Beheading the Green Man: Camelot vs the Green Chapel

This post from Martin Shaw this week just pushed me over the edge to get this out. I’ve been stewing on this idea for months, ever since I hosted a convention for LegendHaven, and a guest mentioned the mythic tension between Camelot and the Green Chapel.

Since following Michael Martin and Grail country, I’ve been slowly inducted into the majesty and mystery of the green man, a half-symbol, half-sacramental idea. Perhaps a reality. He certainly seemed very mystically real to our medieval grand parents. And he keeps probing at the edges of our vision today, even though he gets harder to be seen by most.

I don’t know if I’ve seen him, but I hope I’ve caught the wild spirit that trails in his wake. This whole thing can’t help but be poetic, because it’s everything that modern world is not. Roots, leaves, deep valleys, dark forests, and human living caught between the flourishing city and the forested cell.

Martin Shaw keeps talking about his ruminations on the myth of Percival, and the Arthurian sagas of the Green Knight. I grew up on these wild tales, and didn’t know what to make of them.

But I’m now caught up in what the story seems to mean, at least to me. The myth is haunting me from the inside out, which is what myths do.

The danger of human living is to follow the way of Cain, to stare down at the bloody consequences of our choices, and build cities. We build lives - especially in the first world west - where nature is bricked out. And since we are nature, we’re routinely cauterizing any weird outgrowth or efflorescence from ourselves.

Or at least trying to.

Don’t get me wrong. Camelot is a glorious and wonderful thing. But the point of the Story of the Green Man is that a moment comes when nature reasserts itself in our midst, and there’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. It is massive and terrifying, and perhaps merrier than we let on, eyes glinting with the fun of the game.

The Green Man invites a horrifying head-chopping contest, because he knows something the knights don’t. He grows back. Humans are way too wedded to their lifespan to understand how trees and flowers and the Green Chapel works.

The Green Chapel is the opposite of Camelot. It’s the wild, rank, and blooming cascade of nature, nature without human involvement. It’s the cathedrals in the forests, the hermit fish in the mountains, the herds of creatures folding into each other in a cycle of gift and rebirth.

Human bodies were born in this Green Chapel, and have always struggled to live in a tentative cease-fire, or a harmony with it. Our temptation is to always head away from the hills into the Camelots.

Camelot is like Gondor; neat, lawful, structured, predictable, with clear consequences for human collaboration. It’s mathematical, scientistic, bolted with syllogisms and synchronicity and systems.

But the Green Chapel has no walls, in some way. It’s walls are everything. The forces of the universe and the stars pour in and through it all, the columns are thick and alive with bacteria and bees and barley and beech, the fields of wheat and the fields of gravity grow against each other, the angels and the fairies and everything inbetween all honor their place in the great chain of being.

Humans are meant to live in a tension between them. We have to create Camelots, but we can’t think of them as great armored turtles to keep the world at bay. And to live completely in the Chapel is a return to the jungle, and the loss of our imagination.

Humans are a surface tension between spirit and matter, made up of both, needing to live in both.

That’s why Sir Gawain receives only a nick from the Green Knights cosmic axe. A nick that draws a drop of blood.

The Green Man doesn’t want revenge for all of our abuse to our home, to our body that is our world. He wants to innoculate us, to remind us of our mortality, to draw us out of the brick and plaster and steel structures back into the wild.

Sir Gawain returns to Camelot, but now he has left his blood behind in the Green Chapel. He lives between two worlds, now. He’s met the spirit of nature, the wild Father Christmas alive within every greening thing.

As Christians, all this is a wonderful myth and reality of Christ. Christ unbound, Christ who bled into the world near the walls of Jerusalem, Christ in creation.

This is a great reason why I always have hope for the future. No matter how bad we think things get with our culture, we are ever always huddling round a winter fire moaning at an impending apocalypse.

And then the doors burst open and the Green Man steps in, to remind us that we’re part of an incredibly old story, and we have many lifetimes yet to live, lifetimes to continue discovering and deepening our sense of the mysteries of God.

Enjoy this delightful song from Malcom Guite

My face in the foliage, you’ve seen that face before

It was carved in the Choir by your fathers back in days of yore

I’m the power in the pulse I’m the song underneath the soil

I’m the unseen King of the ditches, ragged and royal

I’m the Green Man, don’t take my name in vain

I’m the Green Man, and its time to break my chain

If you cut me down I’ll spring back green again

I’m the roots on the stock I’m the tender shoots on the vine

I’m the goodness in the bread I’m the wildness in the wine

There’s power in the place where my smallest tendrils are curled

And my softest touch is the strongest thing in the world

I’m the Green Man, don’t take my name in vain

I’m the Green Man, I’m bound to break my chain

If you cut me down I’ll spring back green again

I’m the grass at your feet and the leaves that shade your head

I’ll be your bower of bliss, I’ll be your green grass bed

I’m in the finest flower, I’m the power in the wickedest weed

And I’ll plough your furrow with pleasure and plant my seed

I’m the Green Man, and I make love with the rain

I’m the Green Man, and I feel like breaking my chain

You might think I’m finished but I’ll spring back up again

You can cover me in concrete, staple me down with steel

Spread your houses and your car parks over my fields

But I’ll still be there keeping everything alive

And I’ll spring back green but you might not survive

I’m the Green Man, don’t take my name in vain

I’m the Green Man, Its time to break my chain

You can cut me down but I’ll spring back green again

©Malcolm Guite 2002