So there I was lying back in the bath and chanting an old RuwaShona song for pounding maize or whapping errant husbands, and musing on the Queen of Pentangles and what might be happening there in that magical space bounded by the Endless Knot, when up popped an image of the Sheela-na-Gig and I was once again caught up in yoni energies and hedonism and the blazing sensuous heat of summer and that great vulva swallowing up the known world.
She can be so overpowering at times, my quixotic Celt Mother. Bringing me back to the body and the simmering energies of early menopause and the need to enjoy and indulge the sexual, grab the great sweaty bliss of the body with both hands. In my garden the figs are luscious and dripping sweetness. Just looking at a bowl of succulent purple figs brings me to orgasm.
The Sheela-na-Gig of Ireland and old Celtic Britain is the Divine Hag, the shameless and obscene and devouring woman with her gaping vulva stretched wide and the dark passage to the womb held open. Women in lust, women symbolising the sexual forces of renewal and vitality over against death. That primordial hungry vulva as the gateway to the source of fertility, pleasure and life.
It is all about living through and within mystery. And there is always something to do that is not just wildly hedonistic but pragmatic, helpful and even beautiful. I am making a celebratory supper for everyone who is coming to sit in my living room in front of the television to watch a man with a wonderful open smile and a Kenyan father become the president of the United States. My kitchen is layered with row upon row of ripe tomatoes ready for bottling tomorrow so that I can make pasta with a delicious fresh tomato sauce for 35 hungry people this weekend. A jar of honey and some sage and mint leaves are out on the counter because I am preparing a salve for a sick neighbour who only really trusts paracetamol and is about to experience a whole new style of healing! And a pen and a large official form are set out on the kitchen table so that I can protest – in three languages with a hint of threat – to the the municipality about increases in rates and water costs in a village where most people live below the poverty datum line.
Another surprising definition:
‘The witch was the village herbalist, the midwife, the person who knew things. She would sit up with the dying, lay out the corpses, deliver the newborn. Witches tended to be needed when human beings were meeting the dangerous edges of their lives, the places where there is no map. They don’t mess around with tinkly spells; they get their hands dirty.”
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