Does King Charles’ Green Man make him a pagan?

On 4 April the Royal Household revealed the design for invitations to the Coronation, the work of heraldic artist Andrew Jamieson. While the design is a riot of flora and garden fauna, heraldic and otherwise, one feature of the invitation has above all invited comment – the presence of an anthropomorphic green ‘foliate head’, wearing a crown of oak and hawthorn, with leaves of daffodils curling up almost like a pair of horns. Within minutes, the decorative face had been named. He was the ‘Green Man’, a vaguely defined figure found on plaques in gardens around the nation, who is in turn indelibly associated with another concept: paganism.

The idea that the King approved an invitation to an avowedly Christian Coronation ceremony with a design suffused with ‘pagan’ imagery might suggest, on the face of it, a subversive act on the part of the monarch.