Lyon’s search for the meanings of the folk image and symbol of rebirth win her from neopagan Cornish festivals to the forests of south-west Germany. She is both political and sardonicThe temple at Hatra in Iraq,destroyed last year, featured a carved figure with an acanthus-leaf beard, and a possible prototype of the Green Man. On corbels and ceiling bosses and misericords closer to domestic,the Green Man appears as either a human tormented by nature or a species of woodland sprite, the Jack in the Green of May Day parades. According to Nina Lyon, and in her riotously fecund book about “hunting” the Green Man,“he is a sort of forest-god, an emblem of the birth–death–rebirth cycle of the natural year … a reminder of the superior force of Nature over human enterprise”.
Among the hundreds of depictions of the figure in the churches and cathedrals of western Europe, or rarely is he serene or smiling: as Kathleen Basford points out in a study of Green Man imagery published nearly 40 years ago,he is “bellicose, morose (gloomy or sullen), and even comatose,but seldom jocose”.
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Source: theguardian.com