Updated September 2021 – added an appendix on the symbolism of beheading.

Updated April 2022 – added a paragraph to the symbolism of beheading.

The Green Knight is a unique (and somewhat subversive) retelling of the Arthurian story, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The film is a stunning aesthetic and emotionally charged experience with a story that holds profound psychological insights that are worth learning from.

In the following article, I will provide my understanding of the main psychological motives underlying the story. It’s by no means a complete or definitive analysis but it’s thorough enough for the story to make sense from beginning to end.

As each part of this movie needs to be discussed in relation to its end, I will assume that the reader has watched the movie. If not, please watch it before continuing.

I will rely on analytical psychology to explain the motifs in this movie. By doing so, technical terms will be used which the reader might be unfamiliar with.

To manage this, every time a technical term is introduced, it will be in bold with an asterisk (e.g., libido*). Then the reader can click on the asterisk to consult the lexicon for clarifications.

Lexicon – Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts

The movie starts by setting a gloomy tone:

Look, see a world that holds more wonders than any since the Earth was born.

And of all who reigned o’er, none had renown like the boy who pulled sword from stone.

But this is not that king… Nor is this his song.

Let me tell you instead a new tale.

I’ll lay it down as I’ve heard it told.

Its letters sent, its history pressed, of an adventure brave and bold.

Forever set, in heart, in stone, like all great myths of old.

The movie establishes itself as both a new and standalone story with a mythical dimension. It also warns the viewers that they are facing something different: “a new tale” worth being told, but not one that is usually expected from this genre.

The accompanying visuals distill the essence of the movie in a single shot.

Gawain holds the template of the hero/savior and, as the halo goes down on his head like a crown, something goes wrong. The fire goes to his head, destroying the image of perfection and balance that we are used to. The crowning of the hero has failed. Thus, the movie announces the coming failure of the hero before it has even started.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the head on fire is “Uh-oh, that’s a sign of inflation*.” And so I read the symbolism of “fire going to the head” as both a misplaced affect (fire being a symbol of libido*) but also as an ongoing purification.

In the next scene, Gawain is introduced as both a young man of little to no worth and as someone who holds great potential. Case in point: “Christ is born” announces Essel, the short-haired prostitute, as she empties a bucket on the still sleeping Gawain, a symbolic baptism for the coming tribulation.

In the following shots, Gawain is shown as a clueless and faithless man (Gawain: Where are you going? Essel: To church! Gawain: Why?). He is not a knight yet and isn’t worried about it (Woman: You a knight yet? Gawain: Not yet. Woman: Better hurry up. Gawain: I’ve got time. I’ve got lots of time.). Once on the ground, Gawain admits to himself, “I’m not ready yet. I’m not ready.”

Indeed, Gawain is not ready and the movie is not subtle about it. Later in the movie, more serious character flaws are revealed: he is sexually impotent, will not commit to Essel even verbally, has no stories to tell to the king, and spends his days drinking at the tavern.

These character flaws are partially explained by Gawain being fatherless. This indicates that his “failure to launch” is complicated by a deep masculine wound or at the very least the absence of a masculine role model.

Gawain’s immaturity is easily established. He is a young man with the psychology of a boy who has no masculine template to help him out of his problems. What is more subtle is that, despite his numerous flaws, he is still perceived as a future knight, someone with great potential.

In psychological terms, this superposition of great potential and immature behavior indicates that Gawain is a puer aeternus* (eternal child), more commonly understood as the Peter Pan syndrome.

In other words, Gawain is the immature ego who lives a provisional life*. Like all immature people with great potential, he is terribly inflated* and believes he can get away with anything without committing to anything. In the meanwhile, time flies, and the women around him start to pester him and even plot something against him.

Psychosocially, Gawain is a young boy who has not been confirmed by a father figure. Not only that, he has not gone through any initiation worth telling the king. Young boys cannot develop into men without a conscious decision to face life, abandoning the comfort of childhood. It’s for this purpose that rites of passages were designed as a way to facilitate the transformation of young boys into men. Gawain, like most young men these days, has not been exposed to any rites of passage and thus remains unchallenged and unconfirmed.

It’s important to emphasize how irresponsible Gawain is at the beginning of the movie for only then one will see the value of the trial that’s ahead of him.

Gawain’s mother practices witchcraft and she has taken unto herself to make an offer that Gawain will not be able to refuse.

During the round table scene, we see that the King is being manipulated by the witch mother, as it often happens. Both have a tacit agreement to conspire for and against Gawain.

Why would the mother agree to such a curse upon her own kid?

The movie gives us the answer in two forms. “Is it wrong to want greatness for you?” says Arthur and later Gawain’s mother says, “When you return, you will come with your head held high. My boy, do not waste this.”

Between the previous discussion and what the movie tells us, we find the same answer: Gawain has the potential of a knight but he hasn’t started his journey. Thus the mother makes use of a supernatural trick to offer her son a journey that can make a knight out of him.

Here is the challenge from The Green Knight:

Let whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of heart step forth, take up arms, and try with honor to land a blow against me. Whomsoever nicks me shall lay claim to this, my arm. Its glory and riches shall be thine.
But… thy champ must bind himself to this: Should he land a blow, then one year and Yuletide hence, he must seek me out yonder, to the Green Chapel six nights to the North. He shall find me there and bend the knee and let me strike him in return. Be it a scratch on the cheek or a cut on the throat, I will return what was given to me, and then in trust and friendship we shall part.
Who, then, who is willing to engage with me?

Faced with the challenge from The Green Knight, Gawain jumps at the opportunity of proving himself. Sadly, in his impetuous youth, he decides to show off by cutting the Green Knight’s head. He does this despite being well aware of the binding terms of the contract.

Psychologically, this heroic act is a terrible folly. Being inexperienced and unwise about life, Gawain has never experienced defeat and thus believes himself to be above any laws or repercussions. In this inflated state of both innocence and foolishness (what Edinger calls the ego-self identity in his book Ego and Archetype), he shows off in front of the king and the other knights.

This is the first and key mistake of the story, an act that will have lasting consequences. Yet not everything is wasted. While this condemns Gawain to repay the Green Knight with his life, it also affords him the journey of a lifetime, a series of tribulations that might just turn him into a knight.

As indicative of his psychology, Gawain spends the year doing nothing. Finally, when the time has come, he receives the equipment of a knight as well as a special belt.

I will discuss the magic belt later in this article, as it plays an essential role at the end of the movie. But we can already conclude that this belt symbolizes the mother complex*.

Once on his horse, Gawain progressively loses contact with the kids and the farmers of the town before arriving at a crossroad with a caged skeleton.

This crossing of the first threshold is a point of no return. Gawain is venturing away from the known and into the deadly unknown for the first time in his life.

In psychological terms, the known is ego-consciousness* and the unknown is the unconscious*.

Once into the unknown, a series of trials is to be expected. At this point, Gawain looks like a knight but doesn’t have the character of one. His knightly attire is a persona*, a façade. So his first lesson will be a humiliation, a way to compensate for his yet unearned status.

Gawain encounters a scavenger who provides him with helpful directions. Giving his thanks, Gawain leaves without a second thought. He is interrupted by the scavenger:

Scavenger: Are my directions not worth anything to you?
Gawain: My thanks.
Scavenger: I said, are my directions not worth anything to you?
I mean, a knight like you could spare a wretch like me just a small, small act of kindness.

Gawain’s first lesson is to learn that nothing comes for free in the unknown but that’s only one part of the lesson.

While his first encounter was polite, the second encounter with the scavenger becomes dangerous. What is the reason for this turn of events? The movie gives the answer:

‘Tweren’t enough.
Just ’tweren’t enough.

The second part of the lesson is that every good deed should be acknowledged at its proper value. This depends on the status of the person: Gawain as a knight should be able to respond accordingly to his above-than-average means.

Faced with adversity, Gawain admits that his knighthood is not a reality:

Scavenger: Where you off to? A knightly quest?
Gawain: I’m not a knight.
Scavenger: But you said you were.
Gawain: I never said that. You said that. I never said I was a knight.
Scavenger: But are you?
Gawain: No! No, I’m not.
Scavenger: Oh. Hmm. Well, you look like one.
Thief: Aye. [SNIFFS] Smells like a knight.

As a punishment, the scavenger will strip him of his knight’s armor and his magic belt, break his shield, and steal his horse and swords. All highly symbolic actions of being disrobed of one’s unearned self-image and the painful but necessary lesson of having to rely on oneself.

Outside of these lessons, what is the significance of this encounter?

As Gawain himself admits, his attire is a persona. We have also established that we have crossed into the unknown, so we are in the unconscious.

In analysis, it is known that the first encounter of the ego is the shadow*. It is also known that the shadow compensates the persona. Finally, it’s commonly experienced that, in dreams for instance, the shadow is of the same gender as the dreamer. So we have good reasons to look at Scavenger as a shadow encounter.

Outside of these observations that might appear too theoretical for people unfamiliar with this framework, we can still conclude that Scavenger is Gawain’s shadow. Indeed, Scavenger has all the traits that are missing in Gawain.

In the first encounter, we meet the negative side of the Scavenger. He goes through corpses, is not attractive and his size shows a sharp contrast with Gawain. This is typical of the distasteful discovery of our inferior side.

However, once the negative aspect is dealt with, the positive side of the shadow is revealed. In the second encounter, Scavenger is ingenious, comfortable with weapons, shows leadership, etc. Most importantly, Scavenger is naturally comfortable with being a knight.

Scavenger: You rest your bones, my brave little knight. I’ll finish your quest for you. I’ll finish it good.

This is a quality that Gawain is unable to come to terms with, even when everyone around him acknowledges that he has the potential for it.

Encountering the shadow leads to a stripping of the persona, which is experienced as an abasement. This humiliation is exactly what is experienced by Gawain.

Another way to understand this scene, this stripping, is from the standpoint of inflation. An inflated ego happens when one overvalues oneself. We take a risky or naive decision and end up in the first pitfall. This wounding can be severely damaging to one’s self-worth and we might feel like life has rejected us unfairly. However, that rejection was all along a compensation from the unconscious inflation. Once this humble realization is integrated, one will be able to experience a deeper sense of reconnection to self.

Lying on the ground, stripped of his dignity and equipment, Gawain has a vision of a certain death that awaits him lest he starts acting.

Habituated to a life of maternal comfort, he learns that life requires a continual and effortful striving that makes demands on his masculinity.

Onto the next trial, Gawain meets Winifred, the Lady of the Lake.

After a period of confusion (Gawain: My lady. Are you real, or are you a spirit? Winifred: What is the difference?), Gawain considers plunging into the lake. Having learned that nothing is for free, he asks:

Gawain: If I go in there and find it, what would you offer me in exchange?
Winifred: Why would you ask me that? Why would you ever ask me that?

Gawain’s lesson is still incomplete. It is true that nothing is for free and it is also true that all good actions should be reciprocated. But one should not set a price for helping others, it’s up to the other party to give thanks according to their means. In this case, Winifred will miraculously give him back the Green Knight’s axe as a token of her gratitude.

So what is the purpose of this initiation? Compared to the previous masculine initiation which essentially was about humility, this one leads Gawain into the water of the unconscious, a solutio in alchemical terms. The goal here is to rejuvenate a personality that has become too rigid by dissolving some of its aspects. In a way, it’s a rebirth or a return to a more primordial state of wholeness*. In my estimation, I see Gawain returning the head of Winifred as a mending of his eros* function, the feminine principle of relationships.

Typically, a successful solutio results in the Lady of the Lake providing the sword, the symbolic form of the logos, as an emblem of masculine achievement of courage, bravery, nobility.

In psychological terms, this is an encounter with the anima*.  She confirms that the ego is sufficiently mature to have earned the right to discern wisely the opposites, which is the sword-like aspect of consciousness, the logos* function as the masculine principle of rationality.

In this story, however, Gawain still has a covenant to fulfill, therefore he does not receive the sword but a proxy for it, which is the Green Knight’s axe. This also means that it’s up to the ego (Gawain) to finish the quest and not to the shadow (Scavenger).

Now accompanied by a loyal fox (uncannily similar to the archetype of the Fool), Gawain’s next trial is mistakenly initiated by taking psychoactive mushrooms. He sees his hand turning to moss, then the Green Knight appears in the distance. This primes the viewer to accept that Gawain is descending deeper into the unconscious until he finds himself among a land of giants.

Gawain: Hey! Hey! Which direction are you headed?
Might a weary traverse the valley on your shoulder?

One of the giants notices him and attempts to grab him. The fox intervenes and protects Gawain from the giant’s touch. The fox howls and the giants start howling together.

Because of its surreal nature, this scene might be the hardest one to understand. According to this Reddit post, even the producers do not have an explanation for it. Let’s turn to the writings of Jung and Edinger to see what we can extract from the symbolism of the giants.

Edinger touches a few times on the image of the giants.

1/ In Transformation of the God‑image, Edinger points out an apocalyptic dream.

This is a dream of a man who later became a Jungian analyst:

“[…] It was the end of the world. The cause of this great destruction was a race of great giants—giants who had come from outer space—from the far reaches of the universe. In the middle of the rubble I could see two of them sitting; they were casually scooping up people by the handful and eating them. The sight was awesome.” […]

[This dream] is a very vivid expression of the activation of the archetypal contents of the unconscious. That’s what the giants represent—the archetypes. They’re bigger-than-life things. And as they descend onto earth the image of their devouring human beings is an expression of individuals being eaten up by identification with the archetypes that are falling into the individual conscious psyche. So being devoured by giants is an image of succumbing to inflation.

2/ In Archetype of the Apocalypse, we find the same theme explored in a way that deserves to be quoted extensively.

Let us now consider the theme of “harvesting” as found in the following long apocalyptic passage:

“Now in my vision I saw a white cloud and, sitting on it, one like a son of man with a gold crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. Then another angel came out of the sanctuary and shouted at the top of his voice to the one sitting on the cloud, ‘Ply your sickle and reap: harvest time has come and the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ Then the one sitting on the cloud set his sickle to work on the earth, and the harvest of earth was reaped. Another angel, who also carried a sharp sickle, came out of the temple in heaven, and the angel in charge of the fire left the altar and shouted at the top of his voice to the one with the sharp sickle, ‘Put your sickle in, and harvest the bunches from the vine of the earth; all its grapes are ripe.’ So the angel set his sickle to work on the earth and harvested the whole vintage of the earth and put it into a huge winepress, the winepress of God’s anger, outside the city, where it was trodden until the blood that came out of the winepress was up to the horses’ bridles as far away as sixteen hundred furlongs.” [Revelation 14:14-20, New Jerusalem Bible]

What a terrible image! Although not spelled out explicitly, the underlying idea here is that humanity is a vast “agricultural process” for God to harvest for his own food and drink. The idea comes up elsewhere; it appears, for instance, in the seventh chapter of the apocryphal Old Testament scripture, 1 Enoch. There, Enoch is describing what was taking place just before Noah’s flood, when angels or heavenly beings descended from heaven and married the daughters of men. Here is what he says:

“And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.” [Enoch 7:1-4]

Jung comments upon this passage in Answer to Job and says that the “giants” are pointing to “an inflation of the cultural consciousness at that period,” just before the mythological Flood. […]

What does it mean to be “eaten by giants?” It means to succumb to inflation, a psychological condition that is endemic in our time. In an interesting passage in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says: “Blessed is the lion which becomes man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, and the lion becomes man” (Logion 7). Here are stated two possibilities: the first is that man eats lion, and lion becomes man; the second is that lion eats man, and man is assimilated to lion stuff—and blessed is one and accursed is the other. That is precisely the psychological issue for consciousness when the collective unconscious is activated or even when it lives itself through us unconsciously. To the extent that the ego is eaten by one of the archetypal “giants” or “lions,” the human being has become inhuman; and that is a disaster. On the other hand, to the extent that the experience of the collective unconscious can be assimilated and understood by consciousness, then the archetypes are humanized. This is the issue behind the “harvesting” imagery in Revelation. And it is the fundamental issue running throughout all levels of existence: Who eats whom? It is absolutely elementary for all life processes and applies not only to the physical world but to psychological existence as well.

To fully understand the scene, we now have to consider the role of the fox: why was the fox able to push away the giants?

We have an element of answer in this quote:

“The cross, or whatever other heavy burden the hero carries, is himself, or rather the self, his wholeness, which is both God and animal—not merely the empirical man, but the totality of his being, which is rooted in his animal nature and reaches out beyond the merely human towards the divine. His wholeness implies a tremendous tension of opposites paradoxically at one with themselves, as in the cross, their most perfect symbol.” (Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, par 460)

From this quote, we can understand the giants as representing one half of the totality of the human being, while the fox stands for the other half. This is why they have the ability to understand each other.

In short, the fox stands for the animal psyche where instincts reside, while the giants represent the archetypal psyche.

We now have all the pieces to explain the whole scene:

Thanks to the psychoactive nature of the mushroom, this allows Gawain to be exposed to the collective unconscious*, also called the objective psyche. Once there, he observes the giants, which are the archetypes* of the collective unconscious.

Weary of his troublesome journey, Gawain asks to be in contact with the giants. In psychological language, the ego asks to be in contact with the transpersonal energies of the psyche. As argued above, this is a mistake and can lead to a deadly inflation.

Archetypal realities should be kept separate from human realities because their cross-contamination is dangerous not only for the ego but also for the archetypes. As Peter Kingsley writes, “Disidentifying from the archetypal realities was never just about keeping our human psychology uncontaminated and pure. It’s also about keeping the archetypal realities pure and uncontaminated by us.” (Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity, p. 309)

The fox, the instinctual and animal nature of Gawain, knows about this risk and thus waves off the contact. The fox then communicates with the archetypes, achieving a mysterious harmony.

Somewhat despite himself, Gawain has successfully avoided “being eaten by giants”, which would have resulted in a loss of his humanity. The giants have been warded off and the adventure can resume.

Gawain collapses into an unknown castle. In the morning, he discovers its three tenants: The Lord, The Lady, and the blind Madam.

With Gawain, these four people are a representation of what Jung calls a marriage quaternio, an archetypal symbol that is a “a schema for the self” (Carl Jung, Aion, CW 9 part II, par 42) but “also an individuation symbol, the union of the ‘four.’” (Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, CW 10, par 762).

More specifically, a marriage quaternio is comprised of a masculine subject (Gawain), the opposing feminine subject (The Lady), the transcendent anima (Madam), and the Wise Old Man* (The Lord). Let’s note that this pattern is for a man and needs to be adapted for a woman. A longer discussion of the marriage quaternio can be found in Jung’s The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16).

In this new step of Gawain’s individuation, the Lord asks for an exchange of winnings.

Let us make a promise to each other.
I hunt tomorrow and the day after. Whatever the forest offers me, I will bring you home the best.
And you give me in turn whatever you might receive here.

As the masculine Wise Old Man, the Lord will behave as a protector and mentor, providing with food and wisdom as long as Gawain fulfills his own part, which is to go through the trials of the castle that is “full of strange things”.

This time, the test will come from the feminine side, represented by Madam and Lady. Why is the feminine doubled? Jung tells us that this is an archetypal pattern “since the marriage quaternio presupposes both the difference and the identity of the feminine figures.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 619).

In this doubling of the feminine, the blind old Madam stands for the transcendent anima who “owing to her usually ‘unconscious’ state, bears all the marks of non-differentiation.” (ibid.) Given the fact that no one addresses her directly and that she is represented as old, silent, and blind, this indicates indeed that her existence has the attribute of an unconscious state. I understand her as a witness of Gawain’s trial.

More can be said on The Lady. Lady is fond of tales that she will modify secretly when she sees room for improvements. She also takes a picture of Gawain.

This creative image-making ability, as well as her vast knowledge indicates, that we are dealing with the sophianic side of the anima, an attribute described in the following quote, “[Sophia] is indeed the ‘master workman’; she realizes God’s thoughts by clothing them in material form, which is the prerogative of all feminine beings.” (Carl Jung, Answer to Job, CW 11, par 624)

An important detail is that Essel and Lady are played by the same actress, Alicia Vikander. This choice coincides with the empirical observation that the anima usually takes a similar appearance to one’s current lover. But this resemblance is not a similarity: while Essel is closer to being a tomboy, Lady is unreservedly feminine.

Another interesting observation is that the anima can act in a jealous and possessive manner if she is in competition with women. In the movie, Lady rips off the small bell from Gawain’s neck, which was a previous gift from Essel.

Lady also gives us a long speech on the color green. She concludes with, “Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardor fades, when passion dies, when we die, too.”

In Jung, we read that green “signifies hope and the future […] in alchemy green also means perfection.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 622ff). Further, “The blessed greenness, signifying on the one hand the ‘leprosy of the metals’ (verdigris), but on the other the secret immanence of the divine spirit of life in all things.” (ibid.) and, by quoting Mylius, “They called all things green, for to be green means to grow . . . Therefore this virtue of generation and the preservation of things might be called the Soul of the World.” (ibid.)

Given the title of the movie, we now understand that green is the hidden color underlying all processes of growth and maturation.

In the morning, Lady comes into Gawain’s room. Despite the invitation, Gawain did not join her last night because, as he says, “it isn’t right”. Lady then shifts from a positive anima figure to a seductress.

In a way that is reminiscent of Gawain’s mother, she promises the same magic belt that was given at the beginning of his journey. Gawain repeatedly asks for it, which leads to the devastating “You are no knight.”

This scene was a test of Gawain’s masculinity. So far in his journey, his attitude has matured and he is more of a man than he was before. But does he have what it takes to be a knight? The answer is uncertain as he refused Lady’s invitation.

The test then consists in offering him the magic belt like his mother did. While it’s understandable that the blessing of the mother would accompany him at the beginning of the journey, it isn’t acceptable this late in the journey, especially before the final trial. Technically, this is a regression* (in opposition to adaptation*).

By taking the magic belt, Gawain admits that he still needs the comfort of the mother and the protection of childhood. He refused Lady as the archetypal mother, the anima, to return with the personal mother, the mother complex.

In Robert Johnson’s terms,

A boy has to leave his personal mother and his mother complex and that stupid homespun one-piece garment in order to earn the right to the archetypal mother which is the Grail castle.

Dr. Robert Johnson – The Mother Complex at 2:24

This is Gawain’s second great mistake and the movie is explicit about showing his masculinity being wasted. But the problem does not end there.

Madam appears like a ghost next to the bed and Gawain flees the castle, breaking the promise he made to Lord. Lord stops him and takes a kiss.

How are we to understand this scene?

My interpretation is that Gawain has failed the “union of opposites”, the coniunctio* with Lady thus he ends up at a lower level of development, a regressive “union of the same”.

Union of the same is a prelude to union of the opposites, because union of the same means that whatever the same is, it has not achieved its full reality as yet and needs to be united with more of its own stuff. And when that is completed, it can go on to union with the opposite.

Edward Edinger, The Mystery of the Coniunctio

Gawain’s development is in-between stages and thus neither the union of opposites (with the feminine Lady as his anima) nor the union of the same (with the fatherly Lord as the Wise Old Man) is suitable for him. The former is too demanding, the second has been achieved already. Feeling trapped, Gawain continues his journey.

Leaving the castle, the fox is returned to Gawain. Reaching a new threshold, the fox warns Gawain that this is a place of no return, where nothing will protect him. He offers him a way out.

Fox: Go that way and your doom is at hand. You will find no mercy. No happy end.
Gawain: What witchcraft is this?
Fox: No witchcraft. He you seek is as wild as I, but knows no measure.
Gawain: I know what I face.
Fox: If any man truly knew, he would bear his shame happily and turn away, head held high, to end his song as he saw fit. His secret would be safe with me. Are you this man?
Gawain: No.
Fox: The spell about your waist says otherwise.
Gawain: This is just a dirty rag.
Fox: Leave it here, then.
Gawain: It was a gift.
Fox: No need for gifts where you are headed. Come, come home. Come home with me.

The fox here reveals to be more than instincts (or the Freudian Id) but also the voice of reason by warning Gawain of the certain death ahead of him.

Case in point: Gawain will not leave his belt. Worse, Gawain lies bold-facedly to the fox, proving that he has not acquired the character of a knight either.

Once again, Gawain refuses to see clearly the offer made to him, ungratefully rejects the fox and takes the boat to the Green Chapel.

This is Gawain’s third big mistake and this is another act of heroic inflation that will need to be compensated harshly. Essel’s words resonate, “Why greatness? Why is goodness not enough?”

Gawain arrives at The Green Chapel where the Green Knight is sleeping on a throne. Nothing happens during the night but, when Christmas morning comes, the Green Knight becomes alive to complete their game.

Gawain has to repay his debt by accepting decapitation but he cannot stay still. After much hesitation, he flees the chapel and we assist in his return home.

Back home, Gawain reconnects with his mother, Essel, and is confirmed as a knight by Arthur. He receives the crown, a symbol of solar consciousness. In psychological terms, the ego is now mature enough to reflect the light of the self in his attitude and behavior.

But, as we know, this status is unearned. This external confirmation has not happened on an internal level.

The movie will emphasize this sham in one of the most grueling cinematic sequences I’ve ever seen. After receiving everything one can desire, king Gawain loses everything little by little: he loses Essel to a political marriage, his son to battle, the support of the women around him, his throne, and his head.

However punishing this sequence is, this was to be expected.

An ego that claims to have achieved solar consciousness without having gone through the inner transformation is still unconfirmed. Psychological maturity cannot be claimed by external means. Thus, the slow-moving collapse that we witness in the movie is the natural conclusion of what happens when one claims the unearned.

Thankfully, the movie gives us the solution to this problem: the problem is the magic belt, the mother complex. By refusing to face death, Gawain asks the world to protect him like his mother did. On the other hand, if he adheres to the chivalric code even with a guaranteed death, he earns the title of a knight.

Gawain awakes from his vision, learning that fleeing this final trial guarantees him a fate worse than death and so he accepts his fate.

For the first time in the movie, Gawain is now ready. This is noticed by the Green Knight.

Well done, my brave knight.

Gawain has become a knight inwardly. This transformation however comes at the price of his life, or rather, it comes at the price of all the accumulated mistakes along his journey.

While death is only hinted at, my understanding is that, in this case, the symbolic death requires also a physical death for the rebirth to happen.

After the credits, a final shot shows a girl playing with the solar crown. It is my speculation that, now that the masculine has reached knighthood, it’s time for the feminine to start her journey towards solar consciousness, a similar theme to the Assumption of Mary.

Edit: I have since dedicated a complete article to the symbolism of this last scene.

One final question remains: who or what is the Green Knight?

The first part of the answer can be found by comparative mythology. This post gives us a few answers:

Al-Khidr, The Green One is an immortal being who understands causality, who takes action in the present to prevent dire consequences in the future. If your life is of consequence to humanity Al-Khidr will come and save you. If your life leads to destruction, Al-Khidr will speed your demise.

Al-Khidr is referred to as The Jew, Prophet Elijah (Ilias), Prophet Enoch (Idris), Saint George and The Green Knight of Arthurian legend.

By this equivocation of the Green Knight with Khidr, we can now turn to Jung’s writings on Khidr.

In the essay “Concerning Rebirth” (Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9 part I), Jung discusses at length the Quranic story of Khidr and Moses (or The Green Knight and Gawain, respectively). He concludes that “The character of the self as a personality comes out very plainly in the Khidr legend.” (ibid., par 250) and “All this again indicates that it is Khidr who not only stands by man in his bodily needs but also helps him to attain rebirth.” (ibid., par 253)

In conclusion, the Green Knight is to be understood as the self of Gawain. More specifically, he is immortal part of man assisting mortal man during psychological transformation.

If that is the case, Gawain and the Green Knight are the same. A curious reader might ask, “why would this be shown as a dissociation?” Jung gives the answer:

To sum up, then: Moses has to recount the deeds of the two friends to his people in the manner of an impersonal mystery legend. Psychologically this means that the transformation has to be described or felt as happening to the “other.” Although it is Moses himself who, in his experience with Khidr, stands in Dhulqarnein’s place, he has to name the latter instead of himself in telling the story. This can hardly be accidental, for the great psychic danger which is always connected with individuation, or the development of the self, lies in the identification of ego-consciousness with the self. This produces an inflation which threatens consciousness with dissolution. All the more primitive or older cultures show a fine sense for the “perils of the soul” and for the dangerousness and general unreliability of the gods. That is, they have not yet lost their psychic instinct for the barely perceptible and yet vital processes going on in the background, which can hardly be said of our modern culture. To be sure, we have before our eyes as a warning just such a pair of friends distorted by inflation—Nietzsche and Zarathustra—but the warning has not been heeded. And what are we to make of Faust and Mephistopheles? The Faustian hybris is already the first step towards madness. The fact that the unimpressive beginning of the transformation in Faust is a dog and not an edible fish, and that the transformed figure is the devil and not a wise friend, “endowed with Our grace and Our wisdom,” might, I am inclined to think, offer a key to our understanding of the highly enigmatic Germanic soul. (ibid., 254)
Because of the great age of the legend and the Islamic prophet’s primitive cast of mind, the process takes place entirely outside the sphere of consciousness and is projected in the form of a mystery legend of a friend or a pair of friends and the deeds they perform. That is why it is all so allusive and lacking in logical sequence. Nevertheless, the legend expresses the obscure archetype of transformation so admirably that the passionate religious eros of the Arab finds it completely satisfying. It is for this reason that the figure of Khidr plays such an important part in Islamic mysticism. (ibid., 258)

After finishing this article, I felt compelled to revisit the symbolism of beheading. This fairly abstract issue is left as an appendix, similar to its implied nature at the end of the movie.

In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung discusses the coniunctio, the final operation of alchemy, as a three-stage process. The first stage is called the unio mentalis and is associated with the symbolism of beheading and decapitation.

On the unio mentalis, Jung writes, “Dorn correctly recognized that the entity in which the union took place is the psychological authority which I have called the self. The unio mentalis, the interior oneness which today we call individuation, he conceived as a psychic equilibration of opposites “in the overcoming of the body,” a state of equanimity transcending the body’s affectivity and instinctuality.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 670)

Why does achieving this interior oneness require a beheading? Jung writes, “But, in order to bring about their subsequent reunion, the mind (mens) must be separated from the body—which is equivalent to “voluntary death”—for only separated things can unite. By this separation (distractio) Dorn obviously meant a discrimination and dissolution of the “composite,” the composite state being one in which the affectivity of the body has a disturbing-influence on the rationality of the mind. The aim of this separation was to free the mind from the influence of the “bodily appetites and the heart’s affections,” and to establish a spiritual position which is supraordinate to the turbulent sphere of the body. This leads at first to a dissociation of the personality and a violation of the merely natural man.” (ibid., par 671)

In alchemical terms, compounds are initially found in an impure, confused, and undifferentiated state. This mixture has to be separated, purified and made distinct from each other before being reunited. This is why a separatio must precede a coniunctio. Unconscious oneness must be lost to be rediscovered consciously.

Jung continues on the topic of decapitation, “The Moor in the Chymical Wedding is probably identical with the black executioner mentioned there, who decapitates the royal personages. In the end his own head is struck off. In the further course of events a black bird is beheaded. Beheading is significant symbolically as the separation of the “understanding” from the “great suffering and grief” which nature inflicts on the soul. It is an emancipation of the “cogitatio” which is situated in the head, a freeing of the soul from the “trammels of nature.” Its purpose is to bring about, as in Dorn, a unio mentalis “in the overcoming of the body.”” (ibid., par 730)

Edinger comments, “Another way of seeing beheading symbolism is that it represents the extraction of the rotundum—the round element—from the empirical man. The head is the round element and the beheading, then, extracts that round element […]
And whenever decapitation symbolism comes up in dreams you can know this process is going on. That immediately orients you because it’s alarming at first when you naively encounter this kind of symbolism. You think, “What terrible dissociation process is going on?” and you want to sew them back together again right away.” (Edward Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures, pp. 303-305)

I must admit that the symbolism of beheading is distressing to contemplate, which is why I have not included it initially. Thankfully, its archetypal nature provides a different outlook on the phenomenon. It’s as if psychological rebirth has to be extracted from man with the same violence as the head is removed from the body. 

In summary, the first stage of the coniunctio requires a separation of the mind from the body. This facilitates a union of spirit and soul—of ego and self—at the cost of a temporary dissociation. This dissociation is addressed in the second stage of the coniunctio: a reunion of the body with the now conscious “soul-spirit” unity.

A great addition to the understanding of the symbolism of decapitation can be found in the video Sire Gauvin et le chevalier vert by Jonathan Pageau. Sadly, the video is only available in French at time of posting.

In that video, decapitation is compared to circumcision. Then they consider the question of what to do with what has been cut, how to deal with the residue.

The problem of the residue is put in the perspective of cycles: to enter a new cycle, one must cut with the old one. Yet what has been cut from the old (and how it has been cut) will come back to haunt the new, seeking reintegration or maybe vengeance. The moral lesson here is that what one does to the old cycle will be done onto the new. One must close old cycles with respect and gratitude lest we get treated the same way in the future.

Illustration by Dani Choi (source)

The Green Knight is a great aesthetic experience but it’s its vertiginous symbolism that makes it exceptional. All the keystones of the individuation journey are touched on. Not only that, the movie teaches the viewer what to do and what not to do by allowing Gawain to make critical mistakes along the way. The mistakes are felt very deeply, hitting where it hurts most, which can make the movie a painful experience for young men.

In this respect, the Green Knight is a hero’s journey without idealism. Gawain bitterly fails but also succeeds in many regards. The knightly Gawain at the end of the movie is miles ahead of the boy he was at the beginning, or the fake king he could have been. The journey has not been in vain but the return home was never guaranteed …

The Green Knight is a crash course in analytical psychology. We have a visual representation of almost all the key concepts of analysis: the inflation of original wholeness, the puer aeternus, the hero’s journey, male initiation and male confirmation, the mother complex, the archetype of the fool, the stripping of the persona and the encounter of the shadow, the multiple roles of the anima, the helpful animal instincts and the danger of archetypal energies, the marriage quaternio and the encounter with the self.

Here are some more resources that I did not know how to present into this already long article:

• Carl Jung and the Psychology of the Man-Child (short video on the puer aeternus)
• Growing from Boy to Man: Ultimate Psychobiological Guide (a discussion on male initiation and male confirmation)
• Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (the reference book on the puer aeternus)
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (the reference book on the Hero’s Journey)
• Edward Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Chapter two has a psychological explanation of the Hero’s Journey)
• Edward Edinger – Encounters with the Greater Personality (discussion on the encounter with the self)

Last but not least, thank you for going through this long post. I hope it was useful.

You can check some of my other articles, such A Visual Guide to Jung’s Later Works, A Template For Dream Interpretation, or my dream series on YouTube Dream Series 01 – Walking Alone


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