Summary
In recent scholarship on the Mediterranean roots of neo-paganism and the study of religion, culture, and environmentalism in Central Europe and the British Isles, one often comes across the assumption that there are some deep-rooted connections or conjunctions between the mythic-poetical figure of al-Khiḍr and that of the Green Man. This specifically plays out in research on spring festivals, as they are in the Caucasus known as Nowruz or in the Eastern Mediterranean as Hidrellez or across Central and Northern Europe as First of May festivals. In countering often unfounded assumptions about forgotten historical roots for the identity of al-Khiḍr and the Green Man, this paper argues that the conjunction of these figures was a literary invention that occurred during the 18th and 19th century. By tracing the earliest European accounts of the figure of al-Khiḍr back to moments of intercultural encounters that happened during the 15th and 16th century, this paper aims to demonstrate that throughout the traceable ‘archeology of knowledge’ (Foucault 1969), the defining features of the figure of al-Khiḍr and the festivals associated with him remained surprisingly stable until literary fictionalizations of this figure led to a rather diffuse reception history through the identification of European spring festivals with the Hidrellez. As far as the figure of the Green Man is concerned, it will be shown that any conjunction with the figure of al-Khiḍr is clearly an invention of tradition.

Jens Kreinath (PhD, 2006) is an Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Wichita State University. His fields of expertise include the semiotics of ritual, aesthetics of religion, and history of anthropological concept formation, with an interest in studying entangled infrastructures of material culture and historical discourse analysis. At Wichita State University, he teaches linguistic anthropology, religion, anthropological theory, and is the director of its Visual Anthropology Lab. His research focuses on religious minorities and inter-religious relations in Turkey. Since 2010, he has conducted ethnographic research on Christian-Muslim relations in Hatay—historical Antioch, the southernmost province of Turkey. Based in his ethnographic and historiographic findings on shared traditions of saint veneration in this region, he coined the concept of interrituality to analyze emerging dynamics of interreligious relations as mediated through the aesthetics of sensory perceptions and in the performance of saint veneration rituals at shared sacred sites. His ethnographic findings on Hatay are published in journals like the Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (2014), Journal of Ritual Studies (2019), and Anthropological Theory (2020). His research also appeared in The Seductions of Pilgrimage (edited by Michael A. Di Giovine and David Picard, 2015), Aesthetics of Religion (edited by Alexandra Grieser and Jay Johnston; 2017), Sensations and Figurations of the Invisible (edited by Birgit Meyer and Terje Stordalen; 2019), and Levantine Entanglements (edited by Terje Stordalen and Øystein S. LaBianca, 2021).