An exerpt from a book on the Green Man released March 2006 from Algora Publishing.

In North America Green Man carvings are not part of religious architectural motifs, but rather incorporated into old public buildings such as post offices, banks and apartment buildings. This is contrary to those carvings in Britain where a majority are found on and in church buildings. During the Middle Ages, as well as before this time, the buildings that were designed and built to last were places of power—those being castles and fortresses of the government and churches. We are familiar with many of the grotesque figures of gargoyles found on many of the cathedrals. So too do carvings of Green Men appear on and in these magnificent structures. The reasons for their appearance on these Christian shrines have been debated for years. They are considered by many to be Pagan survivals, which were either incorporated by the early church architects to show dominance over Pagan beliefs or intentionally carved by Pagan stonemasons as an intended statement of “we are not vanquished”. Some have suggested that the numerous carved foliate heads found in Churches represent the continuation of the ancient Celtic head cult into the Christian era.

Researcher Clive Hicks wrote, “commentators have found no mention of the Green Man in Medieval texts, and the image seems to have been used in a wholly intuitive way, accepted but not explained.”(1) While many of the carvings, according to Hicks, were intended to be purely decorative, he also believes that a great many were the result “of a deep, but probably intuitive, sense of symbolism.”(2)

There is also some indication that in the Christian church the Green Man is directly related to the Madonna and Child and to Jesus in particular. Hicks noted in his book, The Green Man: A Field Guide, that “one boss in the vault of the Lady Chapel in Ely might be seen as a green Virgin and Child, and another, at Lincoln, as a green Christ. Two of the most important we discovered were from Exeter Cathedral, where a choir corbel shows the Madonna and Child surrounded by the foliage pouring from the mouth of a Green Man, and from Frieburg im Breisgau, where the Easter Sepulcher, containing a carved figure of Christ in the tomb, is framed by weeping green men.” According to Hicks, “these were clearly intentional iconography, not customary decoration, not pagan survivals, not warnings against sin.”

Nicholas Mann, writing in His Story: Masculinity in the Post-Patriarchal World, notes that it may seem ironic that the Green Man, a very Pagan symbol, “makes his most frequent appearances in ecclesiastical architecture”. However, Mann believes that “in this case, the denial of a chthonic and daemonic immanent power by the Church…has led to its most vital expression in the elements of wood and stone which form the places of worship of the Church. There is irony in this, a quality much loved by the Green Man.”(3)

When did the carvings of the Green Men first appear in British ecclesiastical architecture? The evidence is that they first appeared in large numbers in the late Norman period, from the late 12th to the early 16th centuries.(4) The Doel’s note that the popularity of foliate head carvings was most evident in the 14th and 15th centuries following the Black Death. This would certainly make sense with the symbolism of life and fertility being associated with the Green Man—an intuitive response to the grotesque death that killed over a third of the population in Europe. Basford writes that the “history and development of the Green Man in the Church can…be followed continuously from the fourth or fifth century. Though pagan in origin, the motif evolved within the Church and, during the Middle Ages, became part of its symbolic language.” (5)

The Green Man may be identified more directly with Sylvanus, the Roman “country god’, the god of the oak. Thirlie Grundy, writing in her little book The Green Man in Northumberland and County Durham, notes that during the Middle Ages when the large stone churches began to replace the small wooden ones, stonemasons did not exist. It was the wood carvers who were called upon to fashion the extensive and ornate stonework. “On finding themselves in charge of stone-building projects”, asserts Grundy, the woodcarvers “had summoned the aid of their most trustworthy ally—the powerful, spiritual god of the oak, or today’s enigmatic Green Man.”(6) Sylvanus, also known as the “woodland god”, was a Roman-Celtic tree deity of ancient Britain. Basford wrote of a leaf mask carving on a fountain at the French Abbey of Saint-Denis. Dating back to 1200 CE the fountain has a series of heads carved on the basin, each head with the name of a particular deity engraved over it. The one Green Man face represented is named “Silvan”.(7) An altar dedicated to him was set up in Yorkshire, on Scargill Moor, by the occupying Roman army.(8)

The concept of the woodland god, the Green Man, appears to have followed the Roman armies as they trekked through conquered lands, eventually adopted by the early Christians who aided in the Green Man’s spread along trade and pilgrim routes. While early Christian authorities may have used the Green Man image to induce the Pagan community to go to church, it is also possible that the early Christian faith did not have a clear definition between the ancient Pagan traditions and the new Christian faith, which so heavily borrowed from the past. Because of this lack of definition, the two traditions became fused together—Pagan and Christian—co-existing in the same religious structures for hundreds of years. As researcher John Timpson wrote, “maybe in those days no one was quite sure they (the Pagan gods) wouldn’t make a comeback—so these medieval craftsmen were just hedging their bets.”(9)

Green Man researcher Mike Harding has estimated that there are five times the numbers of Green Man figures in Exeter Cathedral as there are of Jesus. This would certainly imply that they have held an important function and spiritual place in the Christian church for a significant period of time prior to the Reformation.

The early Churches’ obvious comfort with Pagan imagery is most noticeable on the tomb of Saint Abre in the Church of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers. The tomb, dating from the 4th or 5 century C.E., is decorated with a variety of Pagan themes, including dolphins, and a foliate head. Basford notes, “it is a curious carving, quite unlike the Hellenistic leaf masks. The head is surrounded by contiguous and overlapping leaves which may represent the hair and beard, while large sprays of stylized foliage and flowers spring from the nostrils and extend on either side of the head, like fantastic moustaches.”(10) It is this carving, according to Basford, which may be the prototype of the Green Man images of the medieval period. The foliate head at Saint Abre is the first example of the sprouting head in Europe. It was from this same area in France that the Gothic style of Green Man developed.(11)

For approximately three hundred years, between the 10th and 12th centuries, the foliate mask became mutated to represent evil and sin—in fact; the foliate head became part of the exclusive realm of demonology. To this day, many examples of these demon masks exist—including some in the United States. The 13th century reversed this trend with a delightful focus on the lifelike and natural quality of the carved leaves. The obvious struggle between nature and man is shown in many of the Green Man images during the 13th to 15th centuries. Gladly it appears that this struggle, at least as shown in contemporary Green Man art, has changed to one of a symbiotic relationship between humankind and nature. The foliate head has given birth to such garden ornaments as leafy children, birdbaths and other items, which embrace life and the spirits of nature.

1.Hicks, Clive. The Green Man: A Field Guide. Helhoughton: COMPASSbooks 2000, 8-9

2. Ibid. 9

3.Mann, Nicholas R. His Story: Masculinity in the Post-Patriarchal World. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications 1995, 143

4. Doel, Fran & Geoff. The Green Man in Britain. Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd. 2001, 37

5. Basford, Kathleen. The Green Man. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 1978, 19

6. Grundy, Thirlie. The Green Man in Northumberland and County Durham. Carlisle Cumbria: Thumbprint 2001, 3

7. Basford (1978), op.cit. 15

8. Hutton, Ronald. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1991, 208

9. Timpson, John. Timpson’s Leylines: A Layman Tracking the Ley’s. London: Cassell & Co. 2000, 29

10. Basford, K. H. “Quest for the Green Man”, in Symbols of Power. Edited by H.R. Ellis Davidson. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer Ltd. 1977, 107

11. Harte, Jeremy. The Green Man. Andover: Pitkin Unichrome Ltd 2001, 2