“Green, yellowish” designates a colour that is neither the fresh emerald of spring nor the full gold of harvest, but a transitional hue born of synthesis. The Latin description viridis cum flavedine or the English “yellowish green” captures this liminal state, where yellow—the colour of solar ripening and Malkuth—begins to overtake the blue-green of vegetation. Etymologically, green derives from Old English grēne (growing, living), while yellowish descends from geolu (gold, warm), so the compound name literally means “the living colour that leans toward gold.”

Position on the Tree of Life

In the King Scale of Colour, “Green, yellowish” is assigned to Path 20, the direct link between Netzach (Amber, the sphere of Victory and instinct) and Tiphereth (Clear pink rose, the sphere of Beauty and solar consciousness). This path runs down the left side of the Pillar of Severity, yet its colour betrays a softening: the harshness of green is tempered by the gold of Malkuth, which lies directly below. The path is numbered Twenty in the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom, and its colour marks a place where force begins to adopt form, where the raw vitality of Netzach receives the organising light of Tiphereth.

Astrological and planetary correspondence

By traditional association, the yellow-green of Path 20 corresponds to the Sun entering the sign of Virgo—a period when solar fire meets the discriminating earth of the sixth sign. Astrologically this colour reflects the via combusta tempered by harvest, a moment of intense vitality that is nonetheless channelled into ripening and order. In the planetary hierarchy, this hue is often linked to the peacock’s tail in alchemy, the cauda pavonis where all colours appear, but here it is purposefully restricted to the juncture of yellow and green, suggesting the completion of the green stage (viriditas) and the onset of the citrine stage in the Magnus Opus.

Historical context

“Green, yellowish” appears in the colour scales derived from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, themselves adapted from earlier Renaissance colour systems. The King Scale of Colour, attributed largely to William Wynn Westcott and S. L. MacGregor Mathers in the late nineteenth century, drew upon Kabbalistic colour sequences that had been confounded from the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism, but with a distinctly Victorian occult colour theory overlay. The specific hue “Green, yellowish” (or “Yellowish green”) is attested in the 1890s Cipher Manuscripts as the colour of Path 20.

In alchemical tradition, a yellow-green often signified the lemonade stage described by George Ripley and later by the Rosicrucian Chymical Wedding—a brief but crucial moment when the blackening had passed and the white had not yet fully emerged. Paracelsus, in his Liber de Nymphis, associated intermediate greens with the sal of the growing world, a salt that turned plants from purely vegetative green toward the gold of maturity. Renaissance herbals such as those of John Gerard sometimes described leaves “turning yellow green” as a sign that the plant’s virtus was concentrating into seed.

In the Sefer Yetzirah commentary tradition, the colour of the twentieth path is related to the letter Resh (the head, the returning cycle) and the concept of netsach (victory) becoming hod (glory), with the yellow-green representing the first blush of intellectual structure emerging from emotional force.

Closing summary

In the table of 777, “Green, yellowish” occupies the twentieth step of the King Scale of Colour, a hue that appears between Path 19 (“Yellow, greenish”) and Path 21 (“Violet”). It is the colour not of spring but of late summer, when the fields lean toward gold yet still hold green, a colour of ripeness and transition before the violet of Severity deepens overhead.