Alchemisland

Wondering whether UK wildman mythos is something created years after the fact.

Reviewing evidence suggesting a ‘woodwose’ one sees an historical tapestry, whose colors bleed and threads fuse to create a new and unwieldy cryptid.

Things I feel could contribute

1. Once-revered ancestors transformed into ‘entities’ by colonialism and new religions; the ‘hairy men’ of the past who ‘live beneath the megaliths and hide in the woods’ are really just the ‘hairy men of the past’ who live inside us, in the cavernous temples of our minds, in the genetic labyrinth that we contain and which contains us
2. stories of the physical ‘green men’ -Saxon rebels who loved Hereward the Wake and conducted guerilla war against the Normans. It’s fiction but Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake is an essential primer for this historical period
3. occult/symbolic green men which decorate churches are symbols which by their profound energy implant such notions in our heads; the man of the wild with his ivy-draped hair, hirsute and free. I’ve seen countless explanations for the Green Man and his real meaning. Jonathan Black, who wrote both the Sacred History and the Secret History of the World, suggests that we maintain memories of earlier forms. All our myths track not great deeds and the coming of gods but changes to consciousness; he proposes the vegetative man existing in a world before the world, breeding without a partner, and having observed something like Indra’s Net, a vast web of interlinked chains that bound all things together
4. bigfoot, of course – point 1 applies here also as bigfoot is suggested as both a living evolutionary offshoot, the missing link itself, or remnant populations of gargantuan, hollow-boned apes who thrived and grew colossal in a oxygen-rich prehistory

Countless others but, when we discuss this topic, we’re not talking flesh and blood beasts IMO.