Where Gods and Humans Meet: On the Sacred Life of Color
Lapis lazuli · #1B3A6B · lazurite · ultramarine
VSG Magazine · Color series · No. 02
By Gordana Zikic · Virtual Studio Groups
There is a question that art history rarely asks directly, though the evidence for it is everywhere: what if color is not decoration, but contact? What if the function of color, across thousands of years of human spiritual practice, has been to make the invisible visible — to give the divine a body, and to give the human a way across?
This is not a metaphor. It is almost a technical description of how color has been used across the world's oldest traditions.
The bridge that everyone recognizes
The most universal image of color as contact between worlds is one we still reach for instinctively. In Greek mythology, Iris is the goddess of the rainbow and also its embodiment — she uses it as a literal road to carry messages between Mount Olympus and the human world. In Norse cosmology, the Bifröst is a burning three-strand rainbow bridge connecting Asgard, the realm of the gods, to Midgard, the realm of humans. After the flood in the Abrahamic tradition, God places a rainbow in the sky as a covenant — a visible promise stretched between heaven and earth, addressed to all living creatures.
Three traditions, separated by geography and centuries, reaching for the same image: the full spectrum of color as the place where worlds touch.
Blue: the color of what cannot be contained
If the rainbow is the bridge, blue is its most theologically loaded plank.
In Hinduism, the supreme deities Vishnu and Krishna are traditionally depicted with blue skin — not as realism, but as a statement. Blue is the color of the sky and the ocean, the infinite, the thing that has no edges. To paint a god blue is to say: this being cannot be contained within human limits.
Medieval Christian theology had its own blue crisis. The debate was serious: is color a property of light, or of the object? If it belongs to light, then color is divine and immaterial. Abbot Suger resolved it passionately in favor of color as sacred light — and in doing so helped give birth to the Gothic cathedral, those towering windows where blue filtered the sun and turned stone buildings into instruments of divine perception.
The pigment that carried this weight was ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan and traded across thousands of miles to reach European hands. It was reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary — not for aesthetic reasons, but theological ones. The most costly color in existence marked the human body chosen to carry the divine.
Gold: light that does not die — and the blue that replaced it
Gold does not tarnish. This is why it became, across cultures with no contact with each other, the universal language of the eternal.
In Byzantine churches, the gold mosaic backgrounds represented the uncreated light of heaven — the eternal world made visible on stone. The figures of Christ and the saints do not stand against a wall. They stand within heaven itself, the gold an opening rather than a surface, radiating light that precedes and exceeds all material existence.
When medieval Serbian painters decorated Studenica Monastery in 1208, they used both gold and lapis lazuli blue interchangeably, to fill the same sacred space. At that moment, the blue was more expensive than the gold. Heaven cost more in blue.
Fresco was a less expensive medium than mosaic — pigment applied to wet plaster rather than gold tesserae embedded in stone. As Byzantine influence spread into medieval Serbia, painters faced a material problem. Gold mosaic was the established language of heaven, but it required resources not always available. The solution reveals how seriously color was taken as theological substance: ultramarine, that same lapis lazuli blue reserved for the Virgin's robe, completed the sacred space where gold could not. Two colors, one meaning — both the color of heaven, both pointing to what lies beyond the visible.
The equation of gold with the eternal appears far beyond Christianity. In ancient Greece and Rome, gold was understood as the literal substance of the divine — the skin or sweat of immortal beings, incorruptible as the gods themselves. In Buddhist practice, the saffron and yellow robes of monks signal renunciation of the ordinary world and alignment with illumination. The logic is the same across all of these: the color of incorruptible light marks the presence of something that does not end.
White: the color of approach
Where gold radiates, white strips away. It is the color of approaching the sacred without disguise.
In Shinto tradition, white gravel, white paper streamers called shide, and white robes mark the exact boundaries of sacred space — the line where ordinary ground becomes the place where kami, the spirits, meet the human world.
Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, theologian and composer, considered colors to be a divine manifestation, each with a unique spiritual and healing quality — and for her, white was inseparable from the light of transcendence, a color that belonged to the soul approaching God rather than to the world left behind.
The shamanic body as color map
In shamanic traditions, color does not decorate the ritual — it is the ritual's operative element. Here the logic becomes most explicit: the human body itself becomes the instrument through which worlds are connected, and color is what makes that connection legible.
Siberian shamans understand the universe as divided into three worlds — upper, middle, and lower — and travel between them to heal, guide souls, and bring knowledge back to the living. The shaman's costume maps this cosmology directly onto the body: head, torso, and feet correspond to the upper world, the middle world, and the lower world. It is not a uniform. It is a cosmological diagram worn as clothing — and its colors, materials, and decorations are each assigned to one realm. The shaman dresses as the universe in order to move through it.
This is distinct from what Korean mudang do with color, though it operates on the same principle. Korean mudang wear rainbow-colored garments during ritual, the full spectrum of bright colors representing the particular spirits being called and honored. Where the Siberian costume is a map of cosmic structure, the Korean rainbow robe is closer to an invocation — each color a frequency, together creating the full range that spirits can recognize and respond to.
In Aboriginal Australian ceremony, ochre transforms the human body into a living canvas — the patterns reflecting the dancer's relationship to the Dreaming, their lineage, their place in the sacred order. The prescribed ochre palette of red, yellow, black, and white is inseparable from the spiritual power of the design — color is not separate from the symbol system, it is part of it. And the ochre itself is ancient beyond any other tradition discussed here: when Mungo Man was found in New South Wales, he was covered in red ochre that had not come from the local area — carried or traded across Country more than 40,000 years ago. The color arrived with him for the crossing.
Color is how contact happens
From Siberia to Arnhem Land, from Byzantine Constantinople to medieval Serbian monasteries — the same intuition keeps appearing across traditions that never met: color is not just seen. It is how contact happens. We are, without always knowing it, continuing the oldest conversation color has ever hosted.
This is the second in VSG's ongoing series on color. The first: "The Color You Cannot Name: On Pigment, Perception, and the Private Languages of Color."
Pigment series · No. 02
Lapis
Lazuli
from Lāzhward, a region of Afghanistan
#1B3A6B · lazurite · ultramarine
VSG Magazine · The color of heaven
On lapis lazuli
It came from a single mountain in Afghanistan — Sar-e-Sang, in the province of Badakhshan — and from there it traveled the Silk Road to Egypt, to Mesopotamia, to Venice, to the workshops of every painter who could afford it. Which were very few. At its peak, ultramarine — the blue ground and purified from lapis lazuli — was worth more than gold by weight.
The name means "beyond the sea." Not because of its color, but because of the journey it made to reach European hands.
In Byzantine churches, gold mosaic backgrounds represented the uncreated light of heaven. When medieval Serbian painters decorated Studenica Monastery in 1208, they used both gold and this blue interchangeably to fill the same sacred space. Two colors, one meaning. At that moment, lapis was more expensive than gold. Heaven cost more in blue.
Cennino Cennini, writing his painter's handbook in the 14th century, called ultramarine "illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all other colors." He was describing a pigment. He was also describing a theology.
Next: Kermes →
Blue pigments — mineral and plant origin