One of the questions I was asked most often as a teacher was, "What does this color mean?"
It is an understandable question. Open almost any book on witchcraft or magic, and you will find pages of correspondence charts assigning meanings to colors, herbs, crystals, planets, trees, and nearly everything else a practitioner might use.
Many of those systems have long histories. Others are blends of traditions gathered over time. They can be useful as points of reference.
But they were never where I began.
Instead, I asked a different question.
What does this color mean to you?
That one question changes everything.
Years ago, when I taught classes, I didn't hand out correspondence charts during our work with color. Instead, I arrived with a stack of large paint chips collected from the local hardware store.
Not every shade available, just enough to represent a broad range of colors and tones.
Each student had paper and a pen.
The exercise was simple.
I invited everyone to become quiet for a few moments, allowing the mind to settle without trying to achieve anything dramatic. Then I held up each paint chip, one at a time, for only a few seconds.
The instructions were equally simple.
Don't write down the color.
Don't analyze it.
Don't decide whether your answer is right or wrong.
Simply write the first words, feelings, memories, or images that appear.
You have only a few seconds.
The time limit was intentional. I wanted to hear from the intuitive mind before the logical mind began sorting through everything it had ever read in a book.
Only after every color had been seen did we return to the beginning.
This time, the students wrote down the name of the color, and then we shared our responses.
The conversations were always fascinating.
Some meanings overlapped.
Many did not.
I still remember one student who looked at the color orange and immediately wrote, "angry" and "hateful."
No one else in the room had anything remotely similar.
For her, those words carried genuine emotional truth.
They came from her own experiences, memories, and associations, not from a correspondence chart.
That mattered.
Because if she had ignored those responses in favor of what a book told her orange should mean, she would have been setting aside an authentic part of her own symbolic language.
This was never an argument against traditional correspondences.
It was an invitation to begin with observation.
Our lives shape the meanings we carry.
A person raised among cedar forests may experience a tree differently than someone who grew up on an open prairie.
The smell of lavender may bring peace to one practitioner and memories of a difficult relative to another.
A black candle may represent protection, mystery, grief, comfort, or something entirely different depending on the life that has been lived.
None of those responses are accidents.
They are part of the relationship between practitioner and practice.
Over time, those personal meanings may deepen, shift, or even change completely.
That, too, is part of the work.
Perhaps the most valuable thing correspondence charts can offer is a place to continue exploring rather than a place to stop.
A Simple Exercise
If you would like to explore your own symbolic language, gather ten or twelve paint chips in different colors from a hardware or paint store.
Take a notebook and sit somewhere quiet.
Spend a few moments allowing your attention to settle.
Then, one by one, look at each color for only a few seconds.
Before you have time to think, write the first words, feelings, memories, images, or impressions that come to mind.
Don't write down the color itself until you've finished the exercise.
When you've gone through every color, return to the beginning.
Write the name of each color and read your first impressions.
Notice which responses came immediately.
Notice which ones surprised you.
Notice where your own experience differs from what you have been taught to expect.
You are not trying to prove or disprove a correspondence chart.
You are learning the language your own practice has been speaking all along.
Sometimes, that is where the deepest correspondences are found.