exhibitionist carvings
on mediæval churches

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 obsessively-fractal 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), Dr Oakley has one solid idea which she doggedly pursues. This is the obvious iconographic connection between sheelas and apotropaic Gorgon-carvings - 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. 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 post-Romanesque 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 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 Romamesque 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, re-used Romanesque corbel rather than a copy.

After over thirty years of looking at stone iconography on Romanesque churches and at sheela-na-gigs 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.

 

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 have originated in Ireland...