Colour has always been sacred. Long before there were formal colour theories or systematic chromatic analyses, before the spectrum was named and its wavelengths measured, human beings understood that certain colours meant something. That they carried significance beyond their visual appearance. That they were connected to the divine, the cosmic, the ordering of the invisible world.

The colours used in sacred spaces and sacred objects across the world's traditions are not chosen for aesthetic preference alone. They are chosen because they mean something: because they represent, express, or in some theologies actually participate in the realities they indicate. The gold of an icon, the blue of a stained glass Virgin, the saffron of a Buddhist robe, the red ochre on a body in a grave. These are not decorative choices. They are claims.

Gold: the divine

Gold occupies a unique position in the history of sacred colour, because it is simultaneously a colour and a material, and because the material's qualities of permanence, luminosity, resistance to tarnish and rarity are inseparable from its meaning.

In Byzantine icon painting and medieval Christian art, the gold ground is not a stylistic convention but a theological statement. The gold is not a colour representing something. In the understanding of the tradition it is the uncreated light itself, and the icon participates in what it depicts rather than merely picturing it.

Gold in Hindu temples, in the gilded sculpture and gold leaf and gold-threaded silk, similarly expresses presence rather than metaphor: the shining of the god through material form.

In Japanese aesthetics gold plays a comparable role in lacquerware and in the gold grounds of folding screens, creating a space that is simultaneously flat and luminous, and removed from ordinary experience.

Blue: heaven and water

Blue is the colour most consistently associated across cultures with sky and water, the two great natural spaces of depth and immensity, and those physical associations generate its symbolic extensions: transcendence, infinity, the maternal.

In medieval and Renaissance European painting the Virgin's outer garment is typically blue, and specifically the intense blue of lapis lazuli, the most expensive of all pigments. The blue is not incidental. It signals her heavenly nature, and it also signals expenditure: contracts between patrons and painters specified how much ultramarine would be used, because the colour was an index of devotion measured in money.

In ancient Egypt blue was the colour of the heavens and of the Nile's inundation. Lapis, imported from Afghanistan, coloured the faces of gods and was worked into amulets, and Egyptian blue faience carried the same charge in a manufactured material.

In Hindu tradition the skin of Krishna and Vishnu is blue: not a description but a claim about infinite depth, the colour of the sky and the ocean standing for the nature of the divine.

Red: blood and power

Red is the colour of blood, and because blood is life and death at once, red carries the full weight of both.

Red ochre is among the earliest colourants available to human beings, a natural iron oxide occurring worldwide, and it appears in burial contexts of great antiquity. The ochre-marked burials at Qafzeh in present-day Israel are around ninety to a hundred thousand years old, and ochre processing at Blombos Cave in South Africa is of comparable age. Whether the ochre in a grave signals continued life, protection for a journey, or something we have no access to at all, we do not know. What we know is that people were doing it before they were doing almost anything else we would recognise.

In Chinese culture red is luck, prosperity and auspicious celebration, associated with fire, the sun and the energy of life, which is why it appears at weddings and at the New Year.

In the Christian tradition red is martyrdom and Pentecost. Cardinals wear red for their readiness to shed blood.

And in Scottish practice red is protection. The red thread bound into the rowan cross, tied on a cow's tail against the evil eye, worn round a wrist, knotted three times as a cure. Same reasoning as the ochre, arrived at independently: red is blood, blood is life, and life force repels what would drain it. That thread has its own article on this site.

Green: life and return

Green, the colour of growing things and of spring returning, carries associations of life, fertility, hope and cyclical renewal across almost every tradition.

In Islamic tradition green is the most sacred colour: of Paradise, of the Prophet's banner, of the turbans worn by his descendants, and of the dome at Medina.

In the chakra system green is the colour of anahata, the heart centre: love, compassion and connection, the bridge between the lower earth-centred chakras and the upper sky-centred ones.

A correction about the Green Man

Green in northern European tradition is very often attached to the Green Man, described as the spirit of the forests and growing things and presented as a surviving pagan vegetation deity.

The term was coined in 1939, by Lady Raglan, in an article in the journal Folklore.

The carvings are real. Foliate heads, faces sprouting or disgorging leaves, occur in their hundreds in medieval churches across Britain and Europe, and they are strange and wonderful. What is not established is that they represent a pagan survival, or a deity, or a single consistent figure at all. Lady Raglan identified them with the Jack in the Green of English May customs and with a general vegetation spirit, and the identification stuck so completely that it is now repeated as ancient fact.

Their actual meaning is unknown. That is a more interesting position to stand in than a borrowed certainty, and it is the same shape of correction this site applies to the Ogham tree calendar and to handfasting.

Use the Green Man if he means something to you. Date him to 1939.

Colour in working practice

Everything above is historical and comparative. Where it becomes practical on this site is the candle colour key, which is the canonical reference for colour in working here and which is not repeated in this article.

Two things worth noticing when you look at that key against the material above.

Some correspondences are deep and cross-cultural. Red for life force and protection. Gold for the divine and the solar. Black for the chthonic and the hidden. These recur too widely and too independently to be arbitrary.

Others are local and recent. A great deal of modern candle-colour correspondence is twentieth century, standardised through published tables, and none the worse for it as long as it is labelled.

Knowing which is which is the whole discipline.

Sources

  • Gage, J. (1993). Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Thames & Hudson. The standard work.
  • Gage, J. (1999). Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism. Thames & Hudson.
  • Pastoureau, M. Blue: The History of a Color, Black, Green, Red, Yellow. Princeton University Press. A colour-by-colour cultural history, and the best entry point.
  • Finlay, V. (2002). Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox. Sceptre. On lapis, ochre and the pigment trade.
  • Raglan, Lady (1939). The Green Man in Church Architecture. Folklore, 50(1), 45–57. The coinage.
  • Centerwall, B. S. (1997). The Name of the Green Man. Folklore, 108, 25–33. On how the identification was made and why it does not hold.
  • Hutton, R. (1996). The Stations of the Sun. Oxford University Press, on Jack in the Green and the May customs Raglan drew on.
  • On ochre in early burial: Hovers, E. et al. (2003), on the Qafzeh assemblage, Current Anthropology; and Henshilwood, C. et al. on Blombos Cave.

Cross-reference: slynkycat canonical candle colour key; Chakra Reference Database.

Related: [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]; [An Droch Shùil]; [The Science and Soul of Colour]; [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]