Old Stone Vulvas, At a Time Like This?
A Sheela-Na-Gig Story for International Women's Day
It’s March, 2025. You don’t need me to be more specific about what this time is like. There’s a sort of a cloud hanging over everything. Whenever there is a break in the gloom, it’s hard to figure out whether it is hope or escapism.
Obsession over national and global events we cannot control isn’t helpful, but pure avoidance isn’t the answer either.
I don’t think anyone has the answer for exactly the right proportion of pay attention and do something, and offer yourself grace and do anything that gives you joy.
It’s a constant shifting of weight and attention, of stretching and stressing and, hopefully settling back into kindness and moments of pure pleasure.
This is clearly a time to talk about old stone vulvas.
Have you met Sheela?
Sheela-Na-Gig carvings are found across Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England. No one really knows what on earth they meant to the medieval folks who put them there, but these bold, often scary, big-headed women bear their vulvas wide and dare you to look them in the eye as they do it.
Some claim she was apotropaic (intended to ward off evil spirits). Others decided she was a fertility charm. According to Professor Benjamin Dwyer, “there is a distinctly credible hypothesis that Sheelas were placed on church doorways as a means of appropriating residual pagan elements — the powerful female icon of a pagan communal society becomes the powerful female icon of the ‘Mother Church’.”1
To me, Sheela whispers the hardest, truest truths:
Life and death are inseparable fraternal twins.
We worship youth because we have not yet become brave enough to venerate age.
The deepest wisdom, when it finds us, will force us to abandon our addictions to comfort and “keeping it light.”
In this week’s KnotWork Myth & Storytelling episode, I offer you a story I told last year, but I’m presenting it in a new frame.
Irish folklore of the 18th and 19th centuries declared that Saint Patrick had a wife named Sheelah. I imagine a one-sided bedtime conversation between the couple as the pagan Sheelah speaks her mind to her husband, the devoted church father who has not fathered any children of his own.
In my story, it feels inevitable: After Patrick has died and Sheelah is cast aside by the new Christian community, she has no choice but to find immortality in stone. She will finally be seen and held in reverence as Sheela-Na-Gig.
This year, I share this story not to coincide with Saint Paddy’s Day, but to celebrate International Women’s Day. In this moment, it’s more clear than ever that we do, in fact, need to celebrate and advocate for 50% of the population.
That sort of advocacy clearly needs to happen in the voting booth, on the streets, and through the community organizations that work to secure the health, safety, and advancement of women, girls, and femmes.
That work is exhausting, especially when we’re frustrated and stunned that we still need to keep protesting this shit. (We assume that we’re ready for a post feminist world at our peril. According to the World Economic Forum, none of us will see gender parity in our lifetime, and nor likely will many of our children.2)
I think old stone vulvas can help us keep going.
The Sheelas are transgressive. They challenge the individual’s sense of “decency” and the collective view of morality. They shake us out of our private narratives of respectability and ask us to stand naked in the real stories of the body, of mortality, and they demand we reckon with our fear of both.
And somehow, at the same moment, the Sheelas can fill us with joy and recognition. They are portals to the anarchic delight that comes from embracing these strange, fallible, ungovernable bodies of ours.
The Sheelas speak to the wild spaces in the soul where we feel true kinship with the shadows and the mystery and the gorgeous nature of unbeautiful things.
When we can take back our attention from the hucksters, the narcissists, and the abusers who are bullshitting their way through the contemporary bastions of power and instead devote our imagination to the stone vulvas that graced the medieval great hall, something remarkable can happen. Something unexpected. Some sort of solution that is not of this time, but is instead timeless. We can open ourselves to a new way of calculating what matters and recognize that what we fear may actually offer the medicine we need.
The wild, unbridled feminine unafraid of her power, perhaps?
Coming up tomorrow: a Substack Live with two sisters unafraid of exploring wild, unbridled feminine power
I’m so excited to sit down with
and and explore how a connection to the goddesses of Ireland can help lead us to sourced of wisdom in these strange and terrible times.To watch, log into Substack at 2:30 PM GMT/9:30 AM EST tomorrow and look for the notification. It’s our first time doing this so we think you’ll get an email too. Either way, I will share the recording with you when it’s ready!
One last note: The Body Is a Doorway is here!
What synchronicity… At the moment when we’re talking about Sheela-Na-Gig as a portal into the body, mortality, and the otherworld,
’s new book The Body is a Doorway arrives.I have been looking forward to Sophie’s latest for so long (even as I wish she never had to write a book about chronic illness and our broken healthcare system).
Until I can find a quiet handful of hours to immerse myself in Sophie’s gorgeous prose, Nuala is keeping it safe.
