The Green Man
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Who is the Green Man?
The story behind the face in the leaves
The Green Man is question is nothing to do with Roswell or tinned sweetcorn. He most commonly appears as a head, either entirely composed of leaves (a foliate head), or with leaves and branches emerging from the mouth ( a spewing head).
Origins of the Green Man
Although many people associate plant-man hybrids with nightmares about biotechnology, a recent bright idea, the Green Man is very old indeed. He is especially associated with May Day, traditionally called Beltane, and symbolises the return of life and fertility to the land after the winter.
Many more detailed suppositions exist about the Green Man and what he might represent. A slightly pompous leaflet in the Chapterhouse at York Minster claims that the Green Man was associated with a pre-Christian 'cult of the head', before being tamed and shoehorned into a metaphor for Easter. A more likely school of thought is that the green man was too well established and popular to be beaten off by some eleventh hour desert-based upstarts, and so the Church had to grudgingly work round him, like an elderly relative at any family Christmas. Anyway, the Green Man is still with us today, and unlike many other gods does not seem to belong to anyone in particular. This is good news as in many cases interesting deities seem to belong to people with very rigid ideas about how to please them and what they want, and who tend to frown upon more individual interpretations of these things. The Green man is ambiguous enough to avoid being imprisoned by dogma, but defined enough to avoid disappearing entirely.
Where to find the Green Man
Familiar haunts
Although heading to the woods seems like a sensible place to start looking for the Green Man, and I'm sure he is there, he can also be found in one form or another on most old churches in the U.K . I have seen a few nice examples on the West Front at York Minster, and also in the chapterhouse there.
