The Green Man is the primal consciousness of the planet kingdom. He is one of the oldest spiritual concepts held by humankind. Early humans believed that inanimate objects were spirits of deities. In contrast to this belief, at certain human stage of development, people believed that inanimate objects where simply the dwelling places of spirits or deities within the material world. In either case the Green Man represents the animation of Nature by an unseen power. The classic image of the Green Man in a human face mask covered in leaves.
During the early period, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, the forest was a realm beyond comprehension. It was filled with dangerous predators, poisonous snakes, and spiders. The forest also, however, provided shelter and food. The spirit of such a place was an undefined and mysterious character hidden in the plants and trees. When humans became an agricultural society the concept of the plant spirit began to transform. Human reasoning during this stage concluded that because plants were grown from seeds, the spirit of the Green Man must be within the seed. Ancient people viewed the plant that issued forth from the seed as a manifestation of the spirit that once dwelled within the seed. When the time came to harvest the plant, the spirit was believed to flee from bundle to bundle as the harvest was stacked in fields. Therefore it was vital to capture the fleeing spirit inside the last harvested bundle before it could totally escape the field. Once bound inside in such a manor, the Green man spirit could be returned to the soil where he would make the seeds even more powerful for the spring season.
An interesting folk custom related to the harvest season arose in many European communities. When a stranger appeared in the community he was viewed as the plant spirit trying to sneak off unnoticed in the guise of a human. There are still cases in which a visitor to a farm community during the time of harvest is captured and harassed by the locals. Often this person is tied up and held for a short time�according to the locals this is all done in good sport. When no strangers appear at harvest time the last reaper in the field symbolically becomes the plant spirit and is subject to the same treatment. In folk believe the plant spirit driven out by the cutting of the last sheaf, must now take another form. Therefore passes into the reaper who becomes the embodiment of the spirit. In folklore the spirit of the plant has been personified in such folk characters as Jack-in-the-Green and John Barleycorn.
With the rise of Christianity, the attention given to the Green Man began to diminish. However, a careful examination of the pillars inside many old churches and cathedrals in Europe will reveal Green Man faces hidden within the ornamentation. On occasion the leaves appear to grow out of the mouth and cover a humanoid face. Sometimes the sole of the earliest examples appeared in churches and cathedrals around the sixteenth century. Reportedly, Bishop Nicetius of Trier ordered the removal of the Green Man carvings from the ruin of a nearby Roman temple and had them incorporated into the pairs of pillars in the cathedral at Trier. These Green Man images were eventually obscured during restoration work in the eleventh century.
