Th Green Man (1)

In church buildings all over the Three Kingdoms, one can find carvings, in stone or wood, of the Green Man. He is a grotesque figure, usually showing just a rather unhappy (or hostile) head and face, with foliage emerging from its orifices. 

This is a relic of the pre-Christian fertility cults which, after a long battle with the increasingly dominant and intolerant Christian Religion, finally lost the battle.

Except that this is not true. You will find it, or parts of it, in the 'popular' guide books which, at the back of church after church,  you are invited to buy. I recently found it in the little book currently on offer in Dorchester Abbey near Oxford. But it will be convenient to begin with a factual account of the present academic status quo ... and that means Stations of the Sun (1996) by Ronald Hutton. (Curiously, the Green Man is missing from the index: so I will give you the page numbers ... 241-2 and 424-5.) Hutton explains that we have here, according to 1930s writers, "representations of pre-Christian deities or spirits of nature and fertility. This supposition was not based upon any research into the history of either: it was, rather, an extension of Sir James Frazer's preoccupation with tree spirits encouraged by the proposal of another member of the [Folklore] Society and follower of Sir James, Margaret Muurray, that some of the more enigmatic images in medieval churches were representations of pagan deities in which much of the population still believed. This notion was itself equally devoid of any research into medieval sources, but it so perfectly reflected what mid-twentieth-century folklorists wished to believe that it became an orthodoxy."

In 1979, Roy Judge had published his account of the evidence, based on a systematic investigation of historical evidence; but after the publication of Hutton's Stations, Eamon Duffy gave Stations a highly positive review, speaking of : "a great deal of pseudo-science and sheer gobbledegook, for which the great Victorian anthropologist Sir James Frazer must bear much of the blame ... Like many other late nineteenth century neo-pagan intellectuals, Frazer was convinced that under the Christian veneer of modern society, older and deeper beliefs persisted, enshrined in 'folk' customs and recoverable from a srtructural anthropological scrutiny of those customs. This was a theory taken up with enthusiasm by students of folklore ..." In 2014, Tom Shippey wrote about how "over the last hundred years and more, it has been popular to think that past ages worshipped what is variously called the Great Mother, Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. DIstinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classiciist Jane Harrison ... D H Lawrence , Robert Graves, and Rudyard Kipling ... so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented : 'A search for the Mother' had become a major component of the 'unconscious nostalgia of the Western intellectual'".

In 2010, Richard Hayman wrote a small but stylish volume (The Green Man) in which he demonstrated that "The term 'green man' does not have any currency earlier than the 1930s ... That the term has become firmly established is due initially to Lady Raglan, who was inspired to enquire into the green man in the church at Llangwn Uchaf near her home ... In 1939 she published an article in the journal of the Folklore Society in which she argued that the green man in church architecture was a relic of pagan nature worship that had somehow weathered several centuries of Christian culture ... these were 'pagan' images on the margin of a later culture, the work of anonymous craftsmen stubbornly resisting orthodox Christian teaching and carving green men as a silent affirmation of an older faith ... pagan survival ... Upon this foundation the green man was reinterpeted in the latter part of the twentieth century to suit the needs of the post-modern world, as representing some sort of spiritual union with nature ... the assumptions made about the green man in the 1950s are no longer convincing."

!939?? Lady Raglan?? Who on earth was ... 

I hope to complete this piece later.