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Code of Ethics

What Sorrel & Salt values, and how it handles the cultures, sourcing and access questions its subject raises.

This code is part of the Terms of Use. Its section "What Everyone Agrees To" binds every account that agrees to the terms, and its sections for curators, admins, developers and the owner bind whoever holds that role.

The Short Version

  • Everyone is welcome here, and bigotry is not.
  • Other people's closed practices are theirs. The compendium names a source for an ingredient's lore, but not yet the tradition it comes from. A warning on ingredients from closed practices is planned.
  • Take only what can be spared: no endangered plants, no animal parts from protected species, nothing poached. The law can make exceptions for Indigenous peoples' religious and cultural use. #1
  • What the compendium says, it sources. A claim with no source is a claim to doubt.
  • The site is built to be used by everyone, and an accessibility bug is a bug we fix first.
  • No advertising, no selling of data, no owner above the community.

For Everyone

What Everyone Agrees To

The Terms of Use make this section part of what every account agrees to. It is kept short on purpose. The sections after it say why each rule is here; the three at the end add to it for curators, admins and the site's owner, and bind whoever holds that role.

  • Treat everyone here with respect. Racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, antisemitism, bigotry against any faith or lack thereof, and every other kind of bigotry have no place on the site, in a coven or in a support request.
  • Read the Disclaimer before you act on anything the compendium says.

What We Value

Sorrel & Salt is a grimoire for covens: a place for small groups of people to keep what they know, what they have and what they make. These are the values the people who run it hold themselves to, and ask of everyone who joins.

  • Everyone is welcome. Witches, folk practitioners, the curious and the sceptical, of every race, nation, faith and none, every gender and every sexuality. Transgender, non-binary and queer practitioners are welcome here as themselves, without question or qualification. Racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, antisemitism, bigotry against any faith or lack thereof, and every other kind of bigotry have no place here.
  • Witchcraft's history is a gendered history. Between about 1400 and 1775, Europe and its colonies executed an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people for witchcraft, and roughly four in five of them were women, in a period that held women to be less intelligent than men and more open to sin.#2 A site about witchcraft that is not feminist has forgotten whose history it is handling. Feminism here means the plain thing: that women, including trans women, are people whose knowledge, work and bodies are their own.
  • Community over profit. The site shows no advertising and sells no data. It will charge, fairly: enough to cover its costs and to pay the people who work on it a fair, living wage. It is run by people, for people, and the covens on it are run by their own members. We would rather the site stayed small and honest than grew by exploiting anyone, and we hold that what is shared should be shared fairly and decided together.
  • Honesty. The site says what it does and does not do, in plain words, in its privacy policy and its disclaimer. Where it is unsure, it says so.

Accessibility

The site is built to be used by everyone: with a keyboard, with a screen reader, on a phone, at a large text size, in light or in dark. Its pages are checked against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the W3C's standard for making web content accessible to people with disabilities, by an automated test in the browser suite that runs on every change, and the colours in both themes keep to the guidelines' contrast floor.#3 Automated checks do not find everything, so if something on the site does not work for you, that is a bug, and we commit to fixing accessibility bugs first. You can report an accessibility bug through the support form, with or without an account.

The Compendium

Closed Practices and Where Lore Comes From

Much of what the compendium contains was borrowed from somewhere. Some of it comes from open traditions that invite anyone to learn. Some of it comes from closed practices: traditions that belong to a people, are passed on by initiation or by birth, and are not open to outsiders. Taking from a closed practice, without belonging to it, is appropriation, and it has a history of doing real harm.

  • Smudging and the rites like it are ceremonies of particular Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Their purposes, their particulars and the plants they use vary widely between nations, and a plant burned by one may be taboo to another. Until 1978, when the United States passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, many of these practices had been prohibited by law; the Act's own findings say ceremonies had been "intruded upon, interfered with, and in a few instances banned". Today, mass-market "smudging kits" are sold against traditional prohibitions on selling spiritual medicines such as white sage, and Native activists have protested this as cultural misappropriation.#4#5
  • Hoodoo was created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States, drawing on Central and West African spiritualities under slave codes that forbade them to gather. It was practised in secrecy, as a form of resistance, and by the twentieth century white drugstore owners and mail-order companies had appropriated it for profit. That appropriation remains a major concern for the people who hold the tradition.#6

We ask you not to claim a closed practice as your own, and not to share what belongs to a people you are not part of.

Here is what the site does today, and what it commits to:

  • The compendium names a source for each piece of an ingredient's lore. It does not yet record which tradition the lore comes from, or whether that tradition is closed, so an entry can draw on a closed practice without saying so. Recording both is planned.
  • A warning on an entry whose practice is closed, and ethical warnings on ingredients, are planned for the compendium and not yet built. Until they are, this page is the warning.
  • We commit to describing Indigenous, African diasporic and other closed traditions in the words their own practitioners use, cited to those practitioners where a source exists, and never to repackaging them as generic "witchcraft".
  • If you belong to a tradition the compendium describes and it gets your tradition wrong, tell us through the support form. Your account of your own practice outranks any sources we use and our compendium entries.

Ethical and Sustainable Sourcing

An ingredient that is sacred, scarce or both is not a commodity. The site asks every coven to take only what can be spared. Three plants sold for burning show why it matters.

  • White sage (Salvia apiana) is widely used by Native American peoples of the Pacific coast, and is being over-harvested for commercial smudging sticks, incense sticks and cones. Over-harvesting is reducing its wild population and range, illegal harvest is believed to be happening on public land, and in 2018 four people were arrested for taking 400 pounds of it. It is not on the United States' endangered species list, but conservationists are concerned for its survival. Smudging with it is one of the closed ceremonies described above, and many Native Americans have asked non-Native people not to use it at all. #4#7 If you use it, grow your own, or buy from an ethical grower, never from a wild harvest you cannot trace.#4#7
  • Palo santo is two trees. Bursera graveolens, the one burned as incense in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, is assessed as Least Concern by the IUCN, and Peru permits only the collection of naturally fallen or dead wood.#8 Bulnesia sarmientoi, also called palo santo, has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2018 and in Appendix II of CITES since 2010, under pressure from deforestation of the Gran Chaco and global demand for its wood, extracts and oils.#9 Know which tree you are buying, and buy fallen wood.
  • Indian sandalwood (Santalum album), burned as incense and held sacred in Hinduism, is assessed as Vulnerable by the IUCN because over-exploitation has put its wild population at risk of extinction, and India has banned its export.#10
  • Animal parts. CITES, the treaty in force since 1975 that protects endangered plants and animals from the threats of international trade, covers over 40,900 species, subspecies and populations: Appendix I lists those threatened with extinction and given the highest protection, Appendix II those whose trade must be controlled to avoid use incompatible with their survival.#11 The law can make exceptions for Indigenous peoples' religious and cultural use. For example, in the United States, the government's National Eagle Repository gives eagle feathers and parts to enrolled members of federally recognised tribes "for spiritual and religious use".#1 Outside such an exception, no bone, feather, fur, shell or tooth of a listed species belongs in a working, and the site will not help you source one.

The site commits to recording an ingredient's IUCN and CITES status in the compendium where a source gives one, and to marking entries that ask for care in sourcing. Neither is built yet; both are planned.

Why the Compendium Cites Its Sources

Every claim in the compendium is meant to trace to a source: a book, a paper, a page. An entry with no source still saves, and sits on the curators' to-do list until it has one. A formal name is treated as a unique identifier and a common name never is, so a source is cited on an entry only when it names the plant without doubt.

This is not pedantry. Folklore without provenance is where appropriation hides, where a hazard gets dropped from a copied list, and where one person's invention becomes "tradition" after three retellings. A source lets you check us, lets a practitioner see their own words credited, and lets a curator correct a mistake at its root. We prefer academic sources and the voices of the practitioners themselves, and we name an encyclopaedia where that is the best there is.

We ask the same of you: be honest about what you know and where you learned it, and say when you are unsure.

Running the Site

Curators

A curator curates the compendium, its vocabularies and its references, and reads the support requests an admin has marked for curators or assigned to them. A curator agrees to everything above, and to this:

  • Every entry you write or change says where it comes from. You add no claim you cannot source, and you leave an unsourced entry on the to-do list rather than guessing a source for it.
  • You describe a closed practice in its own people's words, cited to them where a source exists, and you do not describe its ceremonies.
  • You keep the compendium's safety notes honest: you write what a source says, you mark what has not been checked, and you never soften a hazard.
  • A support request shows you what a requestor chose to write, without the requestor's email or the coven named in the page address. You read it only to help, and you repeat nothing to anyone who is not authorised to view it.
  • Your curator role gives you nothing in any coven but your own. You do not use it, or ask an admin to use theirs, to reach another coven's ingredients or grimoire.

Admins

An admin can do everything a curator can, and also manages who uses the site: an admin sees which covens a person belongs to, by name and role, grants and revokes the right to create covens, changes site roles, times out a support requestor, mints invitations and holds an owner's seat in the demo coven. An admin agrees to everything above, and to this:

  • You use each of those powers for the site's sake and never for your own: to keep people safe, to keep the compendium honest and to keep the site running. A grudge is not a reason.
  • Every change you make to a person's role or rights is recorded with your name, and you write a note saying why wherever the screen offers one.
  • You see a requestor's email and which covens a person belongs to. You use neither for anything but the request in front of you, and you share neither.
  • A time-out on a support requestor is the site's one sanction today, and you use it for abuse of the support form, not for disagreement.
  • Your owner's seat in the demo coven is for showing people the site. Everyone who signs in can see what you write there, so keep it suitable for everyone who signs in.
  • An admin's role gives you nothing in any other coven. The site's code refuses it, and so do you.

Developers

A developer writes and runs the site's code, and may be able to reach its database and servers. A developer agrees to everything above, and to this:

  • You look at people's data only to fix a problem with the site, and only as much of it as the problem needs.
  • You keep private things private in the code itself: the site checks who may see something before it fetches it, never after. When you change who can see what, you test that the wrong person really can't reach it.
  • Every change to the site's data is recorded with the account that made it. You never add a way around that record.
  • You add no advertising. Analytics run only on the site's own servers, never in a visitor's browser, and the Privacy Policy names the analytics service and what each visit records before it starts.
  • When a change alters what the site stores, who can see it or how long it is kept, you update the Privacy Policy in the same change.
  • You fix accessibility bugs first, and you keep the automated accessibility checks passing.
  • The site's code and its task board are public. You never put a password, key, token or anyone's personal details in the code, an issue or a comment.
  • When you find a security problem, you tell the owner at once and fix it before other work.

The Owner and Everyone Who Runs the Site

The owner holds the primary admin account, which no one can revoke. The site relies on outside companies for things such as its hosting and its mail; the owner tries to choose ethical ones, but cannot hold them to this page. The owner, and every admin, curator and developer who helps run the site, agrees to everything above, and to this:

  • The site stays free of advertising, sells no data and uses nothing anyone writes here to train anything. If any of that could ever change, the owner emails every account to say so, in writing, before it does.
  • Anyone who reaches the database does so only to do what a person has asked for, such as an erasure, or to fix a fault, and says so when it is done.
  • Every rule on this page, and every change to the terms, applies to the owner as to anyone else, and a change to the terms is published as a new version that everyone agrees to again.
  • If the site must end, the owner says so ahead of time. The owner commits to building a way for people to take their own writing with them; it does not exist yet.

Sources

  1. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "National Eagle Repository." Accessed 2 November 2026. https://www.fws.gov/program/national-eagle-repository.
  2. Wikipedia. "Witch Trials in the Early Modern Period." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period.
  3. World Wide Web Consortium, Web Accessibility Initiative. "WCAG 2 Overview." Last updated 17 September 2026. https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/.
  4. Wikipedia. "Smudging." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smudging.
  5. Wikipedia. "American Indian Religious Freedom Act." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Religious_Freedom_Act.
  6. Wikipedia. "Hoodoo (Spirituality)." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodoo_(spirituality).
  7. Wikipedia. "Salvia apiana." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_apiana.
  8. Wikipedia. "Bursera graveolens." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bursera_graveolens.
  9. Wikipedia. "Bulnesia sarmientoi." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulnesia_sarmientoi.
  10. Wikipedia. "Santalum album." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santalum_album.
  11. Wikipedia. "CITES." Accessed 1 November 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CITES.