At GlossyFeathers specifically...
I'm sorry...that last line...are we talking shit about the boundary defying, queer-supporting, Nazi-fighting British spy who was part of an interracial marriage in the 30's - turned Mother of Modern Witchcraft who is Doreen Valiente? The same woman who dealt with Gerald Gardner, Robert Cochrane, and various other men of highly inflated ego claiming long-standing familial traditions on multiple occasions, without whom it is 99.99% likely that modern witchcraft wouldn't have taken off in the first place? The self-same woman who took the Gardnerian book of shadows and made it what it is today by removing the overtly stolen OTO and Thelema elements, then providing some of the most iconic poems and invocations we have today?
We will not stand for the slander of Mama Doreen. You may not agree with Doreen, but Doreen is THE reason you practice witchcraft today and even have the ability to be that snide about healing colors, Glossy.
Literally the color of the ocean was, and is still known to help calm the mind. The sea heals a broken heart is what we say in my home, and lots of us believe it's because of the color, because I live in the South and we know about blue in the sea and on the porch. And its just as protective as it is healing. Your mention of its history in storing and identifying poisonous apothecary material speaks exactly to that quality of protection.
Witchcraft is an idiosyncratic practice. It is based on our on personal understanding and recognition of the patterns in the world around. Everyone perceives the world differently, ergo everyone's witchcraft will look a little different. But beyond that, the color blue had been considered healing for centuries before Doreen wrote a single word. And further still, Doreen didn't put anything to paper she did not actually do. If she wrote it, she did it. She doesn't tell us that nothing else will work ever. She doesn't demand we do this. She provides an example of something she's had success with for us to use if we should ever need it.
Doreen Valiente held an interest in folk-magic from the time she was a child. She began practicing witchcraft at 31, and kept at it until she passed at 77. That's 46 years of experience in witchcraft, magic, and occultism. To treat 46 years worth of experience as not worthy of consideration is pure ego - the same ego that drove Doreen to leave Gardner's coven and seek out other practitioners.
It was also Doreen Valiente who stood up and told the witchcraft community that it needed queer people to survive, at a time when many witchcraft groups were trying to oust queer people for not fitting the male-female dichotomy of their "perfect" little world. Doreen said "fuck that" and gave an impassioned speech about queer rights in the craft, making space for queer folks to safely step into the craft which she arguable created.
The viewpoint from which you are looking at this seems to be "well we're modern so we know better." But I would argue "we're modern, so we see less." We see the blue of our phone screens and computers and completely forget about the blue of the sky, of the sea, of blueberries and butterfly pea flower and cobalt fish floats. Blue from a computer screen causes eye-strain certainly, and if that's the only blue you know, your perception will be that blue is harmful.
But when you stop, look a little deeper, a little further back before we had *motions around* all this, you see that blue has been sacred, powerful, and yes, healing, for a very, very long time. It isn't hard to see why, unless we refuse those older experiences for our newer ones. We may have a more refined theoretical knowledge of magic, but we do NOT have a better functional knowledge if it, because we don't live with it like our ancestors did - even in 1953.
So let's take a moment and pay our respects to Doreen Valiente, without whom queers would have struggled much longer to enter the craft, without whom the "traditional witchcraft" community would be extremely lessened, and without whom the modern witchcraft movement likely never would have taken off to such glorious heights, meaning most of us would not be practicing.
