Colour, Before the Mind Explained It
Long before modern psychology measured reaction times and preference scales, colour was treated as force. In ancient Egypt, certain hues were reserved for ritual. In China, colour marked direction, element, and season. In Islamic tradition, green wasn’t calming—it was sacred. Across cultures, it wasn’t just how a colour looked, but what it did.
Modern theories often reduce colour to marketing cues—blue for trust, red for urgency, yellow for energy. But those tests measure surface reaction, not root meaning. Goethe, writing in 1810, argued that colour was not a product of light alone, but of human perception. He believed it shaped emotion from the inside—blue pulling the soul inward, red pressing it outward. His work was dismissed by physics, but studied by artists for generations.
Even today, colour affects pulse, appetite, sleep, memory. Not as suggestion, but as stimulus. The body registers it before the mind explains it. Which is why the oldest systems didn’t describe colour as illusion or symbol. They described it as power.
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