Easter is approaching, and I found myself unexpectedly in tears today when I reflected that this nominally Christian holiday, supposedly concerned with the death and resurrection of a male god-king, travels under the name of Eostre, the Saxon peoples’ name for a female demiurge of resurgent life in the spring.
Robert Graves said of the White Goddess whom he counted as his Muse: “Everything that reminds me of Her goes through me like a spear.” The world is heaving up flowers around me, and I looked at a stupid Easter card just as I was trying to juggle appointments for a client whose family takes Easter very seriously, in her words, and found myself leaning against a doorframe in tears and saying “We still speak Her name.”
I am ruthlessly rational about life and its decisions, but I read Yeats and Graves frequently and reserve the right to have moments like this.
Here is the Sheela-Na-Gig that sits in my living room. Or lives in my sitting room.
Kentish Sheela-Na-Gig
You find Sheela in churches around the British Isles, flashing her nads with an amiable smirk. She is that old Goddess that keeps resurfacing everywhere, and I love her just because she is crude and ungainly. This one is a hydrastone model bought at Avebury Henge in Wiltshire, England, though I am pretty sure the original was in Kent. I was briefly engaged to a Londoner who at the height of his romantic ambitions wanted to marry me on top of Silbury Hill near the Avebury site, with full Pagan observances, but who quickly demonstrated that he was more interested in his Playstation than in me. Right before that point, he marked our engagement by presenting me with this statuette and a pair of slippers in the shape of sheep. I really did think that even a modest ring would have been more suitable.
But I like Sheela and she lives on my mantel:
If there has to be a conceit about resurrection, let it involve old women who flash and smirk, and flowers that jam their way upward through cold dirt and defy all reasonable expectations that an Earth forced to put up with something as stupid as us humans would keep at it.
Thank you! Until last night, i was oblivious to Sheela. But no more… i’ll celebrate flashing, smirking old women any day!
wouldn’t it be cool of our ubiquitous “Red Hat Society” ladies adopted a “Sheela” stance in the local Max and Erma’s?
The world needs more raunchy old broads.
There are some chalk carved Sheelas in the south of Britain, where the soil allows for that art form, people just dig down a little distance and it’s all chalk and shows up white. They seem to be from the same era and people as carvings like the Giant of Cerne Abbas, known to the locals as “the man with the big willy.”
What a fabulous image. Nice mantel too.
(coming out of chemo haze and catching up on my blog reading)
now I know you’re drugged… I have this picture of a leering would-be smooth guy in a bar, looking downward and saying in a purring tone, “nice mantel…”
[...] 10, 2009 by sledpress Another view of my Sheela-na-Gig, sharing the mantelpiece with my Rechargeable Feline [...]
I loved Sheela-na-gig the first time I ever came across her, and her presence in the carvings of cathedrals along with images of the Green Man always amuses me.
I plan to be a leering lusty raunchy old broad; I’ve been studying up on the raunchy thing for years!
I’m afraid that the red hat society members that I have met may be “celebrating” their maturity, but raunch and lust are far from the pantheon of attributes they embrace. And it pisses me off that they run around “celebrating” being old while dying their hair and getting face lifts. Hypocrites that like to dress up and do lunch.