Heart of Albion Press: Green Men and Triple Rabbits

Heart of Albion

Green Men and Triple Rabbits

My book Explore Green Men was the fruit of my growing scepticism about the widely publicised view that the Green Man was a pagan fertility deity, or forest spirit, so rooted in popular thought throughout Europe that it was able to survive the adoption of Christianity, not only in churches but also in a whole range of customs and legends.

Like many others before me, I found the idea attractive, and, initially, I accepted it as gospel truth. On closer inspection, however, I realised that there was no real evidence whatsoever support such a view. Things simply did not add up. Two and two was being made to make five, six and even seven!

If the Green Man really was such a persistent pagan survivor, why is there no obvious prototype among the known deities of the Classical world or the pagan lands bordering on it? Why did he have no name until the middle of the twentieth century? Why are the earliest disgorging Green Man to be found on artefacts made for archbishops and Christian kings and in churches built by monks? Why is there no record of any Christian body or individual, Catholic or Protestant, from St Bernard to Martin Luther and Cromwell, making any objection to the presence of the image in Christian contexts? Why are there no traditional customs which involve so much as a passing nod to the Green Man on the exteriors and interiors of churches? Why are so many of the Romanesque heads, i.e. those earliest and closest to pagan traditions, not human at all but animal?

These are just some other questions to which advocates of the pagan fertility deity theory must provide an answer, if they want to be taken seriously.

If, however, were taken completely different view of the origin of the Green Man, namely, he is simply a decorative element, perhaps used from time to time in different ways to reinforce the teachings of the Church, then everything falls into place, and two and two make four without any juggling of figures.

Foliate heads come in two main forms – a leaf mask in which the face itself is wholly or partly made of foliage, and a head which disgorges foliage, usually from the mouth, but sometimes from the eyes, nose or ears.

The leaf mask type appears to be derived from images of the Greek god Okeanus, who was often portrayed with sea-weed in his hair and beard. Okeanus, however, was a marine god, not a fertility symbol, and quite early on he was superseded in the Ancient World by Neptune, and was not actively worshipped, although his image continued to be used decoratively, mainly in domestic contexts.

As for the disgorging type, having failed to find a western prototype, I came to support the idea, already mooted by scholars in the nineteenth century, that it derives from the ancient Indian kirttimukha and makara. The kirttimukha is neither a god nor a fertility symbol, but a reformed demon, who assumed an auspicious, protective role, with the face of a lion or fierce monster. The makara is a mythical creature, combining the features of an elephant, a crocodile and a fish, which was believed to disgorge wonderful things, generally depicted as lotus stems and strings of pearls. These two auspicious symbols were combined during the Gupta period (4th–6th century AD), so that stems came to flow from the mouth of the makara into that of the kirttimukha (or vice versa).

The comparison between India images of the kirttimukha and makara and the earliest foliate heads found in Western art and architecture reveals an astonishing similarity both in overall design and in the details of the individual elements. In both, the complete image consists of full-faced lion or monster, flanked by two long-nosed creatures in profile, all joined together by long stems proceeding from their mouths, and, even when the kirttimukha or foliate head appears alone, the stems may include the fir-cone-like buds of the lotus flower.

Early on, both Jains and Buddhists adopted the Hindu image. It travelled to China with Buddhism, and there the makara assumed a dragon-like appearance. In the West, too, a motif quickly adapted to local tastes and conditions, and took on a life of its own. Thus, in Gothic period, foliate heads were very different in style from those of the Romananesque period.

Exactly how and why this originally Indian motif reached the West remains a mystery, although plenty of roads were open to it, including trade in carved ivory, luxury textiles and Arab manuscripts based on Indian learning.

Quite recently, however, my thesis that disgorging foliate heads came to Christendom as decorative elements from the East received indirect support from the discovery that another motif had done the same. This second motif consists of three rabbits, or hares, chasing each other in a circle, which animal sharing an ear, in much the same way as six foliate heads on the roof boss in Chichester Cathedral each share an eye with their neighbours. The earliest known example of this triple rabbit motif occurs in Buddhist cave paintings, dating from the late 6th/early 7th century, in Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi desert in western China. Four centuries later, it could be found on Islamic Mongolian coins, taking for 1281–2, and, later still, it appeared on a floor tile (c.1300) in Chester Cathedral.

All three of these particular examples of triple rabbits can be seen in the current (until 12 September 2004) exhibition at the British Library devoted to the Silk Road and the discoveries made along it by the archaeologist and explorer Aurel Stein (1863–1942). Pictures of them can be found in the British Library booklet The Silk Road: Trade, travel, war and faith by Susan Whitfield. Triple rabbits can be found in many medieval churches, including Spreyton in Devon, where they occur on a wooden roof boss.

Just how and why three Buddhist rabbits made the long journey to Western Europe, through Islamic lands, and found sanctuary in Christian churches is still as much of a mystery as the similar case of the Hindu kirttimukha. We have, however, some certain dates and points of departure and arrival, and, by looking in the right places future researchers should eventually succeed in supplying answers to both conundrums.