White, Purity and Mourning

White reflects all visible wavelengths, and as a symbol it is among the most powerful and most divided of colours. In the Western and Christian tradition it stands overwhelmingly for purity, innocence and light: it is the liturgical colour of Easter, Christmas and the great feasts, the colour of baptismal and, since the nineteenth century, bridal dress, and of the newly baptised. But in much of East and South Asia white is the colour of death and mourning: it is worn at funerals across China, Korea and India, tied to the plainness and renunciation appropriate to grief, precisely the opposite of its Western festive use. This reversal is the classic illustration that colour symbolism is cultural rather than natural. White also carries senses of the sacred and the set-apart, the white robes of priests, of the Hajj pilgrim's ihram, of surrender and truce. In the modern esoteric literature white, as the union of all colours, is associated with the crown and with spiritual wholeness.