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Black colour is a NOT-Colour, the total absence of all the colours allowing us to see the world around us.
So, black is firstly associated with the NOTHING, the HOLLOW and these concepts mean absence of life, hence, DEATH.

In many cultures of the world, like the European before Christ, the world of deads, where souls go, were imagined as immersed in the darkness, where these souls wander in loneliness and silence.

This destiny was for all humans' souls and there was not the Paradise, full of divine light, introduced only by Christian religion.

We can remember the Odyssey, when Ulysses made a descent in the Reign of Deads, the Ades, to talk with his ancestors about his destiny and the Aeneides, written by the Latin poet Virgilius.

Also the Etruscans, especially in their late decadence centuries, had a nightmare idea of the world of deads, equally immersed in the darkness and inhabited by horrible monsters and spectres, where the dominating colours was always the black.

The Christian religion partially confirmed this idea, but only for the Hell, in which the darkness was broken only by the fire burning the sinner souls, opposed to the Paradise.

Dante Alighieri (Florence,1265- Ravenna,1321) in his famous "Divine Comedy", completed in 1320, depicted the Hell and its gallery of damned souls as dominated by the darkness.
The black colour was, already in that age, the natural symbol of death, also because it's the dominant colour of NIGHT that has always worried people; during the black night, in fact, people imagined that demons, criminals and monsters found the ideal condition to attack and kill persons and, at least for criminals, this was true.
Also Dead was and is traditionally imagined and frequently painted in frescoes and paintings as a skeleton dressed with a black habit and handling a long sickle.

So, to celebrate and complain the death of a person, the black colour was a natural choice for the dressing of all persons that had to celebrate a funeral; the widows, the parents and brothers/sisters of the dead, especially in Europe and in America (among the European immigrants), were dressed in black for long periods (the mourning period) to show to their community their condition of pain for the lost of a dear person.
This use is still very frequent in those Countries, at least during funerals, although the tradition of widows of dressing all in black for long periods after the death of their husband, is practiced only in the most traditional societies and by aged women in some Mediterranean regions, like in South Italy, Spain and Greece.

In other Countries of the world, like in India and China, the symbol-colour of death is WHITE, maybe, associated with the colour of bones under the sun and this is the colour of dressings at funerals.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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