Blue black is the colour designation for the 32nd Path on the Tree of Life according to the Emperor Scale of Colour. Unlike the black of Binah (which is the darkness of formlessness) or the deep violet of Yesod (which is the lunar refraction), blue black is a dense, almost metallic shade: a blackness shot through with the deepest remaining blue of the sphere of Chokmah, now solidified at the final station—Malkuth, the Kingdom.

Position on the Tree of Life

Blue black belongs to the 32nd Path—the final path, which connects Malkuth to Hod. It is the descent into total manifestation. In the Queen scale, this path is simply black; in the Emperor scale, the black is tinged with blue to indicate that the passive, receptive darkness of the 32nd Path nevertheless retains a spark of the active, spiritual blue of the uppermost sephirah. It is the colour of the gate that turns both inward to the material world and outward to the infinite.

Astrological and planetary correspondence

This path is assigned to Tav, the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which corresponds to Saturn and also to the fixed sign of the zodiac. In the Emperor scale, blue black therefore carries the weight of Saturn's limitation and the slow, dense vibration of Earth, the element with which Tav is associated in the final, culminating form of the planet. It is the colour of lead—the base metal that alchemists sought to transmute—but it is also the colour of the keystone at the base of the arch, without which the entire structure of the Tree would collapse.

Historical context

The Emperor scale of colour, sometimes called the 'Scale of the King', was devised by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. It represents the Briatic world, the world of creation, and its colours are more stable and 'fixed' than those of the Queen scale (the Yetziratic world of formation). The Golden Dawn attributed blue black to the 32nd Path as the 'Tav of Saturn' to fix the descending current at the very bottom of the Tree. This tincture appears in the secret colour scales given to Adepts of the Order and was later preserved in the tables of Aleister Crowley's Liber 777.

Crowley himself commented that the 32nd Path is the 'administration of the Executive'—the point where all the previous twenty-five paths must be implemented in the physical world. Blue black is thus the administrative colour of final judgment and material completion. In the earlier German kabbalistic tradition, the 32nd Path was sometimes associated with the 'Intelligence of the Administrative', but the Golden Dawn codified it as a colour of deep, resolute darkness, veined with the only possible trace of light: a remnant of the blue pearl grey of Kether and Chokmah, now so compressed that it appears as an almost imperceptible shimmer in the black.

In Liber 777

In the table of Liber 777, at the row for the 32nd Path, the Emperor scale entry reads 'Blue black'. It stands immediately between the Queen scale's 'Black' and the Empress scale's 'Black, rayed with yellow'. This particular shade thus represents the most 'active' form of black on the Tree—the darkness that has already absorbed the structure of the astral light and is prepared to become the foundation of the physical world.