Black, White & Red
The alchemical Great Work is often viewed in at least three stages: nigredo (black), albedo (white), and rubedo, (red) which in turn is transmuted into ‘living gold.’ Interestingly, the colours black, white and red appear throughout the world, from myths and legends, to fairy tales and folklore.
In the Irish tale Dierdre of the Sorrows, one day in early spring, when a calf was slaughtered, its blood spilled onto the snow, and a raven came down to feast on it. When young Deirdre saw it, she cried out and went into a feint. Her nurse Leabharcham, thought she was distressed, but Deirdre said that she had fallen in love with those three colours, and that she would only give her love to a man with hair as black as a raven’s wing, whose skin was as white as snow, and whose cheeks were as red as the blood of the speckled calf. Similarly, in the Welsh legend of Peredur, the young hero falls in love with a divine maiden, whose skin was white as snow, hair as black as jet, and whose cheeks were the colour of blood. As with Dierdre, the sight of the raven and the blood on the snow sent him into a mysterious trance. “Red as blood, white as snow and black as a raven,” is the traditional tricolour folk motif. Appearing in the tale of Snow White, among many others. In the Silver Bough it appears in both The Blue Baba of the Marsh and Apples of Immortality.
These three colours also occur in ritual context, an example being found in an initiation ceremony of the Indians of South California, whose sacred stone tamyush bowls are painted black, white and red. While an Iroquois prophecy, The Vision of Deganwidah, tells of a great battle between three serpents, one black, one white and one red. In Africa, a Dahomey myth tells of how the earth is supported by a coiled snake, and they say at night, day and twilight the snake puts off its clothes of black, white and red.
More recently anthropologists have discovered that these three colours relate to different states of consciousness, and that “culturally, human perception of colour begins with three primary colours: black, white and red, while the fourth is yellow.” Primal in nature, black and red were frequently used in Palaeolithic art, and although no white has been found the walls themselves were often of limestone, or a similar pale stone. “A symbol of transformation red ochre is present in graves and was used in funeral rites, together with white bones and the blackness of the grave.”
In the ancient world as in Northern Europe, the three colours appear again, from otherworldly Irish cattle, to the three faces of the goddess Hecate, and in the Finnish epic The Kalevala, where:
"Ukko's eldest daughter sprinkled
Black milk over river channels
And the second daughter sprinkled
White milk over hills and mountains,
While the youngest daughter sprinkled
Red milk over seas and oceans.
Where the black milk had been sprinkled,
Grew the dark and ductile iron;
Where the white milk had been sprinkled.
Grew the iron, lighter-coloured;
Where the red milk had been sprinkled,
Grew the red and brittle iron.”
This connection between the colours and creation itself was made by writers such as Ovid and Horace, who thought the threads of fate bore these colours, while in Hindu tradition it is said that all of creation was woven from the “Virgin’s white (sattva), the Mother’s red (rajas), and the Crone’s black (tamos). These are the sacred colours of “Kali-Maya, the creatress, or ‘divine female Prakriti’”. White is seen as “radiant, pure tranquillity.” Red as “blazing energy and passion.” While black was seen as “weight and darkness, the silent night of the tomb.”
In Russian folklore Baba Yaga has three servants, a black knight for the dark night, a white knight standing for the bright morning, and a red knight for the day’s sun.
In Hindu mythology these colours are not only connected with the threads of life, but with the life force, or energy known as Shakti. Shakti was said to have first manifested when Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva were angered by demons on Mount Kailash, and a column of smoke appeared. The three gods turned to see a beautiful maiden stood before them. Black, white, and red they were unsure of who she was and so she said to them, “Don’t you know me noble Lords? I am the concentration of all of your energies, I am your Shakti.” After this she divided herself into snow white Sarasvati, red Lakshmi, and black Parvati, who in turn became the beloveds of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. In the Hindu myth of the Manidvipa we are told of the survival of three races: black, white and red, while Shiva, Shava and Shakti flee from their destroyed Island of Jewels, once the abode of the goddess.
Perhaps though, the most famous legend of an island destroyed by a cataclysm is that of Atlantis, and whose primary building material colours, according to Plato, were black, white and red. In occult understanding the colours of Atlantis, and of traditional magic, have always been black, white and red.
~ From my book The Silver Bough
Artwork by Niall Grant
