☀️ Eustace Collection: Connected Consciousness.

This article is a part of the Eustace collection - aimed at helping others create counter-narratives to threats to our historic environment.

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The foliate head, or Green Man, appears across centuries in churches and secular buildings, revealing a connected consciousness through time. Here, I explore how these carvings form a vast network of meaning, linking past and present - thus contributing to significance.

Connected Consciousness

If there's one symbol that I come across in my travels across the country (more often than not in churches, but also in some secular buildings) it has to be the foliate head - popularly known as 'The Green Man.'

Just a few minutes comparison brings out a kind of foliate head typology. Those with tongues out, those with teeth and tongue, those with tendrils coming from their mouths and those from their faces or eyes. Human faces, sprites, kings and bishops.

They are all from the same source, but their meaning is nuanced.

I think of all this typology and feel a jolt of hope. The vast matrix of interaction between humans, throughout huge stretches of time, has diluted into a collective consciousness enriched by remarkably beautiful and striking things that have been passed on to us with their meaning intact.

"The vast matrix of interaction between humans, throughout huge stretches of time, has diluted into a collective consciousness enriched by remarkably beautiful and striking things that have been passed on to us with their meaning intact. "

For me the accumulative act of visiting churches has contributed to a growing sense that there exists between these places a kind of connected consciousness. Each church is a node in a vast network of buildings that have been infused with meaning on so many different levels.

Many churches that are centuries old, rise out of pre-Christian landscapes which are themselves impregnated with meaning. This palimpsest of material culture acts like a conduit, a voltage of human consciousness that flows to the present like an electrical current.