The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104331 Message #2149006
Posted By: Bee
14-Sep-07 - 08:34 AM
Thread Name: Folklore: The Green Man
Subject: RE: Folklore: The Green Man
Some long gone to dust mason, I suspect, may be having a last laugh, having carved the very first foliate head completely out of his own imagination, chiseling away at his oak leaves with an admiring nod to the Roman love of acanthus leaves.
I know there may be, as Sedayne suggests, a churchy basis for these Green fellows, and there may even be an echo of earlier worship as others speculate.
But I have always found that scholarly people, and that includes archaeologists and historians, often tend to spin a religious tale out of the smallest evidence when it comes to ancient times. Many times, they may be onto something. Other times, not so much.
I'm reminded of the various arguments about all those fat little prehistoric Venuses, pounced upon as being little fertility figures or even little mother goddesses. Quite a few years back, someone writing for British Archaeology Magazine (sorry, can't find the article) re-examined the little women and made some entirely different speculations, one of which was that they may have been essentially ancient pornography, and another of which was that they may have been tokens representing captive women (some of them have some interesting suggestions of bindings). He or she may be as wrong as the Mother Goddess folk, but the arguments were just as rooted in probability.
One need only look at the history of 'clan tartans' to see how eager people are to clutch at some kind of continuity of ancestry. For years (and still, occasionally) I did work for a fellow who supplied the artistic desires of that segment of the North American population which is fascinated by their Scottish (and 'Celtic') forebears. There's no question that the works we turned out are things of beauty, but we eventually gave up explaining to people the actual short history of clan-specific tartans, and the monkish and Scandinavian origins of knotworks, and even the specific rules around heraldry, because they didn't want to know. They had their own mythology, which included no clever tailors, no official heralds, and a lot of pre-Christian fakelore.
All quite harmless, of course.