws on thinkers and practitioners who have written about tending life in times of collapse and uncertainty, about staying human in the midst of injustice, and about the power of small acts of collective care and imagination.
It is a gathering space for women, drawing on matriarchal principles and feminist philosophy, on the reclamation of women’s stories and ways of knowing, and on the understanding that how we gather is itself a political act.
While we will gather online, the heart of The Commons is where you are; in your own community, relationships, work, and landscape. The invitation is to practise presence there: tending what is yours to tend, deepening into relationship, and staying connected to what matters most in these uncertain times.
Reach out if you’d like more information. We are returning to something old and reclaiming what is ours in order to meet what is here now. If Sheela Na Gig could speak she would say, join The Commons!
With you in Circle
