The Color of Darkness

If this is your first time reading this newsletter, I've been researching the history and language of color for almost two years. I've always described Colorphilia as an interdisciplinary research newsletter, ie. a place to develop theories based on my ongoing research. [1]

Every once in a while, I develop a theory which fundamentally alters how I understand the world, language, and the historical perception of color. This particular newsletter is one of those theories.

Theory

Overview

In the pre-modern world, they associated light and darkness with the color of the sky. During the day, when there was sun, the effect would be that the sky would be a light-blue hue. At night, it would become a dark-blue hue.

Right before the new moon, for example, when there isn't any strong celestial light source in the sky, the blue hue would deepen in intensity, but never, in their perception or understanding, change to black.

Simply put: this theory would mean that, historically speaking, the perception of light and darkness was not white and black. It was light blue to dark blue.

Black and greyscale did exist in antiquity, under the descriptions of death, the underworld, and shade in general. Unfortunately, these words would also be translated as darkness. In modernity, we have conflated the two senses of the color words for darkness, and ignored the nuance with which they had originally intended.

Relevance

I'm constantly asked as why any of this matters. In this newsletter, I will explore how this theory works within Sanskrit, Hebrew, and English.

You may ask what practical relevance this has in the world. Very simply, the sky is, quite literally, blue, regardless of its current hue or time of day.

Also, I'll apply this theory to the various metaphorical spectra we use, like young being green and old being white.

Backstory

Last Friday, I landed in London, and over the weekend, I quite randomly attended an art fair. At this art fair, I met a fellow researcher and artist named Krishna, whose work explored the metaphorical blue aspects of the Hindu deity with the same name. [2]

Kṛṣṇa (the deity, not the researcher) is traditionally depicted with blue skin, but Krishna (the researcher, not the deity) informed me that the name means "black or darkness". As I am a curious individual, I began peppering the researcher with questions about how the shift came to be, but discovered that he had the same questions, and no answers.

When I returned to my room, I searched for images of Kṛṣṇa in various collections of art spanning more than 800 years, and found depictions ranging from grey and black, dark brown, and of course, blue. I initially theorized it may be related to the medium used, printing method, or availability of pigment, but that didn't really make sense. So I reexamined my initial assumptions, and in doing so, shifted my historical understanding of color, which affects a lot more than why the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa is depicted with the color blue. 

Sanskrit

Kṛṣṇa doesn't really mean black, it means darkness of night or dark-blue.

In English, if we were to describe the color of the sky in the middle of the night right before the new moon, we may use a term like pitch-black, which means that it reminds us of the color of a dark viscous material which is a byproduct of distilling crude oil and tar. 

In Sanskrit, the term used for the second, darker, part of the lunar month is Kṛṣṇa Paksa, or literally, "the dark half". Which, as mentioned above, would just be a very intense deep-blue hue.

Sanskrit Darknesses

Kṛṣṇa is not the only Hindu deity associated with darkness; we also find the Kāli, a goddess of death, to have a name associated with the color black, or the darkness of death. [3]

In both cases, we can find stories of why Kṛṣṇa and Kāli are depicted as darkness, in attempts to hide or disguise the light from within.

Metaphorical Depictions

It's important to distinguish between the perception and how the depiction. Perception is how we see (or perceive) the world, and depiction is how we represent (or depict) that visually.

The highly enlightened, virtuous, or good can be metaphorically associated with an extremely light-blue color, which may sometimes be depicted as light (white), and the extremely unenlightened, evil, or bad may be associated with an extremely dark-blue color, and may sometimes be depicted as dark (black).

Why was Kṛṣṇa blue?

I am not even a novice yet in my knowledge of the Hindu pantheon and cannot read a word of Sanskrit, so I am forced to rely on translations by people who conflate color words.

Kṛṣṇa was born a human, so perhaps depicting him with the dark skin color was an allusion to his path to enlightenment. Maybe dark was literal as him having skin which was a darker hue, maybe it was always metaphorical, or maybe it was both.

Hebrew

Genesis 1 - חושך (ḥosheḥ)

The original language of light and darkness would have mimicked the different stages of the sun and moon in the sky. We see that in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. 

• Before the separation of the heavens, firmament, and oceans, before the assignation of the sun and the moon, everything was a hue of dark-blue.
• In Genesis 1:3, God created the light-blue sky.
• In Genesis 1:5, God created the daily progression from light-blue to dark-blue.
• In Genesis 1:6, God separated the blue hues of the heavens and the blue hues of the oceans.
• And it was only on the fourth day of creation, in Genesis 1:16, that God finally came around to creating the light source of the sun and the moon. [4]

Psalm 23 - צלמות (tsalmavet)

I've previously written, at some length, about the idea of shade, including the (somewhat) mistranslated lyric "valley of the shadow of death".

Shades of grey, we've seen, are linguistically associated with shadows, which are caused by the physical prevention of light, not the color of the sky. The shades of the death are below the earth, deep in a pit, with no access to any light from heaven. Black is the darkest shadow of the pit, not the darkest part of the night.

After realizing the distinction between the various darknesses, I reexamined the usage of the terms of ḥosheḥ and tsalmavet throughout the entire Biblical corpus, and have discovered that while they would each be used separately while referring to the technical darknesses of the sky and the underworld, the two would be used together on several occasions when trying to refer to a human sense of darkness, which would interplay with both.

English

Sky

I've previously mentioned how the word blee was a word for color in Old English, and in Middle English, the colors were somewhat tonal, ranging (from lightest to darkest) from

• bla (white, like blanc) to
• ble (reddish-orange, like blé, the French word for corn or wheat) to
• blo (yellow, like blond) to
• blu (turquoise or light blue) to
• blaw (dark blue).

And my understanding, until now, was those words were all just conflated once blue became the color we know and love today. Which is why if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, it will include all the variously spellings from blo to blaw under the color blue.

What if that whole understanding is wrong and blee didn't mean "color", but rather "colors of the sky", and that it was describing their perceptions of the hues of the sky, not the pigments or dyes they would use to depict the color of the sky? [5]

I had previously made a similar observation whilst researching the use of the color blue in Shakespeare. [6]

Tonal Sky

So bla to blaw is to the descriptive characteristics of the sky, as the tonal progression of  "glass" and "glimmer" to "glum" and "gloom" are to opacity or the reflective capabilities or characteristics of an object. [7]

We saw with the word bizarre that it was linguistically connected to the hues of the sky at sunrise and sunset, which makes sense why the golden ble and yellow blo are found in the hue progression of the sky.

Metaphorical Spectra

We are used to associating the color spectrum with the rainbow. But as I've written many times, that is a post-Newtonian idea. There seems to be a tendency for metaphrical spectra to tend to the lighter.

In modern language, we tend to pick and choose from these different metaphorical spectra without considering their original meanings.

Day sky-cycle as the color spectrum

From today's newsletter we can see the shift from day to night as a continuous spectrum. This can be seen historically as a distinction, for example, in the fight of "sons of light" versus "sons of darkness", which is written about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or the "enlightenment" as a response to the "dark ages".

We also say things like "the darkest time is before the dawn", sing songs named "sunrise, sunset", and many other metaphorical references to this color spectrum.

Plant life-cycle as the color spectrum

I've previously written about how the metaphor of green for young and gold for ripe comes from the perception of the life-cycle of wheat. If we are thinking about the rainbow color-spectrum, yellow/orange come before green, and are therefore closer to the light.

Hair as color spectrum

We can also look at the dark to grey to white hair spectrum to metaphorical describe wisdom. The older we get, the lighter our hair gets, and the more filled with wisdom we become.

Skin as color spectrum

We have seen the ruddy to pallid to white (as death), as the metaphorical way to describe the level of health someone has. We've previously explored how in Spanish, amarillo is connected to the idea of pallid (as jaundiced) with yellow, even though we usually associate pale (as cyanotic) with a light-blue. [8]

Notes:

1. Obviously, this could be wrong. Theories are allowed to evolve or be disproven, based on new information, sources, or perspectives. 
2. When I write "metaphorical blue aspects", I am referring to blue as in the Roman goddess Venus.
3. I've also discovered examples Kāli being depicted in dark-blue, but we've long seen a conflation of the two types of darkness, so I am not completely bothered by it.
4. In Hebrew, the word used to describe the sun and the moon is me'or, a grammatical conjugation which means "agent of light", not light within itself.
5. I don't want to describe this as a spectrum, necessarily, because it's a spectrum of color from light to dark, but it's not a temporal spectrum as we see in the metaphorical spectra.
6. But there is another association that we can see as well. As I mentioned whilst researching "blue" in Shakespeare, that the word was originally written as "blew" and could often be read as a wordplay between the color and the the idea of movement of air.
   In Hebrew, the words for light and air are cognates. We see the same thing in Latin the shiny gold or aura and the word for air. 
   Even more, the word "light" itself could either mean a visual characteristic or a physical characteristic of an item's air-like weight. Until the modern era, the same atmosphere would be responsible for both light and air, so the bl- words of blow and bluster, for example, come from the same bl- connotation.
   We see the origin in the Hebrew name for "Abel", or "Hevel", which simply means a breath, but is turned into the meaning of "vain" or "meaninglessness" in Ecclesiastes.
7. A black eye, for example, is really a very dark hue of blue, which we know, because as it lightens, it progresses through the lighter blue and yellow stages.
8. It would be interesting to see how how the concept of heaven as a place filled with light is connected with the state of death being associated with being white (meaning the complete lack of circulating blood).