Detail from a painting by Tomasz Alan Kopera.
“But what if the knowledge being forbidden to Eve was … a kind of deeper communion with and understanding of the tree and the fruit itself, an awareness of her kinship with them?”
–Maud Newton, “What Did the Forbidden Tree Want?”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this quote since I first read it, more than a month ago. My regular readers know that I think about that moment in the Garden of Eden with the Tree of Knowledge often, and I’ve written about it several times. There are so many theories on just who (Lucifer, Lilith, the Simurgh) that serpent in the tree was, so many theories on what kind of knowledge was forbidden to Adam and Eve. Genesis never explains it; it only says that if they eat the fruit, they will “surely die.” Why would our supposed creator threaten us with death just to keep us from knowing things? Why would they want to keep us naive and ignorant? What would they not want us to know?
Newton’s quote connects my ruminations on the Tree of Knowledge to another of my interests: the Green Man. This figure (like the serpent in the tree) is connected to many different deities and characters: Jack-in-the-Green, Robin Hood, Gawain’s Green Knight, Pan and Dionysus/Bacchus, the woodwose, Cernunnos, Herne the Hunter, and others. He’s also connected to the foliate head carvings so often seen on churches, particularly medieval churches, across Europe and into the Middle East.
Why were the builders of Christian churches so eager to depict a figure that was clearly pagan in origin? Yes, there is plenty of evidence that Christian leaders adopted (or wholesale appropriated) earlier pagan traditions, in part to make it easier to convince people to join them. The way Christmas supplanted celebrations of the winter solstice and Yule, which we’ve just finished celebrating in the northern hemisphere, is a prime example. But to me, it feels like there’s something else at work.
A foliate head in Llangwm, Wales.
Many foliate heads appear miserable, terrifying or both. Leaves sprout from their noses, mouths and ears. Their mouths are often open in surprise, or perhaps a scream; their eyes are wide, bewildered (literally) and frightened. In earlier, pagan times, these figures were comfortable with (and celebrated for) the close connections between humans and the rest of nature. But under Christianity, this connection becomes sinister. The woods and wilds become dark, dangerous, terrifying places. This becomes a pretense for domination; we seek to control the things we fear.
But humans and the more-than-human world, as Queer Nature calls it, have long relied upon each other. While it’s true that, if humans disappeared from the planet, nature would be just fine, it’s also true that a wide range of plants and animals depend on us, just as we depend on them. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this extensively in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” including a story about how sweetgrass grows back stronger and healthier when a certain amount of it is regularly harvested. Regular pruning and proscribed burns strengthen plants and ecosystems. Wild animals depend on humans, not just for the ways in which we function as part of larger ecosystems and food webs, but also for our wildlife rehabilitation efforts. The Green Man’s woods and wilds were once our home; we were once much more consciously a part of nature and the environment than we pretend to be now. The Green Man, in his hybrid form, represents that history.
Dominance over nature has allowed humans to flourish in many ways as a species — and Christianity has abetted that process — but we have also lost a great deal. We have lost the ways in which our nervous systems settle when we’re tracking, foraging, working the land or resting among the trees. We have lost the friendship and medicine of plants, the awe and wonder of seeing wildlife going about its business, the humbling sense of vulnerability and interconnectedness that is our natural place in the world. We (especially white people) chase romantic notions of Native Americans and their “connections to nature,” appropriating imagined spiritual practices because we have long since lost our own sense of indigeneity; either we became colonists, or our ancestors were victims of colonization.
Racism and other forms of bigotry play a role here, too. Once white people saw wild nature as something to fear and dominate, we began treating Black, Brown and indigenous people as subhuman, as savages. Likewise, queer and neurodivergent people are marginalized for being too uninhibited, too transgressive to belong in human society. In “Black Skin, Green Masks: Medieval Foliate Heads, Racial Trauma, and Queer World-Making,” Carolyn Dinshaw connects these ideas back to the foliate heads and representations of the Green Man. “These aesthetically intricate, affectively intense images represent bodies that are strange mixtures, weird amalgams: they picture intimate trans-species relations.” She connects them to festivals like burning man, queer subcultures like the Radical Faeries, and “traumatic postcolonial contexts out of which new queer worlds are imagined.”
The Green Man in my mind isn’t shocked or terrified by his hybrid nature. He’s calm and present, glad to bear the horns and greenery that grow from his head. He knows what we have largely forgotten; that we are nature, and nature is us. He doesn’t mind if we eat from the Tree of Knowledge, if we remember our connection to the natural world. In fact, he’s waiting for us.