The Seba library treats Pallor in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Richard Sorabji, Onians, R B, Damasio, Antonio R.).
The notions of Pavor and Pallor would have been connected in Augustine’s mind, because he tells us that they had been made into two gods.
Sorabji identifies Pallor as a Roman deified concept paired with Pavor, which Augustine deploys to ground his account of involuntary pre-passional bodily reactions that precede rational judgment.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
There is pulsation with flushing or pallor. ‘Every sudden emotion quickens the action of the heart and with it the respiration’, observed Darwin.
Onians traces the Homeric thumos physiology to the visible body-surface changes — flushing or pallor — that attend violent emotion, citing Darwin to confirm the ancient insight that affect is registered in cardiac and respiratory action.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
your heart may pound, your mouth dry up, your skin blanch, a section of your gut contract, the muscles in your neck and back tense up while those in your face design a mask of sadness.
Damasio presents skin blanching — pallor — as one element of the multi-system somatic state the brain constructs during negative emotional imagery, evidence for the body-as-theatre-of-emotion thesis.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
XAOUe; (Hp. apud Gal.) [m.] ‘light green, green-yellow color, pallor’, XAO-WOYje; ‘color of grass, green-yellow, pale’
Beekes documents the Greek etymological field in which pallor, greenness, and yellow-green overlap, establishing that ancient color vocabulary did not sharply distinguish paleness from sickly or plant-derived hues.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
ON fplr ‘pale’ < *pol-uo-. Cf. ⇒ nEAloe;.
Beekes traces the Indo-European root underlying Greek and Norse words for paleness to a shared stem *pol-uo-, situating pallor within a broad cross-linguistic color-designation family that includes grey and straw-yellow.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside
The albedo [whitening] is, so to speak, the daybreak, but not till the rubedo is it sunrise. The transition to the rubedo is formed by the citrinitas [yellowing].
Hillman, following Jung, situates the whitening stage of the alchemical opus — which encompasses pallor’s chromatic field — as a necessary but incomplete psychic condition between blackening and the full reddening of realized selfhood.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside