Who decided that green heals and violet enlightens? Tracing 200 years of colour interpretation.
The aura of antiquity had no colour: it was a breath. The halo was golden, but a single colour. The colourful, readable aura, in which every colour reveals something about character, is an invention of the late 19th century.
It arises where three currents meet. Physics had just discovered that there is radiation beyond the visible: infrared, ultraviolet, later X-rays and radioactivity. Spiritualism was looking for proof of an invisible world. And Theosophy, founded in New York in 1875, combined both with Indian and Western esoteric teachings.
If there are invisible rays, the logic ran, why not a radiation of the soul? And if light is made of colours, then that radiation must be coloured too. Out of this union of scientific language and clairvoyance came the colour charts that still fill aura books, chakra posters and TikTok quizzes today, often barely changed.
Not an aura book, but the root of many interpretations. In the chapter on the “sensuous and moral effect of colour”, Goethe assigns moods to colours: yellow and red-yellow on the “plus side” as lively and warm, blue on the “minus side” as cool and yearning. Steiner edited Goethe’s scientific writings.
The American “magnetist” Edwin Babbitt fused optics, occultism and medicine. He described which colours relieve which illnesses, built coloured lamps for treatment and read health from the colour of a person’s radiance. He is regarded as the father of colour therapy and influenced Theosophy.
The book that shaped the modern aura colour. The Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater shows coloured plates of people “as seen by clairvoyants”, together with a “key to the meanings of colours”: red for anger, brownish grey for selfishness, yellow for intellect, blue for religious feeling.
Rudolf Steiner describes three auras nested inside one another: an aura of drives influenced by the body, a soul aura and a spirit aura. Brown and red-yellow stand for drives, bright yellow for clear thinking, green for understanding, blue for devotion, rose-red for devoted love.
Thoughts as coloured shapes: the plates show how anger is supposed to look like a red flash, or devotion like a blue blossom. The book became a visual source for early abstraction; Kandinsky engages explicitly with Theosophy in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911/12).
The London physician wanted to make the aura visible through glass screens containing the poisonous dye dicyanin. He saw mostly bluish-grey veils in three layers and hoped to use them for diagnosis. In 1912 the British Medical Journal wrote that Kilner had failed to convince it that his aura was any more real than Macbeth’s dagger.
Leadbeater carries the Indian chakras over to the West and gives them colours according to his own clairvoyance, but no rainbow yet: the root chakra is fiery orange-red, the heart chakra golden, the throat chakra silvery blue.
Christopher Hills lays the rainbow over the seven chakras, red at the bottom to violet at the top. This order is now so taken for granted that it is often thought to be ancient. It does not exist in Indian sources.
Nancy Ann Tappe, who described herself as a synaesthete, introduces the “life colour”: a basic colour of the aura that stays the same for life. She also coins the term “Indigo children”.
Pamala Oslie turns this into a personality system with four groups: physical colours (red, orange, magenta, yellow), mental (tan, green), emotional (blue, violet, lavender, crystal, indigo) and mixed types. It is the direct model for today’s aura quizzes.
Guy Coggins’ camera makes the colours photographable: skin readings from the hand are translated into clouds of colour, whose meanings were fixed by a team of psychics. The picture is real; the colour is a measurement in disguise.
Aura photo studios, colour filters, “indigo aura” mood boards and soft gradient images as an aesthetic. The colour charts of 1902 return as a self-test in phone format.
Pick a colour and see what Goethe, Theosophy, Steiner, chakra teaching, the Life Colors system and empirical colour psychology each see in it.
Goethe and Steiner paraphrased or in short quotations, Leadbeater after the “Key to the Meanings of Colours” (1902), chakras after the rainbow scheme (Hills 1977), Life Colors roughly after Oslie (1991), colour psychology after Jonauskaite et al. (2020, over 4,500 participants in 30 countries). The study measures what people associate with colours, not what colours “mean”.
The chakras come from the tantric texts of India. There they are lotus flowers with syllables, deities and elements, and their colours vary from text to text and school to school. There is no fixed rainbow sequence in them. The West knew the teaching mainly through Arthur Avalon’s The Serpent Power (1919) and Leadbeater. The rainbow was placed on top in the 1970s by authors such as Christopher Hills, to match Newton’s seven spectral colours.
Every model claims to have seen the aura directly, and yet they contradict each other in the number, order and colour of the layers.
In the 1980s the question shifts. No longer: which colour is your aura showing right now? But: which colour are you?
Nancy Ann Tappe described the “life colour” as the one colour of the aura that, for most people, stays the same “from the cradle to the grave”. From the 1970s on she increasingly saw children with a new, indigo-blue colour. In the 1990s this became the Indigo children movement: supposedly highly sensitive, especially gifted children of a new generation.
Critics point out that the traits described often match those of ADHD. Reframing them as a gift could mean that children got no diagnosis and no support. There are no studies that establish Indigo children as a distinct group.
In 1991 Pamala Oslie turned Tappe’s approach into a type system that works like a personality test. Exactly this format, a few questions and your colour at the end, lives on today in online quizzes.
According to Oslie: grounded, adventurous, unconventional, playful.
According to Oslie: logical, structured, determined, analytical.
According to Oslie: caring, visionary, imaginative, healing, sensitive.
People who see “auras” are not necessarily imagining things. The eye produces colours and fringes by itself, especially during long, steady looking, which is exactly how aura seeing is usually practised.
Afterimages: Stare at a colour for a long time and the cones responsible for it tire. Look at a bright surface afterwards and the opposite colour appears. A person in front of a coloured wall thus leaves behind a fringe in the complementary colour.
Troxler effect: With a fixed gaze, steady areas at the edge of vision fade, and outlines begin to flicker and “glow”.
Edge contrast: The visual system sharpens edges. At the border between body and background a light or dark stripe appears that is not physically there (Mach bands).
Expectation: Anyone who knows which colour would “fit” reads blurry impressions accordingly. When the person is hidden, aura seers see nothing reliable in tests.
Aura colour charts act as if the meaning of a colour were a law of nature. Research shows: some of it is widespread, much of it is culture.
A study of over 4,500 people in 30 countries (Jonauskaite et al., 2020) found strikingly similar patterns: red is linked almost everywhere with love and anger, yellow with joy, black with grief. At the same time red was the most contested colour, and the associations depended on how close languages and regions are to one another.
Even the question of how many colours there are gets different answers from different languages. In 1969 Berlin and Kay compared almost a hundred languages and found up to eleven basic colour terms. Many languages have fewer; some do not separate blue and green.
In Europe the colour of the bride, in Chinese tradition the colour of mourning: at funerals, relatives wear white.
In China luck and celebration, in many Western contexts warning and passion. In the study, Chinese participants also linked red with joy, Nigerian participants also with fear.
Purple was extremely expensive in antiquity and became the colour of emperors and the Church. Violet, the “spiritual” aura colour, inherits this lustre.
Many ancient languages long had no word of their own for blue. Today blue is the world’s favourite colour in surveys.
The paper The arcane roots of colour psychology, chromotherapy, and colour forecasting in the journal Color Research & Application traces a surprising line: Spiritualism and Theosophy gave colour enormous power over body and soul. That idea travelled via Babbitt into colour therapy, and from there into popular colour psychology and commercial colour trend forecasting.
What they all share is the belief in a fixed, natural order of colours that holds for health as much as for buying decisions. When a brand today picks green for “naturalness” and blue for “trust”, a remnant of the theosophical colour chart lives on in it.
The plates from Thought-Forms influenced early abstraction. Hilma af Klint worked in a spiritualist and theosophical milieu; Kandinsky wrote about the “inner sound” of colours.
Aura photo studios have been enjoying a revival for some years, at events, in pop-up shops and on TikTok. The Polaroid is real photography; the colour is a designed translation of skin readings.
“Aura gradients”, soft, blurred colour gradients, have become a visual language of their own for wallpapers, brands and social media. This page uses them too. The aura has become a style.