#green spring

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THE GREEN MAN

Category: British folklore, European arts and Neopagan customs

The Green Man is a very unique entity. A folkloric being without a folklore, a pagan spirit without a religion, an iconic face that is… literally that. An iconic face. An icon. An image. A motif. A portrait. A face.

In 1939, Lady Raglan (wife of Fitzroy Richard Sommerset, Baron Raglan) published an article in “The Folklore Journal” called “The Green Man in Church Architecture”. In this article, Lady Raglan drew attention towards a phenomenon of English architecture that was called then “the foliate head”, but that she renamed “The Green Man”, and this appellation stuck to this day.

What is a “Green Man”? A Green Man is usually a face (rarely a full body) carved onto a building – well, not just any building, onto the most important buildings of an English city. So, in first place churches and cathedrals, second place the pubs. These faces are also called “foliate masks” because the specificity of a Green Man face is that it is a human face interconnected or “made” with plants elements. A Green Man face ranges from a human face peering out of a thick foliage, to an optical illusion where a carved foliage is shaped like a human face, passing by men faces with leaves instead of hair, beard or mustache. These faces were carved everywhere in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and while most of them are found in England, which seemingly took a strong liking to them, Green Men are found in lesser number in churches and cemeteries of other European countries, such as France or Germany. Architecture and art experts have identified three main types of “foliate heads”. First is the “Foliage Head”, a human head covered in leaves ; second is the “Disgorging Head”, a man head vomiting foliage and branches ; third is the “Bloodsucker Head”, a male face with vines and plants coming out of all of its orifices (ears, nose, mouth…). The presence of the Green Man in Renaissance architecture was put to a stop with the Reformation (those protestants didn’t like things that seemed too pagan), before starting anew in the 19th century with the neo-Gothic and Victorian architectures (and at this point the fashion spread to other countries connected to England, such as the United-States or Australia).

So… The Green Man is an established architectural tradition. A weird face people had the habit to carve in churches and pubs. Alright… But who is the Green Man? That’s the big question. Lady Raglan put forth a bold theory that became massively spread: she wrote that the “Green Man” was the same entity known by the names of “Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of May, the Garland King – the central figure to the European May Day celebrations”. Now, this affirmation has led up to a LOT of debate, and I will talk about the Green Man’s connection to the May Day celebrations later in this post, but Lady Raglan theory held that the Green Man was a pre-Christian deity of life and nature.

And this is pretty much the consensus of everybody. The Green Man used to be a pagan symbol that survived and was reused in a Christianized world. Mind you, there are many Christian theories and interpretations of the Green Man – after all, he appears a lot in Christian structures like cathedrals or cemeteries; and the Green Man was even used to illustrate and ornate Bibles! Some claim it is a symbol of the sins of the flesh consuming the sinner, others will prefer interpreting it as the Holy Spirit breathing life into the world, some even claim it is a visual metaphor of Jesus… But these theories clearly don’t hold much power, especially when you consider how old and widespread the Green Man figure is: the oldest Green Man depictions aren’t actually European, but from the Middle and Far-East. 11th century Green Men in Jerusalem, 8th century Green Man in Rajasthan, and the oldest Green Men ever found were in Lebanon and Iraq, and dated from the 2nd century. This all led to the theory that the “Green Man” maybe originated as a symbol in Asia Minor, before being brought over to Europe – there is also a whole theory in Islamic Sufism of the Green Man being a warped form of the esoteric figure known as Khidr, the Green One, but that’s a whole other talk…

So, the pagan roots of the Green Man cannot be denied. A lot of candidates and theories for the Green Man’s real identity were proposed, some reasonable, some stretched, some really far fetched. Odin, Mimir, Lud, Freyr were all brought to the table, but a clear focus was given to ancient deities of vegetation who were said to have symbolically died and resurrected, such as Osiris or Attis. This is because the Green Man symbol seems to be strongly connected to the topics of life, fertility, growth/regrowth and rebirth. The most reasonable and England-centric theories evoke mostly two direct origins of the Green Man – Celtic and Roman. On the Celtic route, there is always the Cernunnos theory, because some Green Man are depicted with antlers, or with tiny animal faces replacing the leaves covering or being disgorged by the face – which, coupled with the face being that of a mature, often bearded man, all bring back the idea people have of the deity Cernunnos. The other aspect rather has an approach tying the Green Man to the Roman heritage of England, pointing out similar male, leaf-covered deities and figures of nature – Bacchus, Sylvanus, Vertumnus… Especially telling is a “Green Man” of the Romanized England times found carved in the ruins of a villa, but whose vegetation was identified as seaweed and was thought to have represented Neptune, the Roman god of the waters.

Overall, a lot of theories, a lot of discussions, a lot of potential candidates behind this face… And another debated and mysterious topic is the reason this vegetation mask was used in the first place in buildings as religious and sacred as churches out of all things. (The presence of the Green Man in pubs isn’t much problematic – “The Green Man” being a recurring symbol and a typical name of English pubs). One side argues that the Green Man figure was demonized and devilized by the Christians, and probably used in a similar way to the gargoyles in the religious architecture – another grotesque figure supposed to repel evil spirits while frightening people away from badness. The other side rather invokes the full adoption of the pagan figure into the Christian customs, evoking other cases of the old pagan religion becoming part of the culture of Christian Britain (Samhain becoming All Saints/All Souls Day, or the goddess Brigid becoming Saint Brigit). One theory will have you claim that the stonemasons and carpenters secretly kept alive a pagan tradition or believed in an old superstition tied to the Green Man, and secretly carved the head on their most important works in hope of some fertility reward, but given how well-known the Green Man is the “secret” wasn’t apparently well kept, if it existed in the first place. A more reasonable theory rather takes a strong interest in the idea of the Green Man as a symbol tied to death, since in cemeteries and on graves we have a lot of skeletons wrapped in ivy, or with plants sprouting from their eye sockets, making them a more morbid version of the Green Man face – in this theory the idea of a head wrapped or disgorging plants would either be a memento mori about decay (plants growing out of a corpse’s rot) or a hopeful illustrations of rebirth (life formed out of the dead).

So many possibilities, so little answers… But modern consensus generally agrees that the Green Man figure is now a sort of spirit of nature, a personification of vegetation, or the symbol of mankind and nature united in a perfect balance.

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Lady Raglan’s affirmations of how the Green Man is “Jack-in-the-Green, and Robin Hood, and the May King/Garland King of May Day celebrations” should be taken with caution, because Lady Raglan never hid the fact that she was heavily influenced by the famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) book “The Golden Bough”, one of the first big books about comparative religion and finding the archetypes common in European mythologies – but that is as much renowned for its brand new approach to the topic as it was for setting up a lot of artificial interpretations and fake trends. So yes, caution here. But despite that, Lady Raglan was onto something… The figure of the Green Man seems to have had many different incarnations or “cousins” in English culture – the most commonly invoked being Robin Hood (a man dressed in green, living in the forests with or sometimes within the trees, and who was as much a mascot of pubs as the Green Man) or the British Father Christmas (dressed in green too, and crowned with ivy, yew and holly). Most notorious of these “cultural doubles” is however Jack-in-the-Green, a tradition of May Day celebrations in England where a man wears over their upper body a pyramidal or conical wicker structure covered in leaves and foliage, with only their face peeking out of the leaves (if it is out at all, as many Jack in the Green have their face hidden by the foliage). This character, also called Jack o’ Green, traditionally walks alongside the musicians of May Day celebrations, and was believed by Lady Raglan to be another incarnation of the same pre-Christian deity the Green Man corresponded to. Unfortunately this has been proven wrong, as the Jack o Green tradition is proven to have started out in the 18th century and not have existed before that – but Lady Raglan’s theory became so famous that upon the Jack o Green revival (the tradition had died out by the early 20th century, but starting with the 70s, various revivalist groups and neo-pagans decided to bring back the Jack-in-the-Green in May Day celebrations), the figure often became depicted as identical to the Green Man (for example having actors dressed up as Robin Hood and Maid Marian escort the Jack-in-the-Green, or having other actors play the role of “Bogies”, the Jack o Green’s acolytes, as green-skinned men dressed in clothes of foliage).

Beyond these specific figures, there are records of a tradition of “green man” and “green men” strongly present in England – from the expression “green man” being used to denote savage inhabitants of the wild or the people of the old countryside, to actual “green men”, men dressed in leaves and holding clubs, appearing in festivities and parades – there is a set of interesting articles about the history of the Green Man and its existence in English culture here (https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2021/01/introducing-the-green-man/) and here (https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2021/02/what-was-the-green-man/). And this tradition also dwells into the literary domain, as another “cousin” of the Green Man is the Green Knight from the famous Arthurian romance “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (the Arthurian world was another place where the old paganism coexisted alongside Christianity) – E. K. Chambers wrote several decades before Lady Raglan made her article, about how the literary Green Knight was very likely a manifestation of the “green man of the peasantry, who dies and lives again” (see “The Mediaeval Stage”)…