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We be of one kin, you and I.

The chemical formulas for chlorophyll and for hemoglobin are virtually identical, differing by only a single atom:

C55H72FeN4O6 (hemoglobin)

C55H72MgN4O6 (chlorophyll)

Greenblood, redblood: We be of one kin, you and I.

Long ago in the Dawn of Days, Earth took the Sky Twins to be her husbands: Sun, her right-hand husband, and Thunder, her left-hand husband.

From their love also came forth twins: first the Green and then the Red, him that we call the Horned, father of witches.

 A Tale of Ancient Greece

Of all the gods, the poet Simonides held a deep devotion to the Divine Twins, Castor and Polydeukes, known as the Dioskouroi, “Zeus' lads,” and was wont to offer to them regularly.

Now, these same Twin Gods are of ancient lineage, having been known to the ancestors some 5000 years ago, and are widely worshiped among all the Indo-European peoples, from Ireland to India. Known as the Divine Horsemen, they were everywhere accounted the Saviors of Humanity. Indeed, the Tribe of Witches honor them to this day.

Now, it so happened that Simonides was commissioned to write an ode in honor of a certain Thessalian nobleman's son, who had won the crown in boxing at the Olympics. He duly presented the ode at the nobleman's victory feast, but the host was not pleased.

“You poets and your damned mythological allusions,” he said. “You spent more time eulogizing Castor and Polydeukes than you did my son.” (Polydeukes, called Pollux by the Romans, was famed as a boxer.) The upshot of the matter was that he refused to pay Simonides more than half of the agreed-upon fee.

“Maybe the Dioskouroi will make up the rest,” he added archly. This was thought a fine joke by some.

Some time later, back in Athens, Simonides was called to the door.

“Two men on horseback want to see you,” the door-keeper told him. “They say it's urgent.”

Thank Goddess: after a covid-driven hiatus, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is finally open again. At last, I can go see the Green Man Gun.

I've been thinking about it for months. Now, in the normal way of things, I've not a gun guy. I don't own a gun; truth to tell, I've never even fired one. (Yes, I'm just another pansy-ass South Minneapolis liberal wussie. You got a problem with that?) In general, I don't think of guns as things of beauty.

That's why the Green Man Gun—no matter how many times I see it—invariably takes me by surprise.

The Green Man Gun is indeed a thing of beauty. No, I can't tell you what kind of gun it is. (A wheel-lock pistol?) No, I can't tell you for sure where it was originally from. (One of the Germanies, I think.) No, I can't even tell you how old it is. (“16^th” century, maybe?) If you're interested, stay tuned and I'll tell you these things once I make my pilgrimage and find out. Maybe I'll even get a picture to show you.

Here's what I can tell you. It must have been made for some well-heeled nobleman, because it wasn't just made to shoot: it was made to be beautiful.

The Green Man Gun is inlaid with mother-of-pearl and colored enamel, set into the sides of the wooden stock. (“Lock, stock, and barrel” we say, meaning the gun in its entirety. “Stock,” of course, originally meant “tree trunk”: here, the vegetative component of an otherwise metal object.) The major decorative motif, of course, is swirling vegetation with a Leaf Face peering through: hence the name.

What does it mean to have the God of Vegetation adorning, of all things, a gun: a god of life on an instrument of death?

Well, we can ask this question, but—let us acknowledge—it's a modern question. The Green Man only became a god in the so-called 20^th century. To the nobleman for whom this gun was made, I suspect that the Leaf Mask represented decoration, no more. At most, it would have read contemporaneously as an allusion to the forest to which one resorted for the hunt.

As modern pagans, though, our reading of the past is not limited to how the past read itself. This is a central principle of contemporary pagan hermeneutics. The New Pagan Thought is non-Originalist by definition. (Take that, foul SCOTUS conservatives.)

So let me pose the question once again: why a god of life on an instrument of death?

Here we encounter one of the new paganisms' central concepts: the fruitful Death, the death that gives life. The wheat dies on the scythe to give us bread. The grape is plucked and crushed to give us wine. The gun fires to protect, or to give us food. The Green God is no mere god of life. Like his brother the Horned, he is a sacrificial god.

Welcome to the pagan world. Here opposites meet, kiss, and resolve. Here, death brings life, and guns bear Green Men.

So, Posch.

You say that the Horned and the Green Man are not one god, but two: the Divine Twins, Master of Beasts and Master of Plants respectively.

You also say that in our day They reveal Themselves through art.

So what about all those Horned Green Men that we see?

Here in the US, the “Walk” icon at pedestrian crossings is a little white guy. (Figures.)

But in the UK he's green.

In the London suburb where I lived, the sign at the corner crosswalk read: Pedestrians Wait for the Green Man. I always found this highly amusing.

(No, I did not steal the sign. I did not.)

                                    Autumn is a good time for visiting;

                                    During its short days there is work for all...