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DARKNESS, BLACKNESS, COLOUR & EVIL: A DISCUSSION
This little essay came about because of an earlier reddit post, where a redditor asked the not unreasonable question: why is darkness and blackness so often associated with evil in fantasy?
There were some thoughtful and interesting answers in the post, but it seemingly suffered from some reactive down-voting. I also felt that the answer that got the most upvotes was really only a thin part of the whole answer, so, here we go…
The immediate answer to this is that we need to seperate out ‘darkness’ and the ‘colour black’ per se. Darkness is almost universally a pan-human fear. We are diurnal animals, and a lot of the large predators that need to be avoided are (or were, before extinction) more active at night. Lions, hyaenas, wolves and even crocodiles (if the water is warm enough) are much more dangerous at night, at least for a primate with relatively poor night vision. We can presume that probably cave lions or thylacoleo were too. Darkness, as such, is one of several primal dislikes. Isolation (or being without a tribe) is another, as is silence. That last one may seem strange but think about the phrase, ‘It’s quiet, too quiet.’ This is a cliché that is linked to an actual fear. If a predator is obvious and easily avoided, then animals in the vicinity will give out warning calls to identify where it is. It’s certainly worrying when birds and monkeys start making alarm calls, but not terrifying. When all of the animals surrounding you go silent, that is much more something to fear.
One thing that does strike me as interesting is that even in cultures where you might expect the night be less threatening than the daytime, there is still an association between night and evil spirits. I’m thinking in particular of Australian Aboriginal nations living a long way inland. Heat death, venomous snakes and (before they were extinct) megalania would have made the daytime really quite dangerous. But, as far as I can tell, these inland cultures all still associate the night with evil spirits. This looks to be a very deep-rooted link in the human mind.
So, let’s move onto the colour black. The original redditor is not the first to notice that the colour black is associated with evil, not just in English language fantasy, but in the English language. I can name all manner of obscure goblins and devils from English folklore that have black in the name, whether it is a ‘black bug’ (bug as in ‘goblin’, as per ‘bugbear’), or a ‘black boy’, or a ‘black boll’ or ‘bull’ (where bol/bul is a archaic word for a monster) or even ‘black angel’ to mean a devil. Draugnr were certainly described as black, and ‘black elves’ (probably cognate with dwarves) were unpleasant, whereas ‘light elves’ were allies of the gods. It is so prevalent, that a lot of English speakers assume that it’s simply because of a straightforward connection between darkness and blackness, which I don’t think is supported by the evidence. White is also frequently used as a colour for evil (and the dead in particular) across various non-European cultures, but as it happens, also in Europe. In East Anglia a white cat is unlucky to meet, not a black one, and the ‘boneless’ that haunts Oxfordshire lanes was a white, shapeless monstrosity. Both white and black ghosts appear in English folklore.
The association between the colour black and evil seems to be a cultural one. I cannot prove, but I suspect that it has something to do with how a corpse of European complexion tends to turn darker after death. So black therefore becomes a ‘death colour’ in Europe. Perhaps because bones are white, you get a similar association between white and death in parts of East and Southeast Asia.
Colour associations with death and the dead occur elsewhere too.
In another example of colour associations you probably haven’t heard of, it seems that at least in some cultures pale hair is associated with the dead and/or returning from the dead. This might seem strange, but human hair does actually become more pale, sometimes turning noticeably ‘blonde’ or ‘red’ over time (usually a very long time) after death. We’re talking a very long time here. It’s due to the melanin in the hair changing confirmation slowly over time as it breaks down, if I remember right. You need to have a mummified or preserved body on display for years or decades before you’ll see this change, but there are cultures that do this (and there is good evidence of ancient cultures having done this too: for instance, the human bones with holes drilled through them for roping together the various bits throughout much of Britain, or the weird patchwork corpses of the Scottish Isles). Or, you can also discover this colour change by chance. Most ‘bog-bodies’ from Ireland, for example, have hair that is more pale than it was in life. So, the upshot is that once you’ve worked out that hair grows more pale/blondish/reddish after death, you start to associate this with the dead. Maybe after a time you forget why you think that dead people have pale hair, but it sticks culturally. There are posited theories that this is why fairies in some European traditions are often blonde… it could have been a signal to the audience of a story that these are actually the unshriven dead, or the pagan dead, or similar. I’m almost certain that it is the reason that the fairy Yallery Brown (yellowy-brown) has a long blonde beard (he is after all quite literally discovered in what appears to be a grave). It’s probably also the reason that, for example, Maori Patupaiarehe traditionally have pale or red hair: again, this was probably intended to indicate to the audience that the Patupaiarehe were some sort of ghost or spirit (the Maori cosmology draws a pretty blurry line between scary ghosts, revered ancestors and gods: they all seem to exist on a spectrum of supernatural being).
To go off on a brief digression, one of my pet theories is that the reason that the Maori did a little better in their dealings with Europeans than some other first nations peoples is that they had a pre-existing folklore about evil/tricksy white skinned creatures who live in the water. The Maori word for a European, Pakeha, is a modification of Pakehaha, the name of a white-skinned trickster water-fairy. I’m fairly sure there was a conversation early in contact that went something like this: First Maori: You won’t believe it! Pakehaha are real! Second Maori: Just remember you can’t trust a word they say. They’ll try to steal everything you own. First Maori: Noted!
The original redditor also ask why can’t pink be the colour of evil? One other point of interest is that a lot of what we think of as obvious colours don’t go back very far historically. We think that the earliest systems of colours were something akin to just white/black/red. If a colour is going to be attached to good or evil, then it is likely to be one of these three colours. As it happens, all three of these colours (white/black/red) certainly have been attached to evil (or to the returned dead) by some culture or another. Other colours seem to accrue over time. Usually blue/green (as a single colour) and yellow come next. Then blue and green split, and you get other shades like orange and purple. This all sounds like conjecture, but careful reading of very old texts like Homer or the Epic of Gilgamesh or Egyptian texts seem to bear out this slow progression of white/black/red through to the rainbow. And there are cultures today, such as in Papua New Guinea, where orange/yellow/red is the same colour, as is blue/green. That’s a very longwinded way of saying that any colour other than black/white/red is less likely to end up with deeply rooted associations with either good or evil; because good and evil are concepts that go back a long way into prehistory when the verbal colour pallet was more limited. I suspect (but again, cannot prove) that this is probably the reason why Baba Yaga’s knights are black, red and white. A modern person trying to come up with a colour for the day is unlikely to pick ‘white’. Blue or yellow seem more likely choices. But if Baba Yaga is a very, very old story, then it make sense that the knights occupy instead the spectrum of an iron age or earlier culture.
Red, of course, is also associated with evil, but it tends to be a more bloody violent sort of evil. So we have redcaps, who bath their hats in blood, or the blood-soaked and red god Ares/Mars (who frankly, wasn’t even much liked even by the ancient Greeks or Romans: his depiction in the Iliad is anything but complimentary), or red devils of Abrahamic religions, or red demons of East Asian cultures.
I want to say finally that of course the uncomfortable associations between darkness of skin and evil has been noticed and discussed in fantasy previously, through academic texts, but also in novels. Ursula Le Guin famously did this with her Earthsea stories. N.K. Jemisin also plays around with these notions. I even think it is unfair to accuse Tolkien of mindlessly associating ‘black’ with ‘evil’. His elves love the night and the stars. High Elves often dress in black. The colour of Gondor is black. He goes to some length to depict the Harad recruits as just ordinary boys and men taken from their village, and after the fall of Sauron the king of the Haradrim makes peace with Gondor, and the impression is given of a king who genuinely wants peace. The Haradrim almost certainly had the resources to keep fighting, but they didn’t. Once Sauron’s lies were removed, the Haradim were able to express their humanity and express their desire for peace.
tldnr: The association with darkness and evil is more or less pan-human. But the association with ‘black’ and ‘evil’ is not. Some cultures do attach evil and in particular death or ghosts to ‘white’. Others attach ‘bloody’ and ‘violent’ evil to ‘red’. It’s actually quite complicated.