Friday September 16th was the first annual Cloud Appreciation Day.* I hope you got in some good cloud scrying (where one lies down on a soft hill and sees their otherworldly future in the clouds).
Every day was Cloud Appreciation Day on Summer Camp Island.**
And for good reason! Clouds are a constant throughout history and mythology - they’ve seen everything. The Cumulonimbus cloud even has ‘accessory clouds’ - a cloud which is dependent on a larger cloud system for its development and continuance, and also a great thing to wear to a formal:
But we all know the ultimate accessory to a cloud, or Queen Elizabeth I, is the Rainbow.
As we all remember from last week:
Rainbows are rarely seen at noon.
But what else are they hiding? Let’s dive into the not so secret history of rainbows if you have google and this book:
My love affair with rainbows began as a small child when I bought my Grandmother a mug from a pharmacy in the American beach town where she lived that officially awarded her the title ‘World’s Best Grandma.’ The mug had an animal sliding down a rainbow on it, and I found it to be so beautiful. I was living in the UK at the time, and this beautiful rainbow mug, purchased in a pharmacy that was packed to the gills with florescent markers and grape scented stickers, became a symbol of America to me. And I really wanted to live in America. Much like John Cusack in ‘Serendipity’ I search for this mug in every thrift shop in the hopes I can acquire it again. And I still roam around American pharmacies when I am feeling lonely.
While I love rainbows, I found it hard to research them because let’s be honest, I’m mainly in it for the hot pix.
To quote Elizabeth Gilbert:
If someone lights up like a beacon, we almost don't care what they're doing.
This is how I feel about rainbows. But the more books I cracked open, the more enthralled I became. So, let’s get into the facts:
In order to see a rainbow, you must be standing between between the rain drops and the sun.***
And now, the “facts”:
Newton labelled a rainbow’s colors to be red, yellow, green, blue, violet. Five colors. Later, he added orange and indigo. Seven colors. But many believe his choices were not scientific. Newton liked the number seven because the musical scale has seven notes and to him that made a perfect structure. Did he add indigo to achieve the number seven? Possibly. Writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov said, “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes, it seems merely deep blue.” Newton himself admitted, “My own eyes are not very critical in distinguishing colors.”
I love that Newton just decided there were 7 colours in the rainbow because there were seven notes on a piano. We really can do anything we want:
I just received a book from a friend called ‘Affinities’ which includes an image titled ‘Newton’s Tints’ from James Sowerby’s ‘A New Elucidation of Colours’ (1809). I don’t know about you but I’m seeing 16 colours here (Newton):
Rainbows are actually full circles:
The antisolar point is the center of the circle. Viewers in aircraft can sometimes see these circular rainbows. Viewers on the ground can only see the light reflected by raindrops above the horizon.
I am a big fan of this passage from ‘The First Bad Man’ by Miranda July, regarding a baby discovering rainbows for the first time:
This kind of thing is more along the lines of what I was expecting, he said. This will for sure be my top interest, my area of focus.
Rainbows?
And everything else like this.
There is nothing else like this. Rainbows are alone; they are the only thing like that.
The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflection, shadows, smoke – these things were morose and distance cousins at best. No, rainbows are their own class of spectacularity, every single one of them impressive, never a bleak rainbow, never with just some of the colors. Always all the colors and always in the right order.
Rainbows = always all the colours in the right order.
However sometimes we will see a secondary (double) rainbow where the colours are displayed in the reverse order of the main rainbow. Between these two arcs is something called ‘Alexander’s dark band’ (someone take this phrase and make something with it please).
And while I never like to contradict Miranda July’s writing as I find it to be superb - if we are really going down the rabbit hole of things that are ‘like rainbows’ - let me introduce you to: Moonbows (sometimes known as a lunar rainbow) which:
are an optical phenomenon caused when the light from the moon is refracted through water droplets in the air. Because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, it is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow, but it can be captured in a long exposure photograph:
And Fogbows (sometimes referred to as GHOST RAINBOWS - dead, dying, so happy with this fact) which are rainbows cousins, produced by fog rather than raindrops.
The folklore and mythologies around rainbows are as gorgeous as rainbows themselves. Here are some of my favourites (sourced from The Books of Rainbows by Richard Whelan unless stated otherwise):
The Mojaves of Arizona said the rainbow was a charm the creator needed to stop a rain storm; a very bad storm required all of the colours.
In Peru, is was traditionally said that one must remain silent and place a hand over one’s mouth when looking at a rainbow - not out of reverence, but out of fear that the rainbow would cause one’s teeth to decay. A side note here that people thought you could catch the plague by yawning - to counteract this people would do the cross symbol when someone yawns or cover their mouth so as not to let the devil in. So probably wise to ferme la bouche in most outdoor scenarios.
Some European farmers have traditionally said that the rainbow is en evil serpent that comes down from the sky to quench its vast thirst in lakes and rivers. In Slovakia it is said of a person attempting to quench a great thirst ‘drinks like a rainbow.’
We all know that there is a pot of gold at the end of rainbows but did you know that in Silesia, a region that has passed between Germany and Poland the gold can only be obtained by a nude man. Bloody typical.
According to a superstition formerly found in France and Serbia, anyone passing under the arch of a rainbow would undergo a change of gender.
In 1978, the artist Gilbert Baker, designed the first rainbow flag to represent the queer community. He adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit).
I have been leafing through this book called Thought Forms, a seminal occult book compiled by the leaders of the Theosophical Society and a huge influence on Kandinsky and Hilma Af Klint and came across this image that struck me, regarding how we grieve. It reminded of how the Mojaves of Arizona thought we needed all the colours of a rainbow to stop a very bad storm. I love thinking of grief as a very bad storm.
The piece is called At a Funeral.
These two thought-forms were seen simultaneously and they represent two points of view with regard to the same occurrence. They were observed at a funeral, and they exhibit the feelings evoked in the minds of two of the “mourners” by the contemplation of death.
The first image is someone grieving from a place of “despondency and horror.”
The second image is a full expression of deep sympathy in all it’s rainbow coloured moonbow twilight glory:
The lighter green indicates appreciation of the suffering of the mourners and condolence with them, while the band of deeper green shows the attitude of the thinker towards the dead person themselves. The deep rose-colour exhibits affection towards both the dead and the living, while the upper part of the cone and the stars which ride from it testify to the feeling aroused within the thinker by the consideration of the subject of death, the blue expressing its devotional aspect, while the violet shows the thought of, and the power to respond to, a noble ideal, and the golden stars denote the spiritual aspiration which its contemplation calls forth. The band of clear yellow which is seen in the centre of this thought-form is very significant, as indicating that the person’s whole attitude is based upon and prompted by their intellectual comprehension of the situation, and this is also shown by the regularity of the arrangement of the colours and definiteness of the lines of demarcation between them.
In the future I will be implementing all the colours of the rainbow to get rid of any bad storms.
Thank you for reading this article on rainbows. I will leave you with this brilliant abstract exploration of the rainbow colours of the yankee candle company:
Please turn the lights off on your way out.
Thank you.
To my slow motion multi-tasking subscribers:
I’m introducing a paid subscription model. If you like slow motion multi-taking and are able to pay $5 a month towards supporting it, it would mean the world to me. I am enjoying making these so much and would love to be able to continue to dedicate time to them and release them on a weekly basis, and a paid subscription model would be hugely helpful in allowing me to do so.
To upgrade your subscription plan please click the link below:
*Shout out to Gavin Pretor-Pinney who runs the Cloud Appreciation Society, and his book ‘The Cloud Spotters Guide’ which I am my own appreciation society for. If you’d like to hear him in conversation with my fi·an·cé Raviv on his podcast The Study you can do so here.
**Summer Camp artwork included here created by the art department: Jisoo Kim, Thomas Wellman, You Jung Byun, Holly Williams, Ron Russell, Jessica Kleinman and Sarah Beeby, and laid out by storyboarder Graham Falk.
*** Or the Moon and New York City.
Drink like a Rainbow
this made my week to read. thank you!
One of the most intriguing pieces I have read this month - and so interesting to discover moonbows and fogbows!