A New God for a New Paganism:
The Green Man in the Modern Pagan Milieu

Ethan Doyle White

Independent Scholar

London, United Kingdom

ethan-doyle-white@hotmail.co.uk

Abstract

Modern Pagan religions are past-oriented, seeking inspiration and legitimation from the pre-Christian religions that once existed in and around Europe. This has led modern Pagan groups to adopt various ideas about pre-Christian religions and their survival that stem from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship – including the notion of the Green Man. The belief that the foliate heads of medieval ecclesiastical architecture demonstrated evidence for a pre-Christian religion surviving into the High and Late Middle Ages, as articulated in its most complete form by Lady Raglan in 1939, appealed to early Wiccans such as Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, who interpreted these heads as depictions of the Wiccan Horned God. By the 1990s, the Green Man had become a recurring image in the modern Pagan milieu who was increasingly incorporated into ritual, while the 2000s witnessed the growth of modern Pagan literature devoted to this new sylvan god.

Keywords

Wicca, Paganism, Neo-Paganism, Green Man, Esotericism, Medievalism, foliate head

Introduction

When in the mid-1990s they published Paganism Today, an edited volume brought together by the academics Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (1996), the London-based publishing company Thorsons selected an interesting image for the front cover. They picked a photograph not of a Wiccan altar or a Druidic ritual, but one that had been taken inside a Christian church. The image in question was of a roof boss in Norwich Cathedral, a medieval structure in Norfolk, England. How did the publishers conclude that this image, associated as it was with a bastion of Anglicanism, would be appropriate for a pioneering book on modern Pagan religions? The reason, of course, was that the roof boss in question featured a foliate head, an image that in modern terms is often understood as being loaded with both pre-Christian and modern Pagan symbolism: the Green Man.

The foliate head is one of those enigmatic oddities of medieval Christianity that has long perplexed and confused post-medieval observers.1 Here is a human face, usually male, which has leaves branching across its forehead, cheeks, and in some cases emerging from its mouth, nose, or eyes. They are comparatively common in churches and cathedrals across much of Europe, but despite this, there is nothing obviously Christian about them – no apparent references to Old Testament creation myths, nor to the Gospel, and it is certainly not immediately evident what role they might play in a Christian worldview. It is perhaps understandable, therefore, that many modern observers have concluded that the foliate heads were never really Christian after all, but represented a secretive, non-Christian and indeed pre-Christian presence that snuck in under the noses of the medieval clergy. Perhaps, many have thought, they represented pre-Christian gods – pagan gods – and thus testify to the survival of pre-Christian religions throughout much of the Middle Ages? If so, might they not represent ideal symbols, even deities, for modern Pagans to adopt?

The Green Man offers a fascinating case study in how modern Pagan groups have engaged in medievalism, the ways in which post-medieval societies have looked back upon and utilised the Middle Ages (on medievalism see Pugh and Weisl 2013; Matthews 2015; on modern Pagan medievalism see Kinane 2013; Doyle White 2021). Modern Pagan religions are fundamentally past-oriented movements – by claiming the identity of the ‘pagan’ they are consciously harking back to the societies of Europe before Christianity became hegemonic across the continent. This engagement with the past takes many forms; for some, it involves adopting the name of the Iron Age druids, for others it can mean displaying tattoos of early medieval runes, making pilgrimages to Neolithic monuments, or invoking the deities of ancient Greece. Modern Pagans draw upon many past societies in the construction of their own contemporary identities, with the period and region in question varying depending on the modern Pagan religion being practiced. High and late medieval Europe is only one such society, however the modern Pagan uses of this period are especially interesting given the dominant role that Christianity played within it.

The Green Man, as we now understand this character, is a modern creation, a construct of the early twentieth century. As with many modern phenomena, it nevertheless owes a great deal to earlier images and ideas which have been reformulated and reconceptualised in new contexts. Perhaps the most important element was the foliate head, an image that appears in the ecclesiastical architecture of medieval Europe and which over time has also been utilised in non-ecclesiastical contexts (Basford 1996 [1978]). A second core ingredient in the formation of this modern figure was the actual term ‘Green Man’, largely used for a range of public houses in Britain from at least the seventeenth century; prior to this, the term had also been used for figures decorated in foliage appearing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century pageants (Centerwall 1997: 26–27). A third aspect was the Jack-in-the-Green, a conical framework bedecked in foliage that is carried as part of May Day processions in English folk custom. The historian Roy Judge (2000: 19, 24–25) highlighted that evidence for this custom first appears in the late eighteenth century and that, given the absence of earlier references during discussions of May Day revels, it is unlikely to be much older than that. A fourth component was the theories of the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer (1854–1941), as set forth in his epic of comparative mythology, The Golden Bough, which came out in three increasingly lengthy, multi-volume editions between 1890 and 1915. Seeking to explain the role of the Rex Nemorensis, an unusual priesthood devoted to the goddess Diana that existed at a sanctuary in Italy, Frazer ultimately argued for an ancient and widespread tradition of sacrificial kingship underlying many of the world’s mythologies. As part of his comparative approach, he discussed a broad range of European folk customs involving vegetation, including the Jack-in-the-Green, which he interpreted as a portrayal of a spirit of vegetation (Frazer 1890: 88; 1900: 214–15; 1911: 82). The Golden Bough had a major impact on the reading public during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming – as the classicist Mary Beard has noted – ‘one of the symbols of British middle-class culture’ (Beard 1992: 212) and exerting a considerable influence on much of the literature from this period.

The Frazerian theoretical framework was central to uniting these other disparate threads and weaving them into a new image, that which we now understand as the Green Man. This process was not a sudden one but occurred gradually over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the first to link Frazerian theory to the term ‘green man,’ albeit in a non-capitalised form, was the literary critic Sir Edmund Chambers (1866–1954) in his 1903 book The Mediaeval Stage. In doing so, he also identified this figure with the Green Knight, a character from the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Chambers 1903: 186). The Gawain poem was again discussed by the classicist Arthur B. Cook (1868–1952), who in a 1906 article for the Folklore journal compared the Green Knight with the Greek mythological figure of Virbius, whose name, he noted, ‘might be literally rendered the Green Man’ (Cook 1906: 341). In a 1932 discussion of medieval roof bosses found in Ely Cathedral, the church historian Charles J. P. Cave (1871–1950) then noted that the foliate heads reminded him of the Jack-in-the-Green, ‘which was still to be seen in London fifty years ago’ (Cave 1932: 36). Quite possibly following Frazer, he assumed that the Jack-in-the-Green was the survival of a pre-Christian custom, thus suggesting that the foliate heads might be too (Cave 1932: 36).

Perhaps the most interesting early appearance of the Green Man in its modern form, especially as it pertains to the character’s use by modern Pagans, is in The Goat-Foot God, a book first published in 1936. This was one of the novels of Dion Fortune (Violet Firth; 1890–1946), an esotericist perhaps better known for her non-fiction books on topics like the Qabalah. Fortune was essentially a Christian, but by the 1930s was taking an increasing interest in pre-Christian religion (Hutton 2019: 191), something that is especially evident in The Goat-Foot God. Here, she made reference to a public house named the Green Man and had one of her characters explain that the Green Man was the god Pan; ‘He’s Jack-in-the green, the wood-spirit – the fairy man who runs after the maidens on mid-summer eve – What’s that but Pan? The British Pan?’ (Fortune 1989 [1936]: 152). Although no mention was here made of the foliate heads of ecclesiastical architecture, we can see the linking of the name of the Green Man, as taken from England’s public houses, with the Jack-in-the-Green of May Day processions. Significantly, we can also see this conglomerate figure being equated with the horned deity Pan, foreshadowing the linkage of the Green Man with one of the central deities of Wicca, the Horned God, by modern Pagans around twenty years later.

Fortune was not a scholar, and it is unlikely her ideas would have been openly cited as an influence on subsequent academic discussions. However, only three years after her novel was published, a more scholarly attempt appeared that was pivotal in the construction of the Green Man as we now understand it. This was an article published in Folklore, the journal of the Folklore Society, which had been written by Julia Somerset, the Lady Raglan (1901–1971). The wife of the prominent folklorist FitzRoy Somerset, the Lord Raglan (1885–1964) – who had previously suggested a link between foliate heads, the Jack-in-the Green, and Robin Hood in his 1936 book The Hero (Raglan 1949 [1936]: 54) – she had first discussed her ideas at the British Association meeting in Nottingham in 1937 (Anon 1937: 403) prior to publishing them. In her 1939 article, ‘The “Green Man” in Church Architecture’, Lady Raglan used the phrase ‘Green Man’ to describe the foliate heads of medieval architecture, claiming that this was an application of her own devising (Raglan 1939: 45). She then sought to understand the purpose of these carvings, rejecting the previous explanations that she had come across, that they represented the ‘spirit of inspiration’ or simply reflected a craftsman’s imagination ‘run riot’ (Raglan 1939: 45, 47). She insisted – for reasons that she never convincingly articulated – that these sculptures must have been carved from examples in life, thus insisting that they must have been based upon direct observation of:

the figure variously known as the Green Man, Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, the King of May, and the Garland, who is the central figure in the May-day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe. (Raglan 1939: 50)

In arguing that the foliate heads of medieval architecture and folk customs involving the wearing of foliage were effectively two sides of the same coin, Lady Raglan helped to cement a major element of the idea of the Green Man as it would come to be popularised over the coming decades. She then turned her attention to the folk custom that takes place in Castleton, Derbyshire each Oak Apple Day (29 May), in which a man is dressed in foliage and declared a king (as described in Addy 1901). This, she argued, was a survival of the ancient Frazerian rite of the sacrificed king (Raglan 1939: 54), thus tying together the various features that we now recognise as integral to the modern concept of the Green Man.

Lady Raglan cited the work of several other writers in her article, perhaps most notably that of Cave, however there was another individual whose influence seems probable but who was not mentioned: Margaret Murray (1863–1963). As the historian Ronald Hutton (2013: 347) has suggested, Lady Raglan’s theory ‘almost certainly’ took influence from an article by Murray that was published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1934. This was ‘Female Fertility Figures’, in which Murray had argued that the Sheela-na-Gigs – sculptures of women exposing their genitalia that are found in medieval ecclesiastical architecture – depicted an entity who was either ‘divine’ or who at the very least had ‘divine attributes’ (Murray 1934: 97). Murray was an Egyptologist by training, but during the 1910s had refocused much of her attention on British history, devoting particular attention to the topic of early modern witchcraft. She wrote a selection of articles on the subject in the late 1910s before formulating her ideas in greater depth in the 1921 book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and a more popular-oriented follow-up, The God of the Witches, in 1931 (on Murray’s life see Sheppard 2013).

Murray’s belief was that the accused witches persecuted and sometimes killed in early modern Christendom were not Devil-worshippers, but members of a pre-Christian religion devoted to a Horned God. This basic idea was not a novel one – it had previously been articulated by several continental European historians (Cohn 1975: 102–107) – but it was Murray who played a key role in pushing the notion into the popular imagination. There were many flaws in her work on the topic (discussed in Simpson 1994) and her ideas failed to convince several of the comparatively few scholars who then specialised in the evidence for early modern witch trials. However, Murray’s work helped to cement the idea of pre-Christian religion surviving long after the Early Middle Ages in British culture, something which in turn would help legitimise notions of the Green Man as a pre-Christian survival and provide the grounding for the emergence of various forms of modern Pagan religion, most notably Wicca.

Formulated into an explicit and scholarly form by Lady Raglan, the notion of the foliate heads as having origins in pre-Christian religion would recur throughout the twentieth century, promoted by various popular books on medieval architecture. The prominent architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) picked up on it, employing the term ‘Green Man’ in reference to foliate heads (for instance Pevsner 1963: 453). The idea also recurred in the work of the aforementioned C. J. P. Cave. In his 1948 book Roof Bosses in Medieval Churches, Cave repeated his earlier notion that the foliate heads were linked to the Jack-in-the-Green, which he interpreted as a remnant of Frazerian tree worship; nodding to Lady Raglan’s article, he noted that she had coined the term ‘Green Man’ for these heads (Cave 1948: 68). Another to pick up on the idea was the art historian Mary D. Anderson (1902–1973), who for instance featured it in her 1951 book Looking for History in British Churches, where she equated the Green Man with the Jack-in-the-Green and suggested that they represented ‘the spirit of the tree, portrayed by a youth or maiden’ (Anderson 1951: 22). The idea also gained some traction among those writing on folklore, such as the historian of religion E. O. James (1888–1972) in his 1961 book Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (James 1963 [1961]: 288–89), reflecting the pervasive tendency in British folkloristics to interpret medieval and modern customs as pre-Christian survivals which was dominant from the late nineteenth century right through to the 1970s (the emergence of which is discussed in Bennett 1994).

The notion of the foliate heads as pre-Christian survivals would receive further popularisation when adopted by Anne Ross (1925–2012), a specialist in the Iron Age religions of Britain who had elsewhere argued, perhaps independently of Murray’s earlier view, that the Sheela-na-Gigs found on medieval churches were representations of a pre-Christian ‘territorial or war-goddess in her hag-like aspect’ (Ross 1973: 148). Her views on the Green Man came to the fore in a book created in collaboration with the photographer Ronald Sheridan and first published in 1975, Grotesques and Gargoyles: Paganism in the Medieval Church. A light and accessible read accompanied by a rich selection of photographs, the book expressed Ross’ belief that ‘the people’s religion’ of medieval Europe was ‘part-Christian, part-pagan’ and that churches incorporated carvings of ‘pagan deities dear to the people which the Church was unable to eradicate’ (Sheridan and Ross 1975: 8). The foliate heads, Ross claimed, descended from the ‘Celtic cult of the human head’ (Sheridan and Ross 1975: 15). Although Grotesques and Gargoyles was not aimed at an academic audience and does not appear to have been widely read by scholars (as suggested by the sparsity of reviews in peer-reviewed journals), it probably reached a broad popular audience and thus was able to keep the pre-Christian survivals idea in circulation. When later journalists from The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor wrote articles discussing gargoyles and grotesques, for example, they both made reference to Sheridan and Ross’ book (Reif 1976; Andreae 1989).

What can be seen in this body of material is a recurring idea that the foliate heads of medieval ecclesiastical architecture represented a portrayal of a pre-Christian deity or symbol and thus demonstrate that pre-Christian religions survived the early medieval Christianisation process in some form. In large part this was facilitated by the Frazerian theoretical framework which underscored an intrinsic link between characters associated with foliage and pre-Christian religion. For many writers, and no doubt readers, this would have been seen largely as a scholarly argument about the nature of religious history in Britain; for some, however, the argument would have very different repercussions. These were the people whom we now typically refer to as modern Pagans. Modern Paganism, sometimes termed Neo-Paganism, is a category in which can be found a broad array of new religions that are self-consciously inspired by the religious worldviews and practices found in Europe and adjacent areas of North Africa and West Asia that existed prior to the establishment of Abrahamic hegemony in this region (Doyle White 2016a: 43).2 These groups often diverge widely in their beliefs, practices, and socio-political orientations, so much so that modern Paganism is better conceptualised as a diffuse milieu rather than a singular movement (Doyle White 2018: 145).

As the historian Wouter Hanegraaff (1996: 77) noted, modern Paganism is ‘based on the conviction that what Christianity has traditionally denounced as idolatry and superstition actually represents/represented a profound and meaningful religious worldview’ and that ‘a religious practice based on this worldview can and should be revitalized in our modern world’. For modern Pagans, the pre-Christian past is a fundamental source of inspiration and identity. The very term Pagan, which is claimed as a self-designation by many, although not all, of those engaged in modern Pagan religion, represents a conscious attempt by modern people to re-appropriate a Christian term with which Christian thinkers described the pre-Christian religions of Europe and adjacent regions. In this they adopt a term historically loaded with negative connotations and seek to take pride in it; as the scholar of religion Michael F. Strmiska (2005: 9) has observed, there are parallels here with the reclamation of the term queer. This reflects how modern Pagan identities are intrinsically oppositional (Magliocco 2004: 185), with Pagans deliberately setting themselves at odds with majority and mainstream approaches to religion, at least in Christian-majority countries. While the extent to which Pagans do this varies greatly, it points to the culturally alternative nature of modern Pagan religion, which has remained a minority practice wherever it has arisen, from the United States to Russia.

Identifying a specific origin for modern Paganism is a difficult, and probably impossible task. The revived interest in pre-Christian mythologies evident in Renaissance Europe may represent one such origin point (Seznec 1972; Godwin 2002; Bull 2005), although the Romanticist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also played a role in expanding interest in the mythologies of northern Europe too. In many of these contexts, we can see a clear interest in pre-Christian mythologies, although evidence for active veneration is largely absent – had certain individuals moved from an aesthetic adoration to ritual supplication of pre-Christian deities, they would probably have done so secretly and left little or no record of such a practice. Modern Paganism really began to exert a visible presence during the twentieth century. In the early decades of that century, ultra-nationalist groups interested in the worship of pre-Christian deities arose in Germany and Austria, for instance (Goodrick-Clarke 1985), while in the 1930s the Russian émigré Gleb Botkin (1900–1969) established the Church of Aphrodite in the United States (Galtsin 2012).

By the 1950s, it was Britain that had established itself as the centre of development in modern Paganism. A key part of this was the emergence of a religion that subsequently became known as Wicca (on this religion see Doyle White 2016b). Wicca emerged out of the witch-cult theory popularised by the aforementioned Margaret Murray. Whereas she, and other exponents of the theory, had believed that the witches persecuted in the early modern period had been adherents of a pre-Christian religion, the early Wiccans went one further by arguing that this ancient witches’ cult had survived right into the twentieth century. The central figure in the burgeoning Wiccan movement was Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), an Englishman who had spent much of his life in Asia before retiring in 1936 and settling near to England’s New Forest (for a biography of Gardner see Heselton 2012). Gardner had a longstanding interest in esotericism and while in his new home, he involved himself in an esoteric group termed the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship. He later alleged that through this Order he met a secretive group of witches, since called the New Forest Coven. Historians remain divided over whether this group ever existed; Aidan Kelly (1991: xviii–xix) and Chas S. Clifton (2004: 267–70) have argued that it was probably a later fiction invented by Gardner to give his own teachings an older pedigree, while Philip Heselton (2000; 2012; 2020) has assembled a circumstantial argument for the existence of a group of esotericists who may have begun meeting several years before Gardner joined them. Whatever the truth of the matter, in the latter half of the 1940s Gardner relocated to London and established his own group, the Bricket Wood Coven, which met in a woodland to the north of the capital. The tradition he established has come to be known as Gardnerian Wicca and involves the veneration of a Horned God and a Goddess by practitioners who call themselves witches and perform their rituals naked. Gardner was eager to promote his religion, doing so through a novel, interviews with press, and ultimately through his own non-fiction books. In 1954, Gardner published his first non-fiction book about Wicca, Witchcraft Today. Although this was a seminal tome in bringing his new religion to broader public awareness, it made no mention of the foliate heads of medieval architecture.

Gardner followed Witchcraft Today with another book on the topic, The Meaning of Witchcraft, first published in 1959. Much of this text was focused not on explaining the beliefs and practices of his own Wiccan group, but rather on trying to bolster its alleged links to a range of groups and individuals from the past; as the sociologist James R. Lewis has noted, seeking to provide an image of historical authenticity and tradition is a common legitimation strategy for new religions (Lewis 2003: 14). In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner devoted much of a chapter on ‘Signs and Symbols’ to church carvings, indicating that his sources included both Lady Raglan’s article and Anderson’s Looking for History in British Churches. In Gardner’s view, both the ‘Sheila-na-Gig’ and the ‘Green Man’ were ‘definitely pagan’ (Gardner 1971 [1959]: 171). Interpreting these figures in the light of his own group’s theology, which he was keen to argue had prehistoric roots, he declared that the former character depicted ‘the Great Mother’ while the latter was ‘the Old God of Fertility’ (Gardner 1971 [1959]: 172, 176). They were incorporated into churches, he surmised, because either the builders or the clergy themselves had ‘a foot in both camps’, practicing both pre-Christian and Christian religion (Gardner 1971 [1959]: 173). In the book, Gardner also indicated that the foliate head had a use in contemporary Wicca, commenting that he was aware of a wooden example ‘from an old church which has been destroyed that is now preserved in a witches’ meeting place’ (Gardner 1971 [1959]: 177).

Although her name does not appear as co-author, in writing The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner had been assisted by the high priestess of his Bricket Wood Coven, Doreen Valiente (Valiente 1989: 68–69). It is probable from the topic covered and the choice of wording that much of the chapter on church carvings was Valiente’s work rather than Gardner’s. Born and raised in southern England, Valiente (1922–1999) had long taken an interest in esotericism prior to discovering Wicca in the early 1950s. Gardner initiated her into his Gardnerian tradition in 1953 and she soon rose to become his high priestess. She remained in that role, assisting with a variety of tasks including his work on The Meaning of Witchcraft, until 1957, when she and fellow coven-member Ned Grove split from him to form their own group. From their perspective, Gardner’s publicity seeking was reckless and potentially dangerous, and they were unhappy with the manner in which he had sought to sidestep their criticisms of his behaviour (Valiente 1989: 69–72). Valiente went on to write a series of books primarily dealing with Wicca and related topics, in many of which she again raised the issue of the Green Man (for a biography of Valiente see Heselton 2016).

Valiente’s first solo book, Where Witchcraft Lives, appeared in 1962. Here she described the Green Man as ‘a mediaeval version of the old Fertility-god of the woods’ and described how ‘an old wood-carving’ of this foliate head could be found on the mantlepiece of a house in East Sussex which was used by witches. She noted that a pair of stag’s antlers hung above the mantlepiece, something which suggests that the foliate head in question was being used as a portrayal of the Horned God of Wiccan theology (Valiente 2010 [1962]: 90–91). It is probable that this head was that recovered from an abandoned church which had been previously mentioned in The Meaning of Witchcraft. Valiente’s next volume, An ABC of Witchcraft, was first published in 1973 and represented an encyclopaedia on witchcraft and related topics written from a Wiccan perspective. Among the entries was one devoted to the Green Man:

He represents the spirit of the trees, and the green growing things of earth; the god of the woodlands. Hence he is distinctly a pagan divinity […] The Green Man as a woodland god, is a relic of the old pagan rites and beliefs; and his popularity as a motif of church decoration proves that for a long time in Britain, pagan and Christian concepts existed side by side. (Valiente 1986 [1973]: 160)

Linking the figure to both the Jack-in-the-Green and the Castleton Garland King, Valiente also pointedly noted that ‘Some of the oldest representations’ of this figure ‘show him as horned’ (Valiente 1986 [1973]: 160). She again referenced this character in her 1978 book Witchcraft for Tomorrow, where she referred to the foliate head as a depiction of the ‘old nature god of the witches’, a representation of ‘the life-force of nature, the power that clothes the spring woodlands with green’ (Valiente 1978: 60). In these writings, Valiente repeatedly alluded to a conflation of the Green Man, by which she meant the medieval foliate heads, with the Horned God of Wicca, a link that had been made more clearly in Gardner’s The Meaning of Witchcraft. In her solo writings, however, she stopped short of making this connection completely explicit; perhaps she understood this figure as also having an independent existence from the Horned God, whom she characterised as ‘the personification of the masculine side of Nature’ (Valiente 1986 [1973]: 183). She had noted that ‘the Horned God of witchcraft’ had ‘absorbed many of the characteristics of other popular pagan gods’ like Woden and Gwynn ap Nudd (Valiente 1986 [1973]: 184) and it may be that she understood the relationship between the Green Man and the Horned God in a similar way, as distinct figures who had nevertheless adopted some of each other’s traits. At the same time, she also portrayed the Green Man, like the Horned God and other deities, as a personification or representation of forces inherent in nature, in this case of the woodlands, opening the door for interpretations of this entity as purely symbolic, a perception that would gain influence during the 1990s. Valiente’s books were among the most widely read introductory texts on Wicca during the 1970s and 1980s, facilitating the promotion of her ideas about the Green Man to a largely receptive readership.

While Valiente was based along England’s south coast, Gardner had also been responsible for overseeing the initiation of various followers in northern Britain too. The most prominent of these were Arnold (1909–1974) and Patricia Crowther (b.1927), a married couple who established a coven in Sheffield during the early 1960s. Like Valiente, they turned to writing books as a means of promoting awareness of Wicca, starting with their 1965 volume The Witches Speak. Although not mentioning the term ‘Green Man’ itself, the Crowthers did deal with related ideas while discussing the Oak Apple Day festivities at Castleton. The Crowthers declared that the Castleton man who is bedecked in foliage and declared a king was ‘really a Christianised version of the old May Day “Jack in the Green” who represented the old Nature God of the woods’ (Crowther and Crowther 1976 [1965]: 49). Gardner had also secured the establishment of a coven in Perth, Scotland and it was into this group that Raymond Buckland (1934–2017) was initiated in 1963. He went on to establish what was probably the first Gardnerian Wiccan coven in the United States, on Long Island, New York. Like Gardner, Valiente, and the Crowthers, Buckland set out to promote Wicca through a series of books, which proved to be some of the most influential in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. In Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft, first published in 1986, he claimed that the foliate heads depicted the Murrayite witches’ god, while the Sheela-na-Gigs represented the witches’ goddess (Buckland 1986: 4).

As well as the writings of practicing Wiccans themselves, there were also a range of other publications issued in the 1960s and 1970s that reinforced the narrative of these Pagan authors. One of those who did so was Thomas C. Lethbridge (1901–1971), an archaeologist who devoted his attention to the study of early medieval Britain until shifting his main research focus to paranormal phenomena and related topics in the late 1950s. In his 1962 book Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion, in which he focused on unearthing prehistoric and early historic influences on the Murrayite witch-cult, Lethbridge claimed that the faces that peer ‘through the oak leaves in the roof of a village church’ represent Esus, a Gallo-Roman deity whom he characterised as ‘the great lord of nature’ (Lethbridge 1962: 102–103). Later in Witches, Lethbridge described both the ‘Jacks in the Green’ and ‘Robin Hoods’ as ‘forms of the Celtic Esus’, linking the latter to what he called ‘the Pan concept’ (Lethbridge 1962: 150). Another non-Wiccan who wrote on the subject was a woman using the pen name of Justine Glass, and whose work on the subject emerged from her more concerted interest in extra-sensory perception. In her 1965 book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense – and Us, which drew upon the earlier writings of figures like Murray, Gardner, and Lethbridge, Glass interpreted ecclesiastical carvings through the lens of Wiccan theology, describing the Sheela-na-Gigs as depictions of ‘the Great Mother’ and the foliate heads as ‘masks of the Horned God, usually called the Green Man, because he is represented surrounded with scrolls of oak leaves or acorns’ (Glass 1965: 31). In her view, they demonstrated that ‘Christianity and the old cult existed side by side’ for much of the Middle Ages and that many of the stonemasons were ‘members of the Old Faith’ (Glass 1965: 31).

Ideas about the Green Man also began to surface in the Earth Mysteries milieu that emerged in Britain during the latter half of the 1960s. Participants in the Earth Mysteries milieu focused on landscape, seeking to understand ways in which the Earth itself was enchanted by a numinous or spiritual presence and on how past societies had recognised and interacted with such forces. Although not explicitly Pagan, there was a clear crossover of interests between the two communities, and Earth Mysteries exerted a strong influence on the ideas of Pagans such as Valiente. One of the most prominent figures in Britain’s Earth Mysteries milieu was John Michell (1933–2009), a prolific writer with eclectic interests. The scion of a wealthy family, during the 1960s he came under the increasing influence of the counterculture and especially of Ufology, about which he wrote his first book (on Michell’s life see Screeton 2010). His second, The View Over Atlantis, appeared in 1969, and saw him build on the ideas about ley lines first articulated by the antiquarian Alfred Watkins (1855–1935) in the 1920s. Here, Michell repeated the idea that the ‘strange twisted faces’ surrounded by ‘leaves and flowers’ that are found in churches reflected a survival of something pre-Christian, but contra most interpretations, he did not see these as gods or goddesses per se. Rather, he understood them as depictions of the ‘spirits of trees and plants’, added to the church so that it might give the impression of walking through ‘a great forest’ (Michell 1975 [1969]: 37–38).

Another prominent volume in the Earth Mysteries oeuvre was Mysterious Britain, co-written by the husband-and-wife team Colin (b. 1931) and Janet Bord (b. 1945) and first published in 1972. The book only mentioned the Jack-in-the-Green in passing, equating it with the Green Man and linking it to the Frazerian framework of a sacrificed god (Bord and Bord 1978 [1972]: 265), but in their follow-up volume The Secret Country, published in 1976, the Bords explicitly discussed the foliate heads of ecclesiastical architecture, relating how they depicted ‘the spirit of fertility’ and demonstrated that ‘the old faith was still practised, the old gods still venerated’ into the high and late medieval periods (Bord and Bord 1977 [1976]: 120). Ideas about the foliate heads reflecting pre-Christian survivals also seeped into other sectors of the British esoteric community. In his 1978 book A History of White Magic, for example, the ceremonial magician Gareth Knight (1930–2022) – an adherent of Fortune’s esoteric system – mentioned briefly that the ‘green men’ found in churches constituted evidence for the ‘Old Religion’ (Knight 1978: 95).

Over the course of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, we can see the consolidation of the Green Man as a figure within Pagan and Pagan-adjacent communities, especially in Britain. Following the construct expressed by Lady Raglan in the late 1930s, this figure constituted a conflation of Frazerian theories with medieval foliate heads and modern May Day customs, all interpreted as evidence for pre-Christian religious survival well into the Middle Ages and beyond. Members of early modern Pagan traditions, especially Wicca, used this as evidence to bolster their claim that their own (new) religions were in fact survivals of something incredibly old. There was nevertheless room for variation in the specifics of how this figure was interpreted. For early Wiccans such as Gardner and Valiente, the foliate heads were explicitly interpreted as depictions of the Horned God, often juxtaposed with the Sheela-na-Gigs, which were perceived as depictions of the Great Goddess. Conversely, a commentator like Michell could regard them as portrayals of tree spirits rather than of specific deities and the Bords could see them as reflections of a conceptually broad ‘spirit of fertility’. Notions of the foliate heads being a pre-Christian survival nevertheless became sufficiently widely repeated across the pertinent literature that anyone with an interest in the general topic of modern Paganism or folklore would likely have come upon them.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the Green Man came to be established as a recurring character within various modern Pagan communities, typically understood as a pre-Christian god or symbol associated with the natural world. The books of Pagan writers such as Gardner and Valiente no doubt played a role in promoting the Green Man as a figure in modern Pagan religiosity, as did the publications of figures like Ross or the Bords who – although not Pagans themselves – advocated ideas that appealed to a Pagan readership. It is highly probable that the magazines which circled in the Pagan community during the 1970s and 1980s also played a role in this dissemination; the U.S. for instance saw a profusion of magazines from the late 1960s onward, among the most prominent being Joseph Wilson’s The Waxing Moon, the Church of All Worlds’ Green Egg, Carl Weschcke’s Gnostica, and Herman Slater’s Earth Religion News.3 It is also likely that notions of the Green Man as a Pagan god or symbol of the woodland were transmitted orally, both within practitioner groups and local friendship networks but also through the burgeoning Pagan festival circuit that emerged in the 1970s, with such events initially held in hotels before becoming largely outdoor affairs in the 1980s (Clifton 2006: 31, 54; an ethnographic study of these festivals was made by Pike 2001).

One of the most influential U.S. Pagan groups to take an interest in the Green Man was the Church of All Worlds (CAW), founded by a group of students at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 1962. Most prominent among these students was Tim Zell (now Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, b. 1942), who would remain at the ideological core of CAW over the next half-century. In its earliest incarnation, the Church was modelled on a group of the same name that appeared in the 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) (Clifton 2006: 145–47; Sulak 2014). In its early days, the Church lacked a clear theology, instead employing, in Zell’s words, ‘science fiction as a mythic framework’. However, under the influence of Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, Zell began to develop a broader Pagan theology focused around ‘the Divine Feminine’ circa 1970 (Sulak 2014: 68). The Church itself spawned groups, called ‘nests’, in various parts of the U.S., but never gained an especially large following. Instead, its influence came primarily through Green Egg, a magazine that Zell launched from his new home in St Louis in 1968. According to the historian Chas S. Clifton (2006: x), by the mid-1970s Green Egg was ‘the nearest thing to a national Pagan forum’ in the country.

The CAW had a patchy history and both the Church and its magazine folded in the latter part of the 1970s. Zell focused his attentions on other projects before relaunching Green Egg in 1988 and re-establishing his Church. He later noted that, although he was aware of the Green Man from the 1970s, it was in the 1990s that the group began integrating the sylvan figure more fully into its theology, influenced by the publication of a book on the topic by William Anderson (discussed shortly). These ideas would also be set forth in Green Egg, where the image of the Green Man’s foliate features was included on the front of one 1993 issue (Zell-Ravenheart, pers. comm.). Zell, by this point Zell-Ravenheart, discussed some of this theology in his first book, Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard, published in 2004. Here he portrayed the Green Man, whom he named Florus, as one of five children of the Mother Earth and Father Sun and the twin brother of the Flowery Maid, Flora. He identified the Green Man as a vegetation god of death and resurrection and linked him with not only the Jack-in-the-Green but also a range of deities from different world pantheons, including Bacchus, Tammuz, Osiris, and Ochosi (Zell-Ravenheart 2004: 63–64).

There is evidence that, by the early 1990s, a growing number of modern Pagans – especially those influenced strongly by the Wiccan model – were incorporating the Green Man into their rituals. When the BBC released a documentary about the Green Man in 1990, they included footage of a British Wiccan group bedecking their priest in foliage and describing how the Green Man was one of their gods. While attending the 1991 ELFest, a Pagan festival near Bloomington, Indiana, the anthropologist Sarah M. Pike noted that a ‘Wild Magick Guidebook’ available to attendees described how ‘The Green Man is alive and dancing through the forest’ (Pike 2001: 42). That same year, a Midsummer rite that took place in the U.S. involved a ‘wedding feast of the God and Goddess’ in which one of the participants was dressed as the Green Man, with ‘a loincloth of green leaves’ (Magliocco 1996: 99). Another Pagan ceremony conducted at Midsummer 1991, reported to the ethnographer Loretta Orion (1995: 243), incorporated the Green Man into a rite of passage for a boy entering manhood. In this instance, the son of a Pagan family was taken into the wilderness, where he was met by men in masks representing ‘aspects of the god’, one of whom took on the role of the Green Man. This young man was then taught how to build a fire and left there for three days to experience a vision. The anthropologist Sabina Magliocco also noted an appearance of the Green Man at a 1995 ritual held by the prominent Wiccan Starhawk (b. 1951) at the first Pantheacon event in San Jose, California. In this, Starhawk called upon both the Green Man and the goddess Brigid, incorporating a Dylan Thomas poem into her rite (Magliocco 2004: 1). In other instances, the Green Man’s appearance was not bound up explicitly with ritual but rather was used as a marker of modern Pagan identity. At the 1992 Witches’ Ball in Salem, Massachusetts, an annual event hosted by the Wiccan Laurie Cabot (b. 1933), a high priest from Connecticut won the fancy dress competition for his interpretation of the Green Man (Guerra with Farrar 2008: 150). When, in 1998, the American Michael Thomas Ford (b. 1968) created a Boston-based Pagan group for gay men, he called its members ‘Green Men’ and used it as the basis for a new tradition called ‘the Path of the Green Man’ or ‘Green Man Wicca’ (Ford 2005: 2, 11).

The reasons why the Green Man had seemingly grown in popularity among some Pagan communities during the late 1980s and 1990s are potentially twofold. The first reason is that this figure offered a less contentious male deity form than the Horned God. As previously noted, the Horned God was a central figure in traditional Wiccan theology, but he was also readily interpreted by non-Pagans as the Christian Devil – a not unsurprising conclusion, given that the Wiccan Horned God largely emerged through attempts to Paganize (or, in the minds of many Wiccans, re-Paganize) the early modern image of the Devil. This iconographic commonality between the Horned God and the Devil caused problems for Wicca and related forms of modern Paganism throughout its history, although this became particularly acute during the 1980s and early 1990s because of the Satanic Panic.4 This moral panic was pushed largely by evangelical Christian groups, therapists, and allied elements in law enforcement who claimed, without supporting evidence, that there was a conspiracy of Satanists engaged in the widespread ritual abuse and murder of children (Richardson et al. 1991; Victor 1993; Le Fontaine 1998). Thus, in a context where modern Pagans were facing renewed hostility and demonisation from mainstream and Christian sectors of society, a means of switching focus from the Horned God onto a less Satanic-looking deity may have been especially welcome.

The second, and probably more significant reason for the growing popularity of the Green Man in Pagan communities was that, since the early 1970s, modern Paganism was increasingly presented as a nature religion or earth religion, a phenomenon with an intrinsically Earth-centric ethos. According to Clifton (2009: 109), this repositioning became particularly evident after the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. Clifton (2006: 32; 2009: 113) argued that it may have taken off among U.S. Pagans because they, unlike their European counterparts, could not claim to be practicing an indigenous religion of the land on which they lived and thus had to find new strategies for legitimising their practices. A similar tendency was nevertheless also taking place in Britain. Valiente (1986 [1973]: 135) for instance referred to ‘present-day pagans, witches, and Nature-worshippers’, implying a clear kinship between these different groups, while the prominent Wiccan writers Stewart and Janet Farrar (1989: 33) labelled Wicca ‘a Nature-based religion’. This rhetorical shift in the presentation of modern Pagan religion would open up new space for the Green Man; as a figure covered in foliage, a symbiosis of man and plant, this character provided an ideal iconographic personification of this tendency, offering a nature god for a nature religion.

Talk of nature religions among modern Pagans is not purely rhetorical. As Graham Harvey argued, ‘Paganism has Green roots and encourages a diversity of ecological actions’ (2007: 122). While this does not mean that all modern Pagans see theirs as a nature religion or engage in environmentalist activity, it is certainly the case that many Pagans can be considered adherents of what the scholar of religion Bron Taylor (2010: ix) termed ‘dark green religion’, in that they embrace a ‘religion that considers nature to be sacred, imbued with intrinsic value, and worthy of reverent care’. Prominent examples of dark green Pagans include those who involved themselves in direct action protests against road development in Britain during the 1990s (Letcher 2000). On the other side of the Atlantic, links between modern Pagans and radical environmentalists were also developing from at least the 1980s; there was a crossover in membership between the Church of All Worlds and the radical environmentalist group Earth First!, for instance (Sulak 2014: 238; Pike 2017: 68). As Sarah M. Pike’s interviews with radical environmentalist activists has shown, in various cases these individuals had taken a teenage interest in modern Paganism even if they did not choose to define themselves as Pagan in adulthood (Pike 2017: 68). Given this intersection between modern Pagan religion and radical environmentalism, it is unsurprising that the Green Man, widely interpreted as a symbol of both pre-Christian European religion and of the natural world, proved to hold some interest for individuals straddling these two milieus. Although the Green Man has not, as of yet anyway, become a major icon or image within the environmentalist movement, he has certainly made some appearances. Earth Liberation Front radical William C. Rogers (1965–2005), for instance, included an image of the arboreal character on the back cover of his compilation, Mountains and Rivers Compel Me (Taylor 2010: 72).

Reflecting his increasing presence in Anglophone Western culture, the 1990s and 2000s saw a growing number of books devoted explicitly to the Green Man. By far the most influential of these was Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth, first published in 1990. Its British author, William Anderson (1935–1997), had previously written a string of books on medieval architecture and it was through this interest that he had developed a fascination with the foliate heads. Anderson did not openly identify as a Pagan, although his approach to the topic would certainly have chimed with many Pagan readers. Anderson’s central idea was that the Green Man should be seen as an archetype, nodding to Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious (Anderson 1990: 25). He nevertheless built the character into a broader mythology, presenting the Green Man as the son of both the ‘Sky God and the Earth Mother’, an entity who was ‘a young god who is perpetually sacrificed, who descends to the underworld, and perpetually is reborn’ (Anderson 1990: 21). Reflecting the growing awareness of ecological devastation, Anderson also claimed that this archetype was re-establishing itself in popular consciousness as ‘a symbol of hope’ encouraging humanity to create a more environmentally sustainable future (Anderson 1990: 160). The influence of Anderson’s idea can be seen not just in the fact that a BBC documentary featuring Anderson, ‘The Return of the Green Man’, was screened in 1990, but that his work remained widely cited in subsequent publications on the topic – including those of modern Pagans. It is no surprise, for instance, that Zell-Ravenheart (pers. comm.) related that Anderson’s book influenced developing ideas of the Green Man among the Church of All Worlds.

Anderson was not explicitly targeting his book to a readership of esotericists and Pagans, but around the same time several books discussing the Green Man appeared that were written by practitioners of modern Paganism or related forms of esotericism. In his 1990 book Earth God Rising, an examination primarily of the Horned God, the English writer Alan Richardson (b. 1951) conflated the medieval foliate heads with the Jack-in-the-Green and identified them with a pre-Christian deity (Richardson 1990: 151). Another English esotericist, Marian Green (b. 1944), also made reference to the figure in at least two of her books from this period, The Elements of Natural Magic (1989) and A Witch Alone (1991). Green’s books promoted a form of Pagan witchcraft aimed at solitary practitioners, rather than those joining covens, although were clearly influenced by earlier Wiccan writing. She for instance repeated the now-familiar claim that the Green Man appeared in churches as ‘the Green God of Nature’, while the Sheela-na-Gigs depicted ‘the Goddess in her birth-giving or wildly erotic aspect’ (Green 1995 [1991]: 20, 91). Where she took an unusual turn was in interpreting the Green Man not as Pan or the Horned God himself, as had already been done repeatedly, but as a son of Pan (Green 1989: 31; Green 1995 [1991]: 92). She was also one of the first authors to publicly outline rites and other practices that readers could carry out so as to engage with the Green Man. She set forth, for instance, a visualisation in which the reader could meet with the ‘Jack in the Green […] a small man, wirey [sic] and bent with time’ (Green 1989: 30) and elsewhere encouraged her readers to use dried flowers and leaves to ‘make a collage’ in honour of the Green Man (Green 1995 [1991]: 141).

Some of the first books explicitly devoted to the Green Man to be written by a practicing esotericist were The Quest for the Green Man (2001) and The Green Man: Spirit of Nature (2002), both by the English writer John Matthews (b. 1948). Matthews was a prolific author on topics such as Arthurian legend and West European mythologies, both by himself and in collaboration with his wife Caitlyn Matthews (b. 1952). Although their work dealt with many themes of interest to the Pagan community, Hutton has noted that the Matthews refused to ‘identify themselves firmly with either Christianity or Paganism’ (Hutton 2003: 247). John Matthews’ two books on the Green Man, each brought out by a different publisher, overlap heavily in content, with the latter representing a condensed version of the former, sold as part of a pack with a Green Man foliate head plaque. Matthews had clearly read widely in preparing this material – the bibliography of The Quest for the Green Man contains over 180 entries – although Anderson’s Green Man appears to have been a particularly clear influence. Like Anderson, Matthews conceptualised the Green Man primarily as an archetype (Matthews 2001: 8, 11), however he expanded the figure’s utility far beyond the geographical constraints that Anderson had adopted. While Anderson had regarded the Green Man as an archetype applicable only to Northwest Europe and the Mediterranean basin (Anderson 1990: 20–21), Matthews used it cross-culturally to describe a vast range of mythological characters from across the world: Pan, Dionysus, Osiris, Enkidu, Rama, Krishna, and al-Khidr were all identified as manifestations of this same archetype (Matthews 2001: 27–35; Matthews 2002: 12–17). Relating the view that the Green Man ‘represents the energy of the natural world’ (Matthews 2002: 55), like Anderson, Matthews saw the increasing interest in the Green Man as a reminder of how humanity is interconnected with broader ecosystems and of the urgent need for our species to end its environmentally destructive behaviours (Matthews 2001: 132).

Although Matthews avoided calling the Green Man a ‘god’ or ‘deity’, perhaps so as not to put off Christian readers, he promulgated methods by which interested persons could engage with this figure in a religious or spiritual way. He for instance outlined several guided meditations in which individuals could imagine meeting with the Green Man in different scenarios. Elsewhere he suggested using the Green Man as ‘the focus of a simple ceremony of affirmation’ when embarking on new beginnings (Matthews 2002: 51). He also encouraged his readers to set up a shrine to the Green Man containing a foliate head – objects that, he noted, were now ‘generally available in garden centres and gift shops’ (Matthews 2002: 49). This latter comment revealed how the Green Man had been increasingly mainstreamed by the early twenty-first century, largely in the form of a garden ornament fashioned for mass consumption. Although an analysis of this mainstreaming is beyond the present remit, it is important to consider that, by the 2000s, the Green Man was a much more widely recognised figure than it had been before, at least in Britain and the United States, and this would have had an impact on modern Pagan understandings and portrayals of the figure.

Additional books focusing on the Green Man appeared in subsequent years, again written from a Pagan or esoteric perspective and often by authors who are little known within those communities. Published in 2004, The Spirit of the Green Man was authored by a Suffolk-based writer using the nom de plume of Mary Neasham. She characterised the Green Man as probably representing ‘the first divinity our ancestors made connections with’ (Neasham 2004: 27), thus underscoring the notion of this figure as having an ancient pedigree. In her view, the Green Man was not simply a symbolic archetype, but an objectively real entity capable of manifesting in the real world. She thus posited the unique argument that the sculptors who created the foliate heads of medieval architecture were not, as Lady Raglan had argued, basing their creations on humans they had seen bedecked in foliage, but rather were drawing on their own first-hand encounters with the Green Man himself. Another British esoteric writer to devote a book to the subject was Mark Olly, whose work Revealing the Green Man appeared in 2016. Like other authors, Olly saw the Green Man as an authentically pre-Christian figure, but his novel contribution to discourses on the topic was in his argument that the original prehistoric cult of this figure was distinct from that of other fertility spirits and instead arose through the discovery of how to manipulate copper – a metal that is green in its original state (Olly 2016: 106–107).

From at least the early 1990s, various Pagans were making use of the Internet to interact with their co-religionists (Cowan 2005) and as social media developed, so Pagans adapted new means of utilising the World Wide Web. This has meant that the Internet has also become a venue for the promotion of modern Pagan interpretations of the Green Man. YouTube is among the websites to have served this purpose; in 2020, for instance, a U.S.-based Pagan named Scarlet Ravenswood uploaded a presentation about the Green Man to her ‘Pagan 101’ YouTube channel. There, she described him as ‘a symbol of rebirth’ representing ‘one of the most visible Pagan references you’ll see in our society today’. She went on to characterise him as ‘part of the pagan psyche, an archetype representing the fertility of the world’ who has particular relevance given our contemporary issues with climate change (Ravenswood 2020). As of May 2021, the video had been watched over 20,000 times, indicating that this and similar presentations are likely to exert considerable influence over how notions of the Green Man spread across a wider audience. Modern Pagan views of the Green Man have also filtered into television. The U.S. web-series Hellier, for example, which follows a group of paranormal investigators, included a discussion of the Green Man that was heavily indebted to Pagan discourses on the subject in its 2019 second season, while the fantasy fiction series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina also introduced the Green Man as a Pagan god for its third season, released in 2020 (see Aguirre-Sacasa and Berlanti 2020). An interesting feature of both these appearances is that they presented the idea that those worshipping the Green Man are malevolent; Hellier considers allegations (ultimately dismissed by the investigators themselves) of a Kentucky-based group committing ritual sacrifices to the Green Man, while in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the worshippers of the Green Man are similarly characterised as threatening.

The modern concept of the Green Man has, from its origins in the early twentieth century, been thoroughly intertwined with notions of pre-Christian survivals, and through that with modern Pagan religion. While the automatic tendency to interpret medieval and modern folk customs as pre-Christian survivals was largely ejected from mainstream British scholarship during the 1970s,5 the influence that such notions have continued to exert on the modern Pagan milieu has ensured that such ideas have retained circulation in popular culture. It is now easy to come across claims that the Green Man is an ancient god, in some cases a form of the Horned God, or that he is an archetypal image or symbol linked to plant-life and to the natural world more broadly.6 It is nevertheless interesting to note that despite the repeated linking of the Green Man to notions of ‘paganism’, there have been many different interpretations of this character within the modern Pagan milieu. Earlier approaches from Gardnerian Wiccans such as Gardner and Buckland tended to equate the Green Man with the Horned God, thus slotting him in neatly with the established Gardnerian theology that they were keen to claim descended from distant prehistory. For some of these early Wiccans, such as Valiente, the character was also portrayed as a personification or representation of the woodland itself, opening him up to more symbolic interpretations. The growing framing of modern Paganism as a collection of ‘nature’ or ‘earth religions’ during the 1970s probably facilitated rising interest in the Green Man throughout much of the Pagan milieu, at least in Anglophone Western countries, and allowed for his increasing utilisation as an image or character in Pagan ritual. At the same time, growing intersections between the modern Pagan and environmentalist communities likely assisted the character’s move into the latter. Since the publication of Anderson’s Green Man in 1990 – a work that was seminal in shifting and popularising ideas about the sylvan figure – the Green Man has typically been portrayed as an ‘archetype’ and given a broadened remit absorbing a large and disparate range of characters from Osiris to al-Khidr. Throughout this process, the character has remained multivalent, open to many different interpretations and applications. We have not seen the last of the Green Man, as the character continues to become ever more widespread among the cultural mainstream – where the notion of a personification or god of nature is likely to become increasingly resonant in the face of accelerating, negative, anthropogenic changes to Earth’s socioecological systems.

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