What is the Wiccan Rede?
The Wiccan Rede is the primary ethical statement of Wicca. Its most common form is the couplet An ye harm none, do what ye will, first publicly recorded in a speech by Doreen Valiente in 1964. 'Rede' is a Middle English word meaning 'counsel' or 'advice.' The Rede functions as a guideline, not a commandment. It sets one condition — do no harm — and within that limit leaves conduct to individual conscience.
The Wiccan Rede vs the Threefold Law and the Charge of the Goddess
The Wiccan Rede is sometimes conflated with two other Wiccan ethical concepts. The Threefold Law holds that whatever energy a practitioner sends out returns to them three times. It is a separate idea — a cosmological claim about consequences — not a restatement of the Rede. The Charge of the Goddess is a liturgical text, not an ethical principle; it is recited in ritual and describes the Goddess speaking to her people. Not all Gardnerians follow the Rede; some lineages take the Charge as their primary ethical touchstone instead. The Rede is also distinct from the ceremonial-magic concept of True Will developed by Aleister Crowley. Crowley's statement 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' (from The Book of the Law, 1904) is a metaphysical claim about the nature of the self. The Rede is a practical moral guideline with an explicit harm condition.
History of the text
The eight-word couplet was first publicly recorded in a 1964 speech by Doreen Valiente, Wicca's most important poet and ritual writer. According to researcher Don Frew, Valiente composed the couplet following a statement by Gerald Gardner that witches were inclined to the morality of a figure he called the Good King Pausol: 'do what you like so long as you harm none.' Gardner had drawn that phrase from the fictional king in Pierre Louÿs's 1901 novel Les Aventures du Roi Pausole.
A longer form — the Long Rede — appeared in the Spring 1974 issue of the neopagan magazine Earth Religion News. It is a 26-line poem whose final couplet is the familiar eight-word form. A slightly different version, the Rede of the Wiccae, was published in Green Egg magazine by Lady Gwen Thompson, who attributed it to her grandmother Adriana Porter. Thompson claimed the earlier published version was corrupted from the original. Historians have disputed this. Porter died in 1946, before Gerald Gardner's published work, and the poem refers to Wiccan concepts not known to predate the 1940s. Researchers Adrian Bott and Robert Mathiesen concluded that the Long Rede was composed between 1964 and 1975, with its precise authorship still unsettled.
What 'harm none' means — and what it does not
The Rede is deliberately open. It names harm as the boundary but does not specify what harm includes. Different Wiccan communities draw the line differently. Some limit 'none' to persons. Others extend it to animals or to the natural world more broadly. The Rede is also silent about harming oneself, which is a point of ongoing internal debate. Because it is a guideline rather than a code, the Rede asks practitioners to exercise judgment in each situation rather than consult a rule. This distinguishes it formally from the Ten Commandments or Quranic legal tradition. Philosophically, the harm-none condition resembles John Stuart Mill's harm principle from the 19th century and the near-universal ethical concept of the Golden Rule. The Rede does not require active good works, only the absence of harm. Whether its spirit implies a positive obligation to help others is a question Wiccan communities continue to discuss.
The Wiccan Rede in the index
The Wicca entry covers the tradition that produced the Rede and its founding history. The Magick entry traces the ceremonial lineage — including Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — that supplied part of Wicca's vocabulary. The Goddess entry covers the theology at Wicca's centre, including the Charge of the Goddess. The Hermeticism entry covers the broader Western esoteric tradition Wicca drew from. No items dedicated specifically to the Wiccan Rede are currently in the index.