Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Kilpeck, Herefordshire


Sheela na gig

A number of readers of the previous post have asked – via comments, email, or conversation – about Kilpeck’s most famous carving, the female corbel known as the Sheela na gig. Though I have no simple answer to what she is doing here – no one knows quite why pious masons of the 12th century should put such a carving on a church – I’d like to share her never-to-be-forgotten image with you and, startling, plain, explicit as she may be, not gloss over her or evade her as earlier generations must have done.

The Victorians indeed, who found it difficult to cope with such things, apparently removed some of the Kilpeck corbels because they couldn’t stomach such explicit images. But tucked away in the angle between chancel and apse, the Sheela survived. If 19th-century prudes needed to justify the survival, they had ways of reinterpreting the obvious. Years ago, for example, I was doing some work involving frequent trips to the British Museum, where one of the curators showed me the way some of the collection for which he was responsible had been documented in the 19th century. An old record card referring to a statuette of a woman, presumably a fertility goddess, holding up her large breasts in her hands bore the legend, ‘Woman carrying two heavy objects.’ How true, and how wrong.

One Victorian writer about Kilpeck took a still broader detour around reality. G R Lewis, whose mostly useful Illustrations of Kilpeck Church were published in 1842, described the Sheela thus in his survey of the corbels: ‘No 26 represents a fool – the cut in his chest, the way to his heart, denotes it is always open and to all alike.’

Well, church crawlers (especially in Ireland, but in Britain many other places in Europe too) get used to encountering Sheelas, though few this side of the Irish Sea are as well preserved as Kilpeck’s. The possible explanations are several, and are neatly summed up in the current guidebook to the church by James Bailey: ‘A device to ward off evil spirits, a fertility cult figure, a representation of the Great Earth Mother Goddess, a Celtic goddess of creation and destruction, an obscene hag, a sexual stimulant, a medieval Schandbild to castigate the sins of the flesh.’

In a medieval context, perhaps the last explanation is the most plausible. The carvings on the exteriors of medieval churches often portray grotesques, monsters, and the like, as a depiction of and warning against the sins and perils of the world, which we leave behind on entering the sacred, spiritual space inside the building. The Sheela could be part of that worldly community and a warning to sinners. Equally, she could well be a survivor from an earlier culture, a fertility figure most probably, kept on in this Christian context in the way in which one religion will preserve or co-opt some of the symbols of a predecessor. And I’d like to think, too, that medieval carvers were quite capable of knowing that their images could have more than one interpretation, just as we do.

Another interesting thing about the Sheela, and one that you won’t find in the guides and learned articles, is that she has a literature of her own – not the scholarly literature but a rich imaginative literature, having inspired poems by, amongst others, Seamus Heaney, Frances Horovitz, and D. M. Thomas, and prose by B. S. Johnson. These writings (many written for a publication called The Kilpeck Anthology published by the Five Seasons Press) are too rich and various to do justice to here. Heaney comes up with resonant images (‘Her hands holding herself | Are like hands in an old outhouse | Holding a bag open’) that take the poet back to his roots in the Irish countryside and bring us to the idea of fertility again (the bag is full of grain). Anne Stevenson looks back to Jewish lore, and, incidentally, to the humour of many of the Kilpeck carvings (‘This is where God first laughed | and created Lilith’). Nearly all the writers (Jeff Nuttall: ‘She is old in stone’; Fleur Adcock: ‘There was always witchcraft here, you say’) see her as something more ancient than this ancient church. B. S. Johnson traces her back to Egypt and to the prehistoric Beaker People. The meanings of the Sheela na gig are rich and varied, now as ever.

10 comments:

David Gouldstone said...

You say that the Victorians effectively censored some of the carvings. It wouldn't particularly surprise me had they done so, but is there any evidence for this? I know that a few corbels are missing, but do we know that they were sexually explicit and deliberately removed, rather than accidentally lost? If anyone was going to censor Kilpeck, it would seem a very strange oversight to leave our happy sheela!

Neil said...

I think if Paul Gauguin were carving this figure, he would have entitled it (as he did what is probably his most important painting), "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going." "Fertility" always turns out to be a rather catch-all phrase when people use it of myths or goddesses, but I think we can discount the sheela na gig as an image of lust, either approving or disapproving. I suspect she is holding her vagina open to reveal the womb - which is, to use a Welsh phrase of the era, the "strong door" between this world and whatever world lies before and after it. I believe that this figure (which is so unlike the other corbels in aesthetic values) is most likely an incorporation into the physical church of an aspect of a pre-existing spiritual culture, in which both a valley and a womb would have been regarded as sacred vessels, containing, cherishing, and continuing all the potentialities of life.

Philip Wilkinson said...

David: A good question. There seems to be a local tradition that corbels were removed by offended Victorians, and this is mentioned in various guide books to the church that have been published. If this iconoclasm took place it does seem odd that the Sheela was left - but then, we know that Lewis had provided an alternative, 'cleaned-up' explanation of the Sheela, so perhaps that was enough to persuade the destroyers to stay their hand.

Philip Wilkinson said...

Neil: Thanks for that persuasive interpretation. I'd always been slightly concerned about seeing the Sheela as a fertility figure because she is, as it were, all valley and no hills. But you make a good case for the 'strong door'.

Roy said...

I've always just thought of this type of representation as a reflection of the very different values and attitudes of an age where the 'social context' of ordinary folk is really not known with any degree of certainty.

This, and any other similarly explicit figures that may have been present at one time, were most likely not regarded as unusual or obscene in any way, but just spoke to the church-going folk in a language they readily understood.

Thanks for reminding me of this artefact, which I have yet to see in reality but had read about in the past. I too think that Neil's interpretation is probably about right.

David Gouldstone said...

Thanks, Philip, that sounds as if it could well be true, though I suppose we'll never know for sure.

Neil, that sounds pretty convincing, though again we'll never really know. How do sheelas accompanied by ithyphallic figures fit into this theory? There's one, for example, not too far from my part of the world at Whittlesford, Cambs:http://www.flickr.com/photos/hornbeam/1599950991/

Philip Wilkinson said...

Well, phalloi can represent potential life, too, I suppose – but Neil may be able to throw some specifically Celtic light on this. There are, I believe, a few Sheelas with ithyphallic figures nearby (there may be one in the church at Lower Swell on the Cotswolds, not far form where I live, but the carving is so worn it's difficult to say what's going on) though it's more usual for Sheela to be on her own.

Jayne said...

I live in a Victorian property in Edgbaston in Birmingham. Whilst working in the garden we dug up a copy of the Kilpeck Sheela Na Gig, a photograph can be found at http://www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/sheela3.htm

If you click on the photograph, there is further information about the Sheela Na Gig and also about an Afrian carved head that was found under a tree.

We took the Sheela Na Gig to Birmingham museum - they seemed a bit bemused and advised that it probably wasn't more than 100 years old.

Just thought this might be of interest!

Anonymous said...

I live in a Victorian property in Edgbaston in Birmingham. Whilst working in the garden we dug up a copy of the Kilpeck Sheela Na Gig, a photograph can be found at http://www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/sheela3.htm

If you click on the photograph, there is further information about the Sheela Na Gig and also an Afrian carved head that was found under a tree.

We took the Sheela Na Gig to Birmingham museum - they seemed a bit bemused and advised that it probably wasn't more than 100 years old.

Just thought this might be of interest!

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