Letters of authenticity in the world of antiquated goods purport the notion that an object or set of objects is original and traditional. These letters are meant to ensure the buyer, the seller, and the observer, or the robber, of its first-of-its-kind-last-of-its-kind nature. My mom is an antique dealer, and while I remember few occasions of her referring to these documents in relation to Roseville pottery and elaborately painted bride boxes, I knew that there were distinctions in the originals that were not present in reproductions, that one form was “pure” and another was “fake.” I learned, in time, how to tell the difference between objects real and hopelessly inauthentic, where to look for the seams in pitchers and crocks, how to spot one late McCoy from a wannabe. Did these reproductions in their muted malfeasance know the effect of their existence? Did the objects know themselves to be a lie, an act of deception in well-worn peacock paint roughed up at the hands of a millennial who was going for “a certain look,” an aesthetic?
To problematize this issue of validity and valuation, what did it mean for a product to be unoriginal? If it were unoriginal, did it cost less or was it dolled up and sold for the price of the “real deal”? The same ideas might be applied to vintage, retro, and antique clothes, furniture, farm equipment, musical instruments, weapons, artwork, etc.
During the Ordinance Surveys of the 1800s, British cartographers and their assistants sought to map the island of Ireland. In their endeavors, they “discovered” stone carvings in the facades of churches and castles, on standing stones, and in solitary spaces. The irony of their discovery is pinned upon the potential origin of these carvings in that they were likely a product of the Anglo-Normans and therefore first came to Ireland by and with the ancestors of these Englishmen.
The sculptures were called síle na gcíoch, Sheela na Gig when anglicized. Surveyors were informed that they were apotropaic, that they were fertility totems, that they had been in those walls hundreds of years, etc. Unfortunately, we do not have the full history of the Sheela na Gig, but we have much in the way of conjecture and consideration. The sculpture in time has been reproduced in miniature for personal altars, pendants, earrings, and rings. They have been reproduced in paintings, as Ireland herself, in film, and in poetry. Artists of all persuasions have reinterpreted the Sheela for their own productions, so how do we understand this kind of artistic, potentially reverential, reproduction?
In “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious” by Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, the authors note that tradition is an “interpretive process that embodies continuity and discontinuity” (276), that tradition is unbound, and that tradition is a “wholly symbolic construction” (274). If we begin to conceive of the Sheela na Gig as tradition reproduced, reconstituted, and reimagined, we may have the tools the necessary to observe the authentic nature of this constantly mutable object and its ability to trace cultural understandings of women’s bodies, stonework, art, history, storytelling, and experience. The unfortunate reality of the Sheela is that we will probably never know its original purpose. However, we may address the ways in which the Sheela is attributed to feminist movement today, how the sculptures are utilized in personal and public spaces, how they were regarded by the Church in the 1600s, how the surveyors responded to these naked depictions of a woman’s body, and how the reactions to and interactions with stone-cold women pans out today.
Word Witch 