I wouldn’t hazard to guess if the New Christy Minstrels had the legend of the Green Man in mind when they performed what is arguably their most famous song. Some of the lyrics harken to the legend: “Well, I told my mama on the day I was born, don’tcha cry when you see I’m gone,” or “Yeah, I don’t care when the sun goes down, where I lay my weary head.” It’s evocative, though. As the Solstice brings us to the bottom of our axial tilt and the long night begins to slowly ebb, there are certainly worse songs you could have going through your head in dark and cold times.
The Green Man may be the world’s oldest surviving mythical figure, dating back to the neolithic. In lore, the Father Sun, on the winter solstice, impregnated the Virgin Mother Earth, who subsequently gave birth to the Green Man. The spirit of the Green Man, endless, had slumbered under the Earth but was resurrected by the Solstice act, and it breathed awareness into its own form four days after the Solstice, on the 25th of December. That was the day when the lengthening period between dawn and dusk first became measurable. The Green man was subsequently born at the Spring equinox, right around Eostar. Or if you prefer, Easter. The date represented a balance between the yin and yang of day (the masculine) and night (the feminine).
The Green Man would then ripen through the summer, eventually becoming Father Sun. He would die, but as Father Sun would impregnate Mother Earth again, and resurrect for a second, greater harvest at the Autumnal equinox. In late fall he would die again, and in so doing absolve humanity of its sins and follies, and slumber underground until the act of fertility repeats on the next winter solstice.
The Green Man also appears in Mesopotamian lore, where he is given birth by Ishtar and is named either Dammuzi or Tammuz, and in this variation, impregnates his mother in the summer to give birth to himself.
In ancient Egypt, the Green Man was known as Osiris, and while his creation myths were different, he, too, underwent an annual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, closely aligned with the seasons. The evil of humanity which leads of Osiris’ death is now personified, in the form of Set, his dark brother.
The Green Man then emerged in Greece, as Dionysus, and he was slain in the autumn by the Titans. And was reborn each spring when Zeus raped Semele, the Goddess Earth. He would first appear as Pan, and would be the God of merriment and celebration. When he became Dionysus again, his blood would turn to wine, the “water of Earth” and believers would ritually consume wine, calling it “the blood of Earth.”
From there, the Green Man legend went on to Europe, where he was embraced by the Catholic Church who embraced the motif of rebirth, death, resurrection and atonement and arguably applied it to their own legends. Even today, most of the churches and cathedrals surviving from the fifth century on will have images of the face of the Green Man (human visage surrounded by or sometimes composed of foliage) secreted amongst the iconography of the decorations. At the very least, the church would use the existing legends of birth and resurrection in order to promote their own such legends.
The Celtic version of the Green Man is the one best known in the present day, with the legend and mythos surprisingly intact over some eight thousand years or more. The Irish added one more element, calling the Green Man the Guardian of the Forest. In Japan, each forest had its guardian, or Green Man.
It’s interesting to note that the true reason for the seasons, Earth’s axial tilt, was first puzzled out about 1100 BCE in both India and China. Pytheas of Marseilles is the first known European to measure it, using nothing more than daily observations of the shadow cast by a stick in the ground over the course of a year. That was about 350 BCE. So some 150 years before Eratosthenes of Cyrene discovered that the Earth was a globe with a circumference of some 25,000 miles, we already knew that it had a tilt in relation to the sun of about 23.5 degrees.
It’s entirely possible—likely, even—that the secret of the seasons was discovered and then rediscovered many times before in many different places. After all, would you imagine anyone building Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, with their perfect alignment to sun rise or sun set on the days of the Solstice without some of them wondering what was causing it in the first place? Certainly the shape of the Earth was known from prehistoric times just from the shape of the shadow it cast upon the Moon during eclipses. Certainly anyone watching the phases of the Moon over time would realize that something similar might be causing day and night only faster, here on Earth.
But we like to have divine intervention as a part of that process, and so even when the physical science of the seasons was widely known, people flocked to the notion of a higher entity whose birth, resurrection, and atonement of humanity is inextricably linked to the longest night, the longest day, and the balance, and birth and death of nature, one that made human affairs matter in this grand scheme.
Why? Because it gives people hope. Science gives us confidence the sun will gather strength following the winter solstice. Legends give us hope that it’s being done on our behalf.
But hope also exists in how we respond to this most certain of all cycles in our lives, and how we can grow from that.
Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.
Much of the material about the ancient Green Man came from Mark Amaru Pinkham. Many thanks!