R is for Red

I can't write about Black without writing about red.  (Of course, the post about Black was way more important than this one, so if you missed it the first time around on the guitar go read that one first.)

The Red Land and the Black Land is sort of the founding drama of Egypt - the desert and the fertile strip along the Nile, Set and Wesir.  There are a lot of these dances to be had in mythology, the brother/other tango.  And a lot of people want to offload the "bad" onto redness - much like they do onto blackness, though it's generally a different bad.  Red is for rage and lust and all of that stuff that good people don't do, right?  Red is that sign to Stop Doing That, or the mark for danger: don't go here, don't try this stuff, stay away.

Red is also at the root of "rubric", the set of instructions and procedures for a ritual, written in red ink.  Write your names of dangerous beasts and demonic figures in red - and write your gestural procedures and your steps of what to do in red, too.  This is a guide, a structure, and it crops up in rather more than medieval manuscripts; you'll find those red-written liner notes in the Book of Going Forth By Day, too.

Red is for blood, that dangerous color to see on the outside of your skin - but redness flows through you all the time, and it is that redness, that blood, that pulse that unifies your parts, causes your organs to function as a whole.  (This is not a statement about biology; this is a statement about etheric anatomy from an Egyptian perspective.  The fact that it's also kind of true physiologically is also a thing.)  That redness is made of iron, your life built out of the deaths of stars quite directly.  (Trace elements are trace elements, but iron is the star-killer.)  That redness is fire, and its heat is what drives your personal engine.

Which isn't to say that I'm okay with that sidelining of those red emotions, the rage and lust end of things - because those are things which are filled with life.  The idea is not to not have them, it is to have them in appropriate circumstances, to deal with them appropriately, to keep them aligned and, as a different tradition would put it, under the hand of love.  That these things can be a manifestation of the destroyer is a given - but that simply means that they are not an exception to everything else.  Treating them as such because of their intensity is a good way to go completely askew, and that pulls things out from under the hand of love ... and thus more free to smash shit up.

Redness is not the enemy.