(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Chapter 2 The Green Man in Antiquity
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…is the mask form, which is the creation of Roman sculptors in the first century AD; the other is in Celtic art from before the Roman conquest of Gaul.
…Celtic cult of the human head and the former under the influence of the mystery religions widely practised in the Roman Empire, it is likely that both go back to a common source in prehistoric times.
…the matriarchal religion of the Neolithic period of the first farmers centred on and around the Danube Basin.
…great festivals… ploughing and sowing, harvesting, and the slaughter of the beasts…in the fifth and fourth millennia before Christ..
…the snake, the Great Goddess, the young hero and the sacred tree…
…Mohenjodaro and Harappa in India…
…Avebury and Stonehenge.
… Marija Gimbutas… ‘the ithyphallic masked god’: son, lover and guardian of the Great Goddess… from whom Dionysos descends… first appears in Roman art in the context of the Dionysiac mysteries… ancestor of the Green Man.
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…lament at harvest time the death of the young god Tammuz in the regions of Mesopotamia.
…the beloved of Innana-Ishtar, the powerful goddess of love and voluptuousness… Palestine… Baal and his sister-consort Anat, and also the goddess Ashtaroth or Asherah who was both a goddess of the sea and a sacred tree.
Lopped trees called asherim sacred to her were set up in Semitic sanctuaries and they even stood in the Temple of Jerusalem—so powerful was this goddess—until the reforms of Josiah in 615 BC.
36
…Lebanon in the goddess Astarte and her lover Eshmun, a vegetation god of the region of Byblos. For the Greek and Roman worlds Astarte became Aphrodite and Eshmun was known as Adonis…
Byblos. In this steep, cliff-hung and water-resounding place the temple of Astarte stood until Constantine the Great had it destroyed.
... Adonis is born from a tree.
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…he hunted the fiercest beasts and was wounded in the groin by a wild boar, which is the best of winter. Aphrodite came upon his mortally wounded body and in her grief she turned his blood into the red anemone flower.
In Greece the chief festival was celebrated after the harvest, when women would perform the funeral rites of Adonis…
Osiris and Isis were the children of the earth god Geb, who was sometimes represented as covered in verdure…
Osiris was the great civilizer and teacher; he taught his subjects the arts of agriculture, of bakery, and of making beer and wine. He built the first temples and taught men how to sculpt and to make music. Then he set out on a journey to conquer the earth by the pacific means of art and music, leaving Isis as his regent in Egypt. He traveled throughout Asia to India, subduing all peoples with his civilizing influences. When he returned to Egypt in triumph, he went to a banquet given by his brother Set, who secretly hated him and desired to rule in his stead. Set killed him by enclosing his body in a chest which was thrown into the Nile and floated out to sea. Isis, distracted with grief, went wandering in search of her husband’s body. The chest had come ashore at Byblos and rested at the foot of a tree variously described as a tamarisk or a heather. The tree grew to an enormous size, enclosing, the chest in its girth. The King of Byblos had the tree cut down to serve as a pillar for the roof of his palace.
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There it gave off so wonderful a scent that Isis heard of it and knew that it must contain Osiris’ body. She traveled to Byblos where she became the nurse of the king’s son. The queen Astarte came upon her one day when she was conferring the gift of immortality on the baby in her care by bathing it in flames. The startled queen interrupted her and Isis was force to reveal her true name and her purpose in coming there. The generous king and queen gave her the trunk of the tree, from which she extracted the chest containing the body. She took the body back to Egypt, where she hid it in the swamps of Buto in fear of Set finding it. Set, relentlessly pursuing his quest of hatred, found the body, cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them widely. Isis began her search again and regained every piece except the phallus, which had been devoured by a crab. She reconstituted his body, making a new phallus for it, and or the first time she performed on it the rites of embalmment, thereby resurrecting him to eternal life.
…the cult of Isis to be transported out of its native Egypt as one of the most influential of all the mystery religions of the Roman Empire, finding acceptance in the Rhineland, Gaul and Roman Britain.
…long after Christianity had crushed many other pagan rites and religions. Her chief temple at Philae was turned into a church only in the sixth century and many of her attributes and iconography were transferred…to the Virgin Mary in the Romanesque period, when the Green man also was to appear in a new form.
The Greeks had earlier identified Isis variously with Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone and the Eleusinian Mother of Corn at the climax of whose rites came the cry, “The noble goddess has borne a sacred child. Brimo has borne Brimos.” They also identified Osiris with Apollo, Hades, and Dionysos—with Apollo because of his civilizing influence and his cultivation of music and the arts, with Hades because of his role as lord of the underworld, and with Dionysos because of his invention of beer and wine and his association with the fertility of the earth.
38
Isis was a warm, loving and tolerant goddess…
The resemblances of these rites to the story and ritual of Easter have often been commented upon: the comparison has been made between the entry of the reed bearers to Palm Sunday and the carrying of the tree to Christ’s carrying of the cross; and there are strong similarities in the mourning of the death and the resurrection form the tomb, as well as, of course, in the time of the ceremonies. As was noted earlier, comparisons have also been made between the later spring and May festivals of Europe which may descend in part from the rites of Cybele (see. p.27). the cult was certainly spread widely throughout the Roman Empire, and if I mention it here at some length it is because of the resemblances between Attis and the Green Man, first in the sacred tree bearing the image of the god, second in the possible effect of the rites of Cybele on later folk customs, and third in the resurrection theme as will be seen in the frequent association of the Green Man with this theme in the context of Christian iconography.
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…begin with the union of Zeus with Persephone. Dionysos under the name of Zagreus was the fruit of this union wand Zeus intended him to be his heir. Jealous Titans killed the child, cutting up and devouring all his body except his heart, which was saved by Athene. Zeus took his vengeance on the Titans by reducing them to ashes, from which the race of mankind arose. From the heart of Dionysos a love potion was made: this was given to Semele, daughter of the King of Thebes, so that she should fall in love with Zeus. Dionysos was reborn in her womb.
From the satyr plays rose the great traditions of Greek drama…
…Dionysos…one of the most popular mystery religions of the Roman Empire, centred on his myths.
…Neo-Platonist interpretation of the myths.
… Dionysos is identified with the mind of this world, the ‘mundane intellect’.
40
There were many representations of the god. One used in initiation rites was a huge bearded mask wreathed with vine or ivy leaves. This was laid on a winnowing basket to conceal the sacred symbols, including a phallus made of figwood. Sometimes Dionysos is shown as an old man at the point when he goes to the underworld and he is also mysteriously in this underworld aspect identified with Okeanos, called by Homer the origin of the gods.
Plutarch wrote into his wife on the death of their daughter begging her to console herself with the assurance of immortality to be found in traditional belief and in the Dionysiac mysteries.
The Celtic races, according to Caesar, had a firm belief in the immortality of the soul.
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…the Celtic god Cerunnos. He too is probably a descendent of the same lover of the Goddess from whom the ancestry of Dionysos is traced. Dionysos, from being a god of beer, turned into the god of wine and his sway, until the Roman conquest of North-West Europe, was limited to the wine-growing regions of the Mediterranean. His distant cousin, however, was a god of the forests. Often portrayed with antlers growing from his brow, he was attended by deer and snakes and other wild animals, and he too suffered death and exile in the underworld. …the period after the Roman conquest and settlement of Gaul and Britain.
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Just as into the healing waters of the Goddess Sequana at the source of the Seine were thrown sculptures of the afflicted parts of the bodies of those seeking cures, so the Celts may have sacrificed the appropriate symbol of what they particularly needed. Thus, the Gundestrup Cauldron—the symbol of fruitfulness and plenty—man have been allowed to sink into the bog at a time of great dearth.
Sometimes, it is thought, they made artifacts deliberately for the purpose of sacrifice…
The fate of the Gundestrup Cauldron seems to proclaim a message from the Celts, just as the vegetation of the earth must die for it to be renewed again, so the beauty of art must be destroyed or hidden for new art to arise—a message implicit in the myths and images that were to be fused into the Green Man.
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Death, metamorphosis and rebirth are themes in the Celtic myth that has been deduced form the Gundestrup Cauldron…
…the mother goddess who marries first a sky god, Taranis, and then an earth god, Esus-Cernunnos This earth god is known as Esus in the spring when he is the god of vegetation and the lover of the Great Goddess, and after his death as Cernunnos who is half man and half stag. Cernunnos becomes the god of the underworld, like Osiris, and of riches, like Pluto. Esus-Cernunnos returns to become the lover of the Goddess again at the end of winter through the help of a human hero called Smertius who bears many resemblances to Hercules. Smertius kills one of Taranis’ watchdogs; in revenge for this and for being deserted by the Great Goddess, Taranis turns the Great Goddess and her two attendants into cranes. Smertius restores them to human form by sacrificing three divine bulls and then he sacrifices a stag to enable Cernunnos to return to earth and marry the Goddess.
In the interior plaque he appears in a position that recalls a yogic asana. There is a similar portrayal of an antlered god on a seal form Harrappa two thousand tears earlier in date. This is said to represent the god Pasupati, who is an aspect of Shiva.
… power of the image is concentrated on the head, though here his arms are also shown holding deer by the hind legs.
This concentration on the head is particularly important to the development of the Green Man for the following reasons. The human head, either severed or considered on its won, was an object of particular veneration to the Celts. It was the seat of inspiration, foreknowledge, prophecy; it promoted fertility and could act as a guardian to drive away evil forces. They placed skulls in their shrines, as a Roquepertuse. They would put them round their buildings and over their gateways. They also carved the human head in wood and stone and would set the carvings inauspicious places. Many heads of Cernunnos have been found with holes for inserting antlers or vegetation. Some heads have two or three faces. The practice of placing roughly carved heads in stone wall s of fields to promote fertility certainly continued into the present century in Britain and may still be a current rite. The veneration of the head survives in many legends—of heads that spoke by sacred wells, of Bran the Blessed whose head continued to be a delightful companion after he was decapitated. His head was placed on the site of the Tower of London to guard the country from invasion [n24 The Mabinogion].
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New artistic styles could well arise form the syncretism of religions brought about in a common centre of civilization.
…Cernunnos appears frequently in the remains of Gallo- and Britanno-Roman art, in some cases absorbed into the roman pantheon—as in the case of a funeral monument at Rheims where he is flanked by Apollo and Mercury…
The fusion of the two strands probably took place later, perhaps, curiously enough, under the influence of Christianity.
The theme of metamorphosis entered Imperial Roman art in the period of Augustus and during Ovid’s lifetime.
One of the features of architecture during the reign of Augustus had been the splendid sculptures of vegetation…a necessary precursor to the appearance of the foliate head.
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…peopled or inhabited scrolls. Men, women and children were depicted as half figures: that is, human figures naked to the waist arising out of curlicues of leaves.
…the acanthus leaf and its use in the Corinthian column.
…the Jupiter column, in the capital of which the heads of the god and other deities were carved surrounded by acanthus fronds.
…a desire to anthropomorphize vegetation—to draw out the hidden intelligence in plant forms and to give them human forms and faces, a current that was to arise again in Romanesque times.
As the Green Man first appears as a leaf mask, the most obvious source for this would seem to be either the mask of Dionysos used in initiation ceremonies, or theatrical masks. In many of his representations he is shown as a sad elderly face and may thus be representing the ageing Dionysos who descends to the underworld and becomes identified with the universal image of Okeanos. He is to be seen in this form in a frieze on the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek (c. AD 150). He also appears on the two triumphal arches erected in Rome by Septimius Severus who, with his wife Julia Domna, a Syrian priestess, was a keen supporter of the mystery religions. Later he is assimilated to the solar cult of Aurelian and appears in that Emperor’s Temple of the Sun (c. AD 270). He is also to be seen in a temple at Hatra in Mesopotamia with snakes writhing in his hair, a representation that has been compared to the famous male Medusa head at Bath. Some of the best evidence for seeing him a s arising form the cult of Dionysos is in tomb sculpture carved with leaf masks which may represent the point at which the dying are transformed into the universal world of Dionysos-Okeanos.
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It is on a tomb that the Green Man is first to be seen in a Christian context. This is on the tomb of St Abre, daughter of the apostle of the Gauls, St Hilary… [c. AD 400]
…under the impact of Christianity. He, together with the sacred tree and the imagery of the vine, survives…
By the third century the Tree of Life was described as the centre of the world at Gogotha with a holy spring at its feet from which all nations would drink and rise to salvation through its branches.
To many of the early Christians, Christ was the fulfillment and then revealed truth behind the mystery religions that the new religion would supplant.
The resurrection imagery of the Dionysiac rites…
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It was, perhaps, through this adoption of th symbolism of Dionysos that the Green Man was absorbed into Christian art.
…the meeting point of the southern and the northern strands that went into the Green Man and also into Christianity. This is in and around Trier, the most ancient city of Germany, founded by the Romans beside the Mosel in AD 14. long before the Romans the valley of the Mosel was inhabited by the Celtic tribe of the Treveri, part of the Hunsruck-Eifel culture which produced the St Goar pillar. The Romans introduced the cultivation of the vine to the Mosel and the reputation of the region for the quality of its wines dates form this period. The Landesmuseum in Trier contains a series of tombs of the wine merchants and their families. some of these tombs were huge in size even their fragmented remains are impressive. They are in fragments because in the later Roman Empire the cemetery was used as a quarry for a fort built at Neumagen to resist invaders. Walking among these sepulchers and sculptures, I felt I had rarely come across tombs which expressed so cheerful and practical a certainty in the life to come. The world of immortality for those who have made good wine and practised the mysteries of Bacchus is a glorious and permanent promise of enjoyments that in life have been fleeting.
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…a centre of the spread of Christianity.
Bishop Nicetius (AD 526-566) rebuilt the cathedral and in order to get stone he plundered the remains of a nearby temple of the Hadrianic period at Am Herrenbrunnchen. In doing so he carried out an act of the greatest significance for the full adoption of the Green Man into Christian art. He took giant composite capitals each carved on four sides with leaf masks and set them up on piers round the crossing of his reconstructed cathedral.
Chapter 3
The Green Man in the Dark Ages
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…a twelfth-century manuscript of the life of St Amand who, five centuries earlier, had brought about the destruction of sacred groves of oaks.
…put an axe into her hand and told her to cut down the tree. When she had done so, her sight was restored to her.
… victory of Christianity over paganism, in particular over the cults of the tree and the sacred spring.
…an emblem of humanity beginning to see and interpret Nature in a new way.
…the Green Man signifies the relationship of man to Nature…
The Dark Ages… the heavy plough, the stirrup and the more general adoption of the watermill.
…new organizations of villages grouped round a church and a manor.
…mother Earth: they were prepared to would her more deeply than ever before for their own subsistence…
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The worship that had been given to the gods and goddesses of Nature was transferred to the shrines and relics of the saints. Embargoes on clearing forests once considered sacred, or diverting waters that were holy, no longer possessed their old authority.
Man was becoming ready to assert his mastery over Nature and the spirits of Nature…
…new aspect of the Green Man : as the source and goal of the products of time.
…absorbed into Christian iconography in the late Empire and by the time of the beginning of the Dark Ages.
…everything we now see as beauty was for the Celts religion: ‘The forest was divine.
…sixth to the beginning of the eleventh century… that the long, slow transformation in the attitude of Western humanity to Nature took place which was essential to the way in which, during the middle Ages, the Green Man made a bridge form his pagan origins to a fresh life in the context of Christian art.
…in the fifth century St. Martin of Tours ordered that a much revered pine tree should be cut down…
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…trees hung with stones which had been placed there by sick people. Each stone represented a particular illness which the tree would cure.
The presence of yews in so many churchyards is not just a reminder of death and of the evergreen nature of the soul: it is an example of how a tree venerated in the old religion was planted with a new symbolic meaning given it so that the psychic power associated with it could be transferred to the new religion. The church and churchyard with its many yews at Calne (35) in Wiltshire stand on what is thought to be the site of a prehistoric henge monument.
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In his part of Devon the churches possess an exceptional number of Green Men carvings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such as those at Sampford Courtenay, South Molton and King’s Nympton, and it has been suggested that this is because of a continuing attachment to the religion of the trees. (But see p. 122)
…St Paul…the powers, dominations and elemental forces that had ruled the world until the coming of Christ, he did not say that they were fantasies: he said that their time of sovereignty was now over [n13 See Eph. 1: 21; 3: 10; 6: 12; and Col. 1:16; 2: 15, 18, 20.].
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Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 690, denounced the New Year practice of dressing up a stag or an old woman.
…the archaeological evidence pots to a strong revival of native and pagan cults in Britain at the time leading up to the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons and the impact of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, and this may well have been a repeated response at later times of disaster.
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Actions ritually performed or marked by ceremonies become memorable: the ritual sets a pattern in the memory for the timing and due sequence of tasks and actions. They impressed on the young essential knowledge of the phases of the moon, of gauging when to plough, when to sow, when to cut the hay, when to scythe the corn and how long to let it stand in stooks, and when to kill the cattle before the winter set in.
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Cernunnos may also have survived as the leader of the Wild Hunt, the spectral horsemen who, for example, galloped through the deer park of Peterborough and the woods up to Stamford, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1127. it is a hunt of unbaptized souls riding through woods or across the sky recorded in may parts of Europe. In Scandinavia and Germany the leader of the hunt was Odin or Wotan and in Denmark he was called the Groenjaette (or Green Giant).
… John Scotus Eriugena… Through his writings he gave a new and influential impulse to the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition which was to descend from him to the School of Chartres.
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It is a sign of archetypal power in an image that it should be capable of transference form one culture to another, from one set of beliefs to a fresh paradigm of faith. This means that it expresses something permanent in the human soul.
The interlace ornament which is one of the most striking features of Irish manuscripts was an introduction from late Roman art and from the Middle East: it may have been brought by those monks form Egypt who are known to have settled in Ireland.
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If the Green Man first arises as the disgorger and devourer of vegetation in the illumination of manuscripts, he returns to sculpture in this new form in association with three of his ancient sources, the cult of the human head, the healing spring and the sacred tree.
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…appeared in large numbers in sculpture, and why this took place then must be connected with the revolution affecting the attitude of Western peoples to Nature.
In the foliate mask human skin and leaf cuticle are inseparable form one another, as though their identity signified the union between human beings and their surroundings that characterized the living experience of men and women in earlier stages of history.
The legends of Merlin as the figure linking the old and new worlds are an illustration of this… in the end he is drawn back into the ancient world of the forest of Broceliande where Nimue either imprisons him or binds him into union with herself in a tree.
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The machines that on today’s farms segregate their operators in cabins form direct contact from the soil and what grows on it are one of the distant consequences of the psychic revolution in regard to Nature that began in the Dark Ages. The end of the age of participation in Nature is tentatively heralded by the first appearance of the Green Man as the disgorger and devourer of vegetation on the tomb of St Abre, and then appears fully in the earliest sculpture of the Romanesque period.
Chapter 4
The Green Man in the Romanesque and Early Gothic Periods
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…the rise of the Gothic style, in which the Green Man image was to undergo most notable transformations. He was prepared for that over a period of the 150 years of the development of the Romanesque style during which he came out of the borders of the manuscripts in which he had undergone a secret transformation during the Dark Ages to appear in more vital form with the revival of three-dimensional sculptural figurations.
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…there is an urge to express something new through the capital as the voice of the energies in the column. This is to be seen in all the attempts to copy or to perform variations on the theme of the Roman acanthus capital. It was as though the sculptors felt the column was the trunk that had to be made to burst into leaf. Though their masters and patrons were telling them to portray the consequences of tasting the Tree of Knowledge of good and Evil, what in their innermost hearts they wished to do was to recreate the Tree of Life.
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…among all the leaves and interlaced fronds the Green Man returns in a damburst of imagery, the origins of which have been traced to the Great Mother imagery of the Neolithic and subsequent periods, to Mesopotamia, and Scythia and the steppes of Russia, Coptic Egypt, Armenia, Georgia, Syria, Scandinavia and the Celtic regions, which all contributed themes to the basic Roman tradition, made familiar form the carvings and buildings of the imperial and colonial past of Rome.
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…exhibitionist figures or of couples or individuals indulging in a variety of sexual practices in Romanesque churches in Spain, France and the British Isles. Male and female figures display their genitalia often grossly exaggerated, couples copulate or indulge inhomosexual practices. In numbers of examples these figures are associated with vegetatin and are interspersed with heads or, more rarely, figures of Green Men.