HISTORY OF THE GREEN MAN
Although the Green Man is most often seen incorporated as a carved decorative ornamentation on European churches and other buildings, dating from the 11th Century right through to the 20th Century, these were not the first Green Men.
It was Roman artists and sculptors who first developed composite figures (such as those in Nero’s Golden House in Rome), as well as complex carvings of life-like intertwined vegetation. Roman architecture sometimes features ornate leaf masks, which are usually taken as showing the close interdependence between man and nature, and as describing the deities of Pan, Bacchus, Dionysus or Silvanus, and the mystery religions that grew up around them. A leaf-clad statue of Dionysus in Naples, Italy, dating back to about 420 BCE, is often considered one of the first Green Men images.
Indeed, Dionysus is often considered one of the most likely precursors to the Green Man of the Middle Ages, especially given his usual portrayal as leaf-crowned lord of the wilderness, nature and agriculture - it was only later that he became associated with wine, ecstasy and sexual abandon - and his parallel role (in the guise of Okeanus) as a god of the underworld, of death and rebirth. An acanthus-sprouting head of Okeanos (a Greek/Roman figure with links to Dionysus), dating to the 6th Century CE and found in the old Byzantine city of Mudanya, Turkey, appears to have served as a model for several later carvings in Europe.
However, there are similar figures represented in ancient cultures which had little or no Roman influence. The Mesopotamian Green Man carving at al-Hadr or Hatra (present-day Iraq) may date from as early as 300 BCE. A temple to Bacchus at Baalbek, Lebanon, dating from the 2nd Century CE, shows a full leaf-mask distinctly reminiscent of later Green Men. There are many examples of leaf masks from ancient Constantinople (such as those now kept in the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul), although this appears not to have been a tradition carried on within the later Eastern church. Figures similar to the Green Man also appear in Borneo, Nepal and India, one of the earliest of which is a disgorging head which appears on an 8th Century CE Jain temple in Rajasthan, India.
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