Eight words carry the ethics of Wicca: an it harm none, do what ye will. They are easy to quote and hard to live by, and they are younger than many people suppose.
Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfil:
As first recorded in 1964
An it harm none, do what ye will.
Rede is an old word, Old English in origin, for advice or counsel. An, in this sentence, is an old word for if. Put into modern English the Rede says: if it harms no one, do as you will. That is the whole of it.
Where the Rede comes from
The couplet above was first recorded in October 1964, when Doreen Valiente quoted it in a speech at a public dinner in London, a few months after Gerald Gardner's death. Nobody knows who composed it. Valiente is the likeliest candidate, although she never claimed it.
The idea is older than the wording. In The Meaning of Witchcraft, published in 1959, Gardner wrote that witches inclined to the morality of the legendary Good King Pausol: do what you like so long as you harm no one. King Pausole, as his author spelled him, is a character in a French comic novel of 1901. Behind him stands a long line of similar sayings, from Saint Augustine's "love, and do what you will" to the single rule of Rabelais's imaginary abbey in the sixteenth century, and Aleister Crowley's famous version of 1904. What sets the Rede apart from Crowley's law is the condition, and the condition is everything.
There is also a much longer poem called the Rede of the Wiccae, in twenty-six rhyming couplets, which ends with the same eight words. It was first published in an American pagan magazine in 1975. It is a pleasant piece of folk verse, widely loved, and it is not part of the Gardnerian tradition.
Counsel, not commandment
The word rede was well chosen. A commandment is obeyed or broken. Counsel is weighed. The Rede does not tell a witch what to do in any particular case. It tells them what question to ask.
That question is harder than it looks, for three reasons.
- None includes yourself. A course of action that damages your own health, mind or integrity does not pass.
- None includes more than people. Witches hold the natural world sacred, and harm to animals, land and water is harm.
- Harm is not always obvious. It can be done by neglect as well as by action, and by good intentions as readily as by bad ones. To interfere in another person's life uninvited, even kindly, may be a harm.
It is in fact impossible to live without doing any harm at all. We eat, we take up room, we disappoint people. The Rede is understood accordingly as a direction to travel in and not a standard anyone has met. Its practical effect is to make a witch think before acting, and to take away the excuse that they were only following a rule.
Do what ye will
The second half of the Rede deserves as much attention as the first. It is a grant of freedom, and a large one. The Craft has no list of forbidden foods, forbidden loves or forbidden thoughts. Where no harm is done, it holds that people are the best judges of their own lives, and that pleasure needs no excuse.
Some witches read the word will in a deeper sense, as meaning not whim but a person's true purpose: the thing they are here to do. On that reading the Rede says that the business of life is to find one's real will and follow it, harming none on the way. The two readings are compatible, and most of us hold both.
The threefold return
Beside the Rede stands a second idea, often called the Threefold Law: that whatever a witch sends out, whether good or ill, returns three times over.
Its origin lies in the rites. A passage in Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid of 1949 tells the new witch that where good is received, good must be returned threefold. As a general law of consequence, applying to everything a person does, the idea was popularised in America in the late 1960s, chiefly by Raymond Buckland.
Initiates tend to hold it more loosely than the books suggest. Few of us think that the universe keeps accounts and pays out at a fixed rate. What we do think is that conduct shapes character, that what a person does to others they do first to themselves, and that a witch who works in malice will find malice coming back by every road. As a warning, it does very well.
Other touchstones
The Rede is the best known statement of Wiccan ethics. It is not the only one.
- Perfect love and perfect trust
- The words with which a candidate enters the circle at initiation, as Gardner himself made public. They describe what members of a coven owe to one another, and they set a standard that takes a lifetime to approach.
- The eight qualities of the Charge
- The Charge of the Goddess names eight qualities that her people should have, and sets them in four pairs: beauty with strength, power with compassion, honour with humility, and mirth with reverence. The pairing is deliberate. Each quality is kept honest by its partner.
- Silence
- To keep one's word, and to keep what has been confided, is a virtue the Craft rates very highly. See secrecy and the oath.
The Rede in practice
For a working coven the Rede has some settled consequences, which we set out here as our own practice.
- We do not work magic to harm, to coerce, or to bend another person's will.
- We do not work magic for anyone without their knowledge and consent, healing included.
- We take no payment for magic, for teaching or for initiation.
- We do not use the Craft to gain a hold over anyone, least of all those who come to us to learn.
None of that is remarkable. It is roughly what any decent person would expect of people who claim to be able to do what witches claim. The Rede asks only that we expect it of ourselves.