The “Female Saint Patrick”: What a Wrong Story

(CNN) – On the forgotten walls of rural churches or castles collapsing all over Ireland, the tiny figures squirm invisible.

Lost in gray bricks, darkened by ivy or moss, the stone carvings of Sheela-na-gig may be difficult to observe in the wild, but these medieval creations are by no means so many.

Usually bare-headed bald females, with their breasts and legs hanging wide to show exaggerated vulvae, at first Sheela-na-gigs seem peculiarly out of place in the primordial settings of a Christian church.

However, these envoys from an ancient past have much to teach about Irish and Northern European history, and about the pagan roots of the world festival now known as St. Patrick’s Day.

Although in modern times it is a one-day celebration, once it was a three-day carnival that ended on March 18, Sheelah Day.

This is the story of Sheelah: who she was, why she was forgotten when St. Patrick was not, and what traces of her are left behind.

“It’s always there”

Irish mythology is populated by many female figures. The tales of warrior queens, deities, rulers and sacred hags have been passed down from generation to generation.

However, an oral popular tradition means that names, characters, and meanings are transformed over time, and are subject to the interpretive whims of changing societies.

“Sheelah is a popular manifestation of what we call the female cosmic agency,” says Shane Lehane, archaeologist, folklorist and historian at CSN College of Continuing Education in Cork, who has been instrumental in reviving interest in Sheelah in recent years.

“Think of her as the consort of the male, this great mythological tradition of the king and the goddess. She represents the earth.”

Although Sheela-na-gigs are medieval, and the figure of Sheelah first appears instead of newspapers and documentaries around the 17th century, tracing its history back to what is believed to have been its ancient Celtic origins is a almost impossible task.

“There is a belief group among people who study the mythology that every female figure in some form or form represents that entity,” Lehane says. “The fact that he survives is interesting. He’s always there.”

“This great human concern”

There are Sheela-na-gig carvings in northern Europe; one of the best examples is in Kilpeck Church, Herefordshire, England, but in Ireland there are 115 national lists, more than anywhere else in the world.

Because they have often been relocated to their original locations and placed in new buildings, “it’s quite difficult to date them, but the consensus is that they date from the 12th and 15th or 16th centuries,” says Matt Seaver. , maintenance assistant at the National Museum of Ireland. The museum has a Sheela on display at its Dublin Archeology Museum, while six more are on loan for regional exhibitions.

There are two main interpretations of Sheelas in competition, Seaver explains. The oldest view is that “they promote a chaste life, a taboo on sexuality in the Middle Ages. The other theory that developed, mainly since the 1930s, sees them as symbols of fertility.”

Lehane, one of these revisionists, tells CNN Travel that “Sheelah has been the subject of a strong misogynistic outlook for a long time. They were considered to be symbols of evil, symbols of lust, symbols of eroticism.”

She argues that Sheela-na-gigs celebrates “the woman who has custody of birth and death. Sheelah is an icon of this great human concern.”

Hug the daisy

Tara Hill in County Meath is the former headquarters of the High Kings of Ireland, a site for ceremony and burial that has been used for over 5,000 years. Tourist buses travel north from Dublin to visit Tara and nearby Newgrange, a tomb from the Stone Age Passage.

Tara’s Lia Fáil, a phallus-like standing stone, has a powerful story, Lehane explains. “If you were king, you would sit on top of the Lia Fáil and symbolically mate with the land. If you were the right king, the Lia Fáil would shout.”

There are many examples in Celtic mythology of what are called goddesses of sovereignty: female deities who bestow gift powers through copulation.

When a king falls offline, the goddess representing the earth is transformed into a withered old woman, similar to the Sheela-na-gig, known as the Cailleach. “For the new king to come, he must embrace this dangerous witch,” says Lehane, “and she is again transformed into this beautiful, generous, and kind figure.”

The Cailleach is where the earth is barren and treacherous, and time does not forgive. It has given its name to the megalithic tomb, the rocks in the seas and the mountainous outcrops. You can come face to face with the Cailleach at Ceann na Caillí (Cape of Hag) on ​​the Cliffs of Moher and the step tomb at Slieve Gullion Mountain known locally as the house of Calliagh Beara.

‘The first history of Ireland’

St. Patrick, the historical figure, was a former slave trafficked to Ireland from Roman Britain in the 5th century. Exclusively among the Irish saints, he wrote his own history, in two Latin works “Confessio” and “Epistola”.

“The only thing few people disagree with is that there was someone named Patrick and he wrote what became the first story in Ireland,” says Tim Campbell, director of the Saint Patrick Center in Downpatrick. in County Down. “The history of Ireland literally begins with him.”

Patrick refers to the more earthly Celtic tradition when he writes that he refuses to show subjugation to another man by sucking his nipples. There are two Iron Age preserved bodies on display at the National Museum of Ireland that bear witness to this. They belong to two failed kings who have been ritually assassinated and their nipples cut off, so no one can promise fidelity.

Patrick’s legacy as a missionary and Christian bishop “was woven into later legends of early medieval Ireland,” says Campbell, and the mythical Patrick would also absorb older legends.

“Embrace chaos”

The god Lugh is the one most associated with royalty in Ireland, says Lehane. “It represents the perfect male.”

When Christianity appeared, the legend of Patrick took over the cult of Lugh. And next to him was his consort, Sheelah, who was now known as Patrick’s wife.

Many countries have pre-Christian spring festivals and Ireland is no different. Patrick and Sheelah’s three-day celebration, March 16-18, falls just before the spring equinox. The license to dodge and ignore the restrictions of Lent is the Irish version of Carnival.

“You were expected to go wild, to be careful in the wind, to embrace chaos, because that’s the nature of Carnival,” Lehane says. “It’s a very important Irish tradition to recognize.”

Christian influence tamed the licentiousness of the festival and Sheelah Day, recorded as widely celebrated by the Irish and Irish diaspora in the 18th and 19th centuries, fell by the wayside. But Patrick was not left without a companion.

Three saints, a tomb

Patrick may be the boy on the poster, but Ireland has two more patron saints: Saint Brigid and Saint Colmcille. All three, thanks to the impressive promotional efforts of the Anglo-Norman knight John de Courcy, have a reputation for being buried under the same rock in Downpatrick, a sacred place to this day.

“During the Middle Ages, everywhere was intended to be a place of pilgrimage. If you could get the three Irish saints buried in the same place, you would have won the lottery,” Lehane laughs.

The Christian saint Brigida shares many attributes of the pre-Christian goddess Brigid and the feast of the saint – on February 1 – was originally the pagan festival of Imbolc, which marked the first day of spring.

The Irish still celebrate this spring festival by weaving the crosses of Santa Brigida, made of reeds, to be placed on the doors and windows to protect the house from damage.

Holy inches

Saint Patrick and Brigid are also associated with the holy wells of Ireland, of which there are thousands. These natural springs, reserved for healing purposes, are found “in virtually every parish,” Lehane says.

Women repaired sacred wells to relieve gynecological problems, to pray to protect their virginity, or to promote fertility. And while Patrick is the most famous pattern of wells, “most of the wells are dedicated to female figures,” Lehane says.

Today, the few surviving Sheela-na-surviving concerts can often be found near sacred wells, while the wells also often have a cloth tree, where visitors have fixed their tokens and prayers. .

“The Sheela-na-gigs represent a point between life and death,” Lehane says. During the many centuries when pregnancy was a delicate balance between a fruitful new beginning or an interrupted young life, women turned to Sheelah, an icon of birth, in their time of need.

The wells also provided a feminine space for sanctuary and healing in a sometimes hostile landscape.

Sheelah, the goddess of the earth, continues to live in these quiet pockets of rural Ireland, where water flows beneath and the wind blows the grassy hills and cloth ribbons.

In Irish mythology, the witch is dry, but also ageless. It will survive us all.