The very color itself would make appeal to special kinds of inherited feelings, simply because of its relation to awful spectacles, —the glare of the volcano-summit, the furious vermilion of lava, the raging of forest-fires, the overglow of cities kindling in the track of war, the smouldering of ruin, the blazing of funeral-pyres. And in this lurid race-memory of fire as destroyer, —as the " ravening ghost" of Northern fancy,—there would mingle a vague distress evolved through ancestral experience of crimson heat in rdation to pain, — an organic horror. And the like tremendous color in celestial phenomena would revive also inherited terror related of old to ideas of the portentous and of the wrath of gods.
Source: wiktionary