Sheila na Gig

She is the greatest symbol of the life-and-death goddess left in Ireland, where her stones have in some cases been incorporated as "gargoyles" in Christian churches. Her name means "hag"; her grinning face and genital display are complicated by the apparent ancientness of her flesh. Laughter and passion, birth and death, sex and age do not seem to have been so incompatible to the ancient Irish as they are to the modern world.  

Smiling lewdly out from rock carvings, this goddess of ancient Ireland can still be seen in surviving petroglyphs: a grinning, often skeletal face, huge buttocks, full breasts, and bent knees. What most observers remember best, however, is the self-exposure of the goddess, for she holds her vagina open with both hands. 

Cailleach Bera

 (koy-log-vayra)

A very ancient Hag-aspect of the Goddess who was known by many names throughout the Celtic countries.  In the Irish Triads, the Cailleach is considered one of the three great ages:

(the age of the Yew Tree, the age of the Eagle, and the age of the Hag of Baere)

Although reference is made to her beauty, she is also described as having an eye in the middle of a blue-black face, red teeth, and matted hair.  She controlled the seasons and the weather.

As the Cailleach Bheur of the Scottish Highlands, is a blue-faced hag who personified winter, is one of the clearest cases of the supernatural creature who was once a primitive goddess, possibly among the ancient Fomorians before the Celts.  She has various facets of her character in which there is a striking resemblance to the primitive form of the Greek goddess Artemis.  At first sight she seems the personification of winter.  She is called the daughter of Grainne, or the Winter Sun.

There were two suns in the Old Celtic calendar; the Big Sun, which shines from La Baal Time, or Beltane Eve to Samhain, and the Little Sun, which shines from Samhain to Beltane.

The Cailleach was reborn each Samhain and went about smiting the Earth to blight growth and then calling down the snow.  On Beltane Eve she threw her staff under a holly tree or a gorse bush - both are her plants - and turned into a grey stone, therefore making lonely standing stones sacred to her.

In some tales, she does not turn to stone, but rather appears at the house where the fiana lay and begs that she might be allowed to warm herself at the fire, and when she crept into his bed he did not repulse her, only put a fold in the blanket between them.  After a while he gave, "a start of surprise," for she had changed into the most beautiful of women that man ever saw.  So, it would seem that the Cailleach represented a goddess of both winter and summer.

The early Celts savored the dark side of life. They embraced war like a lover, plunging into battle naked, singing gloriously boastful songs. They were fearless in the face of death, which their belief in reincarnation taught them was "...but the center of a long life."

Darkness was associated with new beginnings, the potential of the seed below the ground. In Celtic mythology and folk-lore, the wisdom of darkness is often expressed by powerful goddess figures. Whether in the natural, cultural or individual context, their role is to catalyze change through the transformative power of darkness, to lead through death into new life.