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Skippy took this image off the Web. His search string was - Camel Toe. It's an iconic abstraction which you can probably figure out. Etics will tell you that the letter "C" in our alphabet is an abstraction from the Phoenician "gimel" which meant "camel." Other Etics will laugh out loud at this and insist that the "gimel" is a "throwing stick." The point being that 10 guys with Phds can't agree on anything. Especially when the subject is the Evolution of Symbol Systems. Lucy Lippard, in Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, comments: "Such 'grotesquely exaggerated' images of female sexuality are still greeted by fastidious scholars as the `crude' and `repellent' side of fertility rituals . . . Given the vast numbers of prehistoric figures like the sheila-na-gigs (such as pre-Columbian vessels thru whose orifices the crops were symbolically watered), it is clear such prudery was nonexistent then, though today these objects tend to be hidden away in the `private parts' of museums, unfit for innocent eyes." All except for the French who stick their Pussy pictures smack in the middle of the biggest wall. Michael Gill gives a more masculine explication in his book: Image of the Body - "The Gothic obsession with luxuriant detail gives multiple footnotes to the preoccupations of the times - comic, savage, sometimes irreverent, often mysterious. Small carvings of ill-favored crones can be found in inconspicuous corners of numbers of churches across northern Europe. Each had its individual ugliness, but all have in common the fierce stare, the gaping mouth, and hands stretching wide the labia. It has been suggested that they hark back to earlier fertility goddesses and were put up by superstitious masons to ward off evil luck as the Phallus was thought to in classical times. It seems more likely these unsettling little figures were meant to prohibit sin: pointing out the first tunnel that man could enter en route to hell. The medieval world lay under the shadow of this dreadful future life. `Per me si va nell' eterno dolore' (I am the way into eternal grief), Danté read above the gateway to hell." Mikey needs to get out more. All of the Etics have satisfactory, `just-so' stories to explain the Sheila-na-gig. And many of them are right - to a point. But there is another explanation which grounds these figures in something older and something much bigger. But here's a clue: Many of the Sheilas are carved over doorways either on the east or the west side of the church.




		Skippy took this image off the Web. His search string was - Camel Toe. It's an iconic abstraction which you can probably figure out. Etics will tell you that the letter "C" in our alphabet is an abstraction from the Phoenician "gimel" which meant "camel." Other Etics will laugh out loud at this and insist that the "gimel" is a "throwing stick." The point being that 10 guys with Phds can't agree on anything. Especially when the subject is the Evolution of Symbol Systems. Lucy Lippard, in Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, comments: "Such 'grotesquely exaggerated' images of female sexuality are still greeted by fastidious scholars as the `crude' and `repellent' side of fertility rituals . . . Given the vast numbers of prehistoric figures like the sheila-na-gigs (such as pre-Columbian vessels thru whose orifices the crops were symbolically watered), it is clear such prudery was nonexistent then, though today these objects tend to be hidden away in the `private parts' of museums, unfit for innocent eyes." All except for the French who stick their Pussy pictures smack in the middle of the biggest wall. Michael Gill gives a more masculine explication in his book: *Image of the Body* - "The Gothic obsession with luxuriant detail gives multiple footnotes to the preoccupations of the times - comic, savage, sometimes irreverent, often mysterious. Small carvings of ill-favored crones can be found in inconspicuous corners of numbers of churches across northern Europe. Each had its individual ugliness, but all have in common the fierce stare, the gaping mouth, and hands stretching wide the labia. It has been suggested that they hark back to earlier fertility goddesses and were put up by superstitious masons to ward off evil luck as the Phallus was thought to in classical times. It seems more likely these unsettling little figures were meant to prohibit sin: pointing out the first tunnel that man could enter en route to hell. The medieval world lay under the shadow of this dreadful future life. *`Per me si va nell' eterno dolore'* (I am the way into eternal grief), Danté read above the gateway to hell." Mikey needs to get out more. All of the Etics have satisfactory, `just-so' stories to explain the Sheila-na-gig. And many of them are right - to a point. But there is another explanation which grounds these figures in something older and something much bigger. But here's a clue: Many of the Sheilas are carved over doorways either on the east or the west side of the church.
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