The Green Man is a wondrous and mysterious being who wears many disguises - vegetative, animal, human and superhuman. For the pre-literate world, he embodied the unfolding cycle of greenness and growth, the realm of fields, forests and hedgerows upon which all life depended and without which there could be no food for man or beast. For the civilised world he took other forms; that of a mythological archetype representing the spiritual intelligence of nature; of a character from folklore. personifying the eternal round of the agricultural year; of a mythic hero who transcends death to bring s the wisdom of the Otherworld; of a mysterious challenger who demands that we look again at our connection with the world around us. More recently he has reappeared as a potent symbol of ecological concern.
The Green Man gives us an opportunity to reawaken to the spirit and intelligence of nature - the nature both within us and around us. But this can happen only if we allow it to, only if we overcome the negative aspects of ourselves that have separated us from the natural world - greed, materialism, too great a veneration of science, and a belief that the earth os ours to abuse however and whenever we wish. It takes courage to face our depredations and sacrileges. It is no longer enough to simply say: I deplore the ruination. Rather we must each take responsibility in recovering a real sense of the sacredness of the earth.
From: The Quest for the Green Man, by John Matthews. Godsfield Press, 2001.
