The term ‘Five Colors’ enters the depth-psychology corpus principally through two distinct but occasionally intersecting streams: the Chinese cosmological tradition and the alchemical color symbolism that Jung and his heirs made central to analytical psychology. In the Zhuangzi, the five colors appear as an index of perceptual over-stimulation that disables the eye and corrupts inborn nature — a Taoist critique of sensory multiplicity as a threat to primal wholeness. Jodorowsky, working from a wholly different angle, constructs a Tarot-based pentad of ‘bold’ colors — black, white, red, flesh, and violet — that maps cosmic and human strata from divine purity to earthly depth, positioning flesh at the anthropological center. Hillman complicates the picture by examining the ethnolinguistic sequence of color acquisition (black, white, red; then yellow or green as fourth and fifth), arguing that color is archetypal force rather than mere symbol. The most charged tension in the corpus surrounds Jung’s reduction of the alchemical four-color scheme (melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis, iosis) to three, effectively suppressing yellow as a fourth-to-fifth color. Hillman reads this suppression as a consequential psychological omission. The term thus sits at the intersection of cosmological ordering, alchemical transformation, and the contested primacy of enumerated chromatic systems.
There are five conditions under which the inborn nature is lost. One: when the five colors confuse the eye and cause the eyesight to be unclear.
Zhuangzi identifies the five colors as the first of five conditions that destroy innate nature, making chromatic multiplicity a cosmological and ethical danger rather than a symbolic resource.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis
This allows a group of five ‘bold’ colors to stand out that have no light or dark subtleties. These colors are black, white, red (the three most common colors of the alchemical work), flesh (human), and violet (the androgyne).
Jodorowsky constructs a pentad of primary symbolic colors in the Tarot, mapping five ontological registers from divine purity through human embodiment to androgynous transcendence.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004thesis
if a language has a third color term, it will be red; and if a fourth and fifth, yellow or green.
Hillman cites ethnolinguistic research to establish a universal sequence of color acquisition in which yellow and green emerge as the fourth and fifth primary terms, grounding color hierarchies in biological and archetypal priority.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
Four stages [of the alchemical opus] are distinguished, characterized by the original colors mentioned in Heraclitus: melanosis (blackening), leukosis (whitening), xanthosis (yellowing), and iosis (reddening) … Later, about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the colors were reduced to three.
Hillman, quoting Jung, traces the historical contraction of the alchemical color sequence from four to three, marking the suppression of yellow (xanthosis/citrinitas) as a psychologically consequential omission.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
colors, no less than numbers, must be considered archetypal powers. ‘They provide a kind of primordial classification of reality.’ They are like ‘forces’ ‘biologically, psychologically, and logically prior.’
Hillman argues that colors function as archetypal forces rather than mere symbols, making any reduction or omission within a color scheme a displacement of psychic and cosmological reality.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
Colors are always ambivalent: their meaning cannot be purely positive or negative … their significance will vary depending on cultures, and there again we are not able to reduce them to a system of strict equivalents.
Jodorowsky cautions against any fixed chromatic taxonomy, insisting on the irreducible ambivalence of color meaning across cultural and symbolic systems.
, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting
citrinitas, 189, 229, 232; see also saffron; yellow, xanthosis … nigredo, 36, 188, 229f, 251, 271, 273, 286, 293
Jung’s index entry for citrinitas/xanthosis within the alchemical color schema documents the place of yellow as a recognized but increasingly neglected stage, situating it within the broader sequence of transformation colors.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
The multi flores and the myriad eyes in the peacock’s tail suggest that the colored vision is multiple vision. One must be able to see polychromatically, polymorphously, polytemporally, polytheistically before the terra alba appears.
Hillman presents the cauda pavonis as an emblem of polychromatic consciousness, in which the full multiplicity of colors must be traversed before the final whitening can be authentic.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting
particular colors produce definite mental impressions … color can be used for certain physical, moral, and aesthetic purposes.
Corbin, via Goethe’s Farbenlehre, situates color experience as a spiritual event with determinate psychic effects, providing a phenomenological grounding for Iranian Sufi color mysticism.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971aside
By continuing to regard black as a non-color and segregating it from the bright beauty of the Newtonian prism, our faulty cosmology remains unable to find a place for the nigredo.
Hillman argues that the exclusion of black from scientific color systems perpetuates a cultural inability to integrate the nigredo, extending the problem of color reduction beyond alchemy into cosmological psychology.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside