Green Man
|
Green Man:
Earth-Honoring Male Deity |
From earliest
times, masculine deities were always associated with
the Great Goddess, usually as her husband, brother
or son. And in virtually all cultures this crop
god's annual role was to die and be re-born.
Sumerian
Tammuz, Babylonian Dimuzzi, Egyptian
Osiris, all are representations of this sacred
year king. Note their function: protector, lover and
son of the goddess. In each of these roles the
ancient fertility god acts as husbandman, he who
cared for and was nurtured by the Mother.
This tradition of male nurturance of the
Earth was also a function of the Celtic god
Kernunnos, and it remains celebrated today in the Hindu
rites of
Shiva and
Vishnu.
Dionysos, the wild god of wine and revels, carried this
legacy to Greece out of Syria. He reminds us that a second
responsibility of the Green Man is to feel the ecstatic
intoxication of sensuality and emotion. And
Yogic Christ, the inheritor of this dying/resurrecting
god tradition, carries forward these qualities of
compassion, child-like intuitiveness, courage, and
self-sacrifice into our own time.
The warrior, a related Green Man
represented by Celtic
Lugh, Norse
Tyr and Hindu
Kartikeya, depicted qualities not of aggression but of
spiritual one-pointedness, phallic potency, and right
action.
The Fertility God/Green Man archetypes on
this and following pages thus suggest numerous rich, calm
models for men seeking to rebalance their energies away from
dominator patterns and conditioning. They offer paths of
extrication from the power-ego-competition cul de sac of
patriarchy.
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