The Color of Polytheism

2014-03-30

The Color of Polytheism

I have started reading a small book called Chromophobia by David Batchelor in which the author tracks a long-established tendency in Western culture to eschew color in art. The tradition is deep, going back to the Ancients. As Batchelor says, “… Plato, for whom truth, embodied in the Idea, was, as Martin Jay has put it, ‘like a visible form blanched of its colour’.

Being chromophilic (which is not used to mean “lover of color”, but that’s how I intend it) myself I have never concerned myself with color hatred very much, but now I think about it, we live in a country that has particularly chromophobic roots. Our incomprehensibly beloved “Pilgrims” (emphasize the “grim” part) were all black and white. And they came from a black and white European culture. 

Thinking that this trait of fearing/hating color can be traced back to Plato made me wonder if it has a correlation with a cultural concept of deity. The single-God concept demands an all-in-one view, and white is all-in-one (wavelengths) and black is all-in-one (pigments). So do single-God cultures tend to be chromophobic? Some Christians certainly are, and a lot of Jews are. (Plato’s writings survived early Christian purges because they were largely considered supportive of a Christian view, unlike many other pre-Christian philosophers.)* What about Catholics, who can be quite colorful? They have many Saints, who, in a way, reflect different aspects of sanctity – the way colors reflect different components of white light. Hindus are manifestly polytheistic, and what more colorful culture can be found? They have a deity for almost every different world-view you can think of, from pure physical prowess (Hanuman) to absolute holy purity (Brahma) and hundreds of others I don’t know about.  Colors play an active role in this multi-faceted view by helping to define the attributes of different deities.

I am just starting the book. Perhaps Batchelor makes this point himself later on….. Now I am wondering how the Muslims do or don’t fit the view of monotheist chromophobia.

*   Plato’s Theory of Forms

     by Ian Bruce © Copyright 1998

“If we ask the question of why in the two thousand years of suppression of ideas and burning of books that has been the Christian era, Plato's dialogues have survived intact, we must answer that Plato's theories are fundamentally supportive of basic Christian doctrine.”

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/com3118/Plato.html