Trace The Rainbow: A History of the World's Most Powerful Symbol

Whenever we post a blog about the rainbow flag, we invariably see discussions in the comments claiming the rainbow’s “true” origin as a co-opted Christian symbol. We decided to do the research to chart exactly where the rainbow-as-symbol began, and how its meaning has shifted across time and space. Without further ado, here is the comprehensive social history of the rainbow:

Where Does the Rainbow Begin?

For most of human history, the rainbow was viewed as some sort of a celestial force or entity, but what it precisely meant to any given group of people has varied wildly throughout it's colorful past.

1800 BCE – Mesopotamia

Many believe the rainbow's first symbolic appearance comes from the Biblical story of Noah, but it actually predates that story by more than a thousand years. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian poem about the king of Uruk, a great flood is sent by the god Enlil to silence a noisy humanity when he was trying to nap. After it recedes, the goddess Ishtar holds her colorful necklace up in the sky before the lone survivors and their animal companions as a promise never to allow such destruction again. Sound familiar?

1500 BCE – India

In the Hindu tradition, the rainbow is known as “Indradhanush”, meaning "Indra's bow." Indra, the king of the gods and the god of thunder and storms, was said to use the rainbow as his weapon, firing bolts of lightning from it across the sky. In Sanskrit literature, the rainbow's colors were each associated with different elements of the natural world, embedding it in a rich symbolic vocabulary that persists in Hindu culture today. 

1100 BCE – China

In early Chinese cosmology, written records indicate that the people of ancient China often viewed the rainbow as a dragon-like creature in the sky. In some descriptions, the creature is viewed as inhabiting the space where Yin (female, earth, darkness) meets Yang (male, heaven, light). While some positively viewed the rainbow as a sign that the two great cosmic forces were interacting, in some other texts it suggested a heavenly disturbance and could be an omen of disorder on the horizon. 

750 BCE – Greece

Here, the rainbow pops up again in an epic poem. In The Iliad, among other texts, the rainbow is frequently used to symbolize the goddess Iris. In Greek mythology, Iris serves as the messenger between Mt. Olympus and Earth.The arc of the rainbow disappearing into the clouds mirrored her journeys ferrying messages back and forth.

550 BCE – Jerusalem

Most scholars agree the bulk of Genesis was written in the 6th century BCE. In this Hebrew version of the flood story, God instructs Noah to build an ark to survive alongside his family and two of every animal. After the purge, God vowed never to flood the earth again, creating the rainbow as a sign of his promise. 

250 CE – Central America

The Mayan people largely viewed the rainbow as a dangerous and often harmful force in the universe. They understood it to be a living entity, a great serpent that emerged from caves or springs. Because the rainbow was thought to cause illness, especially vulnerable pregnant women and young children were warned to avoid looking at them.

Much later, in the same region, the Aztec people would begin to tell of their own colorful sky-serpent god: Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was occasionally described as a servant to the goddess Ix Chel, which some translate as “Lady Rainbow”.

Unknown – Australia

Speaking of serpents… Ancient cave paintings in Northern Australia are believed by some to depict a gigantic rainbow serpent known as Wagyl or Yurlunggur, among other names, viewed as an omnipotent being associated with both creation and destruction. Because so much of Aboriginal history was handed down orally, it has proven difficult to precisely date much of their spiritual mythos... though some scholars have theorized that these paintings are nearly 8,000 years old. If those paintings are indeed that old, and are depictions of the rainbow serpent God, the Aboriginal people may be able to lay claim to holding the oldest known rainbow myth on Earth... and possibly the world's oldest continuous religious tradition. Move over Mesopotamia!

700 CE – Scandinavia

In the Norse cosmological tradition, the rainbow appears as “Bifröst”, a burning, shimmering bridge connecting the human world of Midgard to Asgard, the realm of the gods. Unlike the rainbows of other traditions, Bifröst was not a symbol or an omen, but a physical structure. According to tradition, Bifröst will ultimately shatter at Ragnarök, the end of the world, as the giants finally cross it to wage their final war against the gods. 

1100 CE – Europe

As Christianity spread across medieval Europe, the Biblical rainbow retained its covenant meaning but took on new visual power in religious art and iconography. In depictions of the Last Judgment, a subject that preoccupied artists across the continent, Christ is frequently shown seated on or within a rainbow as he presides over the fate of souls. The image drew directly from the Book of Revelation, in which a rainbow encircles the throne of God. Its prevalence in these paintings arguably cemented the rainbow as a symbol of promise and hope within Christianity forever. 

1200 CE – North America

For the indigenous people of North America, the rainbow made frequent appearances in their stories, playing varying roles for different tribes. For the Ojibwe, the rainbow was born when the god Nanabozho decided to paint the 'boring' white flowers, only for the birds to steal the colors and paint the sky with them instead. The Achomawi tell a tale of how the Spider Brothers wove the first rainbow in the sky, ending the long winter (which is why spiderwebs reflect prismatic colors).

From Heaven to Humanity – The Big Shift

If you had to pinpoint any one major pivot point in the rainbow's existence as a symbol anywhere, the most fitting choice may be one Enlightenment-era experiment that would upend everything.

1665 CE – England

Isaac Newton's experiments with a glass prism changed how the Western world understood the rainbow. By passing sunlight through the prism and projecting the resulting spectrum onto a wall, Newton demonstrated that white light was not pure but composed of every color simultaneously, each bending at a different angle when it passed through a medium like water or glass. 

Fun Fact: After this experiment Isaac Newton was the one who ultimately declared which colors were in the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet). He considered a few other divisions, but ultimately decided that it should be split into seven pieces to correspond with the seven musical notes.

1820 CE – England

More than a century later, the poet John Keats would mourn Newton’s discovery, accusing him of destroying the poetry of the rainbow by way of explaining it scientifically. Keats' accusation appeared in his poem Lamia, which contained the lines now paraphrased as the charge that “philosophy had clipped the angel's wings and unraveled the rainbow”, a sentiment that would encapsulate the Romantic movement as a lyrical rebuke of the Enlightenment.

1939 CE – United States

When Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, the song was nearly cut from the film before release. Gay audiences claimed it as their own, hearing in it something beyond its literal meaning. Garland herself became one of the defining gay icons of the twentieth century. Her death in June 1969 came just days before the Stonewall uprising, a proximity the community has never forgotten. This was arguably the beginning of the association between the LGBTQ+ community and the rainbow. 

1960 CE - United States

As the counterculture movement took shape across America, the rainbow became part of its visual vocabulary. Its appeal was straightforward: the rainbow was natural, it was free, it belonged to nobody, and it contained every color at once. In a movement defined by a rejection of conformity and an embrace of unity across cultural lines, that last quality carried particular weight. Rainbows appeared on concert posters, painted vans, and album covers, less as a deliberate symbolic claim, and more as an instinctive reach for an image that already said what the movement was trying to say.

1969 CE – Chicago, IL

Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, organized an unprecedented alliance of groups with little obvious reason to work together: the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots Organization (working-class white men), the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican gang and later civil rights organization), among others. He called this new group the "Rainbow Coalition" because it brought together people of every color under a shared political cause (helping the marginalized escape the trap of poverty). Reverend Jesse Jackson later drew on Hampton's framework, delivering his much-celebrated "Rainbow Coalition" speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention and continuing that work through his own National Rainbow Coalition after his unsuccesful presidential run. 

1978 CE – San Francisco, CA

The rainbow flag as most people now know it was designed by Gilbert Baker, a gay artist and activist in San Francisco, at the request of Harvey Milk, the city's first openly gay elected official. When asked about his inspiration, Baker stated his desire to select a symbol that could represent the wide spectrum of the community. He also acknowledged he was influenced by the rainbow's prevalence within the Hippie culture of the 1960's. While he never pinpointed Judy Garland's song as a deliberate inspiration, he did cite She's a Rainbow by the Rolling Stones as one.

The original flag had eight stripes, each assigned a meaning: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for harmony, and violet for spirit. The pink stripe was removed because the fabric was too difficult to source at-scale, and the turquoise stripe was dropped so that there would be an even number of stripes to divide the flag in half in a more aesthetically-pleasing way, leaving the six-stripe version that became standard worldwide. 

1994 CE – South Africa

When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa's first democratically elected president, the country needed a new story about itself. Archbishop Desmond Tutu supplied one. He began using the phrase "Rainbow Nation" to describe a South Africa that could hold its many races, languages, and cultures together under one identity without erasing any of them. Tutu himself would later say that the “Rainbow Nation” had become a fiction used to avoid confronting persistent inequality. 

1985-2005 CE – United States

The rainbow has also come to symbolize loss in American culture. Since the 1980s, a poem called The Rainbow Bridge has circulated widely in vets offices and animal shelters, first on small paper cards and, later, via chain emails. It describes a meadow where deceased animals wait for their owners before crossing into the afterlife together. Though it’s one of the most reproduced English poems of all time, nobody knows precisely who wrote it.

The second meaning emerged from online communities of people who had experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant loss. By the mid-2000s, these communities had begun using the term "rainbow baby" to describe a child born after such a loss, the idea being that a rainbow appears after a storm: beautiful because of what preceded it. Like the Rainbow Bridge poem, the phrase had no single author and no founding moment. It grew organically because it named something that people needed a name for.

2018 CE – Portland, OR

In 2018, graphic designer Daniel Quasar released a redesign of the pride flag that has since become widely known as the Progress Pride Flag. Quasar added a chevron on the left side of the original six stripes, incorporating black and brown stripes to represent LGBTQ+ people of color, alongside the blue, pink, and white stripes of the transgender flag. The chevron shape was deliberate: pointing to the right, it suggested forward movement. In 2021, Valentino Vecchietti added an intersex-inclusive circle to the design, and that version has been adopted by a growing number of organizations and governments. 

The rainbow, it turns out, is still being written. What does it mean to you?