Green shirts and green kirtles: some good and bad associations

Oscar Wilde's proposition that favouring the colour green is a sign of creativity in individuals but of moral laxity and decadence in nations has made me think of a few green items that have both positive and negative aspects and associations. 

Green shirts and green kirtles for example are worn by both good and bad people.

A few of John Buchan's books are relevant here, and so is one of C. S. Lewis's Narnian books.

Good and bad real-life Greenshirts
John Buchan's fictional Evallonian Greenshirts, who appear in The House of the Four Winds, were described earlier. 

There are some interesting connections here involving an unusual character called John Gordon Hargrave (1894 – 1982), who was an artist, a pagan cult leader, a Utopian thinker, a believer in both science and magic, and many other things. His life story is fascinating, but only a few elements are relevant here.

Hargrave was getting assignments to illustrate books by the age of 12, including some of John Buchan's works!

Hargrave founded various organisations for social change, including one called The Green Shirts. They were dedicated to smashing fascism and campaigning for a universal basic income in the UK.

They may also have been the inspiration for John Buchan's Greenshirts.

Rather ironically, Hargrave's anti-Fascist Greenshirts were balanced by the Irish Greenshirts, a small off-shoot of the Blueshirts, Ireland's largest fascism-inspired movement. Green was chosen because it was the colour of Irish nationalism.

John Hargrave and his militaristic Greenshirts:

Hargrave's Greenshirts are mentioned on his gravestone:

Ghosts and glamour in Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood books

This is yet another article in the series inspired by Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood & Co. books. 

The temptation articles stress how important it is to be wary of people who offer positions of power and to think about their motives. This article has something to say about how important it is to avoid falling under the spell of people and other entities with very glamorous images and to think about what they might be hiding. 

There are questions to ask and lessons to be learned.

Why do some people need to create a very glamorous image? What is behind the alluring façade? What are they concealing below the surface? Is the glittering image all that they have got to attract and influence people with?

Perhaps evil people need glamour in a way that good people do not.

Perhaps glamour, like the Attack-dog Syndrome, is a dead giveaway.

It is essential to understand that many people – and other entities - who at first sight appear to be angels may turn out to be demons!

As with the temptation articles, there are a few references to relevant material in books by other authors.

More about a beguiling ghost
In The Whispering Skull, Lucy Carlyle saves her colleague George Cubbins from the ghost of the evil Doctor Edmund Bickerstaff; in The Empty Grave, George returns the favour by saving Lucy from being destroyed by a glamorous theatrical ghost.

George had been unable to resist the spells of Dr. Bickerstaff and his artefact, but luckily for him Lucy managed to foil the evil necromancer. Lucy however was unable to resist the spell of the Visitor in the theatre; without George’s intervention she would have been lured to her death.

The factors that led to Lucy's vulnerability have already been covered, but there is something more to say about this encounter.