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Warning! |
The Green Man is a mystery, OK? That means that no-one knows who or what he really is, & that there is no single simple answer to the question of his origins. It's alright not to know something, you know! It is allowed. Why do uncertainty & ambivalence make some people so uncomfortable? When I look up at a really hoary wild eyed old face I can't help but want to celebrate the fact the he has many a secret that may never be told.
What follows is a long, rambling, personal perspective on the mystery of the Green Man, who may, incidentally, be found all over Britain, Europe & the World. It's not a referenced, academic treatise. If something here interests you a little research will soon allow you to make up your own mind. Please note that I am taking the approach that our Green Man is not the sole property of any particular religious or other interest group, so if you've already made your mind up & you know who the Green Man really is you may not find that your opinion is ranked higher than any other here.
Mythical stories & legends survive because they are retold in the changing circumstances of place, time & culture. So a tale which may have prehistoric roots may be told as if it happened to Good King Henry or Robin Hood (whoever he is) last Summer. Or a medieval legend as if it happened to "a friend of mine last week." Our media of communication & entertainment can girdle the world in twenty seconds with a story we think is worth repeating - old or new, true or false - maybe repackaging it for different listeners as it is passed on. It's the same process that happened in the past but it is incredibly speeded up. It's interesting how some "Urban Myths" - yes, it really happened to my neighbour when she was on her holidays - may be very old indeed or, alternatively, may have their origins in fairly recent fiction, the lines of a popular song or an event in a soap opera.
We cannot find the ultimate origins of any story or work of art for they are multiple & as branching & intertwined as the brambles out in the Wild Wood itself. A work of art, say a sculpture, might be said to have its origins in the mind & heart & technique of the sculptor, but its final form is the result of a cascade of factors including the materials, tools, the patron & the final purpose of the work. Its symbolism may include carefully selected elements along side others that appeared "by themselves" because of accident, conditioning or sub-conscious factors.
One person's signal is another person's noise. What one person recognises as a primal & ancient archetype another may justify as a means to a more prosaic end.
The name of a person or thing is said to be of great importance in many traditional societies. "The Green Man" seems for the most part to be a modern, generic term which refers to a number of different characters:
As found on this website, carved leaf masks & foliate heads, dating for the most part, from medieval times.
Pubs -- I don't know the history of this particular pub-name but I'm sure that some are older than others. I have been told that genuine old Green Men pubs are references to forestry, like "The Woodsman" etc. They sometimes occur in places which were near woodland within their history, modern urban development having deprived them of their context.
Performers of various kinds such as "Jack in the Greens" at May Fairs & other traditional seasonal events. Sometimes they were statues like a carnival figures rather than an actual person.
These are the three most familiar elements of what is
popularly recognised as the Green Man,
but there are others: 
The Wild Man of the Woods, whether he be forester, hermit or outlaw; mystic, leper or aboriginal hunter.
The Jolly Green Giant on the sweetcorn tin of that brand name. A Pagan Fertility God? More about them later
The Cunning Doctor, with his knowledge of herbs & local places of power & healing. I have it from someone in Derbyshire that such a healer was remembered as "the Green Man" in a village which also had a Green Man pub.
The Bogey Man - yes he's scary & he's peeping out at you from among the bushes! A link with the Bogle or Boggart - not a creature to be trifled with, however he may have been trivialised in some stories.
The Noble Savage - as popularised by Rousseau & many people today who romanticise tribal life as closer to nature & therefore more pure.
You will notice that I have refrained from mentioning the names of any mythical characters or ancient Gods. I suppose I had better. Let us chant some primal monikas:
Woodwose, Mr. Woodhouse, Robin Goodfellow, Robin Hood, (faster than you can say... ) Jack Robinson, Khidr, Suibhne, Merlin, Lailoken, Bwcca, Esus, Eriappus, Nodens, Fenodyree, Puck, Pan, Herne, Cernunnos, Freyr...
Hold it! Few or none of these guys can be said to be actually green in colour. How can you say that different characters from widely different times & cultures, some Gods, some men & some of indeterminate nature are all names for the Green Man? Well I'm not. What I'm saying is that all these fellows have at some time or other possibly made a contribution or had a link with what we call the Green Man today. (I'm sure that you can think of many more! ;-)
Most of them fit into the Wild Man of the Woods or the Jolly Green Giant categories & one or two of them do a bit of Bogey Manning on the side occasionally too. Just to complicate matters every one of these fellows, & I mean no disrespect to them or their fans, are as complicated, uncertain & ambivalent as our modern Green Man figure himself. A lot of them overlap quite bit for instance. There is an argument for Robin Hood & Maid Marion being the memory of a more primal pair, even a God & a Goddess who were once worshipped in these Isles.
Every one of these figures has been through a process of change & amalgamation over time. You may not agree with me when I say that "The Green Man" is a modern term but it is one much used in our time which results from from a similar process of accumulation & synthesis over the centuries. Identity unclear. The same process must be assumed to have occurred with the various Robins, as with - on a slight side track - Merlin & Arthur, too.
For example, I know of a rock in the middle of a bay on the coast of North Northumberland. Its called Robin Hood's Rock (interestingly the OS map labels it Robin Wood's rock). Now what's he doing paddling in the North Sea near Beadnell? Look at all those other places named after him! Arthur, too. Cymrw & Kernow bicker over his origins while Arthur & his men are said to be sleeping under Mount Etna if you're talking to a Sicilian. Oh yes, & he hiked up to Edinburgh with his lads to make a seat of that volcanic hill that towers above the town. & so on. Maybe he was an amateur geologist or something! That explains his affection for the rocky coastlines of Cornwall & Wales - he was looking for fossils! Then all those quests were field trips... & the grail was a meteorite! If you have a good idea it's very easy to get carried away & look for evidence to support it - ignoring contradictory information of course!
Which brings us to a difficult problem. There is the assumption that the Green Man must be a pre-christian survival of some kind, whether as a Fertility God who rules the crops or a Guardian of the Forest. The problem is that most of the oldest & best Green Men come from medieval times - times when people were very devout Christians & it was dangerous to be anything else. People were, for the most part, terrified of the devil, hell, demons, witches & spirits because they'd been taught to be by the Church for generations. The Gods of one era become the devils of the next, as they say. So why are they carving these wild old faces on their churches & other important buildings? The people making these carvings weren't peasants in isolated little villages carrying on the Old Ways. One of the heads in the Marler chapel in Holy Trinity is on the beam above the altar! No, even if some of the Old Ones continued to held in high esteem or affection, our Green Man must have meant something positive to Medieval Christian folk. What that may be is the subject of heated debate among art historians.
Of course it could be argued that they are a secret message to those in the know, put there by stone masons & other crafts people & explained away to the authorities with a tale or two. But they are so widespread & there is no evidence of such a cult ever existing. Of course a lack of historical evidence doesn't deny the possibilty, but why complicate things? The alternatives are no less interesting. Of course there are plenty of people about today who want him to be a prehistoric deity with an unbroken tradition of worship so they will therefore assert that he must be. There are folks who have written popular books making such claims. They may be quoted as expert opinion, but wanting something to be true, even believing it to be true doesn't make it so.
Don't get me wrong, my own feeling is that he has prehistoric roots, in Iron Age & Romano-British belief & possibly even earlier, but these roots are unknown to us - when we speculate let us be honest about it, the mystery remains. What we do know is that he is an almost universally important or popular figure.
Ancient Gods don't die, they just fade away. Part of that process involves some of their attributes passing to their successors, but there is also a process by which some deities are so deeply entrenched in the collective mind (or powerful in themselves) that they are too important to completely disappear. So they survive somehow. I don't think that this is planned as such but that it just happens. Woden, Thor, & Freya are still remembered & honoured by many today & we still have days of the week named after them. But how many modern British people know the origins of our names for Wednesday, Thursday & Friday (never mind Tuesday)?
Insight into the process by which a dimly remembered, nameless & vaguely threatening deity - just take a look at some of their faces - may find himself being honoured by those who worship his successor has come to us via Ireland & also, for me, from Tibet. The famous example is the way in which some of the Catholic saints, such as St Brigit, were once Celtic deities. By a similar process, Buddhism became the state religion of Tibet - a medieval monastic religion with a lot of similarities, from the ordinary person in the fields' point of view, with Christianity. It encountered strong resistance from the Bön Po, often described as the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. More accurately Bön consisted of shamanistic, animistic & yogic doctrines of various kinds - a sort of Central Asian Paganism. Similarly, the new religion didn't demonise all the old deities - many were recruited. But the Old Gods were not made into quasi-historical saints as in Ireland, the process was a little different. They became guardians, & continued to protect the places of power with which they were associated & the newer traditions that took root there. One of these is a roaring head with bulging eyes &, you've got it, branches of foliage emerging from the corners of his mouth. Not sure, I asked a friend about this image, which I saw painted on the top of a tent. (It was in Italy, not in Asia.) He said: "He's a temple Guardian". Not only a guardian, but a temple guardian! Coincidence? OK, Tibet's a long way from here. Some of you may think that their religion is strange & exotic or something & it is certainly dangerous to make too strong a comparison, but the historical process which I am thinking of is probably a similar one.
On the outside of Coventry's old Cathedral the leaf mask faces are alongside animal like faces & grotesques of various kinds - not quite full blown gargoyles. My thesis is that we must look at some Green Man carvings in this kind of light - he was still alive in people's imaginations - very much so - & so he became an important defender of the faith. Blasphemy for some I'm sure, but I don't believe in blasphemy of any kind at all & I'm not writing this just to upset someone.
That does not make him unimportant - all too often he takes pride of place inside the church. The large beams at either end of the Marler Chapel were cut in such a way that something was intended to be added as a relief decoration in the middle of them. Where did those beams come from? Oak beams from the greenwood. There is a sense of memory & celebration of the wildness of nature going on here - this is part of God's power & glory too. There is an argument that the interiors of old churches & cathedrals mimic woodland glades, but I'm not sure how far we can take that one.
People often say that things like the Green Man or tree dressing or the Abbotts Bromley Horn Dance are "just pagan". There is some interesting history behind this comment. First of all my answer to those people is to point out that without the good will of the Church many, if not all of our traditional seasonal celebrations would have died out, even if the relationship of these celebratory traditions with the Church has been a chequered one down through time. During the reformation of course, there was little to distinguish the attitude of the authorities between "Pagan" & "Papist". These sorts of rural seasonal celebratory events & traditional characters would be more associated with the Catholicism which had learned to tolerate them than by the early Protestant Church or later, Cromwell's lot. But the Church has always recognised the value of local distinctiveness & the continuity that such things provide for people. So they're not "just pagan" it's more complicated than that.
How bloody was the Christianisation of Britain? For the most part it seems to have been a cultural & political process - ordinary people had more important things to worry about, like struggling to survive. Let us not forget the manner of the ousting of Pre -Christian religion by missionaries. Much of the time they seem to have cared more for bums on seats than for total conformity. They tended to build their churches on ancient places of worship & were probably fairly tolerant of what went on outside the church & set about trying to convert people. Interestingly, the much loved St Cuthbert of Northumberland wouldn't let a woman into any of his establishments, but you don't hear about his folks going out & punishing people for not practicing Christianity. Another kind of ambivalence.
In today's society the word Pagan is used in a perjorative sense in statements by Archbishops & the like. By it they seem to mean selfish, materialistic & unspiritual. But the origin of the word is in Latin, meaning "rural" or "rustic" (of the fields.) Most of the people who choose to call themselves Modern Pagans quite rightly react against the Archbishop's sweeping judgement - but is he actually referring to them or to a general malaise which he chooses to label that way? Paganism is a rapidly growing contemporary spiritual movement, which in contrast to much Traditional Religion & "New Age" thought finds the divine in the world, not elsewhere in Heaven or on the Astral Plane. In such a philosophy the man made of leaves is a special reminder that we are part of a sacred world.
In the case of the Leafy Gods, if I may call them that, their names are mostly forgotten. If we try to name them, we are, for the most part, speculating. Our Green Man, whose popularity has grown immensely over the past twenty years or so, is a synthesis of many traditions, some maybe very ancient, some maybe not so ancient. This does not matter. What matters is how we feel when we meet him. What he has to tell us about ourselves & our society & our world. I myself, without intention, have found myself providing him with one of his many contemporary voices. It is of course, a great honour & a terrific responsibility, not without its dangers.
In my performances I talk about the past, I talk about the present & I remind folks that the future is in their hands. The Green Man, for modern urban people, is not the King of Fertility who controls crops or the Woodland God whom one placates for success in the hunt. He stands for Nature with a capital N, the interdependence of our complex, way out society with a more primal ground. Ecological issues. Yes, he is still an ambivalent figure. He bridges the gap between a dimly remembered past & a post modern present as well as the human & non-human dimensions of the world.
