The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  The values attached to colours by different cultures may vary greatly, though here too the historical, aesthetic and anthropological literature suggests that similar roles have been assigned, in widely different cultures and over several millennia, to the ‘primary’ colours: white being predominantly benign, black predominantly negative and red predominantly vital. These particular identifications need not themselves be innate, since they relate to constants in human experience. In many cultures the word for ‘white’ may refer to mother’s milk and also semen; the word for ‘red’ to blood; and the word for ‘black’ to soot, coal, charcoal, eyes and hair (and also faeces). There is also a wide cultural consensus as to the immaterial values of black as the colour of bad luck and of all the worst things: of sterility, hatred and death itself. Rudolf Steiner found black ‘hostile to life . . . our soul deserts us when this awful blackness is within us’.9

  It does not need to be said that a particular society, at a particular time, may have reasons to discriminate with extreme minuteness between the hues in a certain range: for instance, between the yellows, greens and browns that indicate the well-being of crops. Several noted studies have recorded the elaborate vocabulary the Dinka in South Sudan have developed to distinguish the fine shades between brown and reddish brown, and the different patterns of brown, black and white which determine the beauty of their cattle. On this subject, which they will discuss for hours, the Dinka sound – John Ryle has said – ‘more like art-critics than stockbreeders’. A high value is set on animals that are entirely of a lustrous black, or of a particular reddish brown, and a higher value still on the piebald animals which they may breed, a paramount value being set on certain patterns of black and white.10

  Without running to as many blacks as the Dinka have words for reddish brown, I do try to indicate the diversity of values that we attach to black, both as a colour which we see in different things, and as an idea, within our heads and words, deriving from that colour. I am aware that I sometimes slip quickly between different categories of black – in optics, pigments, words and conceptual domains – in a way that may seem promiscuous to the systematic analyst of a particular culture. But there is a point, I hope, in attempting a large but not overlong history of an idea, and the diversity of the data means that one must make quick leaps and comparisons. With my background in literary studies, I prefer to think of this as the poetic way of telling a history.

  Through the centuries the colour black has been used to send messages to other people: by flying black flags, by wearing black clothes, by owning black things. And black is the principal colour we use when words (like these) are written down. Even a single colour has many meanings, changing again from culture to culture. I shall not try to tabulate further categories here, since it is more economical to introduce them in the order in which history brought them forward.

  2 A specimen of obsidian, photograph by Hugh Tuffen, 2012.

  ONE

  The Oldest Colour

  IN GENESIS DARKNESS rests on the deep before God proclaims light, or any colour can be. Other mythologies may begin with primal darkness, and in some versions of Greek myth there is at first empty darkness, and the only presence the black bird Nyx, or Night, who lays the golden egg from which the first god, Eros, will be born. Whether our own scientific cosmology begins with darkness is not clear, for it is not sure there was a ‘before’ before the Big Bang. It may be that we burst into being in flaring incandescence – which sank into a darkness of dissipated energy, until matter slowly began to collect.

  Other myths imagine a beginning in light and heat. In Nordic myth, as related in the Eddas, ‘first of all there was in the southern region the world called Muspel’ – the land of eternal fire, whose border was patrolled by the fire-giant Surtur.1 We may imagine a blazing landscape like the surface of the sun, and Surtur too we are able to see, because his name means ‘black’. It is related to the northern linguistic root svart, ‘black’, which comes to us in ‘swarthy’. Surtur stands gigantic in the furnace, black as coal or a burned-out forest.

  When the flakes of fire from Muspel met the freezing mists of the north, drops of moisture condensed into the giant cow Audhumla, who licked from the frozen stones the beautiful figure of Bor, the first god. When our world ends, Surtur will lead his fire-giants north from Muspel, overwhelm the gods and dart fire about him to consume the universe; he will stay, in the heart of fire, an enigmatic, ultimate, implacable silhouette.

  Not all creation myths are so dramatic. In Australian aboriginal myth, the Father of All Spirits gently wakes the Sun Mother in a peaceful, expectant cosmos. Where she walks, plants and creatures wake. In this myth, and that of the African bushmen, fear and darkness come when the first night falls. The first men are terrified until a new dawn brings salvation.

  In various ways, night, the dark and blackness are a part of Creation. The fearfulness that has accompanied black throughout its history may in part date back to the terror night held, especially for nomadic peoples who may not always have been able to kindle fires. Even now a city blacked-out by a power cut can seem as dangerous as a jungle.

  The myth of the First Night, which in several mythologies terrifies the first humans, is not peculiar to ancient tribespeople. Until the nineteenth century, most people believed there had been a First Night. Andrew Marvell described it in the seventeenth century when Oliver Cromwell nearly died in a coaching accident. Marvell compared the English nation, fearing it had lost its light, to the first man gazing in horror where the sun had set, ‘while dismal blacks hung round the Universe’. Till morning came,

  When streight the Sun behind he descry’d

  Smiling serenely from the further side.2

  Cromwell’s coach was not his hearse, and England was safe. And as often happens in descriptions of night, lightless emptiness is treated not as a void but as a jet-black substance: Marvell’s ‘dismal blacks’ were funeral curtains, which were hung both outside and inside a house following an important death.

  ‘Night’ is itself one of the great Indo-European words which has spread – like night – round the world. It is nakti in Sanskrit, nyx in Greek, nox in Latin, nacht in German, nicht in Scots, night in English, nuit in French, notte in Italian (also noche in Spanish, noite in Portuguese and noc in Slovak). The expression ‘black night’ is ancient: the idea that night is not merely lightless, but has the solid colour of black. The ancient Greeks called night ‘black Nyx’, ‘black-winged Nyx’ or ‘sable-vestured Nyx’. Night was not black, however, when she brought longed-for repose: then she is ‘quiet Nyx’ or (for the Romans) ‘dewy Nox’.

  So Shakespeare, more than a millennium later, would refer to ‘sable Night’, or speak of night’s ‘black mantle’, or call night a ‘matron, all in black’. Even when black, however, night was not always frightening. ‘Come, gentle night,’ Juliet calls from her balcony, ‘come, loving, black-brow’d night, / Give me my Romeo’ (III.ii.20–21). For night is also the nest of love, and may be the further, dark lover who brings her lover to her.

  ONE MIGHT ASK what was black, in actual history, before mankind appeared. For when our world cooled into a blue planet, all water and minerals, few of its materials were black. Most rocks are light-coloured, in the yellow-red-brown range. There are black stones like mudstones, or haematite (an iron oxide), or spirel (a mix of iron, chrome, aluminium and manganese), and black veins of serpentinite can be traced in the cliffs of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. Most of the minerals we would call ‘jet-black’ are, like jet (or like the ‘black gold’, oil), relatives of coal – that is, hugely compressed forms of long-dead vegetation. One might then say it was with organic life – and death – that black first became the colour of death.

  Of the natural black stones, the most beautiful is obsidian (illus. 2). It was plentiful in the primal world, though fresh-made obsidian may still be found today. It is formed when – in a country like Iceland – molten lava falls on snow and ice and solidifies at once befor
e there is time for crystals to form; hence its polished, freely curving surface. It sits heavy in the hand like a thick twist of jet-black glass. And obsidian is 50 per cent silica – glass – but black from the presence in it of iron, chrome, magnesium and manganese. Black granite has the same make-up, but is rougher because it crystallized slowly; it is also less black.

  We speak of carbon-black, but the naturally occurring forms of carbon, such as diamonds, are not black: graphite is dark grey. Our carbon-black comes from burned organic things, mostly burned wood. But though plants may go black after death, very few plants are black in life. Most stems and leaves are green, since chlorophyll drinks in red and blue light, and reflects the green away. The petals of flowers are all the colours of the rainbow, and may also be of the deepest red-black or purple, but they almost never deceive the eye into seeming jet-black, even if they are called black poppies, or black mourning brides, or the coal-black pansy. No flower is quite as Alexandre Dumas père describes his black tulip: ‘the whole of the flower was as black and shining as jet’. The reason for this is that the dark pigment used by plants, anthocyanin, has a red to purple colour which in low saturation makes flower petals pink, and in high concentration can be a deep chocolate purple, but is never quite black.3

  Animals, by contrast, have melanin, which allows a true black, and black in the animal kingdom is a colour of life. Many creatures are truly black, in whole or in part. We may see a black swan, own a black cat or a black dog, ride a black horse or pay to see a toreador provoke a black bull. The black of all-black creatures is intense and lustrous, and demonstrably important in mating choices. Charles Darwin concluded that in species of birds where the male is black while the female is brown or mottled (like the blackbird, blackcock and black Scoter-duck), blackness was ‘a sexually selected character’. As to other species where both sexes were black (like crows, and some cockatoos, storks and swans), he concluded again that their blackness was ‘the result of sexual selection’. More specifically, a recent study has suggested that in the Gouldian finch, ‘black male preference for black females’ is ‘lateralized’ in the right eye, so that if that eye is covered, males are sexually disabled, while when black males sing to black females they gaze to them with their right eye especially. Other creatures anticipate the human taste for chequerboards and flaunt a strong contrast of black with white – lapwings, skunks, pandas, penguins – and in piebald creatures, too, such conspicuous colouring may be sexually selected while also sometimes serving as warning colour, as with the skunk. Other warning combinations include black with yellow, as in some snakes and in insects that sting: predatory great tits have, it appears, an inherited avoidance of black-and-yellow prey. Black with yellow may also serve as camouflage, as it does for a leopard stalking in long grass. But for whatever purpose an animal may be black or part-black, its colour is an asset to it. It has bred itself black slowly, from dull beginnings, because its blackness helped it to flourish. The older among us may speak of grey panthers, but we know that in the jungle few panthers are grey, while black panthers darkly burn with life.4

  It is also clear that animals are not spooked by black in the way that humans are. To a cow, a black snake is no more frightening than a lime-green one, and you cannot spoil an animal’s day by setting a black cat to cross its path. Animals are protected, it would seem, by the fact that since they do not have words, they also lack metaphors. It was a bad day for black animals when humans came on the scene, and began to speak, and to use metaphors too. Then the black of fearful night could be the black of misfortune, depression and death. A military or financial reverse could be black. The bad gods could be black gods, and black creatures their creatures; so black cats, goats and ravens became accursed, and even might be the Devil, or a devil, incognito.

  Not all black creatures became simply bad once humans joined the world of creatures. For centuries the raven has had a black reputation because it likes lonely places and is glad to eat carrion. In the Bible the raven is held in abhorrence: ‘And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination . . . every raven after its kind’ (Leviticus 11:13–15). But reference to the raven may also be benign. Jesus Christ made a characteristic retort on ancient prejudice when he said, ‘Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap . . . and God feedeth them’ (Luke 12:24). Perhaps because of the birds’ intelligence, ravens were widely associated, in mythology, with prophecy. Ravens attended the Greek god Apollo, and also the Celtic god Lugus and the Norse god Odin. And in the Old Testament, when the prophet Elijah flees King Ahab, the ravens, at God’s command, bring him flesh and bread at morning and evening. In a Bulgarian icon of around 1700 Elijah squats on the earth near the brook Kerith (which runs at the lower right of frame) while jet-black ravens bring food in their beaks (illus. 3).

  The same icon shows another black creature of mixed credit in myth, the black horse. In the bottom right an inset panel shows Elijah ascending to Heaven in a chariot drawn by a black and a white horse. The Bible also says that Elijah went to Heaven in a whirlwind, but the whirlwind in turn bore a chariot and horses: ‘behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire’ (2 Kings 2:11). Those horses have no other colour than fire, which is represented in the icon by the rich red behind the chariot. Both the black and the white horse – together with the colour red – have presumably come from other books of the Bible. In Zechariah 6 the four spirits of the heavens have the form of horses drawing chariots: in colour they are red, black, white and grizzled. Zechariah says that ‘the black horses . . . go forth into the north country’ and in other mythologies, for instance Chinese, the colour black is associated with North. Because of its fierce cold, ‘the north’ could be a dark idea, but the black horses of Zechariah are not frightening; on the contrary, Zechariah’s angel tells him that the black horses ‘have quieted my spirit in the north country’.

  3 Bulgarian icon of Elijah, c. 1700.

  Again, in Revelation 4, when the first four seals are opened, four horses emerge that are red, white, black and ‘pale’. But though the colour black is often associated with death, the rider of the black horse is not Death – Death, famously, rides the ‘pale’ horse. The rider of the black horse carries a pair of scales, while a voice from their midst calls out the price of wheat and barley, and begs for the oil and wine not to be damaged. This rider is usually said to represent Famine, since his prices for grains are inflated, though the oil and wine may be those used by the Christian faithful in sacraments. Clearly an ominous prodigy of the Apocalypse, he is not more deadly than his fellows, who are identified with War and Conquest as well as with Death.

  In art, in the oil paintings of later ages, black horses may have a magnificent beauty (see illus. 73), but in the symbolisms of myth and philosophy they are more likely to be alarming than exhilarating. In his Phaedrus Plato compares the soul to a charioteer with two horses in harness, one noble and white, the other unruly, ugly and dark or black: this horse represents the anarchic force of passion and lust. Other black creatures have still less ambiguity. Black cats have sometimes been thought lucky – supposedly King Charles I said his luck died when his black cat died – but most often black cats are evil embodied. The familiars of witches would take this form, as might the witches themselves, and in the Middle Ages black cats were sometimes tried, and burned alive or hanged. In a nineteenth-century drawing by Théodule Ribot, three witches crouch, absorbed in the ingredients of their cauldron, while the large black cat, on the shoulder of one of them, seems itself to have a hump. Its head, with pricked ears, could also be a horned head, presiding over the witches’ work with glimmering eyes (illus. 4).

  It was not only in the Middle Ages, or in remote villages, that black cats were thought devilish. The great art critic John Ruskin described the onset of his insanity in 1878:

  A large black cat sprang forth from behind the mirror! Persuaded that the foul fiend was here at last in his own person . .
. I grappled with it with both my hands [and] flung it with all my might and main against the floor . . . [Ruskin’s ellipsis] A dull thud – nothing more. No malignant spectre arose which I pantingly looked for . . . I had triumphed! . . . I threw myself upon the bed . . . and there I was found later on in the morning in a state of prostration and bereft of my senses.5

  4 Théodule Ribot (1823–1891), undated chalk drawing of three witches seated around a cauldron.

  It is not known whether Ruskin attacked a real or an illusory cat. It is interesting that, even as his sanity fails, he records that the cat was merely a cat. His ‘I had triumphed’ then becomes ambiguous, since he speaks as though he overcame the Devil, when it rather sounds as though reality triumphed over delusion. Either way his victory felled him with exhaustion – as might happen after a head-on struggle with an age-old human error, such as the belief in evil powers who could haunt us in the bodies of black beasts.