Deign to Know Me
He sat on his bed in the loft, which felt even cozier with the low ceiling. He’d brought work with him, but was playing Three Hares on his laptop instead, looking for new clues and insights. A fresh way of approaching the game after he’d found himself along the roadside by Schoenfeld’s.
When it came to fan lists of the most beautiful games ever played, those created by Jonathan Henshe were always present, and Three Hares always near the top.
It was a single-player, non-linear adventure that took the player from Asia to Europe, visiting locales where the Three Hares motif was depicted in art or architecture.
Puzzles had to be solved before each motif could be unlocked and collected by the player.
These ranged from easy hidden-object games to challenging puzzles to maddening anagrams. The player faced no adversity.
The only enemy in the game was your own frustration.
As the player moved west along the old Silk Road, the Green Man acted as a narrator and guide. Hinting here, directing there, and, as the fans liked to say, whipping a shit-ton of knowledge on you without you realizing it.
“It’s a nerd’s wet dream,” Kyle Greenman said once, and his father didn’t quite know how to react. It was a weird day of parenthood when your kid started getting innuendo. Even weirder when they started to make their own jokes.
But a nerd’s wet dream it was, and as the fandom grew, so did cheat codes and walkthroughs.
Players divided snobbishly among those who got through the game on their own smarts, and those who caved to the guides.
Threads splintered off to delve into the meaning and symbolism of the Green Man and the Three Hares.
Reading lists were curated, and some of the picks were keeping Liko company on the bed.
Mostly used paperbacks but at the last minute, he threw in the coffee table tome titled Harefoot, which contained works by the artist Ethan Hasen.
Another definitive work was Journey of the Green Man by John Schoenfeld.
Liko looked up from the screen.
John who?
He paused the game, set the laptop aside and slid apart the stack of paperbacks until he found Journey of the Green Man.
A foliate face stared back at him, in between the title and the author name: John Schoenfeld.
“Huh,” Liko said to the walls of his tiny house.
He reached for the notebook, turned to a clean page, clicked the end of a pen and wrote:
Go to Birch Island, NY and look for yourself along the roadside.
Myself?Greenman?Green Man motif on the stone wall along Oak Hill Road.
Farm is called Schoenfeld’s
John Schoenfeld is author of Journey of the Green Man.
Man living there now named Dane, but last name isn’t Schoenfeld.
Liko almost added I swear I know that guy to the list, but didn’t. He chewed the end of the pen, then flipped to the back of Journey of the Green Man in search of a biography.
John Schoenfeld is an historian specializing in British folklore, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism.
He earned a PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies and Folklore from New York University before joining Vassar’s Folklore & Mythology program, where he taught until his retirement in 2005.
A longtime resident of Orange County, New York, he and his wife now live in France.
Liko sighed, unsatisfied with the information. He flipped back to the notebook’s start and re-read his research on the Green Man and Three Hares motifs. Unfortunately, both had dozens of possible meanings, and no satisfying proof to boost one interpretation over another.
As a Brit, he felt a little sheepish about his lack of knowledge of the Green Man.
Growing up outside London, he’d easily passed twenty pubs called The Green Man, nearly all with the foliate head on their signage.
No doubt he’d noticed the symbol as part of his country’s folklore, he’d just never given it any consideration.
It was no more interesting than a red phone booth on a London street.
Yet the Green Man was a motif found in nearly every gothic and Romanesque cathedral, not just in Britain but in continental Europe.
Despite the varying interpretations, all the sources agreed the Green Man predated Christianity.
Why was this unabashedly pagan symbol hanging out in churches, adorning bosses, archways, pew ends, pediments and altars?
Coyly whispering, Psst, look over here. Fertility.
Nature. Vegetation. You want rebirth and resurrection?
Honey, I got it spilling out my eyes, ears, mouth and nose.
Liko had jotted down, The Green Man is a ghostwriter of Christianity—the guy who took the outline and made it into a masterpiece.
He’d scribbled over the words, thinking he had it bass-ackward. He next wrote, The Green Man is the developmental editor of Christianity. In teasing out the union of human and nature, he became the observer of human nature. And…
That idea died on the vine. But a few lines down, in different ink, he’d tried again:
The Green Man watches. And remembers. He says, “I’m still here.
Nature is older than man, older than God.
Nature is truth. I spew the truth from my eyes, nose, mouth and ears.
I vomit time and eat your folly. Am I ingesting or regurgitating?
Am I god or man? Male or female? Secular or divine? Venal or mortal? Does it matter?”
The Three Hares also lacked a single, satisfying explanation.
The motif originated in Asia and moved west to Europe along the Silk Road, picking up an interfaith appeal along the way.
As fans of the video game discovered, the hares were found in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Islamic culture, but the largest concentration was in Devon, in southern England.
Liko’s mother was from Exeter, and could’ve visited no less than seventeen Devonian churches where the triskelion was found.
Among the locals, the hares were known as Tinner’s Hares.
Triskelion, Liko had written in his notes.
Or triskele. Both mean a triple spiral motif, threefold rotational symmetry.
As the Schoolhouse Rock song says, “Three is a magic number.” Easy for Christians to adopt the Three Hares as a symbol of the Trinity.
One in three and three in one. Why not—the Church borrowed so much else from pagan traditions.
Kind of funny, though, that rabbits are best known for being procreative little fuckers.
But that wasn’t quite true. Between the gaming forums, his books, and the internet, Liko learned the hare was a lesson in contradiction.
It was simultaneously a symbol of fertility and chastity.
During the Middle Ages it was widely believed the hare was hermaphrodite—male one month and female the next—and could reproduce without loss of virginity.
Ah, said a maternal deity named Mary. Now you’re talking my language. I’ll take those as my own, thank you very much.
Liko pulled his laptop toward him and resumed the game.
Three Hares ended at Paderborn Cathedral.
The Chamber of the Green Man was an invention, but it brought so much tourism to the German city that the cathedral made a page for the game on its website.
A video clip showed a nattily-dressed tour guide standing beneath the Drei-Hasen-Fenster, the window of the Three Hares.
He pointed to the stone buttress next to the window, explaining how in the game, a loose brick contained a switch that opened a stairway.
The guide cheerfully assured the public there was no such hidden mechanism and please to leave their sledgehammers and crowbars at home.
“The game takes beautiful artistic license,” the guide gushed.
“I’m a fan myself. Paderborn is thrilled with the increased interest and visitation, but I promise you, everyone, there’s no hidden stairway inside this pillar.
It would be architecturally impossible, and…
” The guide pointed up to the cathedral’s roofline where the buttresses abruptly ended. “Where would it even go?”
Liko chewed a bottom lip as he moved his cursor toward the grass beneath the window of the Three Hares, where a scrap of paper seemed to be lying.
When clicked, it turned out to be a photograph: a close-up shot of a stone wall, with a man’s hand drawing out a loose brick.
This innocuous, grainy picture was where the viral mystery started.
The trick that tipped rabbits out of a top hat.
The subtle arrow pointing to the loose stone in the cathedral buttress.
Liko pulled it free, flipped the revealed switch, and ascended the impossible, illogical stairs to the hidden chamber.
The artwork in this magical hall humbled the rest of the game, going from breathtaking to divine.
The circular space had open, arched windows, through which wound thick vines of wisteria, the long purple clusters swaying against the stone walls.
Opposite the door, upon a raised pedestal, lounged the Green Man himself.
Sitting like a happy Buddha, one hand composed in a gesture of benefaction, the other cradling a golden hare.
No round belly to rub and make wishes, but a sensational, fit physique.
His emerald eyes blinked as the user approached, and the hare’s nose wriggled nervously.
On the face of the pedestal were chiseled words:
And ye then deign to know me
O wisteria hares turning
A second hare crouched at the base of the altar, where burned a little fire in a circular depression.
A third hare hid in the wisteria blossoms. Beneath one window, a large dog lay sleeping.
Beneath another, a duck nestled in a heap of straw.
If you clicked the cursor up, you saw the famous Three Hares motif carved into the domed ceiling.