23Concannon, Maureen. The Sacred Whore: Sheela, Goddess of the Celts. Cork: Collins, 2004. 17.
The author adds: "Tracing the Sheela may unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-European by many thousands of years."
In the 1930s Margaret Murray (The God of the Witches) opined that the sculpture generally belonged in the category of mother-goddesses. In 1923 she first wrote that the figures might be the remains of an old fertility cult. (Freitag, Barbara. Sheela-Na-Gigs Unraveling an Enigma. New York: Routledge, 2004. 28.