Black

Ask most modern craft books what black means and you will get one of three answers: protection, banishing, absorption of negativity. The answers are not wrong. They are also not old. Pull the thread back past the twentieth century and you find a colour that carried exactly the opposite associations in some periods, and no unified magical meaning in any period. That is the honest starting point.

A colour that was difficult to make

Before the symbolism, a practical fact worth knowing: a true, stable, deep black was one of the hardest colours to dye before the sixteenth century. In the medieval era, black became the habit of courtiers and a hallmark of royal luxury. That elevation to luxury status tracks directly with the technical achievement of reliable black dye — once you could produce it, you could charge for it, and status followed. Black has always stood for powerfully opposed ideas: authority and humility, sin and holiness, rebellion and conformity, wealth and poverty. The symbolic instability is not a failure of meaning; it is a record of how contested the colour was across different social registers at different moments.

This matters for practitioners because it means there is no “original” magical meaning of black to recover. Every tradition built its usage from the materials — cultural, theological, practical — available to it.

Egypt: Kemet and regeneration

The most striking divergence from modern Western assumptions comes from ancient Egypt. The use of black for royal figures expressed the fertile alluvial soil of the Nile from which Egypt was born, and carried connotations of fertility and regeneration. Hence statues of the king as Osiris often showed him with black skin.

The name Egyptians gave to their own country, Kemet, meant “the Black Land” — a direct reference to the dark, life-giving silt left by the Nile’s annual flood, in explicit contrast to Deshret, “the Red Land,” the lifeless desert. The black colour of Anubis was symbolically associated with discoloration of the corpse after its preparation for burial and the fertile black soil of the Nile Valley, symbolising regeneration. In Egyptian symbolic logic, these two associations — death and regeneration — were not opposites. They were the same process.

The practical consequence for a modern reader is this: when Egyptian sources are cited in modern correspondence lists as evidence that black has always meant death and the underworld, the evidence is being read backwards. Black in Egypt meant the ground that death feeds, which is something different.

Greece and Rome: the chthonic offering

Greek and Roman ritual provides the clearest pre-modern link between black and active magical use. Animals offered to the Olympian gods were expected to be white or light-coloured; animals offered to chthonic deities — the gods of the underworld and the shades of the dead — were black.

Homer’s Odyssey is the most explicit early source. In Book XI (the Nekuia), Odysseus travels to the edge of the world and sacrifices black-fleeced sheep and rams directly into a pit to summon the dead. The choice of black animals is not arbitrary. It marks the offering as belonging to the realm below. Virgil, in Aeneid Book VI, follows the same protocol when Aeneas descends to the underworld: black cattle for Hecate, black rams for the shades.

This is black as ritual register, not black as evil. The colour signals that the work is chthonic — concerned with the boundary between the living and the dead, with the powers who govern that boundary. It does not imply malice. It implies appropriateness.

Early Christian Europe: the demonisation

The early Christian period is where black’s reputation in the West hardens into something grimmer. The archetypal color of darkness and death, black was associated in the early Christian period with hell and the devil but also with monastic virtue. That second clause is important: the Benedictines and Augustinians wore black habits precisely because the colour signified humility and penitence — the same logic that put it on mourners. The colour could mark either the sinful or the self-denying. The Church had not made up its mind.

What did progressively solidify, as Pastoureau documents, was the association between black and everything the Church defined as its enemy: over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches, and magic. The Black Mass, the black cat, the Black Sabbath — these are all projections of this theological move, by which the Church’s colour for death and sin became the colour assigned to those it persecuted. The witch’s supposed black magic is a theological category, not a description of folk practice.

Mourning: a specific and contingent history

The identification of black with mourning is now so complete in Western culture that it feels inevitable. It is not. In medieval France, white was the mourning colour for royalty. In China, white is still the traditional mourning colour. In parts of rural Spain into the twentieth century, widows wore black for the rest of their lives — but this was a geographically specific custom, not a universal European practice.

The dominance of black mourning dress in Western Europe became entrenched from roughly the fifteenth century onward, reinforced by the Spanish court’s influence on fashion and by the Protestant clergy’s preference for plain dark dress. It is a convention that calcified over several centuries, not an ancient inheritance. When modern craft places black in a funerary or Samhain context, it is drawing on this post-medieval European mourning tradition — which is a legitimate lineage, but a relatively recent one.

Saturn and the planetary thread

The one pre-modern magical assignment for black with genuine classical roots is its connection to Saturn. In ancient and medieval planetary correspondence, Saturn ruled lead, the coldest and heaviest of metals, and was associated with the colour black across a range of astrological and ceremonial magical traditions. Saturn governed boundaries, endings, old age, constraint, and the slowness of time — which maps reasonably well onto what modern practitioners use black for in banishing work.

This Saturnian thread runs through ceremonial magic into early modern grimoire traditions and provides the most defensible historical lineage for the modern craft’s use of black in binding and banishing. If you are burning a black candle in work concerned with limits, endings, or the removal of something from your life, the Saturn correspondence is genuinely old. It does not, however, go back to the ancient chthonic sacrifice or to Egyptian regeneration — those are separate threads that should not be conflated.

Apotropaic black in European folklore

Scattered through European folk practice is a use of black that does not fit neatly into any of the above categories: the use of black to absorb or deflect harm. Black animals — particularly black hens and black dogs — appear in folk healing and protective charms across Britain, Germany, and Central Europe, sometimes sacrificed or buried at thresholds, sometimes kept alive as living wards. The logic appears to be absorptive: the black animal or black material takes on the illness, curse, or bad luck and carries it away.

This absorptive logic is the folklore ancestor most clearly recognisable in the modern craft correspondence, where black candles or black cloth are used specifically to absorb and neutralise negative energy rather than to summon or conjure anything. The direct lineage is hard to trace cleanly — the folk practices are fragmentary and regionally specific — but the functional logic is the same.

Modern craft: the correspondence assignments

Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988) is where most English-speaking practitioners encountered black’s assignments as a cohesive set. The list in that tradition runs: protection, banishing, reversing curses, binding, absorbing negativity, working with the ancestors. These are not ancient assignments reconstructed from folklore; they are a mid-twentieth-century synthesis that drew on the Saturnian planetary tradition, the mourning/chthonic thread, the absorptive folk logic, and some colour-therapy thinking from the spiritualist era. The synthesis is coherent. It is also recent.

Black has a wide range of associations. It can be linked with death, mourning, evil magic, and darkness, but it can also symbolize elegance, wealth, restraint, and power. The modern craft’s concentration on protection and banishing is one strong slice of that range. It is not the whole thing.

Working with black honestly

The practitioner who understands this history has more options, not fewer. Black for a Samhain ancestor rite draws on the mourning thread and the chthonic offering logic — both are genuinely old, and the combination is defensible. Black for a banishing draws on the Saturnian thread and the folk absorptive logic — also defensible, also traceable. Black for a fertility working in the Egyptian mode is unexpected in modern Western practice, but it is historically grounded and might be exactly the right call depending on the work.

What is not defensible is the claim that black has always meant what modern craft books say it means. It has not. The colour has been soil, death, regeneration, luxury, sin, virtue, mourning, and ward — sometimes in the same century, sometimes in the same text. A correspondence system that pretends otherwise is flattening a record that resists flattening.

Use black deliberately, with a clear sense of which thread you are pulling. That is the work.

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Cross-references: Saturn (planetary correspondence, forthcoming); Samhain (sabbat); candle magic fundamentals (forthcoming).