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The Green Man
Strangely, there have always been pagan faces hidden in old Christian churches, and some of the strangest are foliate heads: carvings of a man’s face covered in greenery. Such heads are found in England and parts of Europe and the Middle East. They vary considerably from the benign to the sinister, they are always serious, always male and in the prime of life. They are thought to represent the group soul of green vegetation and its perpetual cycle of renewal, birth and death.
I have long been fascinated by the Green Man. There is a 14th century poem called Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which has the same luminous clarity as is found in paintings of that era. In this story King Arthur is celebrating Christmas with his court at Camelot, when a tall knight clad all in green, with green hair and a green horse rides into the hall. He carries a holly bough and a huge axe and challenges any knight to strike him a blow with the axe, on condition that he will accept a return blow on the same day a year later. Sir Gawain takes up the challenge and cuts off the Green Knight’s head. The Green Knight then picks up his head, makes an appointment with Gawain to meet in a year’s time and rides off.
On the following Christmas Eve Sir Gawain, after a difficult journey, reaches the Green Knight’s castle and accepts his hospitality. He is set three tests which involve being tempted by his host’s wife, and scrapes through, but only just. He fails on one point: the lady offers him a magic girdle as protection from her husband, and he keeps silent about it. The Green Knight then reveals that he has set up the whole thing as a test of knighthood and would not have harmed Gawain at all had he been perfect and not accepted the girdle. But as it is, the mistake warrants a little cut on Gawain’s neck with the axe.
The point, which commentators seem to have missed, is that the Green Knight, while immensely more powerful than Sir Gawain, is also stronger in virtue. The Green Knight is the human knight’s teacher. This shows that we have much to learn from the plant kingdom and its selfless work for the planet and our species.
Over the years I have had various experiences with trees, and where I live I am surrounded by trees which are old and very large. Some evenings I lie on the sofa in my living room and watch as the day moves slowly towards night. This is a magical time. You become aware of changes in the world and other consciousnesses awakening.
There is a mature beech tree right outside my window, and one night my eye was drawn to a face shape in it made entirely of leaves. This was not the spirit of the beech tree but a face which suddenly appeared from elsewhere. It was a man’s face, intelligent and slender with flared nostrils. As I watched the face took on more definition. At first the head was turned towards the right with the eyes closed, but the nose and mouth grew more and more distinct. It would have been easy at that point to explain this by the deepening shadows.
I continued to watch for somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour, and then the head turned round till it was directly facing me and its eyes opened. I could see the whites of the eyes and the eyeballs very clearly.
I maintained eye contact with it for some considerable time. Perhaps it had a message, and even if it did not, I wanted to communicate a blessing. Normally I have no problem looking anybody in the eye, but polite humans are taught not to stare. Trees have no such inhibitions. This was an overpowering, unblinking, implacable stare and I soon began to be rather frightened. I wasn’t sure if it was friendly or not. After all, I live here and this tree is right outside my house. So I got up, sent the Green Man a blessing and closed the curtains.
After this experience I decided to let my eyes rest on the sky rather than on the trees when in default mode. While some trees are exquisite, there is an intensity about the tougher ones that comes of their being so rooted in the earth. In ancient times people knew that there is something about forests that can induce panic. I felt I needed a break.
The medieval craftsmen who carved the foliate heads captured the grimness of trees, the “baleful glare” as Kathleen Basford put it in her book “The Green Man”. She writes: “Although the Green Man was a much loved motif I doubt if he was revered as a symbol of the renewal of life in springtime… He represents the darkness of unredeemed nature as opposed to the shimmering light of Christian revelation. The dark side of the Green Man’s character was never forgotten. He was portrayed as a devil and as an “unclean ape” (on various carvings)”.
We are only now beginning to realise the damage that was done by the Biblical injunction in Genesis to “subdue the earth”. Mankind took this as a licence to destroy and pillage nature in every way, and nature -- the world of matter -- came to be regarded as evil. Whereas the Green Man had been seen as a simple force of nature in antiquity, Basford traces the change in attitude to “Rabanus Maurus, an erudite and influential theologian of the 8th century. According to him, the leaves represented the sins of the flesh or lustful and wicked men doomed to damnation.”
It’s no wonder the trees look at us with a “baleful glare.” They serve us well and we abuse them. Humans have caused them to suffer greatly since long before Christian times. The wildwood, the great forest that took hold of Britain after the Ice Age, was ruthlessly cut down over the centuries and what was left was finished off by the Romans and the Saxons. If you ever wonder why the Scottish islands are so bare of trees, look no further than the axes of the Bronze Age. Today little woodland remains and an educated few are waking up to the consequences of our disrespect for trees. Meanwhile a suicidal war against the Amazonian rain forests is currently being waged.
In movies you never see a real wood any more, full of mature trees all dense and higgledy piggledy. Merlin and Robin Hood and their ilk have to make do with a few young silver birches planted so they are evenly spaced out with no undergrowth in the way. Older trees are kept out of sight by our society and got rid of as quickly as possible, like old people. There are few gnarled old trees left outside well maintained parks.
Two nights after I made the decision to disengage from trees I was sitting on another sofa in someone else’s house looking across the lawn towards some trees, but mainly looking at the sky. As dusk fell a huge face appeared among the greenery. It was as tall as the tree trunks and made entirely of leaves. It was oblong in shape, had a Celtic moustache and a lion’s nose, flat and broad and differently textured, which took up a third of the face area. It was not in the least bit scary. We looked at each other for some time and then I stretched out my hand in spirit and stroked its cheek.
