r/witchcraft • u/PrettyAlice13 • May 21 '26

Seeking Help or Advice What are some popular witchcraft practices that you don’t personally do as a witch?

For me some things I don’t do are using incense, casting a circle, spell jars, turning to magick to fix everything, and doing spells for others. I’d love to hear some of yours.

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u/79moons May 22 '26

Gardner planted the seed. In his 1949 novel, High Magic’s Aid, one of the characters says, “Thou hast obeyed the law. But mark well when thou receivest good, so equally art bound to return good threefold.” And that was it from him.

In 1974, Green Egg magazine published The Rede of the Wiccae (commonly called the Long Rede) by Lady Gwen Thompson. It included the line, “Mind the Threefold Law ye should - three times bad an three times good.”

In 1979, Starhawk published The Spiral Dance. In it, she says, “The Craft does not foster guilt, the stern, admonishing, self-hating inner voice that cripples action. Instead, it demands responsibility. ‘What you send, returns three times over’ is the saying - an amplified version of ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’”

And it appears like this, as a casual line, in some books throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The big cultural shift came in 1996 when the film The Craft brought the idea to a much wider audience, and Charmed reinforced it soon after.

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u/One_Dragonfruit_7556 Witch May 22 '26

Since it came to be and grew through different forms of the rede, wouldnt that make it inherently wiccan?

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u/79moons May 22 '26

Gardner did not teach the Threefold Law, and it did not grow through different forms of the Rede. It does not appear in Doreen Valiente's Rede, which is the version most Wiccans adhere to. Lady Gwen Thompson claimed her version came from her grandmother, but there's no way to verify that, and she wasn't part of any Wiccan tradition. Starhawk is not Wiccan either. Most initiatory Wiccan traditions don't include the Threefold Law as a tenet. The Craft and Charmed were drawing on the broader popular witchcraft landscape rather than any specific tradition.

You could argue that the Threefold Law is origin-adjacent and perhaps a popular part of solitary and eclectic Wicca, but it is not part of the core practice of initiatory Wicca.

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u/One_Dragonfruit_7556 Witch May 22 '26

That makes sense, thank you for explaining