3. The Green Woman

[Wanderer]

 

If the Green Man is enigmatic, then the Green Woman is so well hidden from public consciousness that she is hard to find at all. I had to go searching for her, and luckily others have done the same, and hunted her through the churches of Europe. There are some very interesting blogs, such as this:

http://wiccanrede.org/2013/07/the-green-man-the-green-woman-part-i/

These researches allow us to glimpse the ideas behind the rare carvings, and at least try to put some sort of legend to the name...

 

But that's leaping ahead slightly... let's start with the card. The Green Woman stands behind a cauldron, like her male counterpart, but this time filled with milk. She too is wreathed in leaves, with a cloak of ferns, and oak leaves coming from her mouth and face. She wears elegant classical clothing, with a massive gold torc (or something like that!), and gently holds a strange forest creature (made from wood?) in each hand. Rather than staring intently at her cauldron, she looks out at us, smiling but wide-eyed. It's the sort of gaze where you really know you're being looked at. The background is uncertain--is it a rock face, or an ancient tree trunk?--and the only other detail in the image is the cauldron itself, bearing a Sheela-na-gig in all her glory.

 

She is said (in the book) to represent the "female archetype of wildness and green energy". She is the boundless source of creation, the ultimate mother of the forest world, and the giver of life. This is the counterpart to the wildness of the Green Man, being a much more gentle, nurturing figure. The authors equate her with sovereignty, with the Goddess, and also with the Lady of the Lake and Blodeuwedd (from the Mabinogion), and say that ultimately, she is the one who welcomes individual humans into the mysteries of the Wildwood.

 

What are we to make of this figure? How does she relate to the mythological Green Woman? Perhaps not much, is the answer, since we know so little about her origins. Some writers conflate her with the Sheela-na-gig, in which form she apparently gives birth to vegetation rather than having it grow from her face. Most of the likely representations in architecture also show a normal face, and it is usually context that tells us she is actually a Green Woman at all. Most of the information given in the book is effectively new mythology; that she can manifest as those other figures from literature, that she resembles the Green Man in facial foliage, even her role -- it is all a part of this deck's mythos.

 

I'm left very much with the same feeling as for the Green Man, but more so; this figure is a humanisation of a principle, rather than an individual. Where the Green Man is fiercely joyful and wild, the Green Woman is passionately calm and nurturing. She is the softer side of the wild: the gentle rain, the light on a newly-opened flower, and the eye that watches over the growth of the young and inexperienced. She is also the Mother, the source of life, which she nurtures and guards jealously. But... the person in this card makes her seem like an individual, with thoughts, feelings, and choices. She is not. She is, rather, a force of nature: the gentleness to temper the wildness.

 

The Wildwood itself is like this, and necessarily contains this aspect. It seems harsh, inhospitable; red in tooth and claw. And yet, young animals survive, and grow up, and begin the cycle again. Within the gnarled, rain-lashed oak is a snug, dry spot for a nest. Within the torrent of a forest stream is a backwater eddy or a sheltering stone, where the caddisfly nymphs make their homes. Among all the brambles ravaging their rivals in the endless competition for space, mice find a bounty of berries and shelter. Those mice, in turn, are a bounty for the owl that hunts the dark, cold night; on the worst nights, where there is snow and ice, the bounty is easier to find. The Green Woman has no favourites; the owl is as important to her as the mouse, the berry and the caddisfly, because life is life.

 

This is where it is important to realise that personification can be dangerous to our ideas. If the Wanderer is nurtured by the Green Woman on his journey through the Wildwood, it is not because she likes him; it is because nurturing is what she does. She - the force of nature - has no other choice... and that makes it hard for us humans to predict her, because we imagine motives and behaviour that just aren't there.

 

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Any comments? Like the Green Man (but more so), I found this very hard, because the Green Woman is a forgotten archetype in the wild lore; her characteristics are not fully fixed, and her nature amorphous. To some extent, the authors have generated a new archetype, here and before it in the Greenwood. In that deck, she would have made much more sense in the form of a shamanic vision; such personification is natural there. In the grounded Wildwood, she feels less appropriate in this anthropomorphic form, and I can think of other, more subtle ways that I would have preferred to see her represented.

 

In this context, though, I will choose to imagine her as some sort of manifestation of the archetype; but never imagine that she is a being with the types of desires shared by us humans...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Purplemystic]

I see initially The Green Woman as mother nature. Earth itself in it's raw nurturing form. Female aspect of our psyche. Beauty in life itself. To explore further no doubt in my studies...