Green Man Musings

I first got interested in the Green Man about five years ago when I spontaneously dressed up as the Green Man for a Halloween party. Halloween parties are a big deal around here and I painted all my visible skin a Lincoln green, made a robe out of a old green blanket, and wreathed my face and hands with faux ivy strands. It was a good costume as I'm rather tall and large and the wildness was around. It was an evocation of some kind, I now suppose. Or a premonition of what was to come. It is hard to sort past and future and now out when you start getting into Green Man space.

Around the same time I was just starting to keep a dream journal and working with dream contents using some visualization techniques in kind of a Jungian or shamanic way. I had wondered at my choice of costume and later found a reference to the Green Man in a book on imaginal journeys. The gist of it was that Green Man symbols commonly arise when one starts to delve deeper into the unconscious--the Green Man is at the threshold and is maybe something like a gatekeeper. This remark caught my attention as some of my dreams and imaging would bring forth non-human people with stag horns and other woody or nature attributes. I love digging into the symbols and images that arise in this kind of work and so I started some research into the Green Man.

And here I am years later and I must say that I can't give much of a scholar's account of the topic, but my love of it and the mystery of the subject has only deepened. My current reading has been into alchemical symbols and I was delighted, but not shocked, to see my old friend appearing in different guises there. The Green Man seems to be a figure that spans opposites. Human/non-human, plant/animal, living/dead, and so on. I think there's an Osiris thing going on there, too. I still have a vivid memory of doing a meditation on Osiris dead but alive, it is a very weird kind of thing to contemplate and unlike the normal pattern of thought we have about being alive and being dead.