Chris and I set off on Saturday to see if we could find any more examples of the Green Man for our Wiltshire Green Men website At the Sign of the Black Cat. We decided that we had to bite on the bullet and visit some of the town churches in West Wiltshire, so we started with Warminster and went on to Westbury, Melksham and Corsham. Far too many of these were kept locked. Then we couldn’t stand it any longer and went back to village churches for our last two checks.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the green man, specificately about whether he was sneaked into churches by undercover pagans back in mediaeval times. I feel that is most unlikely. What seems to have happened is that during the Romaneque period churchmen went on the pilgrimage to Saint Iago di Compostela in Spain, following the pilgrim route through France and Spain. In many of the churches on the route they saw green men – foliate heads, or spewing foliage – and when they came back to Britain they recalled this and had green men carved in their churches too.
There are two main forms of the green man: the foliage head and the foliage-spewer. The foliate head, where the face is made up of leaves, does seem to derive from pagan Greek and Roman forms, but it’s important to recognise that it was used in the mediaeval Christian church to make a Christian point. As was the foliage-spewing green man also, but his origins are even more interesting. He has been very convincingly shown to have come to Europe from India, where he/it was known as the kirttimukha.
A really great book on the subject is Mercia McDermott’s Explore Green Men, published by Heart of Albion Press. She considers the green man’s origins and variants in great detail, and gradually works back in time to its origins in India. Well, I’m convinced by her arguments, anyway!
What is certain though is that the Pagan community has picked up on the green man and recognised his relevance as a symbol of nature and the green movement. I certainly relate strongly to the green man as an image, and I am able to set aside his past role within the Christian church, which was of its time, and focus on his new role as guardian of the greenwood and of all that is green and growing. It doesn’t matter that this is a relatively recent interpretation – who says things have to be ancient to be real or relevant?
We found three green men, by the way, and one green frog. Although none of our finds were mainstream green men in form, they were all rare and interesting. They’ll appear on the website very soon.
