White seems the simplest of colours, and for some it is not even a colour. Yet in the world's traditions it carries surprisingly different meanings: it can be the garment of the bride and that of the dead, the sign of the political candidate and that of the neophyte. Its symbolic power comes precisely from this apparent simplicity: white is an open space, a page on which the passage from one condition to another is written.
The candidate and the toga candida
In Rome, whoever stood for election to a magistracy wore a toga made especially white, the toga candida, treated to look luminous. From this comes the word candidate, literally «the one dressed in white». The colour was meant to communicate honesty and purity of intent: whoever asked for the citizens' trust showed himself spotless.
It is a remarkable example of how a colour can survive in language long after the custom that generated it.
The white of the neophytes
In early Christianity the newly baptised received a white garment, which they wore during the week after Easter. The Sunday that closed that period was called in albis, that is «in white garments», or more precisely the day on which the white garments were laid aside. White marked a new birth, a life begun again from the start.
Similar customs are found in many initiatory and religious traditions: whoever crosses a threshold often wears white, because the colour without hue expresses the stripping away of the previous condition.
White mourning
In much of East and South Asia white is traditionally the colour of mourning. In China, in Japan, in India, funeral clothes or widows' garments have long been white or of raw, undyed cloth. The meaning is not the opposite of European black mourning, but a variant of it: white indicates withdrawal from appearances, renunciation of ornament, closeness to the passage.
Europe too has known white mourning. The queens of France, in the Middle Ages and beyond, wore mourning in white, so much so that people spoke of the «white queen» to indicate a widowed queen. This shows how the bond between black and death, which today feels natural to us, is in fact a historical construction.
The bride in white
The white wedding dress, now widespread in many parts of the world, established itself in the West mainly from the nineteenth century onward. In earlier periods brides often wore their best dress, of any colour. In Rome, for example, the bride wore a flame-coloured veil, the flammeum.
Bridal white took on the meanings of purity and new beginning, but here too we find the logic of passage: the bride, like the neophyte and the dead, crosses a threshold.
White and light
On the deepest symbolic level white is associated with light. The garments of angels and of the transfigured are described as dazzling white; in religious visions the divine often appears in a white radiance. White is the colour that contains all the others, as the splitting of light into a spectrum shows, and for this reason it can symbolise totality and unity.
The ambivalence of white
But white is also the colour of pallor, of the spectre, of the ghost. In European folklore apparitions are often «white ladies», luminous and unsettling female figures. White can therefore indicate both the fullness of light and the draining away of life: the point at which colour withdraws.
A table of meanings
| Context | Meaning of white |
|---|---|
| Rome, elections | integrity of the candidate |
| Early baptism | new birth |
| Asia, funerals | renunciation, passage |
| Queens of France | royal mourning |
| Modern wedding | beginning, purity |
| Folklore | apparition, the otherworld |
A symbolic reading
The common thread is the threshold. White almost always appears where someone passes from one state to another: from citizen to magistrate, from profane to baptised, from maiden to bride, from living to dead. It is the colour of the intermediate, suspended condition, in which the old has been left and the new is not yet fully assumed. On an inner path, white reminds us that every transformation requires a moment of stripping away and of silence.
In short
- The word «candidate» derives from the Roman toga candida.
- Early Christian neophytes wore white garments as a sign of new birth.
- In Asia and among the queens of France white has been a colour of mourning.
- The white wedding dress spread mainly from the nineteenth century.
- White is the colour of the threshold: full light, but also the withdrawal of colour.
