Green
From SourceryForge
Green is the colour halfway between blue and yellow, and often mixed from them. A wide range of colours, from greenish chartreuse to greenish Cyan are generally recogniced as green, even in their muted or darkened shades. The most important green things are growing plants, that made it the colour of life and nature.
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Physics
Green is a colour representing wavelengths of the visible spectrum roughly between 520 and 570 nm They are shorter than yellow light and longer than blue light. Pure green is in the middle between blue and yellow light.
Green is a primary colour in the additive colour system, together with red and blue. In the subtractive colour system, it is a mix of yellow and cyan. In both cases, its [[complementary colour is magenta
In the traditional colour system which is probably the one that's relevant in magick and symbolism, it is an equal mix of yellow and blue. In this case, its complementary colour is red. The contrast between red and blue is one of the most common and well-known complimentary contrasts in art and design, although often in somewhat muted variants.
Mixing yellow and blue pigments will tend to create green,with uneven mixtures producing shades called yellow-green or blue-green. Warm, natural looking greens include traces of red, which also can be introduced by using yellows or greens which are slightly on the red side.
Green in Nature
As with so many colours, many things can be green, and so it's nature-based symbolism is quite ambivalent.
Of course, in nature all normal plants are green. Chlorophyll, the green colourant in plants, is responsible for their abillity to transform sunlight into energy usable by living beings. This energy is mostly used to produce sugar and from it starch, which can be transformed back into energy as needed. Animals don't have this abillity, so they need to eat plants (or other plant-eaters) in order to get fuel for their bodies. So, green-ness is literally the source of all life ( there are in fact a few other sources, but they are not well-known and by far less important).
Even without that knowledge, the abundance of green in nature and its importance of green plants as basic food source were quite obvious for our ancestors.
But green has also a rich negative symbology. Puss can be green. The face colour of ill persons can appear greenish. Rotting meat gets green from bacteria colonies, and sometimes even fluorescent.
Green in magick and folklore
The Elements (western)
In the western elements green is used to represent Earth.
You may be able to find some interesting correspondences by seeing what other articles link to this one.
