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The strange thing was, he felt no fear.

No fear whatsoever.

As a boy, my friend loved staying with grandma and grandpa on the farm.

He loved the tall, tall corn.

He loved the barn, with its animal smell.

He loved having his own room.

The first thing that he noticed when he woke that night was the smell.

It was the smell that you smell walking into the forest: bright ozone and sweet, dark decay.

He opened his eyes. The Leaf Man stood in the doorway, filling the doorway.

He felt no fear at all. Rather, he felt safe, protected.

The Leaf Man said nothing. He wanted him to, though.

He wanted him to come into the room, pick him up, and hold him in his arms.

He wanted to be his friend.

When he woke in the morning, the doorway, of course, was empty.

“What a strange dream,” he thought.

But when his grandma came to the door to wake him for breakfast, she looked puzzled.

“Where did all these leaves come from?” she asked. “Why is there dirt all over the floor?”

Let's face it, the ancestors were head-hunters.

According to the Roman geographer Strabo, writing in the first century BCE

The Gauls practice a custom common to many northern tribes. In battle, they hang the heads of their slain enemies around the necks of their horses, then at home they hang them on pegs in their houses.

The practice persisted for a surprisingly long time. While in Scotland, I paid a visit to the Well of the Seven Heads, where in 1663 a McDonald war-party stopped to tidy up the severed heads of seven clan rivals before presenting them to their chieftain.

Of course, the McDonald Himself probably didn't hang them around the Great Hall afterward.

What, I ask myself, would it be like to live in a home with severed heads hanging from the walls? While, say, you were eating dinner?

Surely they must have cured them in some way? Surely the stink would have been prohibitive otherwise? ("Oh Luvernios, not another one!") Of course, the old Celtic roundhouses lacked louvers—smoke-holes—over their central fires; smoke just percolated out through the thatch. It would have made for a smokey house-place, but also have kept down insects, and made an ideal environment for preserving meats. I suppose, with time, the heads would have dried and smoked along with the sausage and hams.

I look up into the eyes of the Green Man hanging above the computer. Like many pagans, I have many in my home: maybe 30 or so. (Every time I try counting them, the total is always different.)

Green Men we call them, but let's face it: they're Green Heads, mostly. In my own way, I suppose, I'm as avid a collector of heads as the doughtiest Celtic warrior.

Take a close look at the controversial Green “Man” on the official invitation to Charlie III's upcoming coronation—the one that has occasioned so much brujaja in the British press.

Note, gentle reader, that it is not in fact a Green Man at all, but rather a Green Cat.

Green Beasts

In fact, the Green Feline is a not infrequent variant in the Leaf Mask motif, which turns up, historically speaking, relatively early in the development of the motif: during the early Romanesque period, in fact.

You can generally distinguish them from Green Men by their cleft lips, and the pointed ears on the tops of their heads. Art historian Tina Negus, attempting accommodation, refers to them as Green Beasts rather than Green Cats, but in fact almost all known examples are readily identifiable as felines rather than some other sort of beast.

So: if you're going to have a Green Beast, why a cat rather than some other sort of animal?

Myself, I suspect two reasons: one historical, one, well...what Nanny Ogg would call persychological.

Cats or Lions?

First off...which are we actually seeing here: Green Lions or Green Cats?

Um...Reply hazy, try again later.

For the time being, let's go with the neutral term, Green Felines. Later on, we'll see why the royal Lion would be the preferable reading.

Practical Cats

To this question, my friend and colleague Frebur Moore suggested a practical answer: that—felines being predators—what we see in the Green Feline is the hidden, stalking beast, peering, as it were, through foliage.

Makes sense. But wait, there's more.

Eyes Front

It's clear that the first foliate masks were human faces. This, I suspect, is yet another reason why Green Beasts tend to be Green Felines.

Felines, being predators, have their eyes on the front of their heads rather than on the sides. This makes their faces more visually similar to human faces and hence, more readily adaptable as stand-ins for the human face than those of animals—herbivores, say—with eyes to the sides of the head instead.

Yet another reason why cats are better than dogs.

But the Real Reason...

Deep and Deeper

Take a look at any random collection of historic Leaf Mask images. What you will find is many Green Men, but few (if any) Green Women.

Why not?

If words like “sexism” and “patriarchy” are coming into your head right now, don't let them distract you.

The answer is simpler and more basic than that.

Green Pubes

It was one of those Winters that seemed like it was never going to end.

Just at the point—here in the frozen North it happens pretty much every year—that I was beginning to feel that Winter was eternal and Spring a mere figment of my Winter-bruised imagination—I had a dream so impacting that I'll never forget it.

In the dream, I'm gazing down contemplatively over the expanse of my own naked body. In place of pubic hair, a crisp little thicket of glossy green leaves grows directly from my skin.

Hair : animals :: leaves : plants.

Dionysiaca

The Leaf Mask motif first emerges in art in the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the first millennium, growing out of the common Dionysiac image of a reveler crowned with vine-leaves.

At a traveling exhibit of items from Pompeii (destroyed 79 CE) that came through the Twin Cities some years ago, I saw a painting which struck me as a kind of proto-Green Man: a male head wearing a vine-leaf crown, in which the hair and the leaves of the crown merged visually in such a way that you couldn't tell which was which.

Becoming one with the vine: it doesn't get more bacchic than that.

Clintonism

Behold: the Green "Man" that adorns the official invitation to King Charles' upcoming coronation.

(Note that heraldic artist Andrew Jamieson's winsome little Green Guy, sporting as he does the traditional floral/vegetal attributes of the constituent nations of the so-called WISE Islands—daffodils [Wales], shamrocks [Ireland], thistles [Scotland], and wild roses [England]—renders him a quintessentially pan-British figure.)

Oh, the foofarrah.

“Does King Charles' Green Man Make Him a Pagan?” howls The Spectator.

(Technically, of course, you'll notice that the Leaf Mask in question is actually that of a Green Cat, a traditional subset of the Green Man design, but that's by the by. BtW, I'm planning to be posting specifically about the Green Beast some time in the near future, so stay tuned.)

No, silly cowans, of course it doesn't mean he's pagan. (Green Men are commonly found in churches, remember?) Charles Windsor is a practicing Christian, titular head of the Anglican Church, who regularly goes on retreats at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Mount Athos. (His father was capital-O-Orthodox, by baptism at least.)

Remember, though, Charlie is savvy. This is the man, you'll recall, who once told the press that he regards himself not so much as “Protector of the Faith”, as “Protector of Faith.”

Guess what, folks: that means us, too.

You can also be sure that he knows damn well that, while the Green Man may be an ecumenical symbol of the natural world and all of humanity's essential kinship therewith, he—said Green Man—is ours—i.e. the pagans'—in particular.

No, unlike (purportedly) some of his ancestors, this king is not a witch.

But be of good cheer, O pagans of Britain. Mr. Windsor is sending us a message, and knowingly so: the Green King—champion of organic agriculture and sustainable living long, long before they became fashionable—is on our side.

Why did Allah prohibit the drinking of wine to believers?

According to the Yezidis, it was out of jealousy and fear.

Islamic law generally prohibits the use of intoxicants to Muslims—not that this has slowed the use of drugs such as qat and hashish in the Muslim world, mind you—and Wine is regarded as the first, the chief, the Mother of all Intoxicants.

(When coffee was first discovered, Muslim religious authorities ruled it an intoxicant, and its use therefore forbidden to Muslims. This ruling was so universally rejected by the 'umma that in the end the mullahs just had to suck it up.)

Known euphemistically in Arabic as the Red One—as if even to pronounce its name would be dangerous—wine is specifically forbidden in the Qur'an. Though the book itself provides no reasons for this prohibition, the Yezidis—a Kurdish-speaking religious minority centered in Iraq, whose worship of the Peacock Angel would seem to have arisen in the 13^th century in antinomian protest against the tyranny of the Mosque—do.

(That, in Europe, what we now know as Old Craft also arose in antinomian protest against a tyrannical Church, at roughly the same time, must be considered, at very least, a striking coincidence, if not the actual Hand of some god.

Presumably, the Left Hand.)

When Allah saw how much humanity loved the Red One, they say, he feared that they would always love and worship it more than himself.

Therefore, in jealousy, he did what those unequal to the race—just as Republicans in the US are trying to do today—always do.

He banned the competition.

(That Islamic mystical tradition has always equated Wine with Divine Love tells a truth both older and deeper than any Revelation.)

The blood of the grape is the blood of a god, Red Blood of a Green God. Before any others, the Green Man first wore vine leaves.

Reading Michael Pollan's “The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World”

Did we domesticate plants, or did plants domesticate us?

For years now I've been hearing about a woman in California, priestess to the Green God, who bears on her face the imprint of her god: leaf beard and mustache in green tattoo. Whether or not there really is such a person, I don't know.

But if there is, I love her. Sometimes courage and piety are indistinguishable.

Books about the Green Man tend to be long on iconography and short on concept. No more.

In his 2002 The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan—though he never once mentions Him—has written a theology of the Green God. For "Green God," just read "Plants."

The general view of the Green Man as a sort of vague “Father Nature” figure, while emotionally appealing, has just never been intellectually satisfying. Pollan, however, gets specific. In Botany, he muses on the age-long, epic relationship between Plant and Animal, Green God and Red. Here, deliciously, we reach that place of pagan felicity where science and mythology are indistinguishable.

Plants developed flowers to appeal sexually to animals. It's a truth, but what a truth.

The beauty of Botany lies in its specifics. Pollan divides it into four chapters, each treating with a vegetal particular: Apple, Tulip, Marijuana, Potato, each offering the Animal (and, specifically, Human) world the means by which to satisfy a particular inborn desire: for Sweetness, for Beauty, for Intoxication, for Control.

Though, as I have said, Pollan never once mentions the Green Man—he does bring up witches, though, our kind of witches—if the book has a presiding deity, it's Dionysos, Who puts in frequent appearances throughout. Who is He, after all, but the Plant God, Lord of Intoxication, an Elder God peering through the tragi-comic mask of a Younger?

Throughout, Pollan discusses in intoxicating depth such topics as Desire, Attraction, the nature of Beauty, Memory, the need to Forget, and the nature of Consciousness. He spreads for us here a sumptuous intellectual feast that cannot help but contrast with the Happy Meal™ superficiality (and intellectual sterility) of so much contemporary pagan writing.