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T C Lethbridge – A Step in the Dark

This talk about colours is not without a bearing on the subject we are investigating. One of the modern methods of healing is the use of supposedly appropriate colours for a beneficial effect on the minds of people who are mentally disturbed. This treatment is associated with the name of Rudolph Steiner.

Results are obtained apparently; but one suspects that it is not the colour itself which does the work. This may well only serve to concentrate the patient's subconscious attention on the particular rate for that colour. If the colour were purple, then the concentration could be on safety, or security, something that many troubled minds need desperately. Conversely black has the same rate as death. The wearing of it does not seem to have a very cheering effect on the clergy, although it used to be very becoming on young widows!

The ancient Celts had a colour distinction in their dress. Blue for women, red for kings, green and black for noble laymen and white for clerics. Green and black remains today as tartan.

But more interesting than these distinctions in dress were the points of the compass, the airts, for these had colours and each colour an aspect.

• black was north,
• white south,
• east was purple-red (probably the Classical scarlet) and
• west was somewhere between green and grey.

A wind from the east was lucky; but no good came from the west. The north was the airt of evil and misfortune; while that of the south was the one for good luck. It seems remarkable to me how closely this very ancient system corresponds to our pendulum's compass. I cannot help thinking that long ago in the Dark Ages men still remembered something of an investigation similar to the one we are now undertaking...............

Astrology shows another correspondence with our compass and if we combine these two systems, the Celtic and the Astrological, we find that we have a considerable portion of what was told us by the table of rates [of the pendulum].

It seems hard to doubt that in the remote past a great deal was known concerning our subject and that we are only just beginning to rediscover facts about the Universe, which were once widely accepted. The chances that the pendulum could reveal such a vital table of details, so similar to the ancient ones, unless both refer to the same facts, must be very great indeed.