Violet: a building or structure *

“Is it the form of the clouds, or the tints of the sky, or the colours of the surrounding objects which are so changeable, which have troubled my thoughts as they passed before my eyes? Who can tell?”

– Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla, 1887 (via)

Objects and rooms have distinct colours ranging from the deepest blues and violets to a pale lavender, a muted silver and shocks of yellow. The usage of colour in Le Horla is striking throughout and reminds me of how Van Gogh's paintings became increasingly colourful as his madness enveloped him.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for August is not date-related but lists, for the most part, the colours of the rainbow.

Someone wears purple on Purple Day (International Epilepsy Day).

 

Both in The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954), Marjorie Cameron wears shades of purple. Professionally known as Cameron, she was a follower of #Thelema, the philosophical movement founded by occultist Aleister Crowley.

“Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight”

– Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX (1904)

Meanwhile in 1946, rocket scientist #JackParsons and (pre-Scientology) sci-fi author #LRonHubbard worked on a series of Crowley-related Magick ceremonies named Babalon Working. After Parsons declared the rituals a success, he encountered Cameron in his own house. She became the element required to continue the ceremonies, this resulting in her being declared Babalon, the Scarlet Woman.