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How colours are used by different cultures
For thousands of years, colours have formed significant creative and
communicative aspects of human life. Below are some of the ways
communities have communicated through colours.
The Egyptians
The Egyptian culture used colour in all aspects of their lives. They used
vibrant paints in all their decorative drawings and hieroglyphics which
adorned their homes, burial chambers and temples. Temples were used for
healing as well as worship and archaeologists have discovered that Egyptian
temples contained rooms which were constructed in such a way that the
incoming rays of the sun were split into the colours of the spectrum. From
this, Archaeologists believe that the sick were colour diagnosed and then
invited into the room in the temple which glowed with the appropriate
colour to receive colour therapy.
Solarized water was also used in healing by the Egyptians. This is a
treatment still used today and involves the shining of full-spectrum light
through a glass of spring water. The water is then drunk by the patient in
small doses over an advised period of time.
In addition, the Egyptians used gems as part of their colour treatments.
They believed that gems are pure, containing concentrated colour, and so
have a significant effect upon the body. The gemstones were ground up
into a powder which was administered to the patient. This is the same
principle that is used in Ayurvedic medicine.
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Ayurvedic Medicine
Colour therapy is fundamental to the ancient techniques of ayurvedic
medicine, the Indian philosophy which envisages the person as a being who
wears a coat of many colours, which are continually changing according to
the individual’s physical, emotional and mental state. Ayurvedic practitioners
see this coat as composed of seven bodies which merge with each other to
constitute the aura or electromagnetic field around each individual. The
densest of the layers is the physical body, which contains the purest essence
of all the aura layers. Each subsequent layer then becomes finer and after
the eighth are usually not visible, even to those who can see auras.
According Benjamin Whorf's Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis a person's
language determines and limits what the person experiences. This language
barrier can affect one's perception of color. In some cultures, perceptions of
color hark back to the very origins of a language. This is the case in modernday Japan, where green veers toward blue in speech. When the traffic light
blinks green, for example, a Japanese pedestrian will see green but say,
"Let's go - it's blue." Likewise someone who's immature is aoi (blue), not
green. The reason, according to a Japanese source, stems from old Japanese,
which had only four words for color: white, red (deriving from "bright"), black
(from "dark") and blue (everything else).
In Paris, when the traffic light blinks yellow, the French call it orange. In
English, what we call a red cabbage is actually closer to purple.
The Shon a language in Zimbabwe and the Boas language in Liberia have no
words which distinguish red from orange. Therefore, people fail to perceive
different colors because of language limitations.
White would be an inappropriate color for a wedding in China. It is the color
of mourning. If a bride chooses a white wedding gown, her parents would
probably not allow her to get married. And in France, a bride won't be
wearing white if hers is a mariage blanc (white marriage), i.e. a marriage of
convenience for reasons like obtaining working papers.
In India, even in Christian weddings, while most brides wear white, it is
usually relieved by at least a touch of some other color. If a married woman
wears unrelieved white in India, she is inviting widowhood and unhappiness.
Green was a sacred color to the Egyptians representing the hope and joy of
Spring.
Green is a sacred color to Moslems.
Japanese Emperor Hirohito's birthday is celebrated as "Green Day" because
he loved to garden.
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