Inner Fear Of Darkness Create Our View On Black Color
Why are people still wearing the color black to funerals? Death is a hard subject to think about, an ever-present fact that would rob us of our loved ones. It's the most jarring of experiences that we would simply try to forget because we have no means of stopping. A society needs to deal with death and loss just as a person would in order to go on and progress, but how do our society deal with this subject? What are the signs? How do we interpret them? It appears our culture is demonstrating its feeling towards the complex subject of death and loss by proceedings in a funeral.
The choice of color goes beyond a simple fashion choice to show our attitude towards death and how it is viewed as the darkness that follows life. The tradition of wearing the color black to funerals symbolizes the grief and suffering of the mourners and also hints to the fears that stem from that darkness. As darkness conceals our senses and makes us unable to see and acknowledge our environment, so does death represent an unknown but inevitable future that we know nothing of.
Over the past 50 to 100 years, the color black has gone through a major transition, according to Leatrice Eiseman, color specialist and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. Black has been associated with funerals since the Roman Empire. The ancient Romans would wear a dark toga, known as a toga pulla, to mourn the loss of a loved one. In most regions of the world, wearing black clothes is still used as a way to mourn the passing of a loved one. For example in the middle east, specifically Iran, they are expected to wear black for 40 days.
Afterward, close relatives will bring gifts of colored clothes. Then they would take off the black clothes and stop mourning. Likewise, in western cultures, black is used for mourning. Except it’s not worn for 40 days as it is in Iran, usually just on the day of the funeral. Nowadays, black has gradually made its way from being a color associated with grief and morbidity to one known as a fashion staple that radiates sophistication, Eiseman states.
Today, people wear black as a way to appear slimmer, sophisticated, or wealthy. Despite, black being used for luxury, the color's link to gloom still emanates across cultures. For example in American and European mourning practices as well as in fictional depictions of evil - like a witch's hat or the cape of the Grim Reaper. Even in parts of the bible, black is associated with sin and darkness. Why does this color have such an innate eerie and dark feeling? What distinguishes black to be a sad color across so many cultures? To find these answers, we need to analyze the idea of how black correlates to fear and darkness. Black is all lights absorbed, it's what we see when there is no light. Black is the color of darkness.
One of our greatest fears as humans is darkness, which is why black has such a significant amount of symbolic value. Darkness means the inability to see what’s happening in our surroundings and that creates a sense of fear of the unknown. We cannot see in darkness. Therefore, we cannot prepare and plan which makes us anxious and this anxiety further strips the ability to be logical. For example, the knocking of branches against windows are often ignored during the day but during the night, the same sound might appear as a threat from an intruder trying to get in. This is because of the anxiety that kicks in due to fear of the dark.
The fear of darkness is often associated with children rather than adults. Children between the ages of 4-9 are the most afraid and it decreases as they age. Most children don’t know that something might cause them harm, they have to learn from their adults. According to blogger, Vamshi Krishna, “The apprehension adults express when children go near something unknown confirms their fear and thus, they also develop the fear of the unknown which strengthens the fear of the dark”(yourdost.com).
These are some of the psychological aspects of our relationship with darkness and the color that so represents it. Fear of darkness is, in essence, the same as fear of the unknown. "In the dark, our visual sense vanishes, and we are unable to detect who or what is around us. We rely on our visual system to help protect us from harm," said Martin Antony, professor of psychology at Ryerson University in Toronto. Black is inherently associated with the unknown because it takes away the ability to see and realize shapes and masks potential threats.
Many of us may experience a strong fear while walking alone in the dark in a bad part of town, but it's not as common to feel that way in a dark bedroom. Excessive fear of the dark can be caused by a variety of factors. It may come from a negative experience such as getting attacked in a dark place. When I was a child, I would always walk down the hallway in the night to get to the living room. It would usually be pitch black dark when I did this. I remembered always feeling scared that someone would jump out and scare me because of what I experienced with my uncle. Every time I would pass by his room during the night, he would jump out and scare me.
Usually, he would be wearing a black rib-knit three-hole balaclava, which is also known as a ski-mask. It almost resemblance robbers from cartoon series, like SpongeBob Squarepants. The eyes and mouth piece would be cut out. Then, he would yell, “I’m going to get you,” as I ran through the darkness to my grandmother in fear. The most jarring moments of this experience for me was when I had no idea what awaited me in that room, and we all have similar experiences where the fear of the unknown makes us freeze in place.
Conclusion
Our inner fears influence our rituals. Something as mundane as color can have so much history and psychological merit in our society and culture. We can understand from analyzing rituals from a psychological point of view our inner fear of darkness has shaped the way we view the color black.
