Violet is the dye-stuff of kings, the colour of the imperial Roman paludamentum and the heraldic stain of mourning—a hue poised at the visible edge of the spectrum, where light darkens toward the invisible. Its name descends from the Old French violette, a diminutive of the Latin viola, the flower, and its symbolic weight bears the tension of the threshold: a blending of the red of action and the blue of contemplation, a colour that absorbs rather than radiates, that suggests the conclusion of a cycle and the first hint of a hidden one beyond the visible. In the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, violet is the colour of the Arcanum revealed in the seventh day, the final transformative garment, and in the broader Hermetic tradition it stands for the tincture of the Philosopher’s Stone—purple of the sages—the result of the rubedo and albedo unified, a colour that in its purity seems to issue from a source deeper than light, a kind of shadow born of intense light. The Roman emperors reserved Tyrian violet, extracted from the Murex shellfish, as a monopoly; its extraction was so costly that a pound of the dye equalled a pound of gold, and the colour thus became a marker of the absolute boundary of earthly authority, the point where power touches its own limit and is transfigured into the sacred—the colour worn by the flamines and the Pontifex Maximus in their most secret rites. In alchemy, violet is the Cauda Pavonis, the Peacock’s Tail, that fleeting multicoloration of the nigredo breaking into the albedo; it is the moment of the conjunction of opposites, the hermaphroditic flower of the Rebis, the Two-Thing, and it is the colour of the Onos or Ass of the Divine—the beast that carries the mysteries, neither wholly beast nor wholly god. Crowley, in his Vision and the Voice, associates violet with the Atu of the Universe, the final trump of the Tarot, where the dancer’s veil is violet—the colour of the completed Great Work, the veil that hides nothing because it contains everything, the last colour before the white brilliance of Keter that is the first. In the A∴A∴ grade structure, violet is the colour of the Adeptus Exemptus (8°=3□) who has integrated the red of Geburah and the blue of Chesed into the purple of Tiphereth in its secondary aspect, and the Immediate Past Hierophant wears violet in his aureole to signify that he has passed beyond the Veil of the Sanctuary. On the Queen Scale of Colour assigned to Yesod (the ninth Sephirah), violet is the reflected glory of the Foundation—the receptacle of the astral light, the Moon’s reflection of the Sun’s glory, the colour of the tzaddiq cloaked in the shekhinah when she descends into the form-world. It is not, in this context, the violet of the path between Chokmah and Tiphereth (which is purple, a slightly more red and regal hue), but a deeper, cooler violet: a colour that speaks of the darkness of the evening that precedes the dawn of the actual self, the colour of the Qliphoth when they are not yet broken but ordered, the violet of the Hekhaloth in their outermost hall. In the 777 system, the Queen Scale column is the colour of the Great Mother in her aspect of completion—the womb that is also the tomb, the colour of the violet corolla of the Viola odorata that in the Song of Solomon is the flower of the beloved, the Root of the alphabet Vau, the nail that fixes the act of creation. It is the colour that You do not see until You have passed the eighth gate, the colour of the ink with which the Book is sealed when the reading is over, and the colour of the light that remains in the closed eye after the candle is blown out. In the table of 777, at step 9 (Yesod), The Queen Scale of Colour is Violet—the Foundation’s garment of night-violet, the sum of all that is received and reflected, the colour of the Sophereth who counts the dust of the stars.