Khiḍr

Khiḍr is known as the “green prophet” or the ‘green one.” Khiḍr is said to appear to individuals and initiate them into the mystical path. While most people seek to learn religious truths from another human being– a master, guru, or teacher. Khiḍr would come in the form of illumination and initiate individuals directly into the deep truth. Cobb (1992) tells us “One’s Khiḍr is, for the Sufis, the angel of one’s being, the person-archetype who initiates into archetypal awareness, by instilling ‘an aptitude for theophanic vision’. Khiḍr frees the individual from literal religion and literal psychology.”

Carl Jung spoke of Khiḍr in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. He tells a story of meeting a Sufi man in Kenya, who spoke of Khiḍr:

“During my trip through Kenya, the headman of our safari was a Somali who had been brought up in the Sufi faith. To him Khiḍr was in every way a living person, and he assured me that I, might at any time meet Khiḍr …He told me I might meet Khiḍr in the street in the shape of a man, or he might appear to me during the night as a pure white light, or-he smilingly picked a blade of grass-the Verdant One might even look like that.”

Khiḍr can be seen as an archetype of immanence. He is the “green one”, the “verdant one”. He is the divine as it appears within a blade of grass or within the mind of a mystic. Nothing is more simple than this and nothing is more profound; the divine is all around us and within us. Khiḍr is the angel of our being, awaiting to “initiate’ us into this simple and beautiful truth.

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