The Green Man

I first encountered the Green Man as a child, in the chapter of the Qur’an titled The Cave, traditionally recited on Fridays, the holiest day of the week for Muslims. In this chapter, Moses wishes to meet the person who has been granted more knowledge than him : the Green Man (Khidr). Since then, the chapter of The Cave has been a recurring motif in my life, cropping up in the most unlikely of places and appearing as a long-lost friend in more familiar territory. Ask a Muslim about the Green Man and they will tell you the story of Khidr.

Moses longed to meet the person who had been granted more knowledge than him on earth : the Green Man. Eager to learn from him, he begs the Green Man to allow him to accompany him on his travels. The Green Man acquiesces with the caveat that the man must not question his actions during the journey.

The Green Man, Moses is told, can be found at the meeting point of the two seas. And so Moses sets off in search of this isthmus with his companion. Among their provisions is a preserved salt fish. The journey is long and when the time to eat arrives, the fish is nowhere to be found. Moses asks what happened to it. His companion suddenly remembers that when they had paused to rest on a large rock, the fish jolted into life and slipped away, burrowing into the water. He had somehow forgotten to mention it at the time. ‘That is the place we were looking for’ Moses exclaims and they turn back, retracing their footsteps.  

Dionysus, the god of fertility, the horned and foliate Cernunnos, the Egyption corn god Osiris, the green skinned Buddhist god Amoghasiddhi, the green robed sage of Islam, Al Khidr. The Green Man spans cultures, takes various forms and exists across time and space. The presence of the Green Man across time and space is precisely the Islamic understanding of the Green Man. It is said he is evergreen and immortal, revealing himself to those who seek him.

The importance of the colour green in Islam cannot be overstated. Henry Corbin captured its importance when he wrote that ‘green is the spiritual, liturgical colour of Islam.’ As orange is to Hinduism, green is to Islam. It is everywhere you look, from the vegetal motifs that dominate Islamic art to the dome of the Prophet’s mosque in Madinah, to the garments worn by Muslims. 

Muslims know the Green Man as Khidr, the name itself means ‘the Green One’ in Arabic.  Khidr is the Greening Man, his presence sprouts vegetation and he is often described and depicted as wearing a green robe. He is mysterious by nature. He is not an angel and not a prophet, he is likened to them but ultimately occupies a category of his own: an angel-prophet-guide-wanderer. Appearing to prophets, saints and seekers under various guises, he initiates them into a world governed not by logic-chopping rationality but divine knowledge. As a child, I learnt that the Green Man could appear to seekers in a form some people may least expect a guide to assume: an accountant, a homeless person, a successful businessman. Never treat a person badly, I would hear, they may turn out to be the Green Man!

I wonder what form he has assumed at this very moment and what forms he might take in the future.

They find the Green Man there, seated on a green carpet on the water. Moses, keen to glean some knowledge from the Green Man’s wisdom, asks to join him on his travels. ‘You will not be able to bear with me patiently, how could you be patient in matters beyond your knowledge?’ asked the Green Man. Moses assures him that he will be patient. The Green Man agrees on one condition: ‘do not question anything I do unless I make mention of it to you first.’

They board a ship, the Green Man scuttles it by making a hole at the bottom. Moses protests at this ‘you have done a monstrous thing!’ ‘Did I not say that you will not be able to bear patiently with me?’ says the Green Man. Remembering the promise he made, Moses resolves to maintain his silence, come what may. They journey further and the Green Man kills a young boy. Moses is outraged ‘Did you slay a pure soul? You have done a terrible thing!’ ‘Did I not say that you will not be able to bear patiently with me?’ comes the reply. Again, Moses checks himself ‘if I question you again after this, banish me from your company.’ They journeyed on, arriving at a town and asked the townspeople for food but they were denied any hospitality. As they were leaving, they saw a wall that was leaning. The Green Man stopped and repaired the wall. ‘If you wanted to, you could have taken payment for this’ said Moses. ‘This is where you and I part company’ the Green Man announced. ‘I will tell you the meaning of the things you could not bear with patiently’

A thunderous face garlanded with leaves meets the gaze of worshippers. Foliage bolts out of his open mouth but the growth is frozen in time, he has been carved from stone.  In 1939, Lady Raglan looked up at a half human, half vegetal creature in her local church and named it the Green Man. Before her, these carvings were known by various appellations, ‘foliate head’ ; ‘head of leaves’ ; ‘a grotesque.’ References to the ‘Green Man’ existed long before Lady Raglan but she was the first to assign this name to the foliate heads in churches.

Why does the Green Man adorn churches? Much ink has been spilled trying to untangle this mystery. Even as I ask the question, I can hear Khidr’s response: ‘how could you be patient in matters beyond your knowledge?’ And yet like Moses, we keep finding ourselves asking ‘why?’ It occurs to me that just as Moses was occupied with the outward letter of religious law, so too modern observers of the Green Man are concerned with outward appearances.

The Muslim writer and academic Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad writes that ‘in the Green Man mystery we might seem to be confronting an elision between a pagan and a Qur’anic motif, an association which for the Latins seemed self-evident but which to us appears impossible.’ For Shaykh Murad the approach to the Green Man lies in Islam’s veneration of nature. To be Muslim is to be attuned to the natural world. A Muslim knows what time the sun rises and sets, their five daily prayers revolve around the movement of the sun and the movements of the body during the cycles of the prayer itself recall shapes from the natural world. He describes the Green Man as an Ishmaelite figure, on the margins looking in, of the flesh, of the wilderness, not of the spirit. A key observation by Kathleen Basford, in her 1978 book The Green Man, was her reference to the exegete Rabanus Maurus, who interpreted the foliage around the Green Man as representing carnal lust.

William Anderson had also thought about the relationship between Khidr and the foliate heads in churches. Noting the conjectural nature of his claim whilst highlighting the Islamic influence on Gothic architecture, he wrote of ‘a tradition from Islam which may have influenced the thoughts of the masons and carvers, coming into contact as they did with Muslim craftsmen and architects whose superior skills they were eager to emulate and to learn from.’ Adrian Cooper from the environment charity Common Ground, which holds Kathleen Basford’s extensive collection of Green Man photography, notes that the thirteenth to fourteenth century saw a flourishing of the Green Man in churches. The image shifted from a staid depiction to more idiosyncratic motifs reflecting, he suggests, the different locations and different people who are making the pieces in churches.    

But I am not interested in the study of influences or a search for origins. The Green Man belies a linear, rational explanation and this is reflected in the shifting scenes and episodic narratives contained in the chapter of The Cave: the Sleepers of Ephesus; the tale of the rich man ruined by his arrogance; the story of a ruler that early Muslim commentators identified as Alexander the Great, all shift in and out of focus within a single chapter.

Thinking about the Green Men in churches it occurs to me that medieval churches were built on sites of pagan or druidic importance, the yew trees in the churchyards often predating the building of the church. I am interested in what this means to Muslims in this country. Those ancient societies recognised the significance certain locations held. Places where the earth’s sacredness can be more closely felt. The Muslim teacher, Shaykh Abdullah Ross would encourage his followers to visit such locations. He taught his students that ‘many old churches and other monuments had been built by people who still had a natural capacity to feel where currents of natural energy flow through the landscape and had sited their structures accordingly.’ He would take his students out on trips during the solstice, pausing at certain areas in the landscape or certain churches in various locations: the Peak District; Quantock Hills; Glastonbury. ‘Anyone who is close to nature will go to Paradise’ he said.

The Green Man explains the meanings of his actions. ‘‘The boat belonged to some needy people who made their living from the sea and I damaged it because I knew that a king who was seizing every serviceable boat by force was fast approaching them.’

The young boy had parents who were people of faith, he would trouble them through wickedness, we wished that their Lord should give them a more compassionate child.

The wall belonged to two young orphans in the town and there was buried treasure beneath it belonging to them. Their father had been a righteous man, so your Lord intended them to reach maturity and then dig up their treasure as a mercy from your Lord.

I did not do these things of my own accord: these are the explanations for those things you could not bear with patience.’

The Green Man’s lesson for Moses was not to be wedded to outward appearances, some knowledge can only be learnt through an initiatory spiritual experience. Maybe William Blake understood this about Khidr. In a diary entry dated 10^th September 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson transcribes a conversation he had with William Blake that evening:

‘Perhaps the best thing [Blake] said was his comparison of moral with natural evil – “Who shall say what God thinks evil – That is a wise tale of the Mahometans – Of the Angel of the Lord that murdered the infant. Is not every infant that dies of disease in effect murdered by an Angel?”’  Although Henry Crabb Robinson presumes Blake must be referring to the Hermit of Parnell, the Blake scholar Angus Whitehead notes that the reference to ‘Mahometans’ (Muslims) means he could very well be referring to the Khidr tale in the Qur’an.

This episode demonstrates how Green Man is at times, an incomprehensible, scary figure. He contains contraries and highlights the inadequacy of reason. Ibn Arabi wrote that imagination has the power to combine opposites, ‘it is impossible for sense perception or the rational faculty to bring together opposites but it is not impossible for imagination.’ In the same way, Blake asserted ‘Without Contraries there is no progression.’ The Green Man is like a dialectic of negation in foliate form. But the moment you think you have grasped him enough to begin describing him, is the very moment he slips through your fingers.

As generations of folklorists, writers and artists have turned their hand to the Green Man mythos, the Green Man’s proviso rings in my ears, “you may accompany me on the journey as long as you do not question my actions.”