Why Does Everyone in Lottie’s Cult on 'Yellowjackets' Wear Purple?

Eliza Thompson

Mon, March 27, 2023 at 2:20 AM UTC

4 min read

What can the color tell us about what's really going on at her "wellness retreat"?

The Season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets introduced plenty of new mysteries, but arguably none of them is more intriguing than Lottie’s cult. Everyone’s favorite teen antler priestess survived the wilderness, and she’s still doing her thing as a grownup (played by Simone Kessell). The cannibalism seems to have taken a backseat so far, but there are a few clues her new group is borrowing from the belief system she created in the Canadian Rockies in 1996. During one ritual, everyone wears animal masks, and she and her followers all wear necklaces bearing the symbol that the Yellowjackets found carved on the trees in 1996. There’s at least one thing that Lottie’s new cult has that the old one didn’t, though: Everybody’s wearing purple. The season premiere, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” doesn’t provide any answers, but the real world can provide a few clues about why Lottie might have chosen the shade as her calling card.

Why does everyone in Lottie's Yellowjackets Cult Wear Purple?

1. Lottie is building an empire

Purple has been associated with royalty since ancient times, with the Persian emperor Cyrus (born circa 600 B.C.E.) choosing a violet tunic as his uniform. The color was prized in the Roman Empire as well, and some emperors banned commoners from wearing the color under pain of death. One reason for the shade’s association with nobility was its scarcity. Phoenicians, for example, created purple dye from a species of sea snail, which dye makers cracked open to obtain a purple-producing mucus that then had to be exposed to sunlight for a precise amount of time. It could take more than 250,000 snails to yield just one ounce of usable dye.

Her followers aren’t exactly treated like kings and queens, but maybe she’s hoping the color encourages a royal mental state. She’s all about prioritizing your personal needs in search of your best self, which taken to an extreme could result in the kind of inveterate selfishness that got deposed emperors into trouble.

2. She’s cultivating an atmosphere of clairvoyance

On the more occult side of things, purple is linked with the third eye chakra, which is the center of perception, and the crown chakra, which is said to give access to higher states of consciousness. The color is used to spur psychic visions and abilities, and Lottie, as we know, has occasionally been able to predict the future.

It’s worth noting, however, that Lottie herself doesn’t wear purple. When she’s introduced, she’s wearing shades of orange and red, and during the bonfire ritual, she’s clad in a maroon dress and a white robe. Maybe her constituents need the extra help with their purple clothing, but she doesn’t because she’s already fully in touch with her third eye. (Red, for the record, corresponds with the root chakra, which governs your connection to the earth, and orange goes with the sacral chakra, which controls creativity and sexual energy.)

3. She’s maximizing the power of the human brain

Lottie’s favorite color has plenty of unique cultural meanings, but it’s also interesting from a scientific standpoint. Violet has the shortest wavelength of any color visible to the human eye, meaning it has the highest vibration rate of any light we can see. And while purple isn’t one of the seven colors on the Roy G. Biv spectrum, it’s still pretty cool. As you may remember from grade-school art class, blue and yellow combine to make green, yellow and red combine to make orange, and blue and red combine to make purple. When you look at a color spectrum, green appears between blue and yellow and orange shows up between red and yellow. Purple, however, doesn’t land between red and blue. If it behaved like the other color wavelengths did, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of green. What this means is that there is no single wavelength that will make you perceive the color purple—you can’t see it without help from your brain.

4. It’s, well, a cult!

Everything about Lottie’s compound screams “cult,” but plenty of major religions incorporate uniforms and/or monochromatic outfits. Catholic nuns wear habits, Buddhist monks wear orange robes, and Muslim pilgrims dress in all white. Lottie’s followers, however, are more reminiscent of the Rajneeshees, who wore shades of orange and red at the behest of their leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. During the group’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, Rajneesh ordered his followers to wear the colors to represent the sunrise — a fitting metaphor for a philosophy that included teachings about the dawn of a new man.

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