The Application of the Four Colour Scales of The Golden Dawn

While endless speculation has circled around the origins of the four Colour Scales of the Golden Dawn, almost nothing has been said about their practical application. Theories abound about who designed them, when they first appeared, and how closely they were tied to later doctrinal accretions. Yet the far more important question, how these scales were actually used, has remained largely untouched. The Colour Scales were originally introduced at the Z.A.M. and T.H.A.M. levels, depending on the temple and the period and appeared to be a floating set of papers (and not part of any curriculum) given out by Mathers, based on who he favoured best, according to Dr. Tony Fuller. In the Stella Matutina, these scales were firmly anchored at the 6=5 grade, where a more structured system of Inner Order work required them to be. Their use was incremental: students encountered primarily the King and Queen Scales, most visible in the Vault of the Adepts and on the Pastos, where they served as constant visual keys to the elemental and sephirotic dynamics of the rituals.

The 1925 paper on Tarot colours by Mrs. Felkin represented the first fully articulated attempt to apply all four scales systematically to the Tarot. Every Path and every Sepherah was assigned its appropriate hues, sometimes with surprising fidelity to the earlier Golden Dawn tradition and sometimes diverging in ways that revealed the evolving colour sensibilities of the Stella Matutina. Before Israel Regardie released this document in the 1930s as part of his Golden Dawn revelations, virtually nothing had been published connecting the Tarot and the Colour Scales. For all the talk about the Golden Dawn’s “colour magic,” it remained an almost entirely oral and practical art, confined to temple work and private instruction.

Then, in the 1940s, something interesting happened: while painting the Thoth Tarot, Lady Frieda Harris incorporated all four Colour Scales, not only for the Sephiroth but even for the Paths, which Mrs. Felkin’s paper had not included in such depth. Whether Harris and Crowley had direct access to Regardie’s published material, or whether Harris arrived at these methods through her intensive correspondence with Crowley and the broader Thelemic colour theories, we will probably never know. The proximity in dates invites speculation. Coincidence or synchronicity, the overlap is striking, and it is difficult not to wonder whether Regardie’s disclosures opened a door that Harris then walked through. As with so many Golden Dawn mysteries, the truth is likely lost to time.

In the 1990s Tony Fuller uncovered a series of coloured T.H.A.M. diagrams from the Golden Dawn archives. These diagrams showed, clearly and unambiguously, that their hues were lifted directly from the Colour Scales. I later published redrawn versions of these diagrams in my Inner Order Teachings of the Golden Dawn, preserving the original structure while clarifying the often-faded pigments. My mentor, Jack Taylor of Whare Ra Temple, told me that around the 6=5 level certain adepts were permitted, indeed encouraged, to colour their own diagrams as part of a meditational discipline. According to Taylor, the act of colouring was not simply decorative but a psycho-physical technique. The mental concentration required, combined with the emotional and symbolic engagement with the hues themselves, acted to unblock latent psychic faculties. In this sense, colouring was a form of active ritual engagement, bridging intellect and intuition.

In Inner Order Teachings, I also demonstrated the use of the Princess Scale in colouring the Infernal Habitations diagram, not only to show how the lower scales could be employed in structured work, but to illustrate how colour functions as a layered interpretive tool. The Princess Scale, often overlooked in favour of the more glamorous King and Queen Scales, has its own grounding role, tying higher visionary material back to the physical and psychological levels of practice. For diagrams dealing with the Qlippoth or the lower astral, the Princess Scale can be especially potent, as it anchors the imagery in the realm where psychic debris and subconscious content are most active. Tony Fuller made the point that Paul Foster Case had also used coloured diagrams from the rituals but were restricted. I am unaware if they were A.O., or if Paul Case applied his own colour scheme, Tony Fuller thinks is more than likely the case.

Ultimately, these diagrams were designed to be coloured by the individual practitioner according to temperament, perceptual bias, and meditative need. There is an inherent elasticity built into the system. Colour in the Golden Dawn is not a rigid dogma but a symbolic interface: a way of tuning the psyche to particular frequencies of ritual and contemplative work. How much flexibility one has depends largely on whether one is working independently or within an established temple structure. In a temple, the Vault colours form the reference point that binds the group into a cohesive symbolic field. In solitary practice, the practitioner’s inner landscape becomes the Vault, and individual nuance becomes not only permissible but necessary.

Thus, while debates continue about who invented the Colour Scales and what their “true” sequence may have been, the lived reality of the system reveals something much richer: a dynamic, experiential technology of colour that was always meant to evolve with the practitioner, the temple, and the Work itself.