by Krista West
The Color Dark
With an understanding of the historic concept of “brilliance” well in hand, we now must explore the other end of the ancient spectrum, that encompassed by the category “dark.” While this category is just as flexible as that of “bright,” and contains many varied shades, the use of “dark” can be especially confusing due to one modern custom in particular: the dedicated use of blue-purple during Great and Holy Lent. While the historic rubrics for Lent denote bright on Sundays in Lent (every Sunday being a celebration of the Resurrection) and dark for the weekday Lenten services due to their penitential character, it has become customary in many North American Orthodox parishes to use exclusively the blue-purple shade (commonly called “purple” in modern English) for both Sunday and mid-week Lenten services. The reason often given for Sunday usage is pastoral necessity: if mid-week services are poorly attended then a priest may deem it necessary to wear purple on Sundays so that the laity are aware of the liturgical season. While the setting aside of the traditional rubrics of bright for Sunday usage in Lent due to poor church attendance is itself a matter of concern, an even more disturbing departure from traditional practice is that one particular shade of purple, known to the ancient world as “hyakinthos” (blue-purple), has become intrinsically connected with Lent, rather than the broader, more historic practice of using any color in the dark category, which would have included deep red, burgundy, red-purple, blue-purple, and black as well as any combination of these colors. This change in practice might seem at first a minor point—after all, blue-purple does fulfill the rubric of dark—but it becomes a major concern when one specific modern hue displaces the traditional usage. While there are many local traditions associating certain colors with certain seasons (e.g., blue for feasts of the Theotokos or green for Palm Sunday), they do so only as a preference, not to the entire exclusion of all other colors; in other words, a priest could wear gold vestments for the Feast of the Dormition and still be deemed in conformance with the rubrics. The practice of one single color being assigned to one single liturgical season to the exclusion of all other colors is foreign to the ethos of the Orthodox Christian liturgical cycle.
Not only is this modernistic color influence creeping into Lenten liturgical practice a matter of serious concern on its own, more broadly the laying aside of the ancient category of “dark” during Great Lent in favor of the use of only one specific color—blue-purple—tends toward the creation of a slippery slope upon which the remainder of Orthodox Christian color usage could slide into a completely modernistic color practice wherein the various liturgical seasons are assigned specific, regimented colors. While such practice is common in the Western Christian communions (though even there it is a late development), embracing such a practice in the Orthodox Church would be a rejection of an ancient bright-dark color tradition in favor of an innovation only a few hundred years old.
Additionally, in Orthodox Christian aesthetics, there is often an underlying principle of practicality—it is understood that one beautiful altar cloth can be used for the entire liturgical year if that is the best the community has—and the bright-dark rubrics may be seen as the pinnacle of such practicality. If a priest does not own seven sets of vestments, he may still honorably serve the liturgical year with two. Once again, the focus is on quality and beauty rather than on rigid adherence to specific hue.
The exclusive use of blue-purple for Great Lent is a practice acquired during the twentieth century when Orthodox Christians in North American rarely had access to traditional brocades with their distinctive, Byzantine-influenced colorations, but had to rely instead upon the fabrics available through Western Christian liturgical goods suppliers. Many of the historic, multi-colored brocades utilized in Orthodox Christian practice were simply not available and, through many decades of reliance on American liturgical suppliers, Orthodox Christians became accustomed to Western color practices which tend toward the monochromatic in order to fit within the Newtonian-influenced, Western color canon.
Another reason that blue-purple has achieved and maintained such prominence is the mystery surrounding the historic color “purple,” a color which has been the mark of emperors and kings, associated with honor and prestige, but the exact hue of which eluded scientists and scholars alike for centuries following the collapse of the historic purple dyestuff industry after the fall of Constantinople.
The Purple Paradox
Far back beyond the mists of history, ancient legend has it that Hercules was walking along the coast when his dog ate a sea snail, resulting in a deep red stain around the dog’s mouth. While the story is mythical, it speaks of the undoubtedly accidental, initial discovery of a natural process that would have a profound and lasting impact on human history. Two species of the humble Mediterranean sea snail (Murex brandaris and Murex trunculus) when crushed, exude a clear liquid which, when properly prepared, will color wool or silk fibers with a brilliant, reddish-purple color that will not wash out. From this discovery came one of the most lucrative industries the world has ever known.
Credit for the original discovery of this remarkable dyestuff seems to belong to the Phoenicians whose very name was wrapped up in this color—the ancient Greeks called them “Phoinikes,” which means “red-colored.”14 Because the precious dyestuff was produced in Tyre in Phoenicia, it became known as “Tyrian purple,” and eventually the knowledge of its production made its way to the Greeks.
Tyrian purple’s rich, intense color ensured that it would be highly valued. But this was not the whole of its appeal—much of its value lay in the fact that it was also “fast,” which meant the dye would not rinse out little by little in each washing as was the case with most ancient dyestuffs. Ancient reports of Tyrian purple’s fastness are impressive: in one of his campaigns against the Persians, Alexander the Great took approximately 275,000 pounds of murex-dyed fabric as war booty from the city of Shushan. This fabric had been stored in the city’s treasury rooms for almost 200 years and yet it retained its original “fresh and strong color.”15
These two qualities—remarkable color and highly desirable permanency—along with a phenomenally time-consuming method of production requiring approximately 12,000 sea snails for every 1.4 grams of pure dye, combined to create one of human history’s most fantastically expensive products. Dyestuffs commanded a wide range of prices in antiquity depending on how abundant they were in the natural world, how difficult they were to produce, and whether they were locally available or had to be transported from distant lands. The desire for color was a source of big business in earlier ages; even during the Renaissance painters would sign formal contracts with their patrons that specified which pigments were to be used and such contracts often contained clauses forbidding the artist from using cheaper substitutes.16
In the modern age we do not generally associate particular colors with luxury because the advent of synthetic dyestuffs in the late nineteenth century meant that all dyestuffs came to be similarly priced since they could be manufactured chemically. No longer are the scarcity of natural occurrence or the difficulty of production major factors in the cost of a particular color. In the ancient world, however, Tyrian purple reigned supreme as the most expensive dyestuff known to mankind. In Rome, coins were marked with an image of the murex shellfish, functioning as a type of ancient dollar sign.17 When St Luke tells of Lydia, “a seller of purple,” in Acts 16.14, he is referring to a very wealthy woman. In our modern context it would be akin to saying “Lydia, the multi-millionaire,” or “Lydia, the owner of a software company,” as those who sold the purple dye dealt in a highly lucrative industry, one which most likely required large amounts of capital and gave the business owner access to the upper echelons of society.
By the time of the Byzantine Empire when the use of Tyrian purple was firmly established and was referred to as “murex purple” (Latin “purpura” or Greek “porphyra”) strict legislation was enacted governing its manufacture and distribution in order to
As this passage indicates, the Byzantines took their purple very seriously. Considering that it was classed with antiquity’s greatest treasures, on a par with gold, silver, pearls and gems, it is no wonder that purple became the exclusive province of emperors and high-ranking nobility. The Byzantines used the beautiful dye not only for their own garments, but also to generate considerable revenues through exportation, to manipulate trade by limiting who had access to murex purple-dyed textiles, to set the tenor of diplomatic missions, to influence politics, and to maintain court privileges by the gifting of purpura blatta (i.e. purple silk, from the Latin “blatta,” meaning “moth”).
Tyrian purple and the textiles it transformed became the quintessential hallmark of imperial privilege; it is no artistic whim that Justinian and Theodora are depicted in Tyrian-purple robes in the famous Ravenna mosaics, but rather a conscious use of color to symbolize power and prestige.19 Certain Tyrian-purple-dyed silks were forbidden from leaving the confines of Constantinople and were relegated to the sole use of the Emperor and his court. While there has often been confusion in the academic world about who could wear Tyrian purple, with some scholars contending that only the Emperor himself could wear anything dyed with Tyrian purple, more recent research has suggested that the restriction of certain purpura blatta garments for the Emperor’s sole use had to do with their color and their design, not simply that they were dyed with Tyrian purple. As Byzantine silk scholar Anna Muthesius states, “The regulations indicated not that the Imperial house had an exclusive right to wear Imperial purples of all types, but only that it had the exclusive right of wearing Imperial purple garments of special Imperial tailored ‘cuts.’”20
Despite this long-standing regard for the imperial purple, which lasted almost 2000 years, the modern world knows little of this astonishing color. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the lucrative, yet highly technical, murex sea snail dye industry collapsed entirely and it was not until a handful of curious chemists began experimenting with murex sea snail extractions in the twentieth century that there came to be even a rudimentary knowledge of how this storied dye was produced. Not only was the method of its production shrouded in mystery, its actual shade or color—what it really looked like—was also unknown, creating great confusion for the modern mind that wanted a specific color hue assigned to the name “Tyrian purple,” classifying it within the confines of Newton’s rainbow. It is precisely this modern need to classify all colors into specific hues that has contributed to such confusion regarding the use of purple within Great and Holy Lent. But as we have seen, clearly defined color terms are elusive in the ancient world as a few descriptions of Tyrian purple illustrate:
Throughout the ancient and medieval world, purpure [Tyrian purple] could equally mean a shade of dark red or crimson, and indeed purple is steeped in associations with blood.x21
The color was “dark” with a reddish tinge.22
Writers of Hellenistic times understood “purple” to mean several colors: dull red, magenta, blue, and violet-purple. The most expensive dye was the Tyrian dull red.23
But it seems likely that at least by the 12th century the Imperial purple [Tyrian purple] was normally a dark red; Mesarites notes in his Ekphrasis that the Imperial Chrysobulls were signed in the colour of the blood of Christ.24
It is possible to produce deep red, blue violet, and dark blue tones, depending on the technique.25
There is a great range of purples ranging from the color of congealed blood to a light violet or blue and every shade in between depending on the precise species [of sea snail], the amount of dye used, and . . . the exposure to light which results in a blue color. . . .26
In the descriptions given above we note a wide color range, rather puzzling at first, but comprehensible when several factors are taken into account: first, the different species of the murex mollusk yielded different shades of the dyestuff, some tending towards red-purple (purpura or porphyra) and others towards blue-purple (hyakinthos). The red-purple colors, which are closest to the color we today call “burgundy” or “wine,” were the most prized. Pliny refers to this shade as being “the color of clotted blood, dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”27 Secondly, exposure to light during production could change the dye and it had to be manufactured under specific light conditions to give the most desirable, reddish tone. Thirdly, since murex was such a precious dyestuff, dye baths were used multiple times, each successive dye lot being of a lighter shade until the bath was exhausted. This created initial dye lots of the highly desirable, intense porphyra color but went on to produce successive dye lots of pale mauves and blues that were less desirable and therefore less valuable.28 As dye expert Gosta Sandberg explains:
When we use the word purple in daily speech, we believe it stands for a quite well-defined and singular color designation. However, this is not the case. With a purple secretion as a starting material, it is possible to produce an entire range of color tones and nuances. The nature of the secretion, the mordant, and the dyeing method all play a decisive role in the appearance of the purple-dyed fiber. . . . It is also very clear that during antiquity there were special terms for the various colors that dyers could produce. The writer Marcus Vitruvius clearly distinguished between red Tyrian purple and blue hyacinthine purple, and in a decree the Emperor Diocletian mentions an additional number of different purple tones of varying coloristic appearance.29
Given an understanding of the factors that would influence color variations from a single dyestuff material, we begin to see that, similar to the ancient color spectrum, we have in Tyrian purple a color category rather than a specific hue. This collection of a broad range of colors under one term was quite logical to the ancient mind, especially given the ancient approach to color and its inherent flexibility of classification.
Tyrian purple, however, is unique even in the ancient spectrum. Because the most-valuable porphyra, the color we now refer to as “burgundy,” was “dark by reflected light and brilliant by transmitted light” as Pliny recounts, it inhabited the center of the ancient color spectrum, both in terms of its color, halfway between white and black (red was at the center of the ancient color spectrum), and having qualities both of darkness (by reflected light) and brilliance (by transmitted light). Placed in its proper position in the ancient color spectrum, Tyrian purple becomes a type of bridge color between light and dark; if the x-y coordinate plane of ancient color perception is brought to mind, Tyrian purple occupies a distinctive place at the conjunction of both axes.30 While it is speculative, it is not inconceivable that the symbological significance of this color would not have been lost on the highly symbolically attuned Byzantines. Just as Christ is the bridge between God and man, so porphyra was the bridge between light and dark and therefore the symbolically appropriate color for the King of Heaven. Knowledge of the ancient world’s perception of color along with an awareness of the affinity for symbolic “layering” within the Orthodox Church provides a better understanding of how a color like Tyrian purple could carry multiple symbological associations: porphyra as the center of all the colors, porphyra as the color of royalty, porphyra as the color of the royal robe placed upon Christ during His mockery and scourging becoming also, paradoxically, associated with His humiliation and suffering.
To the ancient Orthodox Christian mind, all of these ideas could have been at play at one and the same time when viewing this color—the only color that had these particular associations with both royalty and suffering, high regard and humiliation. Such symbology may
very well be why purple is used in penitential seasons, recalling Christ’s degradation while yet foreshadowing His triumph as the King of Heaven.
Once it is understood that Tyrian purple, the red-purple that we call “burgundy,” occupies such important symbological ground, certain ancient texts take on additional significance. One of the most notable examples is the recounting of the Annuncation of the Theotokos in the Protoevangelion of James. In this passage the high priest has the temple virgins cast lots for who are to weave the various colors needed for the veil of the temple:
And the servants went and brought them [the virgins] into the temple of the Lord, and the high-priest said unto them “Cast lots before me now, who of you shall spin the golden thread, who the blue, who the scarlet, who the fine linen, and who the true [Tyrian] purple.” Then the high-priest knew Mary, that she was of the tribe of David; and he called her, and the true purple fell to her lot to spin, and she went away to her own house. But from that time Zacharias the high-priest became dumb, and Samuel was placed in his room till Zacharias spoke again. But Mary took the true purple, and did spin it. And she took a pot, and went out to draw water, and heard a voice saying unto her, “Hail thou who art full of grace, the Lord is with thee; thou art blessed among women.” And she looked around to the right and to the left (to see) whence that voice came, and then trembling went into her house, and laying down the water-pot she took the purple, and sat down in her seat to work it. And behold the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, “Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour in the sight of God. . . .”31
