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Green Man -- Earth-Honoring Male Deity
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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.
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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.
see also Green Man items