Red and Blue: “Living and Knowing”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Except for the traditional block-printed Marseille decks, I get very little mileage out of color symbolism in the tarot. Even then, I stay mainly with the three primary colors red, blue and yellow (along with black and white), scarcely noticing the uncommon secondary hues of green, orange and purple, and even less so the occasional gold, beige or flesh-tone. The situation is made worse by the fact that no two decks (unless they are facsimile cousins) share a common palette, so descriptive commentary on the color scheme — often iterated ad nauseam by TdM writers — isn’t universal and is therefore largely a waste of time to memorize.
In my own system, red represents actions, blue emotions and yellow ideas; material matters usually default to green but they can also be expressed by earthy brown or dull black (and more rarely by metallic shades of bronze or gold), while white denotes spirituality. In Jung’s four-fold typology of the psyche, I ascribe red to intuition;* blue to feeling; yellow to thinking; and the subdued earth tones to sensation. Ideally, Wands will exhibit the red of Fire, Cups the blue of Water, Swords the yellow of Air and Pentacles the mixed values of Earth, generally greens and browns. The Minor Arcana of the Thoth deck make a valiant stab at scrupulous accuracy in this regard, while among the RWS decks the color-saturated Albano-Waite shows the strongest adherence to the model.
Going back to the TdM, I was reading that the reds can represent the simple, unexamined act of living one’s life, while the blues convey a more deeply emotional state of contemplation. This premise was floated in a more profound discussion of the two trees in the biblical Garden of Eden; the Tree of Life stood for the “need to live life” and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil the equally compelling “need to know life.” Being told to avoid doing something is often the only incentive one needs for giving it a try; the psychological imperative in Eden was that the allegorical eating of the apple allowed Adam and Eve to jump-start their growth away from primordial innocence and toward self-aware individuation. They needed to get on with it for the advancement of the species.
In practical reading situations, I tend to overlook color theory and just react to the imagery, at least to the limited extent that I scan the pictures at all; most of the time, the instant I identify a card my internalized knowledge of its meaning kicks in and I don’t have to scrutinize it any more closely. Although more “painterly” decks tend to disregard the symbolic color palette, I still like to see at least a nod to the above themes. When working with particularly artistic decks, I often find that the metaphysical aspects of color are thrown overboard entirely in favor of the artist’s creative vision; but then, these decks tend to play fast-and-loose with the iconography as well, so beyond their merit as works of art there is really not much to recommend them.
As a one-time student of the graphic arts, I have a real fondness for bold colors that carry a message, and I would like to see this adopted more rigorously in deck designs as a kind of encoded language conveying their quaternary nature. The Albano-Waite tarot probably comes the closest with its representative background colors, but this isn’t carried forward into the details. Why can’t the suit emblems reflect their elemental persuasion? All staves could be red, all chalices blue, all blades yellow and all emblems of Earth (they don’t have to represent coins) brown, green or black. There have been a few decks that made a genuine effort to incorporate elaborate color symbolism (for example, Pat Zalewski’s Magical Tarot of the Golden Dawn), but what they gain in chromatic fidelity they forego in narrative complexity and metaphysical coherence. There has to be a happy medium.
*I prefer to think of Jung’s “intuition” in functional terms as “egoic aspiration;” its insights are more directed than spontaneous, while unstructured discernment of the imaginative, psychic kind is primarily emotional in nature.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 19, 2023.
