I just got to have a look at the "Three Hares" project above...that IS amazing!

Les, I'm sorry no one answered your posts of

13 Aug 08 - 02:25 AM (My paraphrase: did the green man emerge from the churches into the plays, and if so, so what?)

and

13 Aug 08 - 07:20 AM ("It seems a fair assumption that nobody would mess with the early church by putting pagan symbols in the walls.")

Both good questions/points which deserve further mention.

As to the first one, I don't think most people would say the green man entered the dramatic tradition from the church walls. The "wild man of the woods" who by the 16th Century seems to have been covered with leaves and called "green man" is actually an ancient literary character type (we'll avoid the baggage of the term "archetype," which I agree is problematic). As such it goes back to Gilgamesh, one of the very first literary plots we have, so it is old indeed. Although Enkidu of Gilgamesh did not use leaves, at some point the idea of the wild man reached countries that were heavily forested, where this would be a natural thing for a wild man to do. At some point prior to the 1570s, the character type started to be called a "green man," after the leaves he was wearing.

Characters like this existed in literature and folklore all over Britain and Ireland (Lailoken in Scotland, Myrddin in Wales, Suibhne in Ireland). So the wild man/green man of the plays may be derived simply from such literary and folkloric figures. Certainly such figures exist in European literature and folklore before the foliate head begins appearing in cathedrals.

The question, then, is: was the "Foliate Head" derived from such figures, or were some of the same ideas being expressed by both? This is hard to answer, because people who carved foliate heads didn't comment much on them. But the connections that Centerwell points to suggest that the two traditions were associated by some people as early as the high middle ages.

On to your second point: I don't necessarily agree that no-one would "mess with" the Church by incorporating pagan elements into the design. In fact, practically everything in the Jewish- Christian- Islamic complex of religions WAS based on earlier polytheistic elements. Furthermore, it was a policy of the early Church to adapt elements of local pagan practice in order to facilitate the assimilation of pagan groups.   

For both of these reasons, it's certain that items with pagan origins were indeed featured in churches. Baptismal fonts, censers, and other elements of Church architecture and furniture were surely adapted from pagan predecessors. Churches themselves were often placed directly on the sites of previous pagan worship.

As a good example, angels and demons, which came to Christianity through Jewish tradition, were based on the gods of Judaism's pagan antecedents, especially those of Canaanite mythology. So every angel you see in a stained glass window is, in fact, a medieval imagining of a Christian interpretation of a pagan god.

Those who claim the foliate head may also be a medieval imagining of a Christian interpretation of a pagan god therefore aren't making a wildly extraordinary claim. It's just never been proven. And, as Insane Beard would point out, the people who make this claim often then ascribe meanings to the pagan god they imagine is being represented, which are hard to square with reality.

To connect your two points, most pagan gods who seem to have had a meaning anywhere close to the one that New Agers try to ascribe to the Foliate Head, such as Sylvanus, resemble the wild man/green man of the plays much more than the foliate head. For this reason, a strong connection between the Foliate Head and the Wild Man/Green Man would lend a little much-needed support to the idea of a Foliate Head as a pagan deity.

More cautious observers like Insane Beard try guard against the new agers' glibness in interpreting these traditions. Therefore, they emphasize the small amount of evidence that exists for such a connection.

For myself, I do not dispute that there is a only small amount of evidence. I don't have any particular attachment to the idea that the Green Man has some connection to pagan deities, and I haven't seen any compelling evidence of it. But I do think it should be recognized that

(1) the evidence that we do have is not all recent, and some of it may date back right to the high middle ages.

(2) There is no particular reason NOT to think there is some connection between the Foliate Head and pre-Christian religion, as there is with almost all other elements of Christianity. But this is no reason to jump to conclusions about the meaning of the Foliate Head in general, or about the meaning of any individual example of the Foliate Head.

and

(3) if the Foliate Head is somehow connected to pagan mythology, his appearance in churches is not particularly anomalous or unusual--although specifically Celtic pagan elements are rare.