1Black


Out of Darkness

The Black beauty, which above that common light,

Whose Power can no colors here renew

But those which darkness can again subdue,

Do’st still remain unvary’d to the sight,

And like an object equal to the view,

Art neither chang’d with day, nor hid with night

When all these colors which the world call bright,

And which old Poetry doth so persue,

Are with the night so perished and gone,

That of their being there remains no mark,

Thou still abidest so intirely one,

That we may know thy blackness is a spark

Of light inaccessible, and alone

Our darkness which can make us think it dark.

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1665)1

Let us begin with a simple black square (Plate 2). It appears unexpectedly in a leather-bound book, like a hole that’s been waiting for a clumsy reader to lose balance and tumble in. It is made from hundreds of individually engraved lines, woven atop and across each other into a crisp, pixely blackness. The ink has peeled and puckered over the years, and been smudged in places by roving fingers, but still emits the astringent odor of linseed oil. The execution is far from perfect—the square’s sides are unequal, its edges wobble, and its cumbersome corners bleed into the yellowing paper around them—but the design is so boldly austere that it hits the eye with the force of a hammer. At first sight it looks like a pioneering piece of twentieth-century abstraction: perhaps a preparatory sketch dreamed up in revolutionary Moscow or postwar Greenwich Village. But this unforgettable image was actually conceived more than 300 years earlier, by an eccentric Englishman.

Robert Fludd was born in 1573 or 1574 into a distinguished family. His parents expected him to become a lawyer or gentleman farmer like his brothers, but he opted instead to study at Oxford, where he developed an interest—and apparently some expertise—in the occult. When his sword-belt and scabbard went missing from his college one day, Fludd drew up an astrological chart, deduced from the position of Mercury that they had been taken by a talkative man in the east, and recovered the stolen goods.2 He later established a medical practice in London, where he combined conventional methods with magnetic treatments, horoscopy, and psychic healing. In his late thirties he embarked on another task: to seek out and compile the world’s entire body of knowledge. With no time even to lose his virginity, he produced a series of treatises, on topics ranging from science, alchemy, and medicine to resurrection, music, and even a theory of wind. His masterpiece was unquestionably The History of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm (1617–1621), which chronicled the entire history of the universe, as well as the human place within it. Here, on here, the black square makes its appearance.

It is nothing less than a portrait of the universe before it existed. Surrounded on all sides by the words “et sic in infinitum” (“and so on, to infinity”), the square depicts the shapeless matter that God would later knead into the cosmos.

This primal material is of a primordial, infinite, shapeless Existence, as suitable for something as for nothing; having no size or dimension, for it cannot be said to be either large or small; having no qualities, for it is neither thin, nor thick, nor perceptible; having no properties nor tendencies, neither moving nor still, without color, or any elementary property … 3

How Fludd must have struggled to represent this unrepresentable subject. We can picture him at his desk in Fenchurch Street, quill in one hand, head in the other, wondering how to illustrate something so thoroughly devoid of qualities. In the end, he plumped for blackness. In adjacent text he told readers that his “imaginary picture” envisioned the primordial void as “a black smoke, or vapor, or a dreadful gloom, or the darkness of an abyss.”4 He based his design on several ancient sources, including a third-century Egyptian-Greek creation myth from the Corpus Hermeticum that spoke of a darkness that coiled like a snake, belched plumes of black smoke, and emitted an “indescribable sound of lamentation.”5 He also drew on what is surely the most famous passage in the Bible:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.6

This is of course Genesis 1:1, according to the King James version (first published just a few years before Fludd’s own masterwork). This justly celebrated translation is poetic and portentous in all the right ways, but it gets something very wrong: “darkness” is far too elegant a word for the primeval gloom envisioned by its creators. The original Hebrew was khoshekh () —an ugly, guttural noun that had to be coughed out of the throat like phlegm. This darkness is violent, dissonant, feral.

Creation myths from all over the world begin in similar fashion. Here is the Nasadiya Sukta, sometimes known as “The Hymn of the Dark Beginning,” from the Hindu Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE):

There was neither nonexistence nor existence

then; there was neither the realm of space nor the

sky which is beyond.

What stirred?

Where?

In whose protection?

Was there water, bottomlessly deep?

There was neither death nor immortality then.

There was no distinguishing sign of night or day.

That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse.

Other than that there was nothing beyond.

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the

beginning … 7

This is from the Chinese Huainanzi (139 BCE):

Of old, in the time before there was Heaven and Earth:

There were only images and no forms.

All was obscure and dark,

vague and unclear,

shapeless and formless,

and no one knows its gateway.

There were two spirits, born in murkiness, one that established Heaven and the other that constructed Earth.

So vast! No one knows where they ultimately end.

So broad! No one knows where they finally stop.8

And this, from Polynesia—the ancient creation chant Kumulipo, whose title means “a source of darkness or origin”:

At the time when the light of the sun was subdued

To cause light to break forth

At the time of the night of Makalii

Then began the slime which established the earth,

The source of deepest darkness.

Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness,

Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night,

It is night,

So night was born.9

Why do so many universes begin in such a way? It is surely a product of our own cognitive shortcomings. Humans have never really got to grips with absences. It’s difficult to imagine ourselves not existing, let alone everything else. So when ancient storytellers attempted to describe the void that preceded creation, they fell back on metaphors—endless oceans, divine wombs, cosmic eggs, and so on—though darkness was typically the closest thing to nothing they could conceive.

They turned out to be correct—as far as we know. Modern cosmologists aren’t certain how the universe started, but most agree it began in darkness. The Big Bang, often wrongly thought of as a sudden flash of light, actually generated an infinitely dense darkness that lasted hundreds of millennia. It took 380,000 years for the universe to slacken enough for the first photons to escape and to pierce the blackness with the very first light. As the universe expanded, this white light turned yellow, then saffron, then tangerine, then vermilion, until, around 200 million years after the beginning, it once again returned to darkness.10 At roughly the same time, dense pockets of interstellar gas and dust imploded into the first stars. Pinpricks of light appeared, one after the other, across the blackness of space. Nine billion years later, in an unremarkable corner of the cosmos, one clump of particles curdled into our sun. It showered its surroundings with radiation, bathing light over debris that would eventually coagulate into the Earth. A billion years later, the first single-celled life-forms appeared on our planet. Three billion years after that, a small shrimp-like creature developed a pair of complex compound eyes—and saw the world for the first time.11

DARKNESS VISIBLE

Before LEDs and light bulbs and gas lamps and candles, and before even the discovery of fire, darkness was genuinely dark. Night then bore little resemblance to today’s evenings, which over most of the world are bleached by streetlights and twinkle with charging electronic devices.12 Darkness used to be close, thick, and impenetrable—unless the moon was out. This was far from ideal. As diurnal creatures, humans are optimized for bright conditions. Our eyes provide us with precise and vivid vision in daylight but are rather less useful after dark. This deficiency caused our ancestors to get lost, to fall and injure themselves, and rendered them defenseless against thieves, murderers, and nocturnal carnivores. To make matters worse, darkness could not be remedied. If people were cold, they could wrap themselves in another fur; if they were hungry, they could generally forage for food. But what could be done about the night? Their only solution was to wait until it was over—again and again and again.

We can now dispel darkness with a fingertip, but it remains a stubborn adversary. Many children develop a fear of the dark at the age of two, and some never lose it.13 Eleven percent of American adults are afflicted by scotophobia, making it the fourth most common fear after spiders, death, and—most paralyzing of all—public speaking.14 Edmund Burke, who believed the phobia was a necessary tool for self-preservation, thought darkness even induced physical discomfort, stressing the “radial fibers of the iris” and producing a “very perceivable pain.”15 John Locke, by contrast, argued that it was little more than a superstition. “The ideas of goblins and sprites have really no more to do with darkness than light,” he observed; “yet let but a foolish maid inculcate these often on the mind of a child, and … possibly he shall never be able to separate them again so long as he lives.”16

The Bible contains nearly 200 references to darkness, many referring to the physical challenges posed by night. But its authors also invoke darkness as a metaphor. They connect it to misery and misfortune (“I cry aloud … he hath set darkness in my paths,” Job 19:7–8), disease (“not for the pestilence that walks in darkness,” Psalm 91:6), mortality (“in darkness and in the shadow of death,” Luke 1:79), ignorance (“wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness,” Ecclesiastes 2:13), sin (“if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness,” Matthew 6:23), divine punishment (“God … cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness,” 2 Peter 2:4), and repeatedly contrast it with the goodness and godliness of light:

When I looked for good, then evil came unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness. (Job 30:26)

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. (John 8:12)

Many ancient belief systems hinged on a dualism of light and darkness. Manichaeism, a Gnostic religion established by the Persian prophet Mani in the third century CE, maintained that the world and its inhabitants were little more than battlefields on which light and darkness waged war. At first the two primordial principles—identified respectively with good and evil, spirit and matter—lived apart, in two separate territories. The Kingdom of Light was filled with sun, trees, flowers, and fresh air, while the Kingdom of Darkness was a lifeless terrain of ditches, bogs, and abysses, all choked by poisonous smoke. When the “Prince of Darkness” learned of this rival realm, he grew jealous and sent demons across the border to conquer it. In subsequent battles light and darkness penetrated each other, mixing virtue and vice, the spiritual and material—creating the conflicted world in which humans found themselves.17 Manichaeans aspired to a future in which the two principles were once again divided and peace was reestablished, but, like most Gnostics, they were incorrigible pessimists. “There can be no salvation here, ever!” one of them grumbled. “All is darkness.”18

What many of these metaphors share, and what they share with ancient creation stories, is the notion of darkness as deprivation. Four centuries after the death of Christ, Augustine—who had converted from Manichaeism to Christianity in his early thirties (much to his mother’s relief)—argued that God had made everything, and everything he had made was good. It was a neat and reassuring syllogism, but it raised an inevitable question: if both propositions were true, whence came evil? If God had created everything, he had also made evil; if he hadn’t, then the universe wasn’t entirely of his making. To resolve the conundrum Augustine asserted that evil was simply an absence of goodness, before comparing it to other “privational” conditions such as silence and darkness:

Yet we are familiar with darkness and silence, and we can only be aware of them by means of eyes and ears, but this not by perception but by absence of perception … For when with our bodily eyes, our glance travels over material forms, as they are presented to perception, we never see darkness except when we stop seeing.19

Augustine’s argument, so deeply informed by his Manichaean inheritance, is significant because it identified darkness not with evil—that connection was established long before the Gospels were written—but with absence. This is relevant to us because the same argument was, and is, used to denigrate the color with which darkness is always compared.


Copyright © 2021 by James Fox