Green Chapel:
Mountain of the Lord
…the Temple Mount as an
architectonic unit from its establishment through its several incarnations….[i]
We have to come
back to the Castle of Hautdesert and its relationship to the Green Chapel and
see that they are, in a sense, mutually reflective names for the same place as
seen through different cultural lenses. Eliav,
for instance, points out cogently in his study of God’s Mountain: The Temple
Mount in Time, Place, and Memory, that when talk about this place at the
heart of Jerusalem, you are discussing at the same time a geographical feature,
a historically-constructed site, the sequence of occupation and the memory of
the buildings constructed on it by different people, the officiants who conducted
rituals associated with and the worshippers who travelled on pilgrimages to
visit the site and take part in the rituals, the meanings, implications and
functions of these rituals in various periods of history and as articulated and
interpreted in written texts and oral traditions, many of which are
contradictory and mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, Eliav reliance on a form of critical deconstructionism
lacks dynamic historical depth and psychohistorical nuances. Nor does he understand the essentials of Aby
Warburg’s version of art history, especially the concepts of Nachleben and Pathosformeln. The afterlife
of an image or idea refers to its dynamic, multi-layered continued existence
throughout history, its influences, traces and auras. The forms of passion that trigger the
resurfacing of repressed, supressed and displaced images and ideas keep
transforming the intensity and range of influences the original stimuli exert
on later and superficially distinct events.
The closest Eliav comes to these notions is in his phrase “emerging
conceptualities,” explained in part in this way
When a people
encounter a reality bathed in unfamiliar glamour, they often turn to their
foundation texts, those literary cornerstones that fuel their existence, in
search of prescriptions and vocabulary that will define this new experience.[ii]
This is what happens in Sir Gawain
and the Knight of the Green Chapel, given the differences between the actual
holy sites in Jerusalem that Eliav is discussing and the complex conceits the
alliterative poet explores in his poem. There
is no way that the characters inside the narrative or the singer-of-the-tale
could know the features of successive constructions discovered around the
Temple grounds by archaeology nor even have access to most of the ancient and
medieval texts used to coordinate the scholar’s insights, but it is likely that
a Crypto-Jew living secretly in a dark corner of England in the mid-fourteenth
century, would have a sense of the complications and multiple layers of meaning
to be disclosed by midrashic exegesis, thanks to his family background, the
residual traditions of the academies of notarikon
and rabbinic philology that had flourished in London prior to the expulsions
two or three generations earlier, and the chance meetings with Jewish visitors
from German-or French-speaking lands, France or Iberia or commercial journeys
undertaken on the Continent. He would
not be put off by anachronisms, contradictions or far-fetched analogies, and
might see in the fragmented memories of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land,
mingled as they are with Mid-Eastern and Hellenistic mythologies, room for
poetic enhancements, a place, that is, for his longing for a protected region
of linguistic ambiguity in which to feel safe expressing his pains and
anxieties. If there is a comparison to be made between what Eliav describes as
occurring historically on the physical grounds of the Temple Mount and what Gawain
experiences poetically on behalf of the poet, then it might be found in such a
statement as this:
…I propose that
it is rather the availability of the Temple Mount enclosure within the new
spatial organization of Aelia that allowed, and perhaps attracted, Jews and
early Christians to interact with it and formulate their manifold conceptualizations
about sacred space.[iii]
In one sense,
since Sir Gawain is going to meet what he and his fellow Round Table knights
consider to be an inevitable death caused by the return blow of the beheading
game initiated by the Green Knight in Camelot, it is a place of sacrifice or
murder, a Golgotha, a hill of skulls, such as that found outside of Jerusalem
where the Romans crucified Jesus. Gawain
fully assumes that at the end of the game he plays in the Green Chapel his head
will be separated from his body and will fall into the abyss where probably
there are many other skulls from previous encounters. That the young knight rides down into the
valley of death to find the ancient tumulus (grave mound) or cave (cripta) where the encounter will take
place, this journey of descent is a voyage into hell, hades or sheol, and the downward ride mirrors in
reverse and in an inverted direction the upward flight of souls that are separated
from their earthly bodies to ascend into heaven or at least to that highest
point on earth before beginning the Himmelfahrt
into the sky: and hence the name of Hautdesert,
the high desert.
In Hebrew tradition, there are two hills or
mountains that become assimilated to one
another, Moriah where Abraham goes with Isaac to perform the sacrifice
commanded by the Lord, an act that prefigures in its incompleteness—the staying
of the father’s hand and the substitution of a ram for the youth—the sacrifice of
Jesus at Golgotha, and Zion, the sacred mountain at the centre of Jerusalem and
of the world, at the entrance to whose heart in the Holy of Holies stands the
altar where priests slay the offerings of the people. But annually on the Day of Atonement, Yom ha-Kippurim, the High Priest and his
fellow cohannim and Levites perform a
different ritual in which one of two designated goats are chosen, both alike in
purity, the one to be slain on the altar as a sin offering on behalf of the
nation, and the other, different only when so chosen, to be chased out of the
Temple precincts, mocked by the crowds as it passes through the labyrinthine
streets and alleys of the Holy City, and eventually forced out into the
wilderness where finally it will be thrown down a deep declivity and its body
broken on the sharp rocks—this is the famed scapegoat.
There is, in
addition, another sacred mountain, but one similarly doubled in tradition, and
that is the place where Moses received the Tablets of the Law, the luach ha-brit, and this is usually taken
to be Mount Sinai in the midst of the peninsula that bears the same name, or it
is on Mount Horeb, either the same place with a different name, or a different
place where the same event occurs. One
of the usual etymologies for Sinai s-n-h (סנח) comes from either sin,
the moon or bush or “to fend off an attack”, and for horeb or chorev ch-r-v (חרב) bright sun or sword or “utter desolation
after a mighty battle.” Thus the
contrast between moon and sun, avoidance of a fight or the aftermath of a lost
struggle, a bush such as the burning bush and a sword that defends or fails in
its purpose. These verbal roots enrich
and ambiguate the relationship between the inverted hill of the Green Chapel
and the high desert which is Hautdesert, in the first Gawain receives the expected
blow promised at Camelot but delayed by the unexpected other tests in
Hautdesert, the parrying of words with the Lady of ther Castle and the exchange
of gifts after the Host’s three morning hunts.
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