Course XXXVIII - Teaching 12: How Auric Colors Influence History and Art

The prevailing color in the aura of certain peoples or groups sometimes is so heavily printed in the subconscious of the environment in which it acted that has determined in the aura of this environment entirely characteristic and traditional colors or colored forms.
Sometimes the color of the aura is so powerful that prevails in tastes, habits and way of dressing of a whole people. The Chinese were extremely influenced by their prevailing auric color (of course, this color here referred nothing has to do with the present auric color of China, which is very different from that of millennia ago). Deep wisdom, love of study, disdain for life and passion, and intellectual culture continuously encompassed this environment with a yellow aura also reflected on his clothes and on the art of this people.
In Kamapura there is one statue of the Buddha, in which the yellow color of Siddhartha’s skin looks as if pervaded by sunrays.
Among the Greek, great followers of plastic arts and according to which rhythm and movement had an almost mathematical harmony, auric colors had to be white and luminous; thence, nobles, sages and rulers did not use other color than white in their dresses.
Romans, imitators of the Greek, also adopted attires of this kind. Widowers who were in mourning used white clothes; but the Christendom, a religion centered on sorrows of Humanity, earthly miseries and pain of a God made man, darkened its aura and changed white color for black.
Julian the Apostate, a Hellenic Initiate from the death of paganism, unsuccessfully tried to re-establish the white peplos. Rows of innumerable black monks, with their dark cross, would go ahead, inexorably, destroying the whiteness of pagan gods.
The new color of the prevailing aura had overcome over-imposed on the ancient aura. Thence it was impossible to maintain internally what already was non-existent in the inner auric side of the world. But where an aura manifests entirely its colors –even the most tenuous and softest color– is in the instinctive experience of an artist and, over and above, in that of a painter. Painting, among all arts, is quite near clairvoyance. Colors never seen or invented are printed on canvass by the magical brush-stroke of an inspired artist. The loftiest ecstasy of pictorial art grants an artist the virtue of knowing and printing, partially, colors of the aura.
Giovanni de Fiesole (Fra Angelico), who lived in a constant atmosphere of devotion, painted lofty virgins, in which colors white and blue mainly prevail. We are told of this friar he had painted the Annunciation: the picture was finished but he was unable to translate into the canvass the eyes of the Mother of God, those blue eyes that he had in his soul; he was tired and half asleep on his easy chair he saw how the angels of heaven descended to his cell and painted Mary’s eyes; but the eyes of that virgin have a blue color that no other brush could never equal.
Astral colors are also masterly reproduced on Tintoretto’s paintings; on his chiaroscuros, where ideas and concepts expressed are so well emphasized, the same color changes in such way that only a seer or an intuitive person can recognize it.
A noble tourist was watching one Tintoretto’s painting in the ducal palace of Venice and said: the blue of this sky is unreal, I never saw it; but has the power to awaken the soul, the most perfect ecstasy of amplitude.
In Benares there is one statue of Kali and on a wall at the far end of the temple, there is so significant red that seemingly contains all hatreds, desires, passions and sorrows of the goddess of destruction.
Also Botticelli, in his painting of the Lady of the Mercy in attires, color of the sky, paleness of Christ’s corpse, puts certain shade of red, orange and deep green, which gives the soul a sense of total desolation and that of any conceivably pain.
In the art of stained-glass windows, also astral colors play a very important part. Since the times of those famous stained-glass windows of Tyro and Sidon, never had been seen glasses so artistically painted, until times of Bizantium and, later, in Venice. In the Middle Ages this art was surpassed. By a skilful combination of Colors, on a sunny day at noon, Cologne’s Cathedral reflects colors of the aura of an Initiate of Fire on the center of the Temple.
Stained-glass windows in Lyon’s Cathedral, of fourteenth century, cover certain figures with particular color, which reflect exactly the spiritual progress of those beings.
Modern times, which are in quest of a balance of mind and matter, had uniformed the colors of the aura; thence their main trend to remove heavy colors and use undefined, little significant colors.