My Mum really likes Green men. They pepper her garden. I like them too but I’ve struggled to really vibe with them on a spiritual level, then this year The Greenman was pretty front and centre in our Litha ritual. He was the mid point, both Hafgan and Arawn, the opener of the doors.
For all I’m still Wiccan my rituals have taken on more and more of a Druidic flavour and more Celtic influence. That’s absolutely got to be partly the result of doing the OBOD course but also the group of pagans who I’ve been working with online over the course of the pandemic. That’s probably another blog entry in and of itself to be honest but it has led to a deepening of my work with Gods. The Greenman is a god that I’ve struggled really to understand in the context of his relationship with the dual sun gods that I’m used to thinking of ‘The God’ as. Ahh Wicca with your love of amalgams and merging gods and goddesses, sometimes I think you’re very based on Christianity and sometimes I’m looking at Asia and wondering if Gardner would have really enjoyed the sort of animes where mecha-suits combine in infinite variety with each other.
In any case, my flippancy aside, for some reason I have never understood before, The Green Man as both Hafgan and Arawn. I have seen any amount of images of The Greenman depicted as made up containing both holly and oak leaves and I have never before really understood that as much as I did the Saturday before last.
There he stood, opening our door and there he was, two in one just as The Goddess is three in one and I really felt like I got it, finally.
The thing I really enjoy about being a religious pagan is that the journey never stops, there are always further and deeper understandings and greater movement within your practice. The Greenman is a god who’s been there and understood to be there for a long time. He’s absolutely central to my relationship with the Wild, the world and the fae and I haven’t ever really examined that or understood who he is. I think a lot of times I’ve concentrated on Cernunous and Herne and the Horned, very active, very obvious gods, of whom he is both a part and related to at more of a distance and yet I’ve never stood there and specifically really addressed myself to him. I’ve been out in my garden a lot in the past couple of weeks and that’s a part of understanding him, of addressing him and thanking him for keeping open the door in our Litha rite.
I don’t know, this has been a very poetic and rambling entry, but I guess that that is appropriate for the subject matter. At the centre of everything is Green and that is where he is. In the Green.