Blowing the Lid off The Wiccan Rede
A couple of years ago, when Twitter still started with a T, I got blocked by a witch on that platform for saying something about Wicca that deeply offended her. My crime? I said that The Wiccan Rede, also known as “harm none,” was not an immutable law, and that Wiccans exist who do not believe they must never harm.
She was furious, aghast, horrified, and blocked me. It would certainly be fun to look down my nose on this person. I have been Wiccan for over 40 years, and I don’t need some newbie on social media tell me I’m doing it wrong. But while I enjoy a bit of snark as much as the next witch, I think there’s more value in addressing what is a common misconception.
So let me say it again: Not all Wiccans follow “harm none” as a law.
There are a lot of misconceptions about Wicca, and I thoroughly enjoy debunking all of them[1], but perhaps none more than this one. Let me start with the highlights:
The Wiccan Rede is not, and never has been, a “law.”
The Rede doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Wicca has quite a few variations, and not all of them agree about the Rede’s meaning.
The Wiccan Rede
“Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill: An it harm none, do what you will.”
That’s it. That’s the whole thing we’re talking about. It was first published in 1964, quoting the late Doreen Valiente.
There are people who will tell you that there’s a long version, but that’s not quite accurate. There’s a long poem, “The Rede of the Wicca,” published in 1975 by Lady Gwen Thompson. “The Wiccan Rede” and “The Rede of the Wicca” are two different things.
Is It Law, Though?
No.
“Rede” is an archaic word meaning advice (or, as a verb, to give advice). In its current form, the Rede was first published in 1964, as part of a talk about Wicca given by Doreen Valiente, one of the earliest Wiccan high priestesses.[2] We don’t know if it was commonplace among Wiccans prior to that talk. It’s likely that the exact phrase is Valiente’s—it has her poetic turn—but that she got the idea from Gerald Gardner or someone else associated with him. (I’ll get to quoting Gardner shortly.) We also know that it is referred to as “advice,” “guidance,” or a “credo” by early writers on the subject. None of those words are synonymous with “law.”
In other words, it was considered good advice, a wise guideline by which to live, but definitely not law.
What Does It Mean?
The 1970s through mid-1990s was the Pagan publishing heyday. There were many dozens of Pagan ‘zines in print (on paper!). A few were large publications with wide readership, most were much smaller. They were ubiquitous and they were full of discussion of issues of concern to Pagans and Witches. I was the “exchange editor” of one such publication, which means I was in charge of making sure other publishers received a copy of our ‘zine, and we, in turn, received theirs. So piles and piles of them arrived at my home, and I read (or skimmed) them all. This gives me a pretty good feel for the kinds of discussions and concerns that were widespread at the time.
There were many essays regarding the Rede and how to interpret it.
Most of these focused on the meaning of “harm” and how to live ethically within the framework of harming no one. Is self-defense okay, and to what extent? What about defending or protecting others? Does “none” include animals? Does that mean Wiccans must be vegetarians? If you use magic to get a job, are you “harming” other applicants who also need that job?
The idea of all of those think pieces—an idea that persists today—is that the Rede can be shortened to two words: “harm none.”
But originally, it was pretty clear that the correct shortened version was “do what you will.” It can be seen as a variation of Aleister Crowley’s Law of Thelema: “Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law.”
In The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner writes:
John Calvin’s doxy … was embodied in his famous dictum, “All pleasure is sin.” … Witches cannot sympathise with this mentality. They are inclined to the morality of the legendary Good King Pausol, “Do what you like so long as you harm no one”. [3]
It’s clear what Gardner is saying here: While a Calvinist finds pleasure to be sinful, witches, by contrast, find no sin in harmless pleasure. In modern language, it’s saying that Wicca is sex-positive (pleasure is not a sin) and consent-positive (no one can be harmed).
In other words, the Wiccan Rede isn’t saying “harm no one.” It’s saying “pleasure is okay.”
Let’s look at this another way. Just as we have to understand the archaic word “rede,” we have to understand the archaic word “an,” which means “if.” So if we modernize the language of the Rede we get: “If it harms no one, do what you will.”
We also have to understand logic, since the rede is an “if-then argument” also known as a “conditional” argument. It is a logical fallacy to treat a conditional as reversible. Just because “if X then Y” is true, it does not mean that “if not-X then not-Y” is also true.
For example, I might say, “If it’s spaghetti, serve it with Parmesan cheese.” Am I saying, “If it’s not spaghetti, don’t serve it with Parmesan cheese”? Certainly not! Don’t ruin my ziti by saying that! If I say, “If it’s sunny, wear a hat,” does that mean that you should never wear a hat on a cloudy day? Nonsense—hats serve multiple purposes.
The Rede says, “If it does not harm, then do what you will.” But it doesn’t say anything at all about what you should do if it does harm. “Does not harm” is X. “Do what you will” is Y.
I’m not saying Wicca has no ethical guidance regarding harm! It does, although that’s usually specific to a tradition (I’ll get there). But the Rede is not that guidance. At its heart, the Rede is simply saying that you can have as much harmless pleasure as you like.
The same passage in The Meaning of Witchcraft goes on to say that magic should not be used to harm, unless it is to prevent a greater harm, and if so, the magic should cause as little harm as possible. So, there is ethical guidance about harm, but (a) it’s not in the Rede, (b) it’s not about never harming, only about not harming with magic, and (c) you absolutely can use magic to harm if circumstances require it.
Varieties of Wicca
Wicca emerged in the 1950s in England, and arrived on the shores of the U.S. in the early 1960s. Wicca at that time was what is now known in the U.S. as “British Traditional Wicca” (BTW). BTW mostly consists of people who are members of the Gardnerian or Alexandrian traditions, although there are a few other stripes. (This isn’t the same as Robert Cochrane’s “British Traditional Witchcraft,” which is a whole ’nother animal.) Today, BTW is still widespread, but is a minority in the world of Wicca.
Subsequently, many new traditions of Wicca emerged, that were a direct or indirect outgrowth of BTW. These are traditions founded by people who understood BTW to be the basic framework of Wicca. Wicca, that is, was understood to have certain rules of ritual structure, a certain level of hierarchy, degrees of initiation, oaths of secrecy, and other such traits. There are so many traditions: Off the top of my head, I can think of Horsa, Minoan, Unnamed Path, Central Valley Wicca, Blue Star, Dianic, McFarland Dianic, KAM, New York Wicca, Welsh Traditionalist, Georgian, and Black Forest Clan. Each of these has its own rules and its own ethical guidance.
But these traditions, too, are a minority. The vast majority of Wiccans today are Eclectic, meaning they have created a path that works for them based on their own reading, study, and experience. (Most Eclectics are solitary.)
It is my observation that eclectic Wiccans are, like the one who blocked me on Twitter, more likely to take the Rede as law, and to believe that all Wiccans are constrained to never, ever harm. It seems to me that, as a Gardnerian, I have an entire tradition’s worth of rules and guidelines (mostly guidelines, to be honest) to fall back on, whereas an eclectic, without that backing, is more dependent on what guidance exists out there—and that’s the Rede.
So, eclectics may or may not follow the Rede, and various traditions may or may not include the Rede in their teachings. Those that do may have different attitudes towards the Rede, and may have additional ethical guidance that is taken more seriously than the Rede.
In conclusion, then, the Wiccan Rede is good advice, but it is not a law. It is guidance regarding the morality of things that do no harm, and doesn’t address things that do cause harm. And it is a part of some, but not all, traditions of Wicca, and is adopted by some, but not all, non-traditional Wiccans.
Do with that what you will, as long as you harm none.
[1] My book Roadmap by Moonlight is chock-full of such debunking.
[2] Jason Mankey wrote a detailed history of the Rede in Patheos, “The Rede of the Wicca, January 21, 2017, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/panmankey/2013/10/redeofthewicca/. Here, I’m primarily concerned with its meaning.
[3] The Meaning of Witchcraft, by Gerald Brousseau Gardner. First published in 1959. Seventh paperback printing 1991 by Magickal Childe Publishing, New York. Page 127.
