Red

Red is the colour of blood and fire, and most of its symbolism follows from those two associations rather than from any single doctrine. Because it signals blood, it stands for both life and violence: for vitality, fertility and love on one side, and for war, danger and sacrifice on the other. In the Roman world red was the colour of Mars and of the general's triumph; in the Christian liturgical calendar red marks Pentecost and the feasts of martyrs, tying it to the Holy Spirit's fire and to blood shed in witness.

In China red is the colour of luck, joy and celebration, worn at weddings and given at the new year, an emphatically positive value that contrasts with the Western sense of warning. In Hindu practice red is auspicious and bridal, associated with the goddess and with the married state through the vermilion sindoor. In the modern chakra scheme red is placed at the root centre, the base of the spine, a twentieth-century Western assignment. Its use for prohibition and alarm is a modern convention built on the same visibility that made it the colour of danger everywhere.

Red is the oldest pigment in human use and the easiest to obtain, and both facts shaped everything that was later said about it.

The base is ochre, iron oxide, which occurs as coloured earth and needs only grinding. Ochre-processing equipment has been recovered from Blombos Cave in South Africa in deposits around a hundred thousand years old, and ochre appears in burials, on rock surfaces and on bodies across every inhabited continent. Nothing else in the palette is that available, and a colour that any community can make is a colour that every community can use.

Above ochre sat the expensive reds. Cinnabar, mercury sulphide, ground to the pigment called vermilion, gave a brilliance ochre cannot and carried the hazards of a mercury ore. Red lead, minium, was cheaper and darkened over time. For textiles the choices were madder, a root dye known across Eurasia, and the insect reds, kermes and later cochineal, which cost many times more.

That range is why red does not carry one meaning. The ochre red of a burial and the vermilion of a manuscript initial and the kermes scarlet of a cardinal's robe are the same hue reached at wildly different cost, and the social weight of the colour in any given context depends on which one is meant. A tradition that reserves red for the powerful is talking about the dyes. A tradition that puts red on everyone is talking about the earth.