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'Fragrant smoke is sacred unto the gods'
GUESTBOOK
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Face to Face With The Green Man So who or what is the Green Man? This special report considers the revival of interest in a pagan Symbol for the 21st Century. We look at its origins, what they might mean and where and why you can find the Green Man today. The Search For The Foliate Face As I looked up at the ceiling boss above, it seemed as if the face staring down at me had a growth of vines beginning to spew forth from his mouth and oak and acanthus leaves surrounding his face like a halo of foliage. Incredibly, a Man In The Green was forming before my very eyes. He was awesome. The Green Man is alive and well and can be found all over the country. Not just a pub sign (although there about 30 pubs bearing that name in London alone), but as an ancient symbol from deep within our culture. You may know him as the Arthurian Green Knight or Robin Hood, you will still see him around May Day as Jack in the Green, in Mumming plays and Morris dancing and maybe as the Green George, a relative of St George. Rochester in Kent and Hastings in Sussex stage annual Jack in the Green festivals which shouldn’t be missed, counter balance to harvest festivals, in which a man dressed in leaves is paraded through the street. Most visibly he is a detailed stone carving of a man's face, immersed in foliage, with vines emerging from his mouth. These foliate heads can be found on buildings of all kinds inside and out. In churches and cathedrals look for him as a leafy head in roof bosses, on the tops of capitals, corbels, misericords, bench ends and on tombstones - he decorates sacred architecture everywhere. Norwich is a prime site in this country. The Cathedral there has Green Men on misericords and roof bosses in the cloisters dating from between 1287 and 1430. At Chartres in France he combines his energies with that of the labyrinth and peers out at today’s visitors from the doorway. There are more than forty in its magnificent west front (the royal portal) alone and many more in a large number of other places. Is it conceivable that the Green Man crept in as a pagan figure and has become perfectly acceptable. Canterbury Cathedral has at least 70 Green Men, with secular buildings in the city accounting for another 30 or so. ‘His gentle smile and the radiant foliage like a burst of sunlight.’ The earliest types of Green Men faces are made up of leaves; often oak leaves with the odd acorn. Later they have foliage sprouting from the eyes, ears nose and particularly mouth of the faces. But Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, built around 1446 and with Masonic and Knights Templar associations, has over 100, more than anywhere in the world. Many are close to the Gothic windows, where the foliage from the Green Man’s mouth blends into the surrounds. Says 60s rock musician Mike Harding* ‘I have discovered almost a thousand sites where the Green Man can be found in Britain alone. Some of them like Exeter Cathedral, St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh and Southwell Minster contain numerous heads so that the actual number of Green Man images that I alone know of is probably in excess two thousand’. He goes on ‘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 minsters, 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.’ Some of the earliest images of the Green Man are seen from 1340 at Manchester Cathedral. There are many from the medieval period, but no mention of them is made in literature. When in 1939 the scholar Lady Raglan named him in an article for a folklore journal, she related the leaf-entwined face to the lore of May Day ritual figures like Jack in the Green, or even to green-clad, forest-haunting Robin - whatever his identity it was as valid as it was verdant. Even our mundane architecture plays homage. At the steps leading up to the entrance at the hotel in Russell Square foliate faces can be seen in the brickwork.
Sacrificed King? On a bench end in the parish church at Charing, at the heart of Kent the foliate face is of a cat rather than a human. One explanation give by Nigel Rushbrook, Green Man investigator extraodinare is that, in former times, the cat was regarded as the embodiment of the Corn Spirit. From the green cat's mouth springs forth vegetation and fertility. In earlier times in France, cats were still being dressed in leaves and ribbons and loosed into the fields to celebrate harvest. In this the Green Cat or Man could be seen as representing the sacrificial victim - to ensure a good harvest for the next year, a payment that needed to be made. And there is strange legend about Charing church - that it contains the stone on which St John the Baptist was beheaded.
The Original Environmentalist It is said the Green Man ‘knows and utters the secret laws of nature; irrepressible life,’ what Dylan Thomas called "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age" He is claimed to be that spirit, energy or presence found in every cell of the plant kingdom that transmits itself to us through every green thing, flower, shoot or bud; in every tree we hug. Is the
Green Man as the late Dr Daniel Noel said, ‘an ancient pagan icon [that]
offers visions of a time we cannot remember? Noel thought he was some sort
of Jungian archetype ‘returning from a primeval past, a Celtic survival in
the psyche...it is enough that he is a green ideal and a good idea arriving
from wherever to inspire us.‘ Green Man Facts Experiencing The Green Man by Rob Hardy and Teresa Moorey (Capal Ban) has good sections on the practical side of finding the Green Man but also book a Green Man pathworking, celebration descriptions, and a full-blown ritual for invoking and linking with the Green Man, mask making and much more. *The
Little Book of the Green Man, Mike Harding (Arum Press) |
