Teleidoscope

Mon, Oct 23, 2006

Colors, Elements and Suits

Posted at 9:19 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

The Suits of the Net of Mirrors are derived more from the Five Chinese Elements, which are traditionally viewed as transformational, than from the European elements, which are traditionally viewed as static. The European elements are present to some extent as echoes or overlays, with the overlay of swords/air/metal producing the suit of Storms (with additional relationships to electriticity, ideas, communications, computers, tools) and the overlay of spirit and wood producing the suit of the Woods (with relationships to living things and ecosystems, not carpentry).

Traditional "pure" colors are used for the suits in the original cards I laid out in the early 90s: Black for Metal, White for Wood, Red for Fire, Yellow for Earth, and Blue for Water, with gray overlays on the Twilight cards. The Storm cards were printed silver on black stock, and the other cards were printed in black on colored stock, with the Gates and Powers on off-white stock to help differentiate them from the Wood cards.

Properly speaking, there should be different symbolic colors for the Bright and Twilight aspects of the elements. I'm sure that Twilight Wood is green and the Twilight Storm is violet.

The Bright and Twilight Waters are approximately turquoise and indigo. I suspect those colors map better in Russian, but I never really got a good feel for how the two Russian words that are both translated 'blue' are applied to the visible world.

The red of Bright Flame is the pure red of fresh blood. I suspected at one time that the Twilight Flame (transitions and boundaries) might be a sort of burgundy, but I think I had the phase reversed: Twilight Flame is the red-orange of embers and bonfires.

Earth is ... hard to describe, partly because so much of the yellow part of the spectrum gets named as variants of brown in English. Neither shade is as lightweight as dandelion, nor as shiny and metallic as gold. Standard goldenrod printing stock is just about right for Bright Earth. I'm not sure what the color is for Twilight Earth. I suspect I'll know it when I see it.

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