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Green Man

The traditional salutation amongst the firework fraternity is 'stay green'. This reflects the long historical association between pyrotechnic practitioners and the ancient Green Man. Green Man is part myth, with associations ranging from witchcraft to Robin Hood (dressed in Lincoln Green), and part fact - medieval festival 'stewards' who brandished fire and dressed in foliage as protection.

Green Man is described by Donald J Haarman in the PGI (Pyrotechnics Guild International) Bulletin No 47, May 1985:
Have you ever wondered who the grizzled figure is encircled within the PGI logo, and found on the back cover of the bulletin? Well, wonder no more, for what follows is more than you ever wanted to know about the PGI's logo. It is truly written that; upon founding the PGI (March 1969): Max P. Vander Horck chose the venerable "Green Man", who, with his "fyre clubbe", traditionally led processions of fireworkers at royal (and sometimes not-so-royal) celebrations in Jolly Olde England, to be the representative symbol of this the first non-commercial organization devoted to the love of fireworks.

The drawing of this strange apparition appears on the cover of the second of the four books comprising John Bate's The Mysteries of Nature and Art (1635). (The "Second Booke:" Teaching most plainly, and withall most exactly, the composing of all manner of Fire-works for Tryumph and Recreation.) However, the exact origin of the Green Man has been, until now, as Brock puts it, "obscure". For as luck-would-have-it during my never ending search for references about fireworks; in the Sociological Abstracts Backfile data base I came upon a paper by Barbara Widenor Maggs, entitled, "Firework Art and Literature: Eighteenth-Century Pyrotechnical Tradition in Russia and Western Europe", published in the Slavonic and East European Review (Vol. 54), January, 1976), in which during a discussion of similarities between Russian and Western European pyrotechnical tradition, she presents new information about our Green man!

"Similarities between Russian and Western European pyrotechnical tradition are to be found at several points in the early history of Russian displays. Some of the first presentations for entertainment purposes in Russia as in the West, for instance, were those connected with religious festivities. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia, it was customary at Christmas time for buffoons in wooden hats and with beards covered with honey so that they would not burn, to run about the streets setting off a primitive type of firework and igniting the beards of passers-by. Those who wanted mercy were required to pay a kopeck. Called 'Chaldeans', these actors portrayed the servants who were to prepare the fiery furnace into which King Nebuchadnezzar, according to the Biblical story, threw three men. The 'Chaldeans' were regarded as pagan and unclean, and were traditionally rebaptized on Twelfth-Day. "These 'Chaldeans' would appear to be related to the traditional medieval 'wild man', a figure who was prominent in the art, literature and dramatic productions of Western Europe, and was sometimes linked with pyrotechnics. An observance bearing a striking resemblance to the Russian Twelfth-Day celebrations was the Schembartlaufen in Nuremberg, held periodically at Carnival time between 1449 and 1539. A contemporary police report notes that 'wild men and other mummers' customarily chased and attacked the onlookers. To prevent the crowd from interfering with a traditional pageant dance, the masked, hairy performers also set off fireworks from a kind of gun concealed in greenery that they carried. This particular representation of the 'wild man' may have been connected with spring rituals, or it may be that the participants in the ceremony were involved in secret pagan societies."

"In early seventeenth-century England figures known as 'wild men' or 'green men', also had the task of maintaining order. Strewing fire from large clubs, they cleared the way for certain festive processions. The 'wild men', 'very ugly to behold' are described as having black beards and black hair, with garlands on their heads, and wearing costumes of green ivy.

One finds further associations of the 'wild man' with pyrotechnics in Western Europe in John Bate's The Mysteries of Nature and Art (in part a fireworks manual), published in London in 1635, which shows on the title page the traditional figure brandishing a 'fire-club', and again in a Danish engraving, probably of the seventeenth century, portraying several bearded men dressed in loincloths of flowers and wielding flaming sticks.