Despite his striking image there are few stories about the Green Man. He tends to show up in disguise as Pan or Cerrunos, Bacchus or Radergast. One story, ’Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, casts him in the role of a self-regenerating warrior who rides into the castle keep of Camelot, bursting in on consciousness, challenging all present to fight him, one blow in return for another. Gawain accepts and beheads the knight thinking this might slow him down a bit, but the Green Knight just laughs. He picks up his head and rides off saying they will meet in a year and a day when the blow will be returned but not so readily endured.
Gawain undergoes a series of trials, secretly set by the Green Knight himself. He arrives finally at the appointed hour facing almost certain death. But Gawain is spared. The Green Knight, it now transpires, is acting on behalf of King Arthur and has been commissioned, along with Morgan le Fay, a powerful witch, to test the honour and bravery of Arthur’s knights. Here, the Green Knight seems to be a psychopomp of the individuation process. He not only tests but also helps and has compassion for his charges as he oversees their development.
I had always thought of the Green Man as quintessentially British, baked into the folklore but it turns out not to be so. The reason there are so few stories about the Green Man is perhaps because he is actually an immigrant to the British Isles. The Green Man migrated from India via Iran in the second century, Italy, France and `finally aboard the boats of Norman invaders who decorated churches all over Britain with his image.
The stage for the Green Man’s debut in Britain was set centuries before he arrived and thousands of miles away at the battle of Actium 31BCE. This was a battle fought between Marc Anthony and Cleopatra on the one side who supported the old Roman republic and Emperor Octavian who preferred a more direct approach to government and subsequently became the first Emperor of imperial Rome, the first God-Man. Octavian changed his name to Augustus, the Increaser, hinting at a divine or sacred authority. He proclaimed himself son of the Gods and replaced their images on Legionary standards with his own. He was not simply in charge.
It was with this newly minted imperial mind-set that his grand nephew Claudius then invaded Britain, an invasion which was now idealogical as well as territorial. There could be only one man-god. Claudius’ subsequent persecution of the religious orders of ancient Britain is legendary. He sent his general Suetonius to eradicate all native spiritual practice which he did most efficiently, destroying sacred sites and killing all members of the druidic order at that time.
A thousand years of Dark Ages passed, during which time the Green Man was making his way slowly across Asia Minor and Europe, drawn by this massive wound to the British psyche at the hands of imperial zeal whose rooting out and purging of the old gods had been both ruthless and systematic. Nature abhors a vacuum. By quirk of fate and 1066 the Roman church then brought to Britain gothic art and the compelling images of foliate heads on the doors and eves of its cathedrals.
For another thousand years the Green Man waited in the vaulted ceilings and stone masonry of the church, making it home. Then, on the brink of the Second World War and the orgy of destruction about to unfold from the industrial mechanisation of our world, Lady Raglan wrote an article first using the name, ‘the Green Man’ in the magazine ‘Folklore’. This so gripped public imagination that the Green Man was widely if retrospectively adopted as a national figure, albeit one of 20thC folklore, a symbol nevertheless around which some hope for regeneration and the rewilding of our collective imagination might gather. The Green Man’s response to imperial destruction is what you might expect given his reputation for regeneration. He came back.
The Green man is a trickster. Not only did he manage to smuggle himself into Britain but he gets himself quietly adopted by a culture which then agrees he was always there. Moreover, he will insist on sprouting, sometimes in the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways but always in response to a need, a feeling of loss or fear or barrenness.
I wonder if the predominance of the Green Man’s image over actual stories about him of any kind isn’t testimony to how old he is, like the ice giants of Norse mythology or the Titans of Greek mythology. We have few details as such but more a sense of their energy and presence. The Green Man is elemental, unknown, save the disposition to surprise and delight, to restore and regenerate.
Whilst the Green Man is traditionally associated with seasonal cycles he is particularly connected to Spring because of this emphasis on regeneration, clinically relevant because it is really rather different from the idea of transformation. The Green Man could be thought of as a chthonic form of Mogenson’s ‘Dove in the consulting room’, to remind us that growth happens by itself once optimum light, warmth and soil are provided.
These different models find common ground in Hildegaard of Bingen’s ‘Viriditas’, latin for ‘greeness’, a dynamic principle of regenerative greening, a metaphor of life returning to an inhospitable inner land via natural processes which revitalise and invigorate, a response to difficult material surfacing in consciousness. Dream images of greening often herald new growth and change, the return of life, warmth, abundance. Simply being out in Nature is profoundly restorative, helping us connect with ourselves and underscoring what’s important in life, simple things and precious others.
