Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Read Free Book Online Page B

did not adore him. A healer called Wyju saw straight through Kirkin and laughed at him for his vanity. Naturally Kirkin hated him for this, and plotted revenge. He told Wyju he wanted to go out hunting with him to find a special bird that was wonderful to eat. The only problem was that a hunter could only catch it by jumping on top of it. The comedy of the chase was cut short by Wyju’s jumping into a trap of spiked spears that Kirkin had set for him. The wicked Kirkin laughed and left Wyju to writhe around the valley, spikes piercing the tender soles of his feet, staining the earth with his blood. And ever since that time, the myth goes, Aboriginals have gone to that valley for red ochre. They have smeared the “blood” of the young ancestral healer on their sons before initiation, to teach them to be good men.
    This is one of the reasons why ochre is not only sacred but also dangerous. Red ochre is an integral part of the initiation ceremony of young boys when they become men. In north-east Arnhemland, for example, novices are smeared with ochre in sacred clan patterns on their chests, with white clay masks on their faces. The paint is part of the secret of initiation—and perhaps it is even the secret itself. Many people have speculated on the significance of this red earth—and anthropologists have tended to focus on the symbolism of red as representing men’s blood (meaning death), or women’s menstrual blood (signifying, perhaps, the potential for giving birth). But there is an alternative theory, a curious one: that the iron in red ochre somehow acted as a kind of magnet, to show Ancestors and Aboriginal people the way along sacred paths. 15 When I first heard this I dismissed it as New Age confusion, but then later I heard something new about red ochre—something that did not change my mind, but left it a little more open.
    I learned that scientists in Italy have found a new technique for dating frescos almost to the year they were painted, simply by examining the red paint. “Red ochre contains iron, and the iron molecules act like compass needles,” explained Professor Giacomo Chiari of the Department of Minerological and Petrological Sciences at the University of Turin. He said that in the few minutes between daubing red ochre onto wet clay, and the time it dries, the molecules realign themselves toward the direction of magnetic north. “And if you don’t move the walls then that is how they stay,” Professor Chiari said. Magnetic north changes every year—it can fluctuate over a range of 18 degrees, so you can learn when the fresco was painted from the direction in which the red ochre is pointing. This can lead to curious artistic discoveries: at the Vatican Library, for example, there were three frescos which were believed to have been painted in 1585, 1621 and 1660. The Turin scientists took tiny samples from the borders to see whether they could test their theory. “We couldn’t understand the results. All the ochre was pointing the same way and it wasn’t in any of the ways we were expecting,” Professor Chiari said. And then they did more tests and realized the truth: the frescos were original, but all the borders had been repainted in 1870. Magnetic north is very erratic, though, Professor Chiari added. “So we can do it both ways: we sometimes use frescos—if we know when they were painted—to tell us where magnetic north was that year.”
    He was not aware of the technique being used to date bodies that had been painted in red ochre—as has been a funerary custom in Australia, Africa, America and Europe for thousands of years. Partly because nobody could be sure whether the body had been moved after the ochre had dried and partly because the burials had happened too far in the past. “You can’t go too far back because we don’t know so much about magnetic north thousands of years ago.”
    Roqué said there was no way I would learn about red ochre in ceremonies: “it’s forbidden