Short answers, pulled from the story.
Black was the first color used by human artists, appearing in the Lascaux Cave in France between 18,000 and 17,000 years ago. Paleolithic painters used charcoal from burnt torches to draw bulls and other animals on the cave walls. This earliest use of black predates written language by millennia.
In ancient Egypt, black held positive associations as the color of fertility and the rich black soil flooded by the Nile River. It was the color of Anubis, the god of the underworld who took the form of a black jackal to offer protection against evil to the dead. Conversely, the ancient Greeks viewed black as the color of the underworld, separated from the living by the river Acheron, whose water ran black.
By the end of the 16th century, black was the color worn by almost all monarchs of Europe and their courts, symbolizing power, dignity, humility, and temperance. This shift began in northern Italy with the Duke of Milan and the Count of Savoy, then moved to France under Louis I, Duke of Orleans, and to England at the end of King Richard II's reign. High-quality black dyes arrived on the market in the 14th century, allowing garments of a deep, rich black to be worn by magistrates and government officials as a sign of importance and seriousness.
Black became the emblematic color of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Puritans in England and America because Protestant doctrine required clothing to be sober, simple, and discreet. John Calvin and Philip Melanchthon denounced the richly colored and decorated interiors of Roman Catholic churches, seeing the red worn by the pope and his cardinals as the color of luxury, sin, and human folly. In the Protestant Netherlands, Rembrandt used this sober new palette of blacks and browns to create portraits whose faces emerged from the shadows, expressing the deepest human emotions.
In the second part of the 17th century, Europe and America experienced an epidemic of fear of witchcraft, leading to the widespread superstition about black cats and other black animals. During the notorious Salem witch trials in New England in 1692 and 1693, nineteen women and men were hanged as witches, cementing the association between black and evil in the popular imagination. People widely believed that the devil appeared at midnight in a ceremony called a Black Mass or black sabbath, usually in the form of a black animal, often a goat, a dog, a wolf, a bear, a deer, or a rooster.
As of September 2019, the darkest material known to science is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes. The material was grown by MIT engineers and was reported to have a 99.995% absorption rate of any incoming light, surpassing any former darkest materials including Vantablack, which has a peak absorption rate of 99.965% in the visible spectrum. This scientific achievement mirrors the ancient quest for the deepest black, from the charcoal of the Lascaux caves to the gall-nut dyes of the 14th century.