canopy, where unheard of savage rituals took place in olden times. The Green Man was part and parcel of those wild rituals.
In an article called ‘The Green Man – Variation on a Theme’, which appears at a site called Edge (s. link below), Ruth Wylie says that “the mighty questions of who, what and why” concerning the figure of the Green man “have no answer yet”. However, in her own article she manages to give quite a few answers to those questions. The idea and figure of the Green Man, as Ms. Wylie states, is spread all over England. It is “a mediaeval image usually found in churches… He can be recognized as a face, often grotesque, with foliage sprouting from his mouth, nose, eyes or ears. Alternatively, he may be a face composed entirely of leaves… The earliest known examples are in the art of Classical Rome, from where the idea seems to have moved northwards, to be adopted by Christianity and spread far and wide along the pilgrimage routes. The Green Man vanished with the ‘Old Faith’ after the Reformation…”
The expression of “Old Faith” is the answer to those questions initially brought in by Ruth Wylie. This obviously the pagan religion spread all over Europe before the advent of Christianity. Referring to the same wide occurrence of the Green Man, the Mything Link site (s. link below) states plainly: The Green Man was the god Pan – dweller of the forest, dressed in its leaves and ruling over all kinds of wild rituals.
But according to other sources, the god Pan had a double in the better known, more widely spread and powerful god, Dionysus. In his book The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer says about Dionysus that he was a god of trees in general, sacrificed to by