The Four spirit courts

The four spirit courts are an old system of spirit taxonomy: An attempt to understand the nature of Being in a system of spiritual ecology and interrelation. This map has ties to Thomas Middleton’s 17th century play The Witch, as well as Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The courts are thus:

✾ Red Court

The Red Court are those Spirits who are enshrined in creatures of flesh and blood, whether tied to Human vessels or other animals. This includes those Witches whose Otherness is deeply expressed in the experience of being theriomorphic- especially the werewolves and skinchangers of folklore.

Those of the Red Court identify very deeply with their Fetch-beasts and Familiars. Witches of this court are living exemplars of the Red Magic; the enchantments of Blood; the power of menstruation, birth, manifestation, and sacrifice. They are highly skilled at manifesting, tool-making, cunning, and forming lasting bonds and pacts with spirits.

✾ White Court

The White Court is made of Stellar and Celestial beings. They are Gods- as well as other Mighty and Mysterious spirits; the Great Old Ones; Lords of the Outer Darkness beyond the Beyond. This includes those who passed us the Star Fire and made a Covenant with the first Witches.

They sing the song of Creation to maintain its being, and often behave more like architecture than organism.

✾ Gray Court

The Gray Court (also sometimes called the Green or Blue Court) are the Faery and Elves, as well as Land Wights, Spirits of the waters, and all other manner of Earthly Spirits. Among them are Piskies, Selkies, Nymphs, Satyrs and Seirim, Dryads, the noble Sidhe, genus loci, Disir, Djinni, and many other beings.

They are Shining and Terrible, aligned to the inner nature of reality and the Fateful weave of the cosmos, and living in a state of perpetuity where time bends in on itself in peculiar ways; some were once living in some manner and in their death have been transformed into something that is of the Otherworld. The first humans among them were the Witch-Blood, or Cradle Witches, who opened the Faery Road to Humans and ended the Gray Mists and Blue Fires of the Otherworld.

✾ Black Court

The Black Court is comprised of dead and deceased Souls, and the entities of the deeper inner world where Fate is a singularity. It also includes those in the retinue of Death Entities who ride in the dark of night with the Elder Gods to give the Unseen its share of blood and corpses- including goblins, trolls, ettin and jotun, and vampyric beings; forces of constriction, binding, collapse, rot and decay, curses, and predation.

Death is Necessity and Fate is the Supreme Being. It is important to realize that it is not just human beings who have a consciousness that “dies”— indeed, Land wights, genius loci, and Faery-beings can “die”; the Grave is the repository for All in the end- and the womb of all, too. And the Black Court is wrought of the Pitch-Black Fire of the uttermost depths: The Hidden Light of Fate.