The Wiccan Rede

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law is Aleister Crowley's Thelemic maxim, and it in turn echoes Francois Rabelais's fictional Abbey of Theleme, whose sole rule for its inhabitants was do what thou wilt. Gerald Gardner had contact with Crowley in the 1940s, and Wiccan tradition inherited the same structural idea, a single permissive rule, but qualified so that its permission does not become licence to harm others. The rider, an it harm none, is what turns Crowley's maxim into something recognisably Wiccan rather than Thelemic, and it is this rider, not the older do what thou wilt formula, that is distinctive to Wicca.

In practice the Rede functions less as a rule with a court behind it and more as a discipline of self questioning, since Wiccans are expected to weigh out beforehand who and what an action might harm, including the practitioner, rather than to treat the words as a permission slip. The longer, twenty six line poem that closes on the same couplet has done more to popularise the phrase than any Gardnerian source, since it circulated widely through 1970s and 1980s Pagan periodicals regardless of lineage. Whatever its authorship, disputed as it is, its ethic has become close to a universal reference point across Wiccan and much eclectic neopagan practice, cited far more often than any doctrinal statement about deity or afterlife.

Deciding what the Rede permits is left to the individual practitioner, and this openness is both its strength and its recurring difficulty. An it harm none names no specific acts as forbidden, so Wiccans have long debated what counts as harm and to whom: whether self defense justifies an otherwise harmful act, whether using magic to influence another person's will, even for a stated good end, breaches the rule, whether harm to non human life carries the same weight as harm to a person, and whether inaction that allows harm counts against the Rede as much as action that causes it. These are treated as questions each practitioner and coven answers for themselves rather than as a code with fixed rulings, which is part of why some critics call the Rede too vague to function as ethics at all, while defenders answer that its value lies exactly in forcing deliberate reflection rather than supplying a ready made list of rules.

In practical teaching, the Rede is usually paired with the Threefold Law, which supplies the reason to take the weighing seriously: where the Rede says consider harm before acting, the Law says consequence returns to the actor regardless of intention. New initiates in many traditions receive the two together as their first formal ethical instruction, well before any teaching on deity or the Mysteries, on the reasoning that a working magical practice needs an ethical framework in place before it needs theology.