The Green Man - An Image of Environmental Union
According to ancient mythology we are creatures of the soil, the children of Gaia the earth goddess.
Anthropologists have travelled the world studying the creation myths of a wide variety of native cultures, and found that most share the common belief that men and women were originally fashioned from the soil.
Adam gained his name because he was believed to have been fashioned from adama, which is the Hebrew word for earth.
His duty, according to the Old Testament, was not to conquer the wilderness but to 'serve the earth'.
The Babylonians shared a similar tradition, believing that man was made from a mixture of dust held together with the blood of one of the lesser gods.
As a result they made no sharp distinction between men and the gods they worshipped, because were all made from the same basic materials.
In our moments of reverie and inspiration we may have our heads in the clouds, but we're never happier, or more secure, than when we come down to earth and plant our feet on terra firma.
Like Antaeus in the Greek legend we derive our strength from contact with the soil.
Antaeus, the son of the earth goddess, became a champion wrestler because he gained fresh strength whenever he was thrown to the ground.
He was finally defeated by Hercules who, knowing his secret, held him up in the air so that he was far removed from the source of his vitality and power.
We suffer a similar loss of potency when we're caged in concrete jungles which sever our contact with mother earth.
Scratch the surface of a modern city dweller and below the wafer thin veneer of civilization will be found a wild man of the woods.
Our forebears had their origins in the primeval forests of Africa and we remain at heart a pastoral people.
We try to come to come to terms with the artificialities of modern living - the overcrowding, noise and endless bustle - but deep down we long for the security, peace and transcendental harmony of the wilderness experience.
Our peak experiences come when we are communing with nature.
At heart we remain pagans.
This helps explain the atavistic appeal of The Green Man, the pagan symbol of fertility, foliage and forests.
His haunting image should have been banished from our thoughts with the arrival of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but it still lingers on in our subconscious minds and retains it power to enchant us with it primitive allure.
The origins of the Green Man are lost in antiquity.
In some respects he resembles Sylvanus, the Roman god of the woods; in other he mirrors the passionate spirit of Bacchus and Dionysius.
He is portrayed with a foliate head, a face peering through a wreath of ivy, acanthus or vine tendrils, with evergreen foliage flowing from his mouth.
The earliest surviving sculpture of the foliate man is to be found on the tomb of St Abre at St Hilair-le-Grand which dates back to AD 400.
Since then the icon has appeared throughout the Western world on graves, in the vaulting of Ely cathedral, over the portals of Queen Anne houses in London, at the Palace of Westminster and on the gates to Kew Garden.
The Christian church from its outset has been anxious to ban all traces of pagan tree worship, yet it hasn't been able to banish the Green Man, which is displayed throughout Europe in both majestic Gothic cathedrals and tiny parish churches.
Chartres cathedral has over seventy foliate heads, and even a small country church like High Bickington in Devon contains thirty-seven.
Why is such prominence given to a seemingly outworn pagan symbol? In some ways the paradox is due to the uneasy and ambivalent attitude the Christian church has always had toward the primeval life force.
On the one hand this primordial, Dionysian force is seen as a source of lechery and sin; on the other as a glorious expression of God's handiwork.
The Green Man represents a synthesis of these two opposing views.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, had a different explanation.
He believed that images such as the Green Man were archetypes, or racial memories buried deep in the collective unconscious.
According to his theory of compensation, these archetypes were liable to well up at particular times and places to rectify the imbalances which exist in specific societies.
If this is true, what is the message that the Green Man brings our modern Western societies, which are showing an awakened interest in green living, the preservation of the environment, organic foods, and the development of sustainable energy sources? The foliate head displays the close link which exists between mankind and nature.
Man cannot exist without the sun's energy and the photosynthetic process it maintains within green plants.
Our need for grass, trees and shrubs is far greater than their need for us.
Is this the lesson we have to learn? These days we often regard nature as an adversary, a force that needs to be mastered and subdued because it brings us tempests, droughts, floods and earthquakes.
But the Green Man encourages us to adopt a totally different stance, for it reveals a face which is not severe but smiling and serene.
Whenever we view that benevolent head we should remember that the ecological message it brings is that he and we are one.
We are an inseparable part of the natural kingdom.
This subject is thoroughly explored in Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth, a beautifully illustrated book written by my late friend, William Anderson, the poet and historian.
© Donald Norfolk 2010
Anthropologists have travelled the world studying the creation myths of a wide variety of native cultures, and found that most share the common belief that men and women were originally fashioned from the soil.
Adam gained his name because he was believed to have been fashioned from adama, which is the Hebrew word for earth.
His duty, according to the Old Testament, was not to conquer the wilderness but to 'serve the earth'.
The Babylonians shared a similar tradition, believing that man was made from a mixture of dust held together with the blood of one of the lesser gods.
As a result they made no sharp distinction between men and the gods they worshipped, because were all made from the same basic materials.
In our moments of reverie and inspiration we may have our heads in the clouds, but we're never happier, or more secure, than when we come down to earth and plant our feet on terra firma.
Like Antaeus in the Greek legend we derive our strength from contact with the soil.
Antaeus, the son of the earth goddess, became a champion wrestler because he gained fresh strength whenever he was thrown to the ground.
He was finally defeated by Hercules who, knowing his secret, held him up in the air so that he was far removed from the source of his vitality and power.
We suffer a similar loss of potency when we're caged in concrete jungles which sever our contact with mother earth.
Scratch the surface of a modern city dweller and below the wafer thin veneer of civilization will be found a wild man of the woods.
Our forebears had their origins in the primeval forests of Africa and we remain at heart a pastoral people.
We try to come to come to terms with the artificialities of modern living - the overcrowding, noise and endless bustle - but deep down we long for the security, peace and transcendental harmony of the wilderness experience.
Our peak experiences come when we are communing with nature.
At heart we remain pagans.
This helps explain the atavistic appeal of The Green Man, the pagan symbol of fertility, foliage and forests.
His haunting image should have been banished from our thoughts with the arrival of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but it still lingers on in our subconscious minds and retains it power to enchant us with it primitive allure.
The origins of the Green Man are lost in antiquity.
In some respects he resembles Sylvanus, the Roman god of the woods; in other he mirrors the passionate spirit of Bacchus and Dionysius.
He is portrayed with a foliate head, a face peering through a wreath of ivy, acanthus or vine tendrils, with evergreen foliage flowing from his mouth.
The earliest surviving sculpture of the foliate man is to be found on the tomb of St Abre at St Hilair-le-Grand which dates back to AD 400.
Since then the icon has appeared throughout the Western world on graves, in the vaulting of Ely cathedral, over the portals of Queen Anne houses in London, at the Palace of Westminster and on the gates to Kew Garden.
The Christian church from its outset has been anxious to ban all traces of pagan tree worship, yet it hasn't been able to banish the Green Man, which is displayed throughout Europe in both majestic Gothic cathedrals and tiny parish churches.
Chartres cathedral has over seventy foliate heads, and even a small country church like High Bickington in Devon contains thirty-seven.
Why is such prominence given to a seemingly outworn pagan symbol? In some ways the paradox is due to the uneasy and ambivalent attitude the Christian church has always had toward the primeval life force.
On the one hand this primordial, Dionysian force is seen as a source of lechery and sin; on the other as a glorious expression of God's handiwork.
The Green Man represents a synthesis of these two opposing views.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, had a different explanation.
He believed that images such as the Green Man were archetypes, or racial memories buried deep in the collective unconscious.
According to his theory of compensation, these archetypes were liable to well up at particular times and places to rectify the imbalances which exist in specific societies.
If this is true, what is the message that the Green Man brings our modern Western societies, which are showing an awakened interest in green living, the preservation of the environment, organic foods, and the development of sustainable energy sources? The foliate head displays the close link which exists between mankind and nature.
Man cannot exist without the sun's energy and the photosynthetic process it maintains within green plants.
Our need for grass, trees and shrubs is far greater than their need for us.
Is this the lesson we have to learn? These days we often regard nature as an adversary, a force that needs to be mastered and subdued because it brings us tempests, droughts, floods and earthquakes.
But the Green Man encourages us to adopt a totally different stance, for it reveals a face which is not severe but smiling and serene.
Whenever we view that benevolent head we should remember that the ecological message it brings is that he and we are one.
We are an inseparable part of the natural kingdom.
This subject is thoroughly explored in Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth, a beautifully illustrated book written by my late friend, William Anderson, the poet and historian.
© Donald Norfolk 2010
Source...