Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 12

People began to seriously study light in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You will recognize many names of these “light researchers”: Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Leeuwenhoek, Roemer, Huygens, and Newton. Artists and photographers tried to control and capture the movement of light rays and map its colors. Visionaries and poets wrote about light and color. “Seeing the light” became a way of finding truth. The great English painter James Mallord William Turner studied light science and color theory and put it to work. He called his paintings his “color beginnings.” In his brilliant chrome yellows, organic oranges, and cloudy whites, he connected color to our deep spiritual feelings. When he died, the last words on his lips were: “The sun is God.”

Edwin Babbitt, who wrote a book called The Principles of Light and Color, said light reveals the glories of the external world. “It is quite time that the wonderful world of light and color which is invisible to the ordinary eye, and which is capable of being demonstrated by spectrum analysis and otherwise should be made known, especially as so many mysteries of nature and human life are cleared up thereby, and such marvelous powers of vital and mental control are revealed.”¹³ He believed color provides a storehouse of power capable of revitalizing us, healing and delighting us.

I’ve noticed when I visit Santa Fe, people talk about the light a lot — probably because there’s so much of it there! A photographer I once spoke with worked at night using technologies born of military spying. He explained to me the theory of “visual” versus “haptic” sight. Haptic comes from the Greek word haptos meaning “hands on.” You “see” with your body. He said, “We’re all a bit of both.”

Helen Keller must have been more “haptic” than most people. She scolded us sighted ones a bit. “The panorama of color and action which fills the world is taken for granted… it is a great pity that in the world of light, the gift of sight is used only as a mere convenience.” Keep your face to the sunshine, she advised, and then “joy in all things shall be reflected.”¹⁴

The Gospel writer Matthew tells us, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”¹⁵

In our Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, we have a hymn called Phos hilaron or “O Gracious Light,” which is based on early Jewish prayers.

O gracious Light,

pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,

O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!

Now as we come to the setting of the sun,

and our eyes behold the vesper light,

we sing your praises, O God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,

O Son of God, O Giver of Life,

and to be glorified through all the worlds.¹⁶

Glorified through all the worlds! Not just this one, but all the light worlds. All the color worlds.

Sun Mystery schools existed throughout medieval Europe. Christ was called Sol Invictus. And his mother, Mary, was called “starlight”: Stella Maris. Ancient mysteries tell us that beyond our sun lies another sun. A spiritual sun. People have been known to meditate on the sun until they see the “sun at midnight” or the “sun beyond the sun.” Even if we don’t mediate like this, we’re apt to notice the sun and its magnificent colors at two times during the day: dawn and sunset. We have learned that looking directly into the sun can harm our eyes. However, sun-gazing has been a part of most ancient mysteries and spiritual practices. Even St. Patrick said he’d been saved from Satan by Helios. The Sun. The Devil fell upon him “like a rock,” he wrote in his Confession. He couldn’t move. Then, with all his might, he called on the Sun and he was freed from his misery. If you visit the Vatican you can see a mosaic in the chapel cave of St. Columbanus, of monks praying to the sun.

For about six hundred years Christian monks lived on Skellig Michael, the rock pinnacle that sticks up out of the Atlantic, eight miles off Ireland’s Kerry Coast. They braved Viking raids and harsh conditions, collecting dew and rainwater to drink. A half-dozen of their beehive huts are still there. St. Fionan supposedly founded it in the 500s but legends about this mysterious rock indicate it was a sacred spot long before the Christians came. Recognizing the spiritual importance of the sun, it’s very likely these monks began the tradition of carving Irish crosses with circles on top, honoring the sun. Monks copied old precious manuscripts that would have been lost to Europe’s Dark Ages had not these scribal scholars known that “the White Gospel page turned darkness to light.”¹⁷

Further remnants of how the early Irish valued the sun can be seen in the sixty-five tall round towers still scattered around Ireland, many with conical roofs intact. Some experts believe they may have functioned like antenna to collect subtle magnetic sun radiation. Rubble and dirt fill the bases leading to speculation that the towers were “tuned” like huge organ pipes. The monks who didn’t build them, but set up residence near them, benefited from whatever sun vibrations they collected, as did the plants that flourished around them.¹⁸

The early Egyptians revered sunlight by many names: Kheperi, the infant sun of the morning; Re, the powerful sun at noon; and Atum, the enfeebled but creative sun of the evening. They called it The Great Disk. The Flaming One. Normandi Ellis points out that “Light is the source of life, an electrical impulse and binding force that sizzles and snaps through nature and the human body, through every animal, every chromosome and atom… We are tongues of flame leaping from the One Fire. We are gods in the body of God.”¹⁹

And the Persians, a thousand years earlier than Abraham, learned about light and darkness from their prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster. Ahura Mazda was the divinity associated with light. Evil, they believed, sprang from Angra Mainyu, who was associated with darkness. On a cosmic plane armies of light warred against armies of darkness. A series of messianic figures would come, he said, to bring people back to oneness. This early Iranian prophet who wore white until he died in about 551 B.C.E. called God “Self-Luminous” and “The King of Light.”