Abstract

This dissertation investigates ancient ecological and indigenous cultural forms in response to contemporary crises of ecology and psychology—"an alienation that haunts the modern soul while increasingly choking the biosphere." Lady Raglan's (1939) documentation of foliate masks carved into churches throughout much of Europe is taken as a starting place: faces where "oak leaves grow from the mouth and ears, and completely encircle the head" (p. 45). Another data point: excavation beneath Notre Dame Cathedral uncovers a Roman-era stone block dedicated to Cernunnos ("The Horned One"), demonstrating literal encasement of pre-Christian fertility traditions in stone (Evans, 1988). The inquiry examines such documented traditional forms alongside Classical, Roman, Greek, Sumerian, and Near-East archeological and textual sources, exploring how historical patterns of human-earth relationality might inform contemporary crises through the rediscovery of autochthonous creativity: the natural human capacity to reconnect with body, symbol, ancestry, memory, and ecological life-worlds. The study introduces the method of epistrophic hermeneutics: a novel synthesis of hermeneutics with Hillmanian therapeia and epistrophē—defined by Hillman (2007/2016o) as "the reversion or return of soul phenomena to the archetype, according to the principle of likeness or analogy" (p. 153). The term hermeneutic of hospitality is introduced as an alternative to hermeneutics of faith or suspicion, respectively – a practice of epistemic humility at depth, rooted in what Hillman (1981/2013a) termed a "poetic basis of mind"(p. 31). The method embraces Hillman's dictum that "we can never be purely phenomenal or truly objective" because "one is never beyond the subjectivism given with the soul's native dominants of fantasy structures" (Hillman, 1981/2013a, p. 32). Archetypes, in this sense, are understood as "the primary forms that govern the psyche" (p. 13): participatory lenses of the epistemic eye. A hermeneutic of hospitality thus protects epistemological pluralism that includes cultural diversity yet continues deeper, beyond tokenism and into a celebration of pluralism at epistemic depth: that is, a protection of the living ecosystem of mind and image. Concretely, this reading stance follows Hillman's (1986/2016f) therapeutic attitude: "Instead of inquiry: interest, respect, welcome, praise—even attachment. To greet… even mythic presences that may be unpopular or demonized."(p. 96) This epistrophic work aims to "release the mind into its originality beyond the old entrapped condition" (Hillman, 1986/2016d, p. 295), aligning with the work’s principle of autochthonous creativity. The argument proceeds via case-rich exegesis. In Classical Greece, Dionysian masks give the Green Man civic expression; Dionysus appears as “a horned god… crowned with serpents” (Euripides, Bacchae, trans. 1996, p. 34), binding horns, snakes, and vegetation to ecstatic ritual. This vegetal–animal fusion has deep Mesopotamian precedent: Enki of the Sumerian wetlands was “the Wild Bull of Eridu” whose iconography shows “two streams, the Euphrates and the Tigris, flowing out of his shoulders” (Kramer, 1961, p. 76), while Damu embodied “the power in the rising sap” (Jacobsen, 1976, p. 39)—both figures conjoining fertility, water, and vegetal renewal. The parallel is explicit in Greek cult: Dionysus Limnaios, “Dionysus of the Swamps,” inhabited Athens’ oldest sanctuary where “water pours abundantly from under the rocks” (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.20.3), mirroring the Sumerian Dumuzi-abzi, “the power to renew life in the watery deep” (Katz, 2003, p. 35). Wild Bull Dumuzi is at once bull and cowherd—divine animal and shepherd—whose “bitter laments when he dies as the dry heat of summer yellows the pastures” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. 64) mark the seasonal transition toward death and dormancy. The archetypal union of Goddess and God appears again in Baal and Baalath, “the male power identified especially with water” meeting “earth,” whose union makes “plants and trees, animals and men… the offspring” (Patai, 1990, p. 45)—a cosmogony of ecological reciprocity. These figures also share the power of metamorphosis. Humbaba’s “seven splendours” enable constant transformation—“Humbaba’s face keeps changing!” (George, 2003, p. 37)—a capacity echoed in Dionysus, who is “a lion, a bull, a boar, a bear, a panther, a snake, and now a tree, fire, water” (Euripides, Bacchae, trans. 1996, p. 101). In Near Eastern vegetal–arboreal myth, Adonis is born from the trunk of his mother-tree Myrrha, which “split open to allow the birth” (Graves, 1960, p. 74); Osiris is enclosed within a tree’s girth, Isis crafting his wooden phallus for resurrection (Graves, 1960, p. 60). Likewise, Ningishzida’s “winding roots, embodiments of living supernatural power, free themselves from the trunk and become live serpents entwined around it” (Black & Green, 1992, p. 136), a precise analogue to Dionysus Perikonis who “twines himself around the column” (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 10.19.3). Taken together, these scenes form a coherent archetypal grammar: a horned-vegetal deity mediating between water and earth, embodying seasonal death and renewal, uniting the powers of plant, animal, and human through metamorphosis, and returning life to the land through sacred union. This grammar repeats across Sumerian, Levantine, and Greek worlds, providing the imaginal architecture that will later be carved into the foliate heads of Medieval Europe. By tracing – text by text, altar by altar, mask by mask – how these symbolic forms have historically mediated human–earth relationship, the study demonstrates that epistemic pluralism at depth is precisely the restoration of a type of human culture capable of ecological harmonization. This is not a dynamic that can be simulated through instrumental control; it depends on the cultivation of consciousness that lives in participatory reciprocity with the more-than-human world: an epistemic eye that glints green. A hermeneutic of hospitality, in this sense, is not merely a method of interpretation but a protection of epistemological pluralism capable of return to the imagination of the Earth. The image of the Green Man describes just this: a dynamic bridge mediating between the many worlds of participatory and epistemic possibility. His mythic dance, rooted in water and leaf, horn and mask, death and return, is the precise form through which the restoration of the living Earth and the living soul become an indivisible act. Published January 2023. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18447.50089