Royalty: A Color We Can’t See

“You have to listen to the opening of this week’s Holy Post,” a friend told me yesterday. It’s a podcast I thoroughly enjoy, so the recommendation was easy to accept. I hadn’t followed through as of this morning - to be fair, it still hasn’t been 24 hours since the referral - but on a walk through the woods my friend was persistent. Apparently I just had to hear what the podcasters had to say about… purple.

She was right. It’s a fascinating, hilarious listen, and if you want to catch it, jump to 07:15 and stick around for ten minutes. I’m about to spoil it though, so if you hate spoilers then stop now, go listen, and then come back.

Welcome back.

The key idea is that purple doesn’t exist, according to some scientists. When you pass white light through a prism and split it into its component colors, there’s no purple in the spectrum. The visual spectrum begins with red and ends with blue - and sure, the very bluest blue is what we call violet, but it isn’t truly purple. Purple is what happens when red and blue are combined. However, since they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum of visual light, they don’t actually overlap. Our brains can’t make sense of processing red wavelengths and blue wavelengths at the same time (both of them coming off any “purple” object) so it tries to make sense of the image by combining the red and blue into something - something we call purple. I felt skeptical while listening to all of this until a particular point was made: in order to make sense of wavelengths at the opposite ends of the visual spectrum, our brains bend the line of color into a circle and invent this overlapping color to reconcile the extremes. That result is what we call purple: a color created by the brain to make sense of a visual contradiction.

I love that kind of thing. And while loving an idea isn’t reason enough to be convinced by it, this particular issue feels low-stakes enough to let it be. This time.

Kaitlyn Schiess, one of the hosts and a theologian/author I greatly appreciate, gasped and said, “this has theological implications!”

I matched her gasp - I saw glimmers worth chasing. The hosts dived into purple as the color of royalty, the color of the Lenten season, the rarity of its existence in nature as a pillar of its value. All great thoughts, but what I wanted to chase was that royalty thing. I couldn’t shake the possibility that “royalty” might be our brains bending a spectrum into a circle in order to process something that otherwise doesn’t make sense.

So try this metaphor with me: imagine superimposing humanity and divinity onto the visual spectrum. On one end, you have all the shades and tints that we associate with being human—earthy, tangible, flawed. On the other, the colors of divinity—mysterious, infinite, unreachable.

And now think about how we’ve talked about royalty throughout history. (In modern terms, you could even substitute “celebrity.”) So often, we elevate royalty to a place where human and divine blur. Reverence, honor, allegiance, homage, worship—we give to royal humans what we usually reserve for gods.

It makes sense, then, that purple became the color of royalty in many cultures. It’s the visual representation of our minds trying to reconcile the human with the divine. It’s the soul’s version of color theory: creating a loop, inventing something new, just to make sense of what seems irreconcilable.

In my understanding of the world’s greatest and truest stories, the mythology that crossed over into history finds ground zero in Jesus of Nazareth. So many stories have demigods, crossovers between the human and divine. We long for one who turns the spectrum into a loop, who can re-story what it means to be human by fully assuming humanity without relinquishing an ounce of deity. I’m writing this on Good Friday, the day of remembering the God-man put to death on a Roman cross in a Judean countryside - opposing forces shot through the whole story.

The sign above Jesus proclaimed his kingship, intended to mock but telling it straight. Royalty, purple, the full circle moment. The only way our hearts can make sense of it is to loop what stands opposed, and this is just what Jesus did. The message of Jesus has always been this: the path to his kingdom is shaped like a cross. Opposing forces—life and death, power and humility, humanity and divinity—held together in one person.

It’s the only way our hearts can make sense of it: not by flattening the spectrum, but by looping it. And in Jesus, that’s exactly what God has done.