1. Know yourself.

2. Know your Craft.

3. Learn.

4. Apply knowledge with wisdom.

5. Achieve balance.

6. Keep your words in good order.

7. Keep your thoughts in good order.

8. Celebrate life.

9. Attune with the cycles of the Earth.

10. Breathe and eat correctly.

11. Exercise the body.

12. Meditate.

13. Honor the Goddess and God.

The Wiccan Rede

Bide you the Wiccan laws you must, in perfect love and perfect trust.
Live and let live, fairly take and fairly give.
Cast the circle thrice about, to keep the unwelcome spirits out.
To bind the spell every time, let the spell be spake in rhyme.
Soft of eye and light of touch, speak little and listen much.
Deosil go by the waxing moon, chanting out the Wiccan rune.
Widdershins go by the waning moon, chanting out the baleful tune.
When the Lady's moon is new, kiss your hand to Her times two.
When the moon rides at Her peak, then the heart's desire seek.
Heed the North wind's mightly gale, lock the door and trim the sail.
When the wind comes from the South, love will kiss you on the mouth.
When the wind blows from the West, departed spirits will have no rest.
When the wind blows from the East, expect the new and set the feast.
Nine woods in the cauldron go, burn them quick and burn them slow.
Elder be the Lady's tree, burn it not or cursed you'll be.
When the wheel begins to turn, let the Beltane fire burn.
When the wheel has turned to Yule, light the log, the Horned One rules.
Heed you flower, bush and tree, by the Lady, blessed be.
Where the rippling waters go, cast a stone, the truth to know.
When you have and hold a need, harken not to other's greed.
With a fool no seasons spend, or be counted as his friend.
Merry meet and merry part, bright the cheeks and warm the heart.
Mind the Threefold Law you should, three times bad and three times good.
When misfortune is enow, wear the blue star on your brow.
True in love you must ever be, lest their love be false to thee.
These words the Wiccan Rede fulfll: An it harm none, do what you will.

For witches  this be Law -

Where ye enter in, from there withdraw.

An ye will secure the spell,

Cast some silver in the well.

Enhance thy trance

With drug and dance.

Vervain and dill lend aid to will.

Trefoil, vervain, St.-John's-wort, dill,

Hinder witches of their will !

Upon the clock, dependeth not.

Success pursueth the persistent.

Guilt flees when none pursueth.

Power shared is power lost.

Seek thine enemy in secret.

Thoughts are things: as a man thinkest, so he is.

No one person can accomplish all.

Danger is never overcome without danger.

The past is fixed, yet the future may be bent.

Where communication fails, confusion follows.

Some things cannot be understood by mortal man.

Many such must simply be accepted.

Rush in where angels fear to tread: the Gods are with you.

As a man thinketh, so is he.

If you think small, you become small.

Remember the Passwords: Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, so trust the

Universe and be at Home everywhere.

If you imagine and fear 'I will get trapped', of course you will get

trapped. Fear not, and you won't.

You are never less alone than when you think you are alone.

Fear not, for fear is failure and the forerunner of failure.

Pray to the Moon when she is round

Luck with you shall then abound

What you seek for shall be found

In sea or sky or solid ground ...

NOTES

 These come from various sources

There's no reason to believe that any list of aphorisms is part of the "standard" Gardnerian or

Alexandrian BOS.

Sources of this list are known to include:

 The Witches' Almanac

 The Grimoire of Lady Sheba

 Wicca the Ancient Way

 Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft

  Add your own; I did. ---Sekhet.

Hear Now the words of thee witches,
The secrets we hid into the night,
When magic was our destiny's pathway,
That now we bring forth into light.
Mysterious water and fire,
The earth and the whispering air,
By hidden knowledge we know them,
And will and keep silent and dare.
The birth and rebirth of all nature,
The passing of winter and spring,
We share with the life universal,
Rejoice in the magical ring.
Four times in the year the Great Sabbat
Returns, and the witches are seen
At Lammas and Candlemas dancing,
On May Eve and old Hallowe'en.
When day-time and night-time are equal,
When sun is at greatest and least,
The four Lesser Sabbats are summoned,
And Witches gather in feast.
Thirteen silver moons in a year are,
Thirteen is the coven's array.
Thirteen times at Esbat make merry,
For each golden year and a day.
The power that was passed down the age,
Each time between woman and man,
Each century unto the other,
Ere time and the ages began.
When drawn is the magical circle,
By sword or athame of power,
Its compass between two worlds lies,
In land of the shades for that hour.
This world has no right then to know it,
And world of beyond will tell naught.
The oldest of Gods are invoked there,
The Great Work of magic is wrought.
For the two are mystical pillars,
That stand at the gate of the shrine,
And two are the powers of nature,
The forms and the forces divine.
The dark and the light in succession,
The opposites each unto each,
Shown forth as a God and a Goddess:
Of this our ancestors teach.
By night he's the wild wind's rider,
The Horn'd One, the Lord of the Shades.
By day he's the King of the Woodland,
The dweller in green forest glades.
She is youthful or old as she pleases,
She sails the torn clouds in her barque,
The bright silver lady of midnight,
The crone who weaves spells in the dark.
The master and mistress of magic,
That dwell in the deeps of the mind,
Immortal and ever-renewing,
With power to free or to bind.
So drink the good wine to the Old Gods,
And Dance and make love in their praise,
Till realms of the Gods receive us
In peace at the end of our days.
And Do What You Will be the challenge,
So be it Love that harms none,
For this is the only commandment.
By Magic of old, be it done!

 

The Witches' Rune

(Note: This alphabet is widely called ‘Theban runes’ today, but this seems to be a recent invention by users who noticed the usage parallelism with Futhark. The letterforms are actually cursive rather than runic; they contain many curves and are not well-suited to be incised or scratched into hard materials as are true runic alphabets like Futhark, Ogham, or Tolkien's Cirthas Daeron. The term ‘Theban runes’ is not attested before the 20th century; older sources refer to either ‘Theban letters’ or the ‘Theban alphabet’, the practice I have followed here.)

 

The earliest known source for the Theban alphabet is Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy first published at Antwerp, 1531. Agrippa gives the Theban alphabet in chapter 29 of book 3 and writes "Of this kind of character therefore are those which Peter Apponus notes, as delivered by Honorius of Thebes".

 

This almost certainly refers to the author of the early-14th-century Liber Juratus, or the Sworne Booke of Honorius. (The better-known "Grimoire of Honorius" is a 17th-century forgery long postdating Agrippa.) However, the characters do not appear in any manuscript of the Liber Juratus, nor in any edition of Peter Apponus, aka Peter De Abano (whose only extant magical work is the Heptameron).

 

One clue suggesting the Theban alphabet is older still is implicit in the Latin-alphabet equivalents given by Agrippa. The absence of U/J/W suggests that the Theban alphabet originated as a Latin cipher before the 11th-century introduction of W and long before the late-15th-century development of U and J.

 

The origin of the letterforms is obscure. They do not resemble any of the scripts likely to have been known by Agrippa (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, or Futhark). There is a passing resemblance to the more elaborate letters in the Avestan or Pahlavi scripts used to write Old Persian. However, they are obviously an invented alphabet rather than an evolution of Avestan; they have too many superfluous flourishes of the sort natural evolution would have worn away. All the evidence is consistent with an origin as an early alchemical cipher alphabet influenced by Avestan.

Near the end of the 1800s the Theban alphabet was adopted by the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn and its successor orders (notably the Ordo Templi Orientalis or O.T.O.) from Agrippa (filtered through later compilations plagiarizing Agrippa, notably Francis Barrett's 1801 The Magnus).

 

The Theban alphabet seems to have passed to the Wiccans from successor orders of the Golden Dawn as part of the Gardnerian reinvention of Wicca during the 1930s. Today they are primarily associated with Wicca and indeed are sometimes referred to as the "Wiccan alphabet".

The Theban alphabet has always been employed primarily for talismanic inscriptions and magical formulae; also occasionally as a manuscript cipher. It is not associated with any particular language. Most of the early corpus was Latin, but modern usage is probably mostly in English.

Most Wiccans recognize the Theban alphabet, but the skill to sight-read or write it without a reference is uncommon. Nevertheless, given the estimate now usual among sociologists of religion that there are more than half a million Wiccans in the U.S. alone, there may be as many as a hundred thousand people worldwide who have employed it.