PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form
Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Green Man/Red Man

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Colors (vision): What are the differences between red and green? - Quora

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.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

 

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.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 The Castor and Pollux group “Orestes and Pylades” or The San Ildefonso Group,  Roman Workshop - The Prado Museum in Madrid - Spain

 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.”

Last modified on
Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Yup, that's them. My heart-friend Sparky T. Rabbit used to refer to them, rather endearingly, as the "Horse Boys." Did you know th
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I grew up with a Time-Life trio of books on the Worlds Great Religions. I liked looking at the Hindu gods and I remember a pair o

 

 

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. (“16th” 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 20th 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.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Horned Green Men: A Colloquy

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?

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Master-in-Green

They say that he's god of women, and the artists show him naked amid the women's pulsing dance.

Verdelet, the witches named him: the Master-in-Green.

He's green.

(They say that in the old days they greened him with copper and ground malachite.)

There's a shaggy crown of leaves bound round his head, and leafy ruffs at his wrists and ankles as well. He rustles when he moves. He's the Green.

Green lord of chlorophyll, twin to the blood lord of beasts: like his brother, both wild and tame. Of the two, he's the rooted, the calm one, the peaceful, the thinker of long thoughts.

Don't be fooled.

Last modified on
Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Aline "Macha" O'Brien
    Aline "Macha" O'Brien says #
    Moving and beautiful! Thanks.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
People of the Morning Star

Hear O People of the Morning Star

 

...
Last modified on

Additional information