“Colors are Forces, the Signatures of the Forces”: How Colors Become Entities
An earlier version of this essay was initially published in the I:MAGE Exhibition Catalogue. Robert Ansell and Livia Filotico, eds. Somerset: Fulgur Ltd. 2014
Regardless of how one approaches metaphysical and scientific concepts of color through the centuries, one thing is certain: color is a mighty slippery subject. Over time, scores of scientists, artists and thinkers have labored to understand the nature of various colors and importantly, how to use and predict their effects, because color produces powerful and profound impacts on the body, emotion and spirit. And although none of us, most likely, see color in exactly the same way as anyone else, and different cultures attribute different symbolism to colors, color shapes perceptions, and alters experiences and we can even anticipate the physical and emotional impact that different colors may produce.
In many cultures, colors have not only been perceived as symbolic of abstract principles such as love or anger, they have also been interpreted by artists and magicians as distinctive entities which can be summoned and called forth and which will subsequently be able to act upon the physical plane. Sometimes colors are believed to be independent beings, but more commonly they are interpreted as powers which can be not only employed, but invoked in a sacred manner to produce specific effects in both the artist and the viewer. With the evolution of color theory and color technologies in the 18th and 19th century and the mingling of the languages of science and spirituality, we see an interesting development in the use of color in both sacred and ostensibly secular contexts, where the effects of color are not just the result of artistic experiment, but perhaps also serve as a way of contacting beings on other planes of existence.
Here I will briefly examine the philosophical frameworks that have encouraged both artists and magicians to interpret colors as entities to be invoked. I will also briefly consider the impact of this idea on the viewer and in how this may impact how we think about and interpret esoteric art. Importantly, we will also discover that there is an intersection between how the science of color develops in the modern era with more established spiritual conceptions of color as entity, inspiring artists to engage in sophisticated engineering of color in order to produce profoundly spiritual effects. There have been so many approaches to color and color theory around the world and throughout time, that it was important to be selective here, so I have concentrated on the history that I believed best showed how the principles of color as entity informed historically European esoteric and modern occult traditions, and who ultimately had the most impact on artists who work with those concepts. This essay is really just dipping a toe in the ocean.
But first, although we know that colors are themselves effective on the symbolic level, how do we distinguish between symbol and entity? Clearly, color operates as both. In Goetic magic, for instance, one learns symbols which stand for the names of entities to be invoked. But does the mere presence of the symbolic form of the name impact someone who cannot understand or does not know the entity? I suppose that entirely depends on how you believe these things operate. Perhaps if you call the name, even without intent or ceremony, the entity may appear or act, but what of the mere presence of the name or the glyph of the name? What happens if you look at a symbol for which you have no reference or context?
On the other hand, the use of color can function as a direct invocation if believed to be a power in and of itself. There is no mediation, and it will undoubtedly produce a response in the viewer. A color used in art will be necessarily be multivalent: it will carry symbolic resonances, drawing from the culturally determined and directed meanings ascribed to it (which also implies that different cultural backgrounds will shape various responses), but it will also carry the potential for physical and emotional reaction which may well be established by neurology. Regardless of artistic intent, a color acts of its own accord. It makes perfect sense that color should, therefore, sit at the nexus between discourses of science and spirituality, symbol and entity. And as the science for understanding color and also for producing ever more refined and nuanced shades and hues has developed over the centuries, the scope for manipulating the effects of color also emerged, the effects of which were zealously adopted by artists and magicians alike. Through time we can see a refinement of a very old idea; that color serves as a gateway to higher truths and non-corporeal entities, and the impulse to shape and instigate that experience for both artist and viewer interacts with the science of color theory and color production.
Platonic and Neo-Platonic Frameworks
As with many things esoteric in the West, the primary schematic for understanding color as an entity to be invoked is derived from Plato and his philosophical successors. In this consideration we are less concerned with Plato’s issues of color classification, but more with his understanding of the spiritual and material implications of color. Although this is not an area of concentration for Plato, his ideas and the derivations which follow provide the groundwork for centuries of mystical applications. A significant question in the ancient world was whether color is inherent in an object or is it a reflection? Katrina Ierodiakonou explains in her reading of Plato’s explanation of color in the Timaeus that for Plato colors are emanating effluences made of some sort of flame, which indicates that they have an independent existence and are not created by either the eye itself or any sort of reflection.[i] The essences of the flames were actually geometric forms. Plato was more interested in the theoretical implications of luminosity than he was color mixing and the derivation of particular colors, and given that there were absolutely no standardized colors during that period, this may be understandable. In fact, Plato believed that people could not understand the ways in which particular colors were derived with any certainty and so focused on the characteristics of black, white, red and what he called “brilliant” or bright.
But it is centuries later with the articulation of Neoplatonism that we start to see the ways in which color starts to inherit its own vocabulary of transcendence and spiritual essence. As ideas of deity and The One become conflated with rhetoric of “light” and “illumination,” color and its relationship to light becomes more important in symbolizing various aspects of the divine that were accessible. In The Enneads, Plotinus (CE 204–270) pioneered the idea of the “formless form”, after Plato, suggesting that the aesthetic and spiritual experience of that which was a representation was not an apprehension of that which was real, as the real and the good are beyond and superior to that which has form. For instance, the shape of the lover is inferior to the experience she/he/they represent, which is love. The further we can get from the form toward the essentialized immaterial, the more readily we can aspire to union with The One. Color is thus placed in the realm of essence, but not form, and this continues to be a key feature in the understanding of color as a gateway to the spiritual to the present day, especially as Kandinsky explores the rhetoric of the move toward abstraction as being a liberation from form and materiality.
From the Neoplatonists, the concept of emanations, the idea that the divine reaches manifestation through successive stages into the material, makes its way into western esotericism primarily via the Jewish Kabballah of the early Middle Ages and then in the Christian Cabala of the Renaissance, which becomes most significantly crystallized in the magical correspondences of Agrippa. The idea that emanations of the divine reflect diversity from a basis of divine unity, as all things emanate from the source, provides the perfect metaphor for the differentiation of light into the diversity of color. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) iterates this idea with respect to color with brilliance being the furthest removed from matter, being a better, purer vehicle for spirit, and darkness or black as embodying matter and thus furthest from spirit. All other colors descend from brightness to darkness in a spiritual hierarchy.
Much early magically relevant color theory rests on the premise of sympathetic magic, and that, similar to Plato’s view, colors contain and reflect properties, and that you can add colors to things to achieve outcomes linked to planetary powers. Agrippa (1486–1535) writes in Three Books on Occult Philosophy (c. 1533) that light comes from the mind of God and then emanates downward through the Holy Spirit through angels. When it reaches humans it then becomes the knowledge of the divine. All things perceive (and reflect) the color of divine light according to their capacities, indicating that color holds a particular, inherent quality which can be apprehended by the magician. Colors thus also contain the influence of the stars to which they have sympathetic qualities. Agrippa links specific colors to planets and also to the various signs of the Zodiac and to the elements, presenting a basic version of the Hermetic table of correspondences well known to 19th century magicians ad modern occultists. The schema is explicitly Platonic in that everything is an emanation of the divine and that everything has its own Form which corresponds to the divine pattern, but Agrippa believes that the Forms are communicated through Rulers, Governors and Intelligences. Therefore, if you want to harness the power of a particular attribute, the magician will be required go up the chain of command. So, while Agrippa may not consider color to be an entity in itself, one will have to invoke and petition the correct being in the chain to properly access the properties that a color signifies. While later color theorists may not be as explicit about the ways in the properties of color are communicated, the general Neoplatonic framework in which much of spiritual color theory develops into the Modern period relies on many of Agrippa’s assumptions.
During the Renaissance and into the early modern period, there then emerges a distinction between optics, and the more culturally driven perceptions and effects of color, providing a glimpse of the interplay between discourses of science and spirituality that are so central to understanding the development of esoteric thought and practice up until the middle of the twentieth century. This is somewhat exemplified by the competing frameworks of Newton and Goethe, both of whom were driven by differing spiritual beliefs concerning the nature and experience of color. Issac Newton (1642–1726) who coined the term spectrum, determined in the late 17th century that prisms did not color light, but that light itself could be broken down into various colors. Newton established a sevenfold schematic of color based again on planetary divisions from the ancient world, and held to the notion that colors, planet and musical notes corresponded. Newton still maintained that light contained colored particles, and therefore held some essential substance, that they were not simply reflections of light. Goethe’s 1810 work (1749–1832) sits primarily in distinction to Newton, who was more interested in the mechanisms of color perception rather than the experience of color, which was Goethe’s focus. Goethe believed that colors result from the interplay between light and dark, and that colors have an inherent darkness or lightness that can be subject to influence from the opposing quality. While scientifically Goethe’s work has been rejected, the poetic qualities appealed to artists such as Phillipp Otto Runge who further developed Goethe’s visual model and eventually impacted the Theosophical understanding of color.
In 1810 the German Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) published Farbenkugel, which further articulated the interplay between the science of color, artistic method, and spiritual applications of color. Runge believed there were five equal color elements, white, black, red, blue and yellow, and that these elements were pure and irreducible. He believed that the chromatic elements red, blue and yellow represented the Trinity and he placed these geometrically at the points of an equilateral triangle. Runge developed a spherical color system to represent all of the possible combinations of color mixing, with light at one end, dark at the other, and transected by blue, red and yellow at equal intervals. Runge’s concentration was on understanding and communicating the rules of pigment, not of light, and he created, or perhaps properly described the principles by which various color combinations produce harmony or disharmony in the viewer. He was primarily interested in the power of color to produce physical effects. Like Plato and some of the Neoplatonists, Runge was actually concerned with the quality of brilliance and luminosity in colors which he believed was most effectively demonstrated in transparent colors, those without the addition of black or white. In an 1806 letter to Goethe, he explains that the addition of either white or black to pure elemental pigments (red, blue and yellow) to create the condition of opacity also created a condition of materiality, which renders them either weak (mixed with white) or evil (mixed with black). But the application of light to transparent color, Runge believed created remarkably uplifting sensations.[ii] We see Runge’s applications in the Theosophical characterizations of pure color as luminous beacons of divine signature.
By the late nineteenth century with the further development of artificial pigments, we see a progression into a variety of practical applications of color which also form the basis of color theory in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The complementary color theories of Ogden Rood in his 1879 Modern Chromatics, with Applications to Art and Industry were influential among artists of the late nineteenth century, with notably Van Gogh and Seurat using complementary colors to create a vibratory effect in the viewer. The Golden Dawn used the same technology in a ritual format to create intense initiatory experiences.
There is no doubt that the Golden Dawn magical curriculum developed the use of color in magical contexts in sophisticated and complex ways that had not been previously possible. In fact, the magical use of color is a cornerstone of the Golden Dawn curriculum, and is a distinguishing feature from other magical schools of thought. The Golden Dawn is largely responsible for regularizing the colors we associate with the Kabbalistic Tree of Life today. When the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 it coincided with the expanded development and production of pure hues and a wider range of bold, artificial pigments that didn’t require blending. Moina Mathers, wife of one of the Golden Dawn founders Samuel L. “Mac Gregor” Mathers, and Florence Farr, both trained artists, contributed to the experiments with color that the Golden Dawn formulated in their ritual practice. What developed as a result is an exciting set of ritual practices and meditations merging traditional esoteric color correspondences and ideas of colors as invokable entities with newly emerging commercial and artistic applications of the physical and emotional impacts of color. In this way we see the Golden Dawn engaging directly with modernity and scientific discourses of the day, as magical engineers produced spiritual experiences with color that they believed were not only mythic in scope and narrative, but which were also repeatable.
A thorough and nuanced understanding of colors and their magical and especially Kabbalistic correspondences remains an essential part of the Golden Dawn curriculum. One of the key symbols of adepthood is the Rose Cross, which contains a color wheel in the center, with each color representing one of the twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life. The precision of color mixing and color contrast was highly important to Golden Dawn magicians. If the color was not precise, the correct result may not be obtained. However, the expanding range of brighter synthetic colors being released in the nineteenth century provided magicians with a richer way of playing with and also experiencing an expanded range of sacred color.
One of the most interesting and innovative uses of color in the Golden Dawn system is in the use of the Vault, which is one of the system’s primary initiatory devices, essentially being used to incubate an adept. The Golden Dawn vault is a seven-sided chamber ostensibly designed after the tomb of mythical spiritual adept Christian Rosenkreuntz, the story of whom underpins several strands of Golden Dawn ritual and mythology. Each of the walls, designating each of the seven planets, is covered with squares containing symbols painted in an opposing color to the background. This phenomenon is known as simultaneous contrast and it was used to directly invoke the spirit of the planets and the zodiacal signs. The intended visual impact is that all of the squares would be seen to vibrate therefore causing an intense immersive experience for the candidate. Additionally, simultaneous contrast of colors can also cause a temporary retinal burn, so the symbols might potentially remain visible to the candidate after the ritual, which of course reinforces the experience of color and also symbol possessing otherworldly essences. This is again one reason that the precision of color mixing in the Golden Dawn was such an important issue. Not only were these entities to be invoked, but the impact on the candidate needed to be ensured. Given that we exist in a world today saturated with color, image and pure hue, it is hard for us to imagine the physical and emotional intensity of the experience of the Golden Dawn vault for the candidate.
Despite the fact that the Golden Dawn had a well-articulated system of color, it would seem that the impact it had on the wider art world was limited. The work of Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) is certainly an exception. Colquhoun was a Surrealist and an accomplished lifelong esotericist who believed strongly in the idea of color as entity and who based most of her work on the Golden Dawn color scales. Colquhoun believed that colors had an independent existence as entities, and thus many of her works can be interpreted as invocatory to some degree or another. Colquhoun had a lifelong interest in the application of color and its effect on the body and spirit. In addition to her longstanding esoteric pursuits, Colquhoun had training in the commercial applications of color, which her archives show she applied in fanciful ways. In 1936 Colquhoun worked with French cubist Amédée Ozenfant who was hugely influential in English color theory, particular in the application of color to architecture. Colquhoun studied at his London atelier, and her archives show a number of wildly colored and fantastic architectural designs, indicating that her own interests in the application of color to environment to achieve specific outcomes were quite far ranging. In what is perhaps the most sophisticated of these explorations, late in her life, in 1977, Colquhoun developed a fully abstract tarot deck (which she spelled “Taro”), designed for meditation, not divination, that she rooted in the Golden Dawn Kabbalistic color system. Her deck was designed to deliver the information encoded in the card directly through color, bypassing the conscious, rational, narrative mind.
As Alex Owen has noted, although the Golden Dawn was an initiatory and secret society, it was not a backward looking one.[iii] It engaged with contemporary currents in art, politics and science, to create a modern magical system rooted in the idea of ancient wisdom. The ways in which its movers and shakers used both color and shape in a ritual context to communicate to initiates keys to the fundamental building blocks of the universe, indicate the strikingly modern nature of this project. Nevertheless, it is likely that the complexity of the Golden Dawn system and its comparative specialization, along with the fact that much of the system was not made public until the late 1930s that its overall impact on the development of contemporary art movements was limited. However, the impact of Theosophy on the development of abstract art in the 20th century was significant, and we can still see the continuing interplay between the science of color and the spirit of color. The Theosophical system was different than the Golden Dawn system, although both of them are still rooted in a Platonic framework where non-form provides access to a more unmediated divine experience. The Theosophical conception of color would appear to be more symbolic and less ‘primal entity’ driven than the Golden Dawn system, yet the working premise for the viewer is the same: experience of color produces a primal effect and colors have independent fixed realities. Yet there is a contrast between the emphasis on invocation and ritual magic in the Golden Dawn that is absent in Theosophy, so while colors do seem to have the impact of independent beings, representing them seems to be sufficient invocation of their spiritual reality.
The works of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter which described the literally colorful existence of independent “thought forms”, were undoubtedly the most significant of the Theosophical contributions to the modern art world. According to Besant and Leadbetter, not only do humans have colorful auras, which was not an entirely novel idea at the time having been influenced by both Eastern and Western theories of subtle bodies, people also project “thought forms” which have predictable and constant shape and color, and which are visible to trained clairvoyants. Thought forms can be shaped by the vibrations of thoughts, which Besant and Leadbetter believed indicated a person’s intent, proclivity and state. The shapes and colors of thought forms are said to be key to a person’s nature and level of spiritual development. Besant and Leadbetter presented these theories in two works written at the turn of the twentieth century, their collaboration Thought Forms (1901) and Leadbetter’s Man Visible and Invisible (1903). In Man Visible and Invisible, Leadbetter presents a stunningly illustrated guide to the meanings and correspondences of colors and thought forms and what they signify on other planes. Although these thought forms were not characterized as hierarchical entities that one might formally invoke in the way that spirits or intelligences might be in a more Hermetically driven system, they were absolutely entities that had an existence independent from their creator, and which also shaped the environment into which they entered, making them well suited for the experiments of the emerging abstract art movement.
Besant and Leadbetter’s work also intersected with the language of science that was just developing at the end of the nineteenth century. For Besant and Leadbetter, testing and repeatability was not the cornerstone of the phenomena, it just very simply…was. These forms were theorized, observed and transcribed, and the promise of emerging science was that they could eventually be explained. Theosophical thought forms were also part of the wider discourses on vibrations, energy, and waves permeating both science and spirituality at the turn of the 20th century.
Wasily Kandinsky drew on Besant and Leadbetter’s theories as well as the Theosophical writings of Rudolph Steiner in his 1912 Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which is recognized as a key text in the history of abstraction, although many of the ideas were likely predated by the early twentieth century esoteric and Theosophically informed abstractions of Hilma af Klint. The premise of an underlying spiritual or esoteric dimension to abstract art contradicts popular conceptions of abstract art as inaccessible and emblematic of a disenchanted modernity, although this view is rapidly being revised by interest in artists such as af Klint. Theosophically derived approaches do not require the possession of a more rigorous vocabulary of correspondences on the part of both the artist and the viewer as does a Hermetic approach. While a Theosophical methodology also might benefit from some decoding, ultimately the experience of color itself allows for immersion and immediacy.
Kandinsky was aiming at an art of transcendence, a rejection of form and the degradation into materiality which is a perfect iteration of Neoplatonist views. Kandinsky believed that color harmony was predisposed by the spiritual condition of the viewer, which would ultimately triumph over any unpleasant symbolic associations that might also form a response. Kandinsky also believed that since colors produce a correspondence to soul vibrations that the artist can, with precision, produce a change in the soul of the viewer and also of the artist. For Kandinsky, the spiritual applications of color were timeless and universal, and the move toward abstraction was actually a return to fundamental principles perhaps best expressed by “primitive” cultures who, he believed, were more fully attuned to a spiritual dimension. Kandinsky attributed specific properties and polarities to colors and to mixtures of colors, and was also concerned with the effects of the harmony of color when placed together. For example, blue was heavenly, violet expresses frailty. Yet he also notes that colors also have essences and effects which do not lend themselves to description. Form restricts the power of color to affect vibration and to drive spiritual evolution. Here we see another shift toward the creation of an immersive environment with color as its centerpiece, with the primary goal of propelling spiritual development.
Donald Kuspit writes of the spiritual impulse in abstract art that “The most significant abstract art today reflects an inner conflict between the socially encouraged will to conventional communication and the personal will to spiritual experience.”[iv] This holds true of esoteric art, whether representational or abstract. Marco Pasi has argued that the nature of esoteric art relies on the power of esoteric symbols to disrupt and undermine, that it is powerful because it signifies heresy, and it is that essentially heretical quality which gives esoteric art its power, regardless of the beliefs or practices of the artist or audience.[v] Much of what historically falls into the category of “esoteric art” is figuratively focused and representational, inviting the viewer into strange worlds and dream like dimensions, populated with liminal and otherworldly beings suggesting fantastic encounters. It may also incorporate symbols which suggest hidden associations and the suggestion of initiatory knowledge. The art of Leonora Carrington and Austin Osman Spare exemplifies these approaches, and so does the art of alchemical allegory and the aesthetically didactic material culture which emerges through Freemasonry, such as tracing boards . Yet if our gaze privileges a representative visual narrative, what other stories and experiences of esoteric thought are we missing?
Within the analysis of esoteric art, there has been much less discussion about the relationship between artist and audience and the role of performance and immersion, and it may be that the use of color as entity can be analyzed within in this framework. If artists are using color as gateways to other realities, or as a form of invocation of mediating powers, or producing thought forms intended to spiritually influence the viewer, this enriches the narratives encoded within esoterically driven art. When we experience the potential power of say, a color block, or the juxtaposition of several colors to impact the physical or psychic response of the viewer, and consider the way in which that response will have been intentionally engineered by the artist within an esoteric or occult context, the disruption still exists, but the source of the disruption is somewhat different. There may not necessarily be anything that is particularly exotic looking, fetishistic, or coded in the esoteric piece itself, yet the position of the artist makes it inherently esoteric and draws the viewer into a different, perhaps more accessible, dynamic with the piece. This opens up potentially new readings and cultural dimensions for abstract and contemporary artists who are not exploring the world of esoteric images and themes, but who are perhaps verging on performance, as their art is indeed an invocation and we become part of the ritual.
[i] Ierodiakonou, ‘Plato’s Theory of Colours in The Timaus’ pp. 221,227.
[ii] Letter from Phillipp Otto Runge to Johann Goethe, 3 July 1806 in Kuehni, Phillipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere.
[iii] Owen, The Place of Enchantment, pp. 51–52
[iv] Kusbit, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, p. 314
[v] Pasi, ‘Coming Forth By Night’ pp. 106,107.
Bibliography
Donald Kuspit. ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Contemporary Art’ in E. Weisburger (Ed.) The Spiritual in Abstract Painting: 1890–1985. New York: Abbeville Press/Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1987.
Katrina Ierodiakonou. ‘Plato’s Theory of Colours in The Timaeus’. In Rhizai: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 2:219–233 (2005)
Rolf G. Kuehni Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere: A Translation with Related Materials and an Essay. Inter-Society Color Council, 2008.
Rolf G. Kuehni and Andreas Schwartz. Color Ordered: a Survey of Color Systems from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2008.
Alex Owen. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Marco Pasi ‘Coming Forth by Night’ A. Vaillant (Ed.), Options with Nostrils (pp. 103–111). Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2010.
