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Colour in the Diagrams.

Colour exists in the spiritual world as well as in the natural. Spiritual Colours originate in the spiritual sun which is the first emanation of the Divine Love and Wisdom of the LORD who is a Man. His emanating Love operates and is felt in the spiritual world as fire and in the sight of the angels is red like fire, while His Wisdom or Truth operates and is perceived as light and is white. Thus red and white are the primary Colours. The other Colours arise from various combinations of these on a ground of dark.

The natural sun is from the spiritual sun, its fire from the love and its light from the wisdom of that sun. This sun also emits two principles, one flammeous or fiery, the other luminous or splendid; the first red from fire, the second white from light. (HH 118, 128.)

Colour becomes perceptible in objects. Objects modify and variously present the influent beams of the sun. This they do according to their form philosophically considered, which is not mere shape but that arrangement and relation of parts on which their quality depends; thus the Colour of objects is as their form. (TCR 52, 53.)

Objects in which the flammeous elements of the sun rules are red, those in which the luminous rules are white. Red represents love or good; white, truth or wisdom.

In the heavens, Colour is genuine. The higher and more perfect the heaven, the brighter, richer and more living the Colour.

Objects apart from the influent beams of the sun have no Colour, nonetheless there is in them a certain something as a ground of dark for the reception of Colour. This ground, like Colour itself, is two-fold, one part for red, the other for white. In objects of orderly form and especially in objects in heaven this ground of dark is mild and agreeable. In hell it is the reverse, a result of the evil and the false; and the Colours there are spurious, dismal, and repulsive. (AC 364.)

In these Diagrams the innermost or supreme degree would, were it possible, be drawn in sun Colour, which Colour arises from a perfect union of red and white and most perfectly represents the union of love and wisdom in the soul; but as we are unable to produce sun-Colour we have adopted gold as the nearest approach to it.

In the representation of the three degrees of the mind and of the three heavens the celestial is drawn in red, the spiritual in white (instead of blue), -and the natural in green.

Were the Colour of the spiritual degree to be determined by good, which is the affectional or voluntary of this degree, the Colour would be blue, but white is chosen-the general correspondent of the intellectual. Blue, however, is implied in the white which corresponds to the truth or intellectual principle of the spiritual degree, because truth reduced to practice implants the good of truth and so imparts a tint of blue to the white of the spiritual heaven. The good of the spiritual degree and of the spiritual heaven in its essence is truth from the good of the celestial, and thus is intellectual good. (HH 118, 128; AE 405[c], 832; D.W. in AE I; DLW 380; AC 9467.)


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