Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man

by Nina Lyon

Who, or what, is the Green Man, and why is this medieval image so present in our precarious modern times? An encounter with the Green Man at an ancient Herefordshire church in the wake of catastrophic weather leads Nina Lyon into an exploration of how the foliate heads of Norman stonemasons have evolved into today’s cult symbols. The Green Man’s association with the pantheistic beliefs of Celtic Christianity and with contemporary neo-paganism, with the shamanic traditions of the Anglo-Saxons and as a figurehead for ecological movements sees various paths crossing into a picture that reveals the hidden meanings of twenty-first-century Britain. Against a shifting backdrop of mountains, forests, rivers and stone circles, a cult of the Green Man emerges, manifesting itself in unexpected ways. Priests and philosophers, artists and shamans, morris dancers, folklorists and musicians offer stories about what the Green Man might mean and how he came into being. Meanwhile, in the woods strange things are happening, from an overgrown Welsh railway line to leafy London suburbia. Uprooted is a timely, provocative and beautifully written account of this most enduring and recognisable of Britain’s folk images.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Nature, Folklore, Mythology, Travel, Medieval

304 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2016

About the author

Nina Lyon has worked in a Buddhist therapeutic community in Scotland, written contraband essays for cash in Berlin, and helps run the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival near her home in Hay-on-Wye. Her essay 'Mushroom Season', inspired by youthful psychedelic misadventures and the mountains behind her home, was published by Random House in 2014 after being chosen as runner-up in the Financial Times/Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is currently completing a PhD about nonsense and metaphysics at Cardiff University

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley to read and write an honest review.

The Green Man is one of those anomalies of British folklore. It is a sculpture of a male face, either surrounded by or having branches or leaves emerging from it. They are often carved from stone and are found on all types of buildings including churches, which is odd for a pagan symbol rooted so deeply in the past. It isn’t just a British symbol either, similar images are found in many cultures around the world.

Lyon first encounters this face when sheltering at a Herefordshire church in a storm. It makes her wonder just how an ancient pagan symbol ended up on a church and why it is still a popular icon even today; there are a number of pubs all over the country, including one close to me, that carry the name ‘The Green Man’. Her curiosity over this blatantly pagan addition to a Christian building made her start to investigate the origins of this face. It was the start of a journey that would take her across the country, the the forests of Germany, to the stone circles of ancient Britain and of course the woods. There was a spiritual journey too and a discovery of Celtic Christianity, neo-paganism and shamanism. She even contemplates starting a sex cult, but other mums at the school gate aren’t so sure… She encounters all sorts on her journey too, there are priests and morris dancers, artists and eco warriors. Each of these people has a link back to that enigmatic figure.

I have always liked this enigmatic figure, there is something other worldly about it, a combination of the natural and the sinister, the real and surreal. Lyon is prepared to take anything on and explore all pathways as she investigates and contemplates the Green Man. There were parts of this I really enjoyed, her trip to Germany into the dark forests in search of an ancestor accused of being a witch was fascinating, but there were other parts of the book, Aleister Crowley springs to mind, that was less captivating. All that said, Lyon has written a bang up to date book on an endearing cult figure that has been deeply rooted in our society for time immemorial. 3.5 stars overall.

[Sam Worby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Seriously disappointing, but that's because I expected something serious. If you want insight into the green man and what he has meant to people over time don't look here. If you want insight into the pseudo-profundities of another arts graduate with a very shallow grip on history then this is the book for you.

I almost stopped reading this book on p.44 where Lyon says that the process of agriculture is what turned ape-men into men. This is wrong, offensive, ridiculous, and based on no attempt to engage with the evidence. It's the worst of dozens of breezy assertions of something the author thinks supports her overall point. On a more mundane note the book is filled with "facts" that make no sense on examination. For example, p281 "When the Norman Conquest opened up passage across England and Wales, they [the Cistercians] sought out unobtrusive places to establish monasteries". What does this even mean? How did the Norman conquest open up passage? There's no evidence that there wasn't passage (between England and Wales? between either and the continent?)? What were the Cistercians doing establishing monasteries years before they were founded? Does she mean the English conquest of Wales? It might seem unfair to pick on this example but it is one of many.* This book is careless.

Lyon writes a journalistic feature-piece about nothing much at all in the end. The book meanders all over the place, not really engaging with the green man, mostly providing anecdotes which seem chosen to prove how cool and anarchistic the author is. It is like being ranted at by a pub bore who has taken one too many substances and thinks they are (a) amusingly self-deprecating (b) very clever and (c) have an insight into secret truths about the world.

Finally, the author has an irritating habit of "negging" her likely readers: cagoule-wearing national trust members; audiences with an interest in folklore; Glastonbury attendees; medievalists. This is all done with the kind of possibly ironic tone I have hated since the 90s. Is it meant to be serious, self-deprecating? At times, I read the way Lyon talks about other people like sheep and wondered if she is deliberately sounding psycopathic as a pose. Then I decided I don't care.

*Some other examples (this whole book irritated me so much I took notes!)
- Repeated talk about "The Church" as if it was a person who has decided to oppress free thinkers throughout history. Except for the Celtic church, which was spiritual. And the early catholic church, which was liberal because it allowed paganism to be preserved. The whole approach was anarchy = good; the church = bad. Which is about the level of historical engagement I would expect from a teenager.
- The assertion that most popular music is just words with sound for emphasis (cf the wonderful complexity of techno etc)
- A frankly bizarre reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which was all about Lyon
- The fact that the book contained less than 10 pages on actual green men

[Leah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mushrooms and tree-hugging...

The book starts with Lyon being intrigued by the proliferation of the Green Man and other obviously pagan carvings on early churches. Making the point that early Christianity needed to incorporate some aspects of existing spiritual beliefs in order to attract adherents, she then goes on to speculate that worshipping, or at least respecting, the natural world and assuming it has some kind of power is at least as rational as contemporary conventional religion. So she decides to start a sex cult.

There is a vein of humour running through the book, which sometimes works but more often makes it difficult to know exactly how seriously Lyon expects the reader to take her arguments, such as they are. She's clearly superficially knowledgeable of both nature myths and philosophy, and in the early chapters she uses this knowledge quite effectively. She's humorous about being unable to find willing participants for her sex cult, but is incredibly dismissive of Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular. At first, I admired the writing and intelligence, though I felt from a very early stage that she hadn't really thought through what, if anything, she was trying to say.

As the book progresses, she takes superficial looks at various aspects of things that she seems to associate with paganism or nature cults; for example, witchcraft, shamanism, Alesteir Crowley's beliefs, etc. Half the time I wasn't even convinced of their relevance to the argument she seems to be attempting to make – namely, that conventional religion is on its way out and we need to revert to some kind of paganism, a belief in a single consciousness, from which some kind of mystical power does (or perhaps doesn't) derive. It's possible that I'm over-simplifying – I did lose the will to live fairly early on – but I don't think so. It all has a hippy, undergraduate feel – drugs and drink seem to feature quite heavily at the points of her 'insights'. She cherry-picks the bits of philosophy that she thinks give some intellectual grounding to her rather unstructured rambling, but they really don't. The whole thing is too sloppy and unfocused to shed much light on anything. And, being honest, I never felt she was convinced of her own arguments.

I wondered, fleetingly, at the fact that the two people I have known reasonably well who have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders were, variously, raised by academic metaphysicians or philosophy students at the time of diagnosis. Perhaps overthinking makes you mad. Perhaps mad people are merely thinkers.

Ignoring the clumsiness of the sentence structure, this is her reasoning for why people with psychotic illnesses should seek treatment from shamans rather than conventional resources. One wonders if she considered the possibility that, since she's spent her life in and around academia, she probably meets a disproportionately high number of academic types, perhaps just possibly skewing the results of her in-depth survey.

Partly, the problem is that she makes assumptions to suit her agenda with no corresponding evidence. For example, she makes a big point about how conventional religion has destroyed the traditional way in which early pagans actively joined in with ritual celebrations (though how she knows they did this is an unexplained mystery – time travel? Mystical messages from the great beyond? Perhaps a tree told her...), so that now they tend to be made up of performers and audience, rather than participants. She, of course, sees this as a loss, so much so that she assumes that's unarguable.

But I reckon that even if, for the sake of argument, one accepts her assumptions about pagan rituals, lots of people would argue that sacrifices and orgies might not be such a loss, and perhaps our more reserved behaviour is a sign of civilisation – or in Scotland, perhaps just a response to it rarely being warm enough to encourage us to get our kit off outdoors. Also, she frequently repeats that she is an atheist which, therefore, would obviously make her feel like an onlooker at a Christian ceremony. (I'm trying so hard not to say “Duh!”) I'm an atheist, too, but I'm willing to bet that true believers probably feel like participants in their religious practices rather than audience members.

As the book wears on, Lyon rambles around England and bits of Europe in a totally unstructured way, going to visit tree-hugging shamans and attending festivals at Stonehenge and other such trite remnants of hippy culture, where she learns that apparently the best way to celebrate life is to get stoned out of your head. When she started nostalgically bleating on about how Ecstasy had been a brilliant thing in the '90s for bringing young people together in shared experiences, I realised with a twinge of pity that she really didn't have a clue it's the youthfulness that achieves that, not the drugs.

In conclusion, good prose style, some averagely decent nature writing, occasional shafts of humour, but the bulk of it is basically twaddle. As she neared the end, Lyon admitted she'd kind of lost interest in her original aim of creating a new Green Man sex cult. She wasn't alone.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Faber & Faber.

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[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley to read and review.

The figure of the Green Man has always intrigued me - a name given to many carvings across Britain and Northern Europe for the image of a man's face, usually made of vegetation or having vegetation (often oak leaves) sprouting from his mouth, beard or hair.

I can already see me dragging my long suffering husband round a North Yorkshire Green Man trail of my own devising!

It's all to easy to just say that the Green Man is a 'God of good harvests' in church carvings or a 'reminder of the force of Nature'. There has to be more than this for the figure to remain so constant through the centuries.
Nina Lyon does her own journey and research into him, and her travels to different parts of the UK and then to Germany are the best parts of this book. She's a very good, observant travel writer, musing on what she sees and feels.

The book also contains what sometimes seem like essays or a thesis on all manner of subjects - shamanism, animism, Morris dancing etc. I sometimes found myself reading the same sentence several times over to try and work out its meaning!

Lyon isn't the slightest bit preachy. She can however be a little judgemental even when she's telling herself she's not! But what an interesting lady - anyone proposing to start up a sex cult in her small home town has my respect!

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's pretty difficult trying to class Uprooted as a certain type of book... what starts as Lyon trying to form 'some kind of anti-dogmatic neo-pagan religion that was not a religion' around the idea of the green man became a looser set of musings on how belief and nature interact. She touches on psychogeography, morris dancing, techno, shamanism, wild swimming, panpsychism and Lewis Carol, bringing it altogether into a fascinating study. It was made especially readable due to her healthy skepticism of 'woo'-type things - she didn't dismiss them out of hand and allowed for the fact that her understand of things might not always be correct, but she also noted coincidences etc that if she had been so inclined could have been taken for proof of magic...

I only have two criticisms, one a tiny niggle and the other less so. Firstly, refering to everyone by initials is annoying, as if she's trying to be more mysterious than necessary, and it also makes it hard when you're reading to remember if this person has popped up before or not. But the really annoying thing is her lack of references - she mentions so many books, albums, talks, articles, but rarely names them or their author, and there is no bibliography either. It just seems so stupid, at one point she literally bemoans the fact that two authors are very under-read and unacknowledged, but she fails to give any clue as to the second person's identity - how then are we meant to follow up and read this apparently deserving author? But at the end of the day, I still thought it was a 5 star read, I really loved it.

Many thanks to netgalley for the chance to read this.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to preface this review with the fact that I am a pagan (specifically, I’m studying druidry through the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) and I consider my spirituality a living religion. These things are going to give some bias to how I read and reacted to this book, and not everyone is going to come at it from the same place.

Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man is, on the surface, a journey exploring the idea of the Green Man, the foliate male face which is associated with British folklore and found in many buildings, including churches. I picked this book up because of a personal interest in the imagery and idea of the Green Man (I have several reproductions of Green Men in my house) and because of a general interest in writing about nature and nature spirituality (Robert McFarlane’s books are a personal favourite, to get an idea of my tastes).

There is a lot in this book. The reader follows Lyon as she searches for Green Men in a variety of places, including England and Germany, and as she passes through groups of many people. She refers to many spiritualities and philosophies, and presents the reader with a literal forest of ideas loosely grounded upon the idea of the Green Man. She talks to many people about her quest, from priests to morris dancers, and even toys with the idea of starting her own fertility cult to return some kind of worship of the Green Man to the modern world (the mothers at school aren’t so keen on that idea).

Lyon seems sincere in her desire to explore nature spirituality, but for me the tone of the book tends, at times, to detract from this sincerity. There’s a strong thread of humour, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell if she’s laughing with or at her subjects, and the treatment of living nature spiritualities is often superficial. She certainly seems to have an awareness of druidry and shamanism, for example, but doesn’t seem to have gone too far into exploring what either of them mean as a living practice, which was often frustrating for me. Most likely other readers who aren’t deeply steeped in paganism studies may not have an issue with this.

It also would have been of benefit for everything she talks about to be properly referenced. There is so much covered in this book, which would make it an ideal starting point for someone to begin the exploration of nature spiritualities, and it would have been nice to give, at the least, a list of books and places which she found useful along the way. It should also be noted that Lyon uses initials to refer to people she talks about – presumably for privacy reasons – which was fine, except where it became easy to mix up who she was talking about, or she talked about a book that someone had written, and the reader has no way of tracking down what that book or who the author was.

Overall, I did enjoy this book, and would recommend it to others, especially if they’re looking for a gateway into exploring nature and nature-based spirituality. If you’re well read in pagan studies, you might want to look elsewhere, but likely you’ll find at least a few pieces of wisdom here.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Self indulgent white girl seeks spiritual experiences - cue a string of cringeworthy and in most cases high self indulgent experiences where she tries to 'get all spiritual' and completely loses the thread of what she's trying to actually say.

Very little in this which actually relates to the Green Man - most of it is pseudo-intellectual waffle, she's just sooo hip right???? Hanging out at Avebury, seeking connections with local Shamans, hugging trees - all in a slightly snobby middle class way. Apparently she's also written an essay of Mushrooms about her drug use in her 'youth'. She seems like the kind of douchebag you'd avoid at a party.

The cover art is highly deceptive here, because it's beautiful and draws you in to assume the book is a serious investigation into the Green Man. It isn't. Lyon rambles about the UK and Europe and rambles on about a huge number of things she never actually justifies with references - most likely a vast majority of it is her own opinion.

Oh and she's got her own wood as well, where she pretends to get all spiritual and hangs up ribbons and skulls and mirrors from the trees - except she completely fails at anything remotely spiritual as she's a die hard atheist who wait for it... organizes a philosophy festival.

By the end of this incoherent ramble you wish she'd piss off back to her wood and leave the folkloric investigation to more serious historians, because they might not be 'like totally cool you know?' but they might actually have the insight and knowledge to write a decent book.

[Damaskcat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always been interested in the Green Man as I used to live in Norfolk and there is a Green Man in Norwich cathedral. In this interesting book the author goes in search of the Green Man in her own area - Hereford and the Wels/English Border country. Fans of Phil Rickman's series about Merrily Watkins will recognise many of the places mentioned in this book. For a time the author thinks about starting her own cult of the Green Man until she realises through her researches that the Green Man is and always has been well established.

No one really knows how the figure originated and there have been many theories put forward. In this book the author journeys geographically and philosophically through many different places and belief systems. She looks at Aleister Crowley, Egyptian beliefs as well as the Knights Templar and the Knights of St John amongst many other religions and philosophies.

I did find her habit of referring to the people she consults by one initial a little irksome at times and I think I would have preferred it if she had given them pseudonyms if she didn't want to reveal their real names. I could have also done with a bibliography and an index but those criticisms aside the author writes well and this book will be of interest to anyone who wants to know more about the Green Man. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review.

[Rob Adey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of like Robert Macfarlane giving Alan Moore a piggyback through the countryside, taking in pagans, techno, panpsychism, allotments, Nazis, how lichen works...

[iosephvs bibliothecarivs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Come for the folklore, stay for the snarky asides, progressive philosophy, and gorgeous nature writing.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was research for my next book. I wish all research could be this fun. Highly recommended.

[Bryan Wigmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personal, social, political, a rollicking good read. An exploration rather than a thesis, but none the worse for that.

[Ivan Monckton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self centred pseudo intellectual claptrap. Steer clear....

[Cassandra Reads & Reviews · Rating 2 out of 5]

A meandering navel-gazing screed with only a few saving graces. Replete with standalone facts and philosophical threads meant to place reader and writer in an exploration of the pagan Green Man grounded in the christian traditional foundations of the past in geographic space, these threads became the most interesting part of the book, not as a tapestry they made interwoven with the author's own discoveries, but as standalone moments to build a "To Read" bibliography.

The narrative overall was rambling and disorientated, constantly centring back on the author, who simply is not interesting, not insightful, not offering up anything beyond self indulgence. Nowhere is this more salient than the overflowing ever expanding landscape descriptions that only served to disconnect the narrative and functioned, particularly as they began to recur and recur, only to distract. Descriptions that the structural editor in me suspects were intended to do the precise opposite.

What is this book about? What has it discovered or concluded? How was the journey (literal as described and figurative as the reader) relevant, insightful, or important? These questions were not only not answered, they do not even seem to have been asked.

If you have a particular interest in the concept of the Green Man philosophically and historically then this book's citations make for good reading. I did find a number of interesting ideas, but none of them were the author's. Declined from 3.5 stars to 2.5 stars because of the author's stigmatizing and ableist approach to discussing mental illness as an outside observer. She chose to minimize, romanticize, even dismisss the very real and serious suffering of the mentally ill, all in the name of her own intellectual wishcasting self indulgence. I found it all very distasteful.

[Cheryl Killey Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have really enjoyed delving into this book, I found it interesting and thought provoking. But, if you are looking for a blow by blow history of the Green Man's origins, this is not for you. He is the thread which leads her on a spiritual journey, with no fixed destination. Please, don't cringe - this is no poorly written, new-agey, text. The quality of this work lies in Lyon's gift for prose, there are countless beautifully written passages, particularly when she is trying to capture the sensation of engaging with our natural environment. But it is engagingly honest, this isn't a saccharine account, she is as quick to describe the rumble of traffic as the texture of a tree.

The book explores people's responses to The Green Man, and raises an intelligent discussion about the role the symbol may have played while name-checking sites you can visit. Lyon also discusses a variety of philosophies, with brief summations of a variety of perspectives, from thinkers you will have heard of, but may not have read.

For me, my response to this book is coloured less by what it said, than what it did. As a result of reading it, I was inspired to visit my local Green Man, carved from a fallen tree in a nearby park. I connected with my environment, not in some hippy-trippy fashion, but I made the effort to stop, take a breath and drink in the views. So, I highly recommend reading Lyon's book, because she could do the same for you.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Containing surprisingly few examples of the Green Man, this is perhaps more accurately described as a philosopher's travelogue as she explores the idea of setting up a Green Man cult. It seems her cult is more a device to frame her thought so - apart from one unlikely attempt - isn't really pursued with any seriousness. It is, however, very much about the spirit of animism, and its relevance to contemporary society. Lyon's discussion, drawing on the examples of her family, friends and new acquaintances, is a heartfelt and effective defence of animist principles. She draws parallels between Spinozan thought, the absorption of pagan beliefs into the Christian church, the spirituality of trance music, how children perceive the world and how we relate to nature. And because she draws heavily on her own experience - both as an academic and philosopher, and an anarchic hallucinogen consuming young woman - it's a convincing argument, told with wit and a deft relationship to the ideas at work.

So if you want a history of Green Man and Sheela Na Gig carvings, there's not a lot of that. If you're after an exploration of the mindset behind them, come on in.

[Asiem · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

Nina Lyon presents a book that is delightfully clear and comprehensible in parts, and equally opaque in others. The book should not be construed as being about the Green Man; it is rather aptly titled to indicate the nature of the journey, a voyage of discovery as Lyon visits various sites around the U.K. to track down Green Man remnants.

While I have no complaints against the 'stream-of-consciousness' narrative style adopted in the book, others might differ, pointing out that there is not so much of the Green Man as had been hoped. The journey has been well documented, and is interesting if you are new to the idea of the Green Man, or are just starting out on your own journey. Lyon has obviously researched for this book, but has a tendency to wax philosophical on occasion, which makes for some very jargon-y reading. The conferring of initials to interviewees also becomes a bit confusing, until one is struggling to recall who S is, or where J was met.

Overall, not bad for a one-time read.

[Andy Horton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I might have preferred this as a long-form essay in a weekend broadsheet supplement. A personal journey, rather than a researched and referenced study, this was interesting for the insights into how someone seeks to engage with what the green man may have represented in the past and does now.
I did find one intriguing reference in the text to a recommended work by an earlier folklorist, and have now ordered Whistler's The English Festivals for my Kindle.

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meandering book, which explores without leading to new destinations. The most intriguing parts for me were the connections to philosophy and Lewis Carroll, but I suspect the author did not expect the reader to enjoy that, because she scattered then very lightly as a seasoning rather than a main dish.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't decide quite what this author was intending to write about. The book meanders about, a wobbly walk through paganism, religion, philosophy, nature writing. It was like listening to someone slightly stoned riffing on their pet subjects without any particular coherency. It was frustrating to follow so many philosophical wanderings to find yourself at the end having gone somewhere but got nowhere.
What this book really needed was a good editor.

[Kimberley · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
Not what I expected. Some really fascinating bits that I loved, particularly where she was in her woods or out in the landscape, and some parts where I was very not into it (the unabomber stuff was a tough hang). Couldn’t shake the sense that she would probably roll her eyes at me, which is fair enough. Interesting if you are REALLY into philosophy

[Barney Nuttall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tricky to grapple with from start to finish, but that’s psychogeography. It demonstrates all of the symbols of the genre which I simultaneously loathe and love, the indulgence, stubbornness and vain introspection which makes beautiful, pointless works unfettered from anyone’s expectations of success apart from the authors.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent exploration of modern relation to nature. A wandering journey that felt like walking side by side with an old friend. Nina Lyon gave vocabulary to many thoughts and feelings previously unnamed. This is a welcoming starting point for pantheism and animism.

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but not really a search for the green man as much as a philosophy student's search for nature as part of the principles of life.

[Tracey · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather dry read. Not much about the Green Man , though some interesting facts about Arthurian legend and Cornwall !

[Sarah Edwards · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m confused about what I just read. A book about nothing it seems.

[Rose Paris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Macfarlane, with a gonzo edge.

[Nel Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting but interesting enough

[Aimee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was intermittently engaging in spite of rather than because of Lyon, who seems keen to remind everyone of how free she is of the Capitalist mindset, from the comfort of her private woodland. The book had good pointers for those looking to explore the Green Man further and the prose style was broadly lucid. However, one can't help feeling that Lyon would be happiest writing a book about herself and herself only, Green Man be damned.

[Gary Budden · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the increasingly crowded field of creative non-fiction (especially books dealing with place, landscape and our attitude to nature) Uprooted has provided a welcome change of pace and attitude. Ostensibly about the Green Man and his manifestations in religious architecture, folklore revivals, and most importantly our modern culture, the book quickly expands beyond that focus into a serious look at humanity’s conflicted relationship with the natural world – where it all went wrong, ways of rebuilding that relationship, and other possible ways of being and engaging with the world other than the failing methods we currently employ.

Looking at such unfashionable topics as magick, neo-paganism, animism and panpsychism seriously, but, crucially, with a sense of level-headed humour, is what made this book for me. Rejecting the life-sapping and anti-spiritual approach of modern materialism, but deftly avoiding the (to use Lyon’s phrase) woo woo that mars a lot of well-meaning but ill-thought-out New Age-ism, this book advocates embracing a certain messiness and non-doctrinaire approach to our engagement with the world – no one knows exactly what the Green Man meant, and no one can agree on what it means now. Perhaps it’s enough that it means something, and should be used as method of engagement rather than just another replacement deity to be worshipped unthinkingly. The Green Man, Lyon suggests at one point, is 'the entry point to Faerie' – if you’re comfortable with metaphor and symbolism, and allow the Green Man to represent an entry point into a different way of thinking rather than any depressingly literal interpretation, then I seriously recommend this book.