Pitch

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Genesis 1: 1-3. Bringing light to total darkness is a powerful image—whether or not you’re a Believer. 

If you’ve been in a cave when the guide turns off all the lights, you know what pitch black is. The terms “black as night” and “blackout” don’t even come close to expressing the absolute absence of light. For human creatures, being in total darkness can be a fearful thing. We have no heightened senses of smell, sight, hearing, or touch to navigate a world in complete darkness. The pitch blackness of the cave triggers a primal fear in us: there can be danger in the darkness. The longer the guide withholds the lighter and lets the darkness remain, the more anxious some tend to get. Small children begin to whimper, people fidget. (Let there be light. Please.) But then the guide lights one small candle, and it illuminates the large cavernous room. You can almost hear the collective sighs of relief (or was it just yours?). We all wonder what we would do and what would happen to us if we were to remain in the pitch-black darkness. Our hearts go out to those who became trapped in mines or lost in caves, never to see daylight again. 

As a color name, pitch is taken from a number of viscoelastic polymers called by the same name. These polymers are derived from petroleum, coal tar, and plants and can be natural or manufactured in the forms of tar, bitumen or asphalt, and resin. Though it isn’t always the case, we think of pitch as extremely dark, resinous, and tar-like, unyielding and weighing us down (think La Brea Tar Pits outside Los Angeles, where thousands of animals were trapped over tens of thousands of years and slowly, slowly drowned in thick black ooze). 

The fear of pitch blackness perhaps goes back to a time before electricity or fire when we had no control over the darkness. Those cloud-covered nights without the moon and stars to show the way could be oppressive and dangerous—for who knew what wild animal lurked nearby searching for a meal? And who knew what was out there that had never been seen in the light! 

Fear of the deepest dark and the unknown are found in stories from multiple eras and cultures. Nyx, the daughter of Chaos, is the ancient Greek goddess of the night. Her children include sleep, anguish, discord, and death.¹ Nott, a black-robed night goddess from Germanic/Scandinavian traditions, rides in a chariot pulled by a dark horse, drawing darkness across the sky like a drape.² The fearsome Hindu warrior goddess, Kali, is depicted with dark skin and wears a necklace of skulls, brandishing swords and a severed head.³

Fear of the deepest dark also came to be associated with death, for what can be darker than the grave? In the Book of the Dead, the ancient Egyptian funerary text often buried alongside the body, the scribe, Ani, writes of his experience in finding himself in the underworld. “What manner of land is this unto which I have come? It hath not water, it hath not air; it is deep, unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein.”⁴

Although pitch black has taken on ominous connotations, your leather furniture in beautifully rich Turncoat Pitch is guaranteed not to frighten you . . . unless you’ve been diagnosed with melanophobia—fear of the color black.