“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Applied to old age, the color black denotes a returning to those unconscious forces. Now all of this so far is from the standpoint of American and Western belief. It is simply the reality in which many of my readers are involved. In other “underground” systems of belief, however, black is seen as a symbol of great knowledge, power and strength. When this is carried to an extreme you wind up with devil cults, in which the poorly understood powers of creativity and exuberance rush out in distorted form; the undersides of consciousness are then glorified at the expense of the other, white, “conscious and objective” values.

Through the ages, again, underground philosophies have tried to combine the two concepts, usually going from one extreme to the other in combating the current ideas in historical terms. In some of these philosophies the daylight is seen as pallid, for example, in comparison with the true brilliance of knowledge that illuminates the dream state, and black is the symbol then of secret knowledge that cannot be found with normal consciousness, or be scrutinized in the light of day.