Golden Dawn Thoth Color Scales Study Group - Introduction

ravenest

But the scales aren't meant to accurately portray the "true" colors, which don't, strictly speaking, exist on this plane, but merely to serve as an X factor to us lowly humans. Even by their own admission, the tables don't portray the "Limitless Light" (the purest they get is the unportrayable "brilliance" of the King scale) but a representation of a representation.

I guess thats the 'magical color theory' but I feel it does little for its application as a magical technology as I see influence of a color, on a psyche in more subjective terms, in relation to the processes in the observer more than I see the validity of a color being able to instill an influence by some power or enrgy of its 'own' .... but both ideas seem to have magical validity and Crowley never seemed to give one presidence over the other.

I have often heard people on LSD "hear" color and "taste" sound, although my own limited experience in the area showed no such results, unfortunately (although colors did seem "newer" somehow, but that's a story for another time).

It depends on whether the LSD gets into your cognitive pathways inside your brain. The same effect can come about by synesthesia, ( particularly color-graphemic synesthesia), other psychedelic drugs, physical trauma (e.g. a stroke) or 'cross-wiring' ( e.g. a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure).

It is highly probable Mathers experimented with such things, and that the scales were influenced by these experiments.

Maybe with Hashish in Paris but I think the time scale is wrong for Mathers to be on acid or mescaline or any A.L. that Crowley developed from mushrooms (as I think that was after the Mathers period )
 

ravenest

Trippy colors man

Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception described some interesting color effects induced by mescaline. I never noticed colors being affected very much by hash or weed except for increased clarity. I only tried mushrooms a couple of times at night, and it made everything a ghastly orange, extremely unpleasant, and inducing a bit of paranoia.

:shudder: :( The problem there is the mushroom contains a variety of goodies and nasties, one can never tell what combination is going to effect you. A bit like the large list of psycho-active ingedients in different types of ' hash or weed'. It can lift one up with clarity and inspiration or glue one to the couch in a stupor. I think the Psychology of Hashish (by Crowley) contains an extensive list of these psycho-actives.

[Some postulate that it may have been Crowley that introduced Huxley to mescaline.]

I guess now all we need is a volunteer to 'dose up' and repeat Newtons experiments and Goethe's observations ..... please post results below :)
 

Barleywine

Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception described some interesting color effects induced by mescaline. I never noticed colors being affected very much by hash or weed except for increased clarity. I only tried mushrooms a couple of times at night, and it made everything a ghastly orange, extremely unpleasant, and inducing a bit of paranoia.

Like most my age, I experimented. I was in Germany for much of that era. No weed in sight (no great loss, made me paranoid anyway . . . and HUNGRY), a cornucopia of hashish, over-the-counter speed, a bit of opium (stupor, anybody?) and some bad imported acid. None of it produced any kind of dramatic "visual" - or "head" - high, it was all body-centered. Except the acid, but . . . well, I never should have looked in that mirror (if you've ever seen the French-language version of Les Visiteurs - not the NYC knock-off - you'll know what I'm talking about). Mescaline was another exception. Tried it once back in the States, outdoors, at night, in the country. The sky was awash in breathtaking silvery moon-and-star light from horizon to horizon but, as you might suppose, I was more interested in the gorgeous young lady at my side (who I couldn't see very well in the dark anyway :(). And it gave us both the expected stomach cramps, although minor. Mushrooms were never on the menu, so I can't comment there. Full disclosure: 30 years of random workplace drug testing in my subsequent career effectively nipped my experimentation in the bud (or the "buds," if you catch my drift :D).
 

Richard

......Full disclosure: 30 years of random workplace drug testing in my subsequent career effectively nipped my experimentation in the bud (or the "buds," if you catch my drift :D).
Same experience here. I worked mostly in an educational environment. I made an anonymous suggestion (untraceable) that all of the administrators should be tested first as a good example to the other employees }), but that didn't happen, of course :D.

The psilocybin experience was after retirement. There are a few varieties in the woods around my house, but to be on the safe side, mine were home grown from spores legally purchased from a Canadian supplier.

To keep this on topic, it is perhaps significant that the Albano-Waite Tarot, which also was based on the GD color scales, is often referred to as having a very psychedelic, late 1960s hippy look. However, it is not dissimilar to the coloring of the B.O.T.A. in my edition of The Tarot by P.F. Case, which has no connection to the 1960s counterculture movement. However, Mathers was not immune to the lure of mind-altering substances, such as the excellent whiskies from Scotland, so he may have ventured further by experimenting with mescaline and like substances. Certainly Crowley seemed to have a personal interest in such experiences.
 

Richard

:shudder: :( The problem there is the mushroom contains a variety of goodies and nasties, one can never tell what combination is going to effect you. A bit like the large list of psycho-active ingedients in different types of ' hash or weed'. It can lift one up with clarity and inspiration or glue one to the couch in a stupor.
In my experience, after the lights on the front of my CPU morphed into the likeness of a demonic smiley face, I asked my SO why the computer was looking at me like that, and forthwith betook myself to bed and lay there, with one leg over the side with a foot flat on the floor for grounding, until the substance wore off.
 

Barleywine

. . . with one leg over the side with a foot flat on the floor for grounding, until the substance wore off.

I know that trick! It helps keep the room from spinning around and wards off nausea.

Back on topic, when I was in art school we used an artist's paper called Color-Aid paper in our graphic-design collage work that was an intensely colored, often highly saturated, pigment-coated stock. I created a series of two-dimensional works using colors that "flashed" strongly against one another long before I ever heard of the occult concept. It wasn't exactly "op-art," but it had a brisk illusory 3-D presence and powerful vibration to it that was reminiscent of that style. Some of the pieces were quite mesmerizing, almost an assault on the optic nerve, and no psychedelics were needed to get the effect. It was achievable simply by placing one color next to another. These were entirely abstract; I never coupled them with imagery as might be done in tarot deck creation. Peter Max did some rock-concert posters that made use of the same phenomenon, but I don't think he ever did a tarot deck. And of course there was so-called "black-light" painting that only came alive in ultraviolet light. I don't know that anyone ever did a "black-light" tarot either; good thing, it probably would have driven readers blind or mad!
 

Richard

I still have my black light from the early 1970s. I once used it to illuminate a yule tree decorated with day-glo colors. Those characters in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test were a little too casual with UVA illumination. They easily could have damaged their vision. Great book, though! Makes me nostalgic, in a way. (I bought my first Tarot, the Albano-Waite, around 1969 at the Shambala Bookstore in Berkeley CA.)
 

MikeTheAltarboy

As far as I know, the original color scales were devised by Mathers together with his artist wife Moina, and probably others fluent in color theory. DuQuette intimated that some of the colors were arrived at by astral projection, meditation (read:tripping out). Is there any source by Mathers himself explaining why those colors and not others were used?

I feel like I recall reading somewhere that the King Scale is derived from Jewish Kabbalistic Tradition, blending between the polarities of Red and White (but I can't remember the particular text that gave them). The G.D. system didn't follow it exactly, but it's close enough to be a probable source.

The Queen scale seems to be a pure G.D. creation based on color theory: Black, White Grey, then primaries of Red, Yellow, Blue; tertiaries of Orange, Green, Violet; and Muddy Brown at the bottom.

The Prince scale seems to simply be the first two added together: Pink + Yellow = Salmon, etc.

The Princess scale I've got nothing on. :)