It seems to me that the 'paganisation' of folklore is the result of the self-same Victorian paternalism that was used to justify the evils of colonialism. It's there in the cultural condescension that would interpret any given folk custom as being somehow 'vestigial' of something now 'long forgotten'.

When the thoroughly aristocratic Lady Raglan first called her medieval ecclesiastical foliate-head a 'Green Man', she did so fully in the faith that the Jack-in-the-Greens (or should that be Jacks-in-the-Green?) etc. were survivals of pagan fertility rites quaintly perpetuated by an ignorant lower order of society unwittingly preserving (as mere superstition) an ancient belief system that they themselves couldn't possibly understand, either in terms of its 'true' provenance or else its 'real' meaning.

That such thinking still exists today tell us much about the political & cultural agendas of modern pagans and such-like new-agers who think themselves privy to a deeper, sacred knowledge (such as the tripe one finds in most books on the Green Man) which masquerades as ancient wisdom but which is, in actual fact, wholesale invention on the part of the writers.

It occurred to me recently that I love Green Men in the same way that I love the singers in local folk clubs and singarounds. It's these people (in all their stylistic diversity & invariable idiosyncrasy) that give substance and vibrancy to the notion of the 'revival', just as the highly individualistic stylings of (say) Davie Stewart might give us a sense of the wide tradition he himself was but a part of. It is in the singing of traditional song (whatever the hell that might be) that the individual interfaces with the collective; and, no matter what ability the singer, I always feel I gain a far greater appreciation of such a song by hearing it sung than I ever do by seeing it written down.

Empiricism in all things; and the more I experience the corporeal wonders of the univese, so the more wondrously devoid of anything so much as resembling absolute meaning it all becomes...