03/19/2026
Happy Sheela Na Gig Day! Representing themes of life, death, fertility and protection. I have been celebrating this day the past couple years more than St. Patrick’s 🍀This year feels extra potent to me being 33 weeks pregnant! Seeing Sheela Na Gig celebrated gives me strength and courage to get through this last trimester and labor!
To learn more about Sheela follow .brading I love what she wrote about Sheela:
“St Patrick’s Day was yesterday, but today (March 18th) honors Sheela na Gig, a powerful and mysterious figure from medieval Europe.
Her name is thought to mean “faery woman of the v***a” and her carvings can be found in Ireland, Britain, France, Spain, and beyond.
Her carvings are especially abundant in Ireland, where there are more carvings of her than anywhere else combined.
She’s mostly found on forgotten walls of country churches, graveyards, crumbling castles, and near sacred wells.
The origins of Sheela are mysterious, dating back to the medieval period, and there are lots of theories about her.
Some of the early theories claimed she was a grotesque figures intended to warn people against the sins of lust, given that so many of her carvings are found on churches.
But Shane Lehane, an archaeologist, folklorist & historian, says: “Sheelah has been the subject of a strong misogynistic perspective for a long time. They were seen as being symbols of evil, symbols of lust, symbols of eroticism.”
Interestingly, the act of women flashing their ge****ls has been believed to scare off demons as far back as the ancient Greeks.
More recently, researchers have leaned towards the idea that the sheela is a pre-Christian folk goddess and her exaggerated v***a a sign of life-giving powers and fertility, a portal between life and death.
I post about Sheela every year...but this year, she feels more potent than ever.
She feels like a rallying cry and a reckoning. An ancient voice that longs to be heard in these times.
Long live Sheela na Gig. ❤️”
