Was the “Green Man” Really an Ancient Pagan Deity?

If you’ve read anything about paganism, you’ve probably heard of a figure known as the “Green Man.” This is a name that is commonly applied to an artistic motif that often appears in decorative carvings in churches in western Europe, depicting a male face surrounded by leaves and foliage. In many depictions, the man is shown with his mouth open, disgorging foliage from it.

In modern popular culture, the Green Man is widely portrayed as an extremely ancient and extremely powerful “pagan” nature deity who was supposedly of immense importance to pre-Christian cultures throughout Europe and the Middle East. In reality, the Green Man is nothing of the sort and the whole notion of him as any kind of deity is actually less than a century old.

The Green Man as he is popularly portrayed

The website Ancient Origins is somewhat notorious for publishing all kinds of inaccurate and poorly-researched articles about ancient history. It is therefore no surprise at all that an article published on the website on 29 January 2015 titled “Unraveling the Nature and Identity of the Green Man” is redolent with all sorts of exaggerated and obfuscating claims.

The article asserts that the Green Man is an extremely important and influential pagan deity whose origins go back “thousands of years” to a time “long before the coming of the Christian religion … before the days of the Roman Empire.” It claims that he is so extraordinarily ancient that “his beginnings and his worship are not fully known.”

Nonetheless, the article goes on to make all sorts of claims about what the Green Man supposedly represented for ancient “pagan” cultures, insisting that he “is believed to have been … a symbol of growth and rebirth” and that he represents “the pre-Christian notion that Man was born from nature.”

Ancient Origins’ obsession with the Green Man goes even deeper; another article published on the website on 20 June 2016 ham-fistedly asserts that the Green Man is the original, primordial prototype for all deities throughout the world who are supposedly associated with life, death, and rebirth, and that Jesus of Nazareth, the central figure of Christianity, is merely a cheap knockoff of the Green Man.

ABOVE: Ancient Christian mural painting of Jesus from the Catacomb of Commodilla, dating to the late fourth century CE

These claims are not supported by ancient evidence, but they are reinforced by popular culture. In the Netflix supernatural horror television series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, some of the main villains for Part 3, which was released on 24 January 2020, are a group of “pagans” who describe the Green Man as “the oldest of the gods” and perform human sacrifices to him to nourish him so that he can return to earth. In order to complete the Green Man’s resurrection, they need to sacrifice a virgin, leading them to inquire very closely into various characters’ private sex lives.

Obviously, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a work of fiction; it’s not supposed to be based on any kind of actual history. Therefore, the writers are allowed to make up whatever deities they want. I’m not annoyed with the writers of the show for including the Green Man as a character. I am, however, a bit peeved that people writing about the show online treat the Green Man as an entirely authentic ancient “pagan” deity.

An article published on the website Refinery29 on 27 January 2020 purports to describe the actual mythology that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is based on. Annoyingly, it accepts the notion of the Green Man as a genuine ancient deity entirely without question, saying this:

“Another God featured in Chilling Adventures, and possibly the most important, is the Green Man. While the name ‘Green Man’ seems pretty basic, it is actually a common figure in religion and mythology. Even literary characters like Robin Hood and Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings can be traced back to this symbolic figure who represents nature, and renewal. And actually, Pan is associated with the Green Man in mythology, but Chilling Adventures separates the two deities.”

As I will demonstrate in a moment, none of this is really true. The Green Man deity portrayed in the show is an invention of twentieth-century pseudohistory.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the “pagans” in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina attempting the resurrect the Green Man by sacrificing a person whom they believe to be the virgin Mary Wardwell, but who is actually the witch Pesta in disguise

The Green Man as an artistic motif

In order to understand the true history of the Green Man, we need to make a very important distinction. On the one hand, there is the genuinely ancient artistic motif of a male face surrounded by foliage, which some scholars have retroactively labelled the “Green Man.” On the other hand, there is the notion of the Green Man as an important nature deity, which is entirely modern.

The “Green Man” artistic motif occurs in some works of ancient art, but there is no evidence to suggest that anyone in ancient times ever worshipped the Green Man, that anyone ever built any kind of temple to him, that anyone ever offered any kind of sacrifices to him, that anyone ever told any kind of stories about him, that anyone ever ascribed any kind of deep symbolic importance to him, or that anyone ever even thought of him as a deity at all. In fact, the figure whom modern scholars sometimes call the “Green Man” didn’t even have a name until less than a century ago. He existed solely as an artistic motif—nothing more.

Even the artistic motif, however, is not nearly as old as other sources would have you believe. The articles published on Ancient Origins all make the Green Man seem positively primeval. In reality, the oldest identifiable depictions of a male head surrounded by foliage in a manner resembling the so-called “Green Man” come from the Near East and date to around the second century CE. In other words, although the artistic motif of the “Green Man” is genuinely ancient, it is not really older than Christianity.

One early artwork that has been identified as a supposed depiction of the “Green Man” is a carving from the wall of a building in the ancient city of Hatra, which is now located in the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq. The carving shows a male face with leaves instead of a beard. The face was carved in around the second century CE, when Hatra was an important border town between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a relief carving on the side of a ruined building in the ancient city of Hatra in Iraq, dating to roughly the second century CE

Versions of the foliate head appear in ancient Roman artwork as well. The Great Dish of Bacchus, an ancient Roman silver dish dating to around the fourth century CE that was discovered in a ruined Roman villa in the town of Mildenhall in Suffolk, England, contains a depiction at its center of a male face whose hair and beard are made out of leaves.

The face in the center of the Great Dish, however, probably does not represent a primeval forest deity. On the contrary, it is generally agreed to represent a Roman sea god—probably Oceanus or Neptunus—and the leaves growing from his face are agreed to actually represent seaweed.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Great Dish of Bacchus from the Mildenhall Treasure, dating to around the fourth century CE

Perhaps the earliest surviving depiction of the so-called “Green Man” disgorging foliage occurs in a carving from a stone sarcophagus discovered in the Church of Saint Hilary of Poitiers in the city of Poitiers, France. The sarcophagus dates to sometime around the late fourth or early fifth century CE. It depicts the face of a man surrounded by leaves, with new leaves spreading from the face’s mouth or nostrils.

ABOVE: Photograph of the sarcophagus from the Church of Saint Hilary of Poitiers, which dates to around the late fourth or early fifth century CE

A surviving mosaic from the Great Palace of Constantinople dating to around the sixth century CE or thereabouts depicts the face of a man whose hair and beard are both made of green foliage.

Like the foliate head in the center of the Great Dish of Bacchus from the Mildenhall Treasure, the foliate head from the mosaic from the Great Palace of Constantinople most likely represents a sea god—most likely either Okeanos or Poseidon—and the green foliage surrounding his head most likely represents seaweed. The mosaic is currently housed in the Great Palace Mosaic Museum in İstanbul.

ABOVE: Roman mosaic from the Great Palace of Constantinople dating to around the sixth century CE, depicting a man whose hair and beard are made of green foliage

Foliate heads seem to have become especially popular decorations in Romanesque churches in western Europe in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries CE. They often appear in archways and in the capitals of columns. These representations often show the man disgorging foliage from his mouth.

ABOVE: Photograph of a head disgorging foliage from the doorway of the Church of St. Mary and St. David in Kilpeck, England, a Romanesque Norman church, dating to around the middle of the twelfth century CE

ABOVE: Photograph of a head disgorging foliage from the archway of the Romanesque Garway Church, dating to around the thirteenth century CE

Images of the “Green Man” artistic motif occur in Renaissance art and architecture as well. The German Renaissance artist Sebald Beham (lived c. 1500 – c. 1550) produced multiple print engravings of male faces surrounded by foliage.

ABOVE: Engraving of a “Green Man” head produced by the German artist Sebald Beham in 1543

ABOVE: Engraving produced by the German artist Sebald Beham in 1544

Versions of the “Green Man” artistic motif appear in some works of English Neoclassical art. Notably, a painting dating to 1867 depicting a male face with a green beard crowned with a wreath of leaves appears on the ceiling of the Bankfield Museum, a historic house museum in Halifax, England. Various green plant motifs can be seen coming out of the man’s mouth.

ABOVE: Neoclassical painting of the “Green Man” motif from the ceiling of the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, England

The context of nineteenth and early twentieth-century western European folklore studies

As I have previously emphasized, although images of male foliate heads do occur in ancient, medieval, and early modern art and architecture, there is no evidence that anyone in pre-modern times ever imagined that these faces represented a single primeval “pagan” nature deity.

The very first steps towards the modern conception of the Green Man as a nature deity were actually made in the early nineteenth century CE. As I discuss in this article I originally published in March 2020, in the early nineteenth century, the poets and artists of the Romantic movement were influential in promoting the skewed impression that pre-Christian religions in Europe were all about nature worship.

Notably, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (lived 1770 – 1850) wrote his famous poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” about the supposed “pagan” connection with nature that was supposedly lost after the rise of Christianity. Meanwhile, Romantic artists produced heavily romanticized depictions of imaginary “pagans” worshipping their deities in woodland clearings, surrounded by beautiful natural landscapes. The theme of Sacrifice in Arcadia was especially popular.

ABOVE: Sacrifice in Arcadia, painted by the German artist Friedrich August von Kaulbach (lived 1850 – 1920)

The Romantic movement also attracted a great deal of attention to the study of western European folklore. In its early days, the study of folklore was, in many ways, a nationalistic enterprise. Western European folklorists wanted to see their native customs as ancient and traditional. As such, it was extremely common for folklorists to interpret elements of western European folklore that weren’t explicitly and obviously Christian as “survivals” from ancient “paganism”—regardless of whether there was actually any concrete evidence to indicate that the piece of folklore in question was of pre-Christian origin.

It is partly as a result of this careless tendency that there are so many people today who seriously believe that Christmas trees and the Easter Bunny are of ancient “pagan” origin—even though neither of these things can be historically traced back any further than the fifteenth century CE. (For more information, you can read this article I wrote debunking the alleged “pagan” origins of modern Easter traditions and this other article I wrote debunking the alleged “pagan” origins of modern Christmas traditions.)

ABOVE: Postcard from 1907 showing a rabbit with the words “Loving Easter Greeting.” Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing even remotely “pagan” about the Easter Bunny.

Despite all the attention that “paganism” was getting, during this period, Christianity was still very much the dominant religion in western Europe. As such, most western European anthropologists, folklorists, and scholars of religion were raised in Christian homes and it was therefore common for them to assume that all religions are fundamentally similar to Christianity.

As a result of this assumption, anthropologists and folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently interpreted “pagan” religions that were, in fact, very different from Christianity using essentially Christian theological frameworks.

It was in this cultural and intellectual context that the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (lived 1854 – 1941) wrote his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, which was originally published in two volumes in the year 1890. The book was later retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.

In the book, Frazer claims that basically every religion in every time period in every part of the world is centered around a male deity who is associated with agriculture and vegetation who is believed to die in the autumn during the harvest season and be reborn in the spring. He also claims that many western European folk traditions are rooted in the worship of this supposed primordial dying-and-rising vegetation god.

ABOVE: Photograph from the National Portrait Gallery website of Sir James George Frazer, taken on 22 April 1926

Although Frazer’s notion of the dying-and-rising vegetation god is clearly inspired to a large extent by the Christian interpretation of Jesus, in his book, he manages to construe a wide array of very different figures from the mythologies of very different cultures around the world—including the Egyptian god Osiris, the Phrygian god Attis, the Greek mythological figure Adonis, and the English folkloric figure John Barleycorn—to fit it.

Nowadays, anthropologists and folklorists generally regard Frazer’s work as outdated at best, if not outright misguided. The British social anthropologist Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (lived 1910 – 1989) gives the following assessment of Frazer’s work in a lecture he delivered at the University of Oxford on 28 October 1982:

“Frazer used his ethnographic evidence, which he culled from here there and everywhere, to illustrate propositions which he had arrived at in advance by a priori reasoning, but, to a degree which is often quite startling, whenever the evidence did not fit he simply altered the evidence!”

“A single example which is relevant for my later presentation will show you what I mean. In volume nine of the twelve-volume third edition of The golden bough, Frazer cites evidence that as far back as the fifth century BC the Roman Saturnalia was celebrated around the time of the Winter Solstice in late December (Frazer 1911–15, vol. 9: 306).”

“Furthermore, Frazer admits that there is no evidence that it had ever been held at any other date. However, according to Frazer’s theory, Saturnalia ought to have been a Spring Festival held around the end of February. So he simply ‘conjectured’ that at one time this had actually been the case and thereafter proceeds with his argument as if the evidence relating to the Winter Solstice Saturnalia really applied to a Spring Festival.”

Despite the fact that much of what Frazer wrote is extremely speculative and, in many cases, demonstrably inaccurate, his book was wildly popular and his speculations proved extremely influential on early twentieth-century British folklore studies. One of the many people who read The Golden Bough and came to believe Frazer’s claims was the British aristocrat Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan.

ABOVE: Front cover of the first volume of the third edition of Sir James George Frazer’s influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

Lady Raglan’s invented mythology of the Green Man

Lady Raglan almost single-handedly invented the entire concept of the Green Man as he is known today. What’s even more impressive is the fact that she did it through a single thirteen-page article, titled “The ‘Green Man’ in Church Architecture,” which was originally published in the March 1939 edition of The Folk-Lore Journal. (The title of the journal was later changed to simply Folklore.)

Lady Raglan begins her paper with an introduction explaining how she herself invented the name “Green Man” in around the year 1931 and applied it to the carvings of foliate heads that she often saw in British churches. She writes:

“It is now about eight years ago since my attention was first drawn by the Revd. J. Griffith, then vicar of Llangwm, in Monmouthshire, and himself a folklorist, to a curious carving (Fig. i). It is a man’s face, with oak leaves growing from the mouth and ears, and completely encircling the head. Mr. Griffith suggested that it was intended to symbolize the spirit of inspiration, but it seemed to me certain that it was a man and not a spirit, and moreover that it was a ‘Green Man.’ So I named it, and the evidence that I have collected to support this title is the reason for this paper.”

Having explained her own invention of the name “Green Man,” Lady Raglan goes on to discuss some of the carvings from English churches that she regards as belonging to the “Green Man” type. She also draws some extremely speculative conclusions about what she thinks the Green Man might symbolize, based on Frazer’s previous speculations in The Golden Bough.

ABOVE: Photograph from the National Portrait Gallery website of Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan, taken on 5 April 1923

Lady Raglan concludes in her article that the Green Man must be an ancient “pagan” nature deity, who must have been believed to have died and risen again. She also concludes that ancient “pagans” in Britain must have performed a ritual in springtime in which a mortal man must have been chosen to represent the Green Man himself and then been ritually sacrificed. She writes on page 54 of The Folk-Lore Journal:

“Now it seems to me that not very deeply buried in this rite we have the bones, the framework, of the magical rite of the spring sacrifice. All who have read the Golden Bough are familiar with the theory that a man was chosen to represent the god, and he, after conferring by the proper magical ceremonies his strength and fertility upon his people, was sacrificed (perhaps by hanging), decapitated, and his head placed in the sacred tree. We know that Odin and Attis were both hanged, and it is possible that our Green Man is a descendant of the same myth.”

There is essentially no reliable evidence whatsoever to support this conclusion; Lady Raglan is pretty much just making stuff up. Nonetheless, her conclusions about the Green Man were very much in line of the cultural and intellectual zeitgeist, so the idea quickly became wildly popular. Thus, Lady Raglan almost single-handedly transformed a nameless artistic motif found in some carvings on the walls of churches into a cultural sensation.

To give you a sense of just how recent the notion of the Green Man as an ancient “pagan” deity truly is, I feel I should note that H. P. Lovecraft originally introduced the character Cthulhu in his short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” which was first published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1928—over a full decade before Lady Raglan published her article about the Green Man. This means that Cthulhu is authentically more ancient than the notion of the Green Man as an important “pagan” deity.

ABOVE: Illustration of Cthulhu, drawn by H. P. Lovecraft in 1934. Cthulhu is authentically more ancient than the notion of the Green Man as an important ancient “pagan” deity.

What does the Green Man represent?

At this point, most of my readers are probably wondering what the artistic motif of the man’s face surrounded by foliage actually represents, if it doesn’t represent a “pagan” nature god associated with “growth” and “renewal.” The truth, unfortunately, is that, for the most part, we don’t actually know what ancient or medieval people thought the foliate head was supposed to represent.

The assumption that the artistic motif of the foliate head must represent nature or “growth” is based on the the fact that, in contemporary English-speaking societies, leaves tend to be associated with these ideas. Leaves, however, can mean different things in different cultures and not all cultures share the association of leaves with “nature.” (Indeed, not all cultures share the concept of “nature” as a distinct thing at all.)

Given the fact that the motif of the foliate head occurs in art from so many different cultures over such a great span of time, it is probably a mistake to assume that this image represents the same thing in all the cultures that it appears in. The carving of the man with the leafy beard from Hatra probably doesn’t represent the same figure as the image of the man with the leafy beard from the center of the Great Dish of Bacchus, who almost certainly doesn’t represent the same figure as the carvings from Romanesque cathedrals of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Just because these are all depictions of foliate heads doesn’t mean they all share the same symbolic meaning.

The foliate heads seen in Romanesque churches may simply be decorative motifs without any especially great symbolic significance, since they normally only appear in fairly marginal locations, such as in archways and capitals, and they aren’t discussed in any detail in medieval texts. Artistically, it is possible that they may be derived from the older Roman representations of sea gods with hair and beards made out of seaweed.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of oak leaves. Leaves don’t necessarily represent the same thing in all cultures.