What is practised today as spellcraft descends from a much older and more scattered folk magic: charms, cunning-folk remedies, and grimoire traditions that promised to heal the sick, find lost property, curse an enemy or win a lover, generally without any organised theology behind them. Gerald Gardner's mid-twentieth-century Wicca gathered pieces of that inheritance, ceremonial magic drawn from the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, and folklore research by writers such as Margaret Murray, into a single system with its own ethic.
The Wiccan Rede, an it harm none, do what ye will, is the most quoted expression of that ethic and functions as a working limit on spellcraft rather than a licence: a spell aimed at controlling another person's will, a love spell directed at a named individual chief among the objections, is widely held within the tradition to violate it regardless of intention. The threefold law, the claim that whatever a person sends out returns to them multiplied, supplies the consequence side of the same argument and is treated by critics inside Paganism as folklore rather than doctrine, since it appears nowhere before Gardner's own century. Practitioners disagree among themselves about binding spells, protection magic aimed at a specific aggressor, and whether petition and gratitude differ meaningfully from spellcraft aimed at getting something. What survives the disagreement is the working assumption behind the whole practice: that focused intention, given a physical form to carry it, is not idle unless it is also unaccountable.