Green Men and other Spirits

"The Green Man signifies irrepressible life. Once he has come into your awareness, you will find him speaking to you wherever you go. He is an image from the depths of prehistory: he appears and seems to die and then comes again after long forgettings at many periods in the past two thousand years. In his origins he is much older than our Christian era. In all his appearances he is an image of renewal and rebirth ..." --William Anderson, in Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth. London: HarperCollins, 1990.

"Here is the life, Socrates, my friend," said the Mantinean visitor, "that a human being should live -- studying the beautiful itself. Should you ever see it, it will not seem to you to be on the level of gold, clothing, and beautiful boys and youths, who so astound you now when you look at them ... Those who are pregnant in soul however ... these people are pregnant with and give birth to what is appropriate for the soul. What, then, is it that it is appropriate for the soul to bring forth? Good sense and the rest of virtue, of which all poets are procreators ... " - Plato's Symposium, translated by William S. Cobb, 1993.