The Chicken or the Egg....

Talk about hieroglyphics today in class got me wondering about other kinds of mythological hieroglyphs. So I decided to look up the Green Man and homologies of homologies, the Green Man is a symbol for rebirth, renaissance, the cycle etc! It's amazing to me how allllll of these stories are so strangely connected! More specifically, Green Man represents spring and the rebirth of vegetation basically.

This is basically what Green Man normally looks like:

Pretty self explanatory. Older looking person, male, leaves/vines/vegetation etc. Fairly simple. BUT! Green Man can show up in many forms. Green Man can appear to be a male peeking through foliage, be made of foliage, or be sprouting foliage from facial orifices. Depictions can be strictly facial or full body. Green Man can also be a WOMAN but green women are very rare. There can be Green Men aside from humans as well. Cats, lions, and demons are also fairly common and on gravestones, skulls sprouting vegetation to symbolize rebirth is common.

Here's some other forms of Green Men/Women/Cats/Lions/etc:

After looking at these myths and hieroglyphs it begs the question, what came first? Did ancient cultures randomly draw and then make stories to match them? Were the stories first and the drawings were made to make a historical account of the stories? I think the latter is more likely but we'll never know for sure!