How red marks liminal thresholds between life, death, sacrifice and renewal

In 1823, English geologist William Buckland discovered a skeleton in a limestone cave in Paviland, southern Wales, which he identified as a prostitute from the Roman era, as the bones were coated in red ochre. Nearly a hundred years later, further studies, including that of grave goods, also painted in red, proved that the skeleton, which was dubbed “Red Lady of Paviland,” was actually a man and that the burial was not from the Roman era but from around 33,000 years before present! Since then, archaeologists have found similar ochre burials across continents: at Qafzeh in present-day Israel, at Sungir in Russia, at Lake Mungo in Australia, in sites across Africa where it continues to the present day in the cosmetic ritual practices of women from the Himba community. As the evolutionary anthropologist Camilla Power has written, red ochre decoration of bodies and clothes is “a recurrent and structured feature of ritual behaviour.” It marks a transition: puberty, which is an initiation into a new phase of life, or death, which is believed to lead the soul to an afterlife.

Victor Turner, the anthropologist of ritual, would later call such moments “liminal” — thresholds where ordinary hierarchies or naturally existing freedoms dissolve and a different order briefly governs. Power has argued that red pigment, especially in early human societies, likely functioned as a “technology of collective ritual,” shaping peoples’ behaviour long before administrative law or coinage existed. Across cultures, the administration of red — the mixing of ochre, the marking of bodies, the handling of blood — is often entrusted to those who themselves stand in liminal spaces. Ethnographic accounts from Siberia to the Americas describe ritual specialists whose gender expression does not align neatly with male or female roles. Many Indigenous North American traditions speak of Two-Spirit figures; Siberian shamanic traditions describe initiates who symbolically “die” and return altered; in parts of South Asia, hijra communities historically performed roles in rites of birth and fertility.

Archaeological work by Alison Watts demonstrates that red ochre from particular sources, in Middle Stone Age Africa, was transported across significant distances despite the local availability of similar pigments. Such a patterned preference indicates that red ochre’s value was not reducible to its chemical function or to its colour value. Colour, texture and a socially charged location, as well as the human effort that went into sourcing, supplying and administering, were all seen as part of total meaning-making. Such long-distance networks bound communities divided by time and space into networks of total prestation, as Marcel Mauss called it, where society becomes bound across economic, aesthetic, legal, and religious spheres all at once.

In the Rig Veda, dawn (Uṣas) is described as aruṇa, flushed and radiant, the sky streaked with the colour of awakening sacrifice. In the Greek epics, Homer often calls the sea “oinops”, meaning wine-dark, and likens battlefields to fields of spilled blood, where bronze and flesh meet in crimson blur. In the Hebrew Bible, the word ’adom (red) shares its root with adam (human) and adamah (earth), binding soil, body, and mortality into one linguistic field. In ancient China, vermilion marked imperial gates and ritual seals, the cinnabar pigment associated with life-force and alchemical transformation. Roman writers describe the use of red ochre and cinnabar in triumphal processions and funerary rites, while in Mesoamerican codices, red pigments signal both sacrifice and renewal. Across these traditions, red signals thresholds: dawn and dusk, war and fertility, earth and blood, death and consecration.

Economic Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book, Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value, notes that in the earliest Brahmanas (texts that explain or provide commentary to the Vedas), red as a colour value becomes the basis for a ritual system of value exchange long before the emergence of commercial markets. The sages of these Brahmanas negotiate with gods and coax them into allowing red to become a colour of substitution so that gods see the sacrifice of red objects or animals as equivalent to the sacrifice of human life itself.

Goethe, writing millennia later, would describe red as the colour that approaches the eye with warmth and immediacy. Ochre, he noted, belongs to the “earth colours,” close to bodily sensation, never fully abstract. Red does not recede like blue. It confronts. It occupies. In Zur Farbenlehre which was published in 1810, Goethe describes an experiment where a spectrum is viewed through a prism at the edges of light and dark. He observes that when blue deepens toward darkness, it intensifies into violet; when yellow deepens toward darkness, it intensifies into red. For Goethe, red was the culmination of intensification, where light thickens toward matter.