These three colors appear together in different cultures and symbolic representations around the world.
They were likely the first primary colors with which people drew and imagined realities beyond what we saw with our eyes: the white of limestone or seashells, the red of hematite-rich earth, and the black of charcoal.
Three clearly differentiated colors that, in my opinion, bring us closer to the reality of the world. On one hand, the two opposite colors, white and black, and their well-known interpretations as light and darkness, female and male, yin and yang... And the red, on the other hand, as the unity of opposites or non-duality. Red is the binding and intermediate element between the extremes, which removes the veil of what we initially conceptualize as negative-positive or virtue-defect. Red in these lines means the consciousness that transcends the initial perception of this code we call life, and is capable of seeing the whole phenomenon.
A few years ago, I created an artwork titled Yellow, Red, Black. In that piece, I explored the theory of the Gunas from Samkhya culture (India). The Gunas are described as the three humors that form the material universe, or Prakriti: Sattvas, Rajas, and Tamas. The Universe was created at the moment when these Gunas became unbalanced. Each Guna has specific characteristics:
Sattvas (White or Yellow): purity and knowledge
Rajas (Red): movement and agitation
Tamas (Black): heaviness and inertia
The Gunas are used in Yoga philosophy and Ayurveda (ancient Indian medicine) to study and analyze people, according to the proportion of these elements or colors in their changing constitution.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her masterpiece Women Who Run with the Wolves, explains the meaning of these three colors within the story of Vasalisa. At one point, Vasalisa, the protagonist, is sent by her wicked stepsisters to fetch firewood from the dangerous witch Baba Yaga's hut. Along the way, the white rider, red rider, and black rider appear. I transcribe the author's words as follows:
''These colors symbolized birth, life, and death, as well as the ancient concepts of descent, death, and resurrection; black symbolizes the dissolution of old values, red represents the sacrifice of illusions once considered valuable, and white is the new light, the new wisdom that comes from having encountered the first two.
The ancient words used in medieval times are nigredo (blackness), rubedo (redness), and albedo (whiteness), and describe an alchemy that follows the cycle of the Wild Woman (...). Without the symbols of dawn, the rising of light, and the mysterious darkness (...).
The colors in the story are extremely valuable because each possesses its mortal and vital nature. Black is the color of clay, fertility, the essential substance in which ideas are sown. But black is also the color of death, the darkening of light. (...)
Red is the color of sacrifice, anger, murder, being tormented and killed. But it is also the color of vibrant life, dynamic emotion, excitement, eros, and desire. It is a color that is considered a powerful medicine for psychic ailments, a color that awakens appetite. (...) Red is also the promise of imminent growth or birth.
White is the color of the new, the pure, the pristine. It is also the color of the soul liberated from the body, the spirit freed from the burden of the physical. It is the color of essential nourishment, the mother's milk. On the contrary, it is also the color of death, of things that have lost their most favorable appearance, their flow of vitality. Where there is whiteness, everything is temporarily a blank slate, where nothing has been written. White is the promise that there will be enough nourishment for things to start again, that the void will be filled.''
The references from this author lead us directly to alchemy and to the Opus Magnum text, where these colors are used to describe the transformation of the soul, from its darkest levels of evolution to the brightest.
We hope you enjoyed it, and we will continue exploring this group of colors in different cultures. Thank you for reading this far.
Colorful regards,
Symbiotic Colours
SOURCES
PINKOLA ESTÉS, CLARISSA. Women Who Run with the Wolves.
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