The Mystery of the Green Man

The Face in the Leaves

His face stares down at us from the roofs and pillars of our great

cathedrals and churches. He is found all over England, some parts of

Wales and Scotland and a few rare places in Ireland. His roots may

go back to the shadow hunters who painted the caves of Lascaux and

Altimira and may climb through history through Robin Hood and the

Morris Dances of Old England to be chiseled in wood and stone even

to this day by men and women who no longer know his story but sense

that something old and strong and tremendously important lies behind

his leafy mask. He is the Green Man, Jack in the Green, the Old Man

of the Woods, Green George and many other things to many other men.

The Beginning of the Search

I first came across him twenty odd years ago in the Folk Shop in

Cecil Sharp House in London where I had gone to buy some guitar

strings and plectrums. Amongst the pipes and tabors and the John

Pearse guitar tutors was a curious plaque, a resin cast of a wooden

carving of a human head, with branches bearing fruit sprouting from

the mouth. The man who ran the shop didn't know where he had come

from or when, though he knew that it was 'a Green Man,' which he said

was 'some kind of fertility symbol or other' and would cost me seven

pounds ten shillings. I bought him and took him home. My family were

used to me turning up with strange things and when I put the Green

Man up on my study wall they tapped the sides of their heads and

regarded it as yet another of my aberrations, to go along with my

attempts to make wine from dandelions and soup from nettles, both

of which had filled the house with the smell of dead and rotting

vegetation and had almost poisoned them.

Over the years, travelling the road in my day job as journeyman

comic cum folk singer, I kept bumping into the Green Man, in tiny

churches and great minstrels, hidden in corners and blazoned on the

bosses. One day in Exeter Cathedral I worked out that images of the

Green Man outnumbered those of Christ by about five to one and it

seemed to me that something as ubiquitous as the Green Man must have

a story waiting to be told, and that if only I could dig deep enough

I might be able to discover that story.

Gathering the Harvest

Well years later I'm still digging and I still haven't come to the

bottom of the story. I have discovered almost nine hundred sites

where the Green Man can be found in Britain alone. Some of them like

Exeter and Southwell Minster contain numerous heads so that the

actual number of Green Man images that I alone know of is probably

at least two thousand. A church like St Boniface's in Bunbury which

only lists one Green Man in it's official handbook has in fact five

as well as a Green Lion spewing branches from its mouth. Driving

through Humberside and Lincolnshire a few weeks ago I found myself

in a lovely village called Saxilby. Though I have never found any

reference to Green Men appearing in the church there, I thought I

might as well have a look since I'd plenty of time to spare. I found

three fine Green Men on bosses on the wooden roof of the aisles.

Stories in the Leaves

I'm often asked who he is and whether there is a Green Lady. The

answer to both those questions is that I don't know, though I do

have a several theories that I'm working on. There is a strong

reason to believe that the Green Man, as an image, is extremely old.

Paintings on cave walls showing shamanic dancers may be depicting an

earlier form of the image. Temple columns from the Mediterranean

show him as a leaf mask on the capitals and in this country from the

eleventh century on he appears in the churches and cathedrals. The

only pattern I have found so far is that he seems to appear in his

greatest concentration wherever there are stretches of old relict

woodlands. Thus the biggest collections I have discovered so far

seem to be in Devon and Somerset and on the edge of the great

forests of Yorkshire and the Midlands. Southwell Minster for example

which has some wonderful Green Men in the Chapter House is on the

edge of the old forest of Sherwood. It could be that the images

represent the God of the Woods, the Life Spirit, the Spirit of Death

and Resurrection and as an image the Green Man has his counterpart

in one of the oldest English Folk images, the Corn or Barley God

whose beginnings stretch back to the camps of the Neolithic farmers.

An old English Folk Song collected in the early years of this

century tells of such a god, John Barleycorn who was cut down by

three men who 'came out of the West their fortunes for to try'. They

let the dead Corn Spirit 'They let Him lie for a long long

time 'till the rain from Heaven did fall, Then little Sir John

sprung up his head which so amazed them all.'

The Green Man has other manifestations as Jack in the Green, the

character who dances ahead of the May Queen in many May Day

processions such as those at Hastings and Knutsford. A lord of

misrule figure he may be also linked to Robin Hood, Robin Goodfellow

and Puck.

The Green Man Goes To Church

Christianity today is strictly monotheistic, since the Reformation

even the Saints and the Virgin Mary have been consigned to a lesser

circle of the pantheon. It is possible (though no documentary

evidence exists to support this idea) that no such clear definition

existed before the fifteenth century and that in order to get

followers of 'the Old Religion into church, cult figures such as the

Green man were brought into the Churches. A great number of the

images and practices of the modern church have a Pagan origin. Yew

trees and Holy Water, candles and bells, the dates of most of the

major religious festivals, the fact that many of the oldest churches

are on Pagan sites (some even within stone circles) and that saints

like Brigid or Bride are Christian versions of the Pagan Goddess

Brid, all indicate a stronger Pagan influence on Christianity than

the Church has often cared to admit. The Green Man therefore may be

just another example of a Pagan image brought into the Church to be

made safe.

As to the Green Lady, well there is good reason to believe that the

cult of the Virgin Mary which was suppressed with such vigor by the

Reformation and by the Puritans was related to the worship of the

Green Man's female counterpart. One of the Green Man's

manifestations was as Robin Hood, the Lord of the Merry Greenwood.

This Robin Hood had nothing to do with the bows and arrows and

Sheriff of Nottingham stories. He was an older and more powerful

figure and the Robin of Loxley figure was grafted on much later.

Robin Hood was a lord of Misrule as well as the King of the Wood.

His lady was Maid Marion and thus the Merry Greenwood and Merry Men

thus become Mary's Greenwood and Mary's Men and the Morris Dancers

who danced on May Day got their name not from the Moors or

Morriscoes but from Mary - they were Mary's dancers and their dances

when they leap into the air are a symbol of Life triumphing over

death.

The Green Man in India

Recent searches have taken me to India and Nepal where I have

discovered the Green Man in one of two forms. As a simple foliate

head similar to those seen in Europe and as a spewing or uttering

head with foliage (sometimes highly stylized) coming from his mouth.

In this form he is often given the name Kirtimukha or 'The Face of

Glory' and may have a mainly apotropaic function. But meanings are

culture specific where images are not and the Green Man can mean

many things to many people. Apo Kayan - a Guardian of the Forest

perhaps? If we suppose a common Indo-European origin for our

language then the idea of symbols and myths travelling across to

Europe from India and Persia seems less than fanciful to me. There

was a known two way traffic between East and West from well before

the Middle Ages, the Silk Route and the Spice Route didn't just

bring goods West, they also took Amber, lead and other goods East.

People traveled with these goods and ideas went with them too. The

idea of boundaries and frontiers or race or mythologies is a neat

fixation of the past offered to us by the kind of scholars that like

to see the White Man and all his works and glories as the great

civilizing influence upon the world. There is a poem by Brecht that

asks who built the Seven Gated City of Thebes, the answer being of

course that it was not the kings or princes but the little men and

women who sat huddled by the fires outside the city walls.

Travelling masons, labourers, woodcarvers, storytellers took images

and myths with them and knew no boundaries of race or creed. Jesus

is Osiris is Odin is John Barleycorn is the Holly King

who is victorious over Winter and Death.

Since I began my search for the Green Man I have discovered that for

every answer there are at least a dozen questions and I am no near a

firm understanding of this mysterious figure than I was when I

started. I do know one thing though, a symbol that is found all over

Western Europe and which appeared in the churches and cathedrals

over a four hundred year period was neither something trivial nor

purely decorative. The Green Man has a story to tell, if only we

could hear it.

I am offering these notes/images/ideas in the spirit of knowledge

and ask only that you respect that. Ideas are not copyright and I am

merely picking up and running with a ball that was first thrown into

the air by Lady Raglan and was carried much further by Kathleen

Basford and William Anderson. The book of my work In Search of the

Green Man will be published in 1998 if the force that through the

green fuse still drives the flower is still with me.

Mike Harding - 1996