Flying The Colours

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 21)

Iron Hans by Ignaz Taschner

So for the last few weeks I’ve written about Sacred Stories and the Severance, Threshold, Return progression that often runs through such tales. Now I want to turn to another set of stages, associated with three colours; black, red and white. By retracing my steps through these classic myth themes I will be interested in how they do or don’t inform our continued investigation of a Liturgy of the Wild. My hunch so far is they may prove useful.

These colours are often located in fairy tales, famously the Grimms' tale Iron Hans, where a young man rides three horses into three battles, a black horse, a red horse, a white horse. Something in us just wakes up when these colours get vibrationally close to each other. What I’m going to do first of all is make associations between the colours and their attributes, in doing so drawing on the work of Robert Bly, Michael Meade and James Hillman. I’ve been teaching it so long it’s etched into my own life experience, but it’s always good to gesture back towards the well where you first drank the water.

I first came across a version of these associations about twenty-five years ago. I was living in a one-room bedsit in a men’s hostel. No phone, no computer, no telly, the only company coming from when I walked to a red phone box twice a week and dialled friends. I was in the middle of a divorce and absolutely assailed with heartbreak. It was hellish. But this degraded moment, this Katabasis, this descent into Negredo, was the very thing that would provide the ferment of what would come after. And it was absorbing what I am about to describe that turned a prison cell into a hermit’s hut.