Your talk of sexuality & the hag has been rattling around my brain for a couple of hours now. Sheela really is quite a riddle (I don't like mysteries!). Let's just suppose, again, that Sheela is a pagan goddess (my instinct tells me she is even if my head can't prove it!). What an interesting juxtaposition - the hag's cunt. On the one hand there's the hag-like and deathly thin body, sticky-out ribs etc. that FourWinds describes. On the other hand there's the strong emphasis given to the source of all life - the cunt. Death & life rolled into one being.

I appreciate what you're saying about Sheelas as symbols of sexuality, too. Sex for its own sake, not sex for procreation. This just mystifies me even more, though. I can think of few symbols that would offend Christian sensibilities more. Indeed, it could be argued that such a symbol was especially designed to offend Christians. So what the hell are they doing in churches? I hate mysteries!

It doesn't really prove it one way or the other but here's a thought. We know that Christian worship went on at pagan sites. Many stone circles, for instance, had crosses raised in them and were turned into Christian temples. Many churches stand on the sites of older pagan temples. It seems to me that its not unreasonable to suggest the opposite - that (thinly disguised) pagan worship went on in Christian churches. A great many Irish saints are thinly disguised pagan deities, after all (St. Bridgit of Kildare, for instance, being almost completely undisguised!).

The problem with this, of course, is that the Sheelas are from the 10th century at the earliest. The question is this: how long did pagan traditions continue after the coming of Christianity. I'm pretty sure that Margaret Murray is not very respected as a historian in academic circles. I'm not an academic, though, so here's a quote from God of the Witches (I'd be interested to see if anyone can pick holes in her argument):

"When Christianity first arrived in Great Britain it came in from the West and established itself among the people rather than the rulers. Centuries later other missionaries entered on the East. The Christian Church had by this time become more organised, more dogmatic, more bent on proselytising. The main attack, therefore, was not on the people but on the royal families, particularly on the queens whose influence was well understood. Paganism, however, received continual reinforcements in the successive invasions of heathen peoples; Danes, Norsemen, Angles, Jutes and Saxons poured in and took possession. In judging of the history of early Christianity in Britain it must always be remembered that the people who brought it in on the East coast were foreigners, who never amalgamated with the natives. Augustine was Italian, and for more than a century no native Britons were advanced to high places in the Church. Theodore of Tarsus, with the aid of Hadrian, the negro, organised the Church in England in the seventh century, Italians and other aliens held the high offices. The Augustine mission and their successors concentrated on the rulers, and through them forced their exotic religion on a stubborn and unwilling people. This is very clear in the reign of Canute, whose conversion was hardly two generations before the Norman Conquest; in his zeal for his new religion he tried to suppress heathenism by legal enactments. No religion dies out with the dramatic suddenness claimed by the upholders of the Complete-Conversion theory. The constant influx of Pagans through several centuries more than counterbalanced the small number of immigrant Christians. The country must therefore have been Pagan with Christian rulers and a Christian aristocracy. A parallel case is that of Spain under the Moslems. There the rulers were of one religion, the people of another, the popular religion receiving continual reinforcements from abroad." (p. 5)