European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a white horse. In the Norse tale “Tatterhood,” a red flower and a white flower grow side by side in the dark earth.
This week, I interviewed the mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw for Mini Philosophy. Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild, makes the case that folk stories and myths can help us understand ourselves and life more broadly. And in these colors, we find a map of human maturation.
The colors correspond roughly to three modes of being. Each has a gift and a shadow. Each belongs most naturally to a particular season of life, though we can move in and out of all three depending on what’s happening to us. And most of us, Shaw argues, are deficient in one of them without knowing it.
The Red
The Red is ambition. It’s life force, ego, desire, and the courage to go beyond the comfortable. The Red is Nietzsche’s “will to power” in folktale form. And there’s something quite adolescent about it. At its best, the Red is energetic, decisive, and determined. At its worst, it’s naive, pig-headed, and reckless. The Red doesn’t doubt. It acts. And without it, very little in this world gets done. As Shaw puts it:
“It’s the Red that urges you on, gives you the courage to take a position, draw a line in the sand. It’s the Red that lets you dream big, pack a suitcase, and head out on an adventure. Someone in the Red is not crippled with self-doubt but can act decisively in their ambition to get ahead.”
The shadow is predictable enough. A life of arrogance, aggression, and constant competition will wear itself thin. It becomes exposed, and it only takes one dramatic loss to blacken the red. Some fights cannot be won.
But the deeper problem is that the Red, unchecked, has no room for other people. It fails to notice the needs of others. In the medieval Grail legend, a young knight called Parzival — brave, impressive, and full of Red — arrives at the castle of the Fisher King, a ruler suffering from a wound that will not heal. The entire court waits in agony for someone to simply ask the king what’s wrong. Parzival sees the suffering, eats the dinner, goes to bed, and rides off the next morning without saying a word. He didn’t fail because he was cruel but because he’s never been wounded himself, and so the question — “What hurts you?” — literally doesn’t occur to him. That knowledge is years away.
The Black has to happen first.
The Black
The Black is initiatory failure — descent, vulnerability, melancholy, and self-doubt. If the Red belongs most naturally to youth, the Black tends to arrive — often uninvited and unnoticed — in middle age. The Black is what happens when the Red runs out of road. It’s when a relationship hits a wall, a career hollows you out, or a depression greys the hues of the world.
Of course, the Black is not as fun or thrillingly epic as the Red. But it isn’t optional. And our culture, which celebrates ambition and service in roughly equal measure, has almost no vocabulary for it.
Shaw writes:
“Without the Black we have little to say about shipwrecks, blizzards, and getting lost in the fog. Without the Black we have intelligence but we don’t really have wisdom. If you are guided in ways to curate the Black you can become sage-like; if you don’t you can become terribly bitter.”
The Black is not automatically redemptive or especially romantic. Suffering doesn’t make you wise by default — it can make you wise, or it can make you bitter, and which one depends entirely on whether anyone teaches you how to hold it. There is an entire self-help industry that exists to rush people out of the Black before it’s done its work.
The White
The White is what Aristotle called phronesis — practical wisdom that can only be earned by living. It hasn’t left the Red or the Black behind; it’s gathered both up and put them to use for something beyond the self. If the Red says, “I can,” and the Black says, “Maybe I can’t,” the White says, “What do you need?” It’s the ability to face a situation and know what the right thing to do is. Sometimes you need the hammer of Red. Sometimes, you need the surrender of Black. Shaw puts it like this:
“The White is that precious ground of eldership, of carrying the ability to bless, to raise up others, to encourage. It’s not needy. It is the breast that is full of milk. It’s absolutely generative, it doesn’t cling, it’s neither sour nor excessively sweet, it sees calmly and for long, long distances.”
Shaw says our culture celebrates the Red and the White reasonably well, but has almost no idea what to do with the Black. We want our leaders to skip from youthful ambition straight to elder statesmanship without ever passing through the Underworld. We don’t grieve publicly. We don’t talk well about failure. We walk backward into our own dying.
Most people can identify without much effort which color their life is in right now, as well as which one they’ve been avoiding. And a life involves Black as much as Red and White. In the Grail legend, Parzival does eventually return to the Fisher King’s castle — years later, after his own share of failure and grief. This time, he asks the question. “What hurts you?” The wound heals. The kingdom is restored. But it took a lifetime of Red and Black to make it possible.
This article The 3 colors: What folktales teach about how to grow wise is featured on Big Think.