This afternoon I put the finishing touches to a talk I have to give tomorrow, on The Green Man. One thing was rather indeterminate in my mind for a good part of the process of writing. Should I entitle it “Looking for the Green Man”, or “Finding the Green Man”. The difference between the two is interesting. I’ve ended up by opting for “Looking for …”, and only just now have I become clear in my own mind about the reason for that choice.
My point is that attempts in the past to tell us what the Green Man “means” are fundamentally misdirected. There is an implication here that there has been a single meaning to these images which it might be possible to identify. This is to misunderstand the nature of the symbol, and indeed probably the nature of symbols more generally. The question assumes that there must be an authoritative interpretation which could be discovered and spelled out. The result of my thinking on this topic is that this is a fundamentally misdirected enterprise. There is and never has been this kind of “philosopher’s stone”. The idea of the Green Man is a resource that is available to be used in a variety of different ways. The picture functions in the way words function in language. They can be combined freely in a variety of contexts to achieve a variety of meanings, serving different purposes.
I’m reminded only now of the insistence of the great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, that myths are resources, “tools” is the word he uses, which enable us to think about the world. I suppose that this is how we should approach the task of understanding an image like the Green Man.