Raymond Buckland had already done more than almost anyone to establish Gardnerian Wicca in the United States, having trained under Gerald Gardner's own initiate Monique Wilson in England before bringing the tradition across the Atlantic in the early 1960s. By the early 1970s, though, he had grown critical of the very structure he had helped import.
Gardnerian Wicca requires initiation through an existing coven, transmitted from priestess or priest to a new initiate in an unbroken chain, which meant that anyone unable to find or be accepted into a coven simply had no path into the religion at all. Buckland, having watched that gatekeeping firsthand from inside it, set out to build an alternative rather than reform the original. On August 2, 1973, he founded Seax-Wica, drawing its names and imagery from Anglo-Saxon paganism, Woden and Freya in place of Gardnerian Wicca's own deity pair, for a tradition designed from the start to work without an unbroken initiatory lineage behind it.
He published the complete tradition the following year in The Tree, and was unusually candid in the book itself about what he had done: Seax-Wica was his own twentieth century synthesis, built using historical Anglo-Saxon names and concepts rather than handed down as a surviving continuous practice from that period. The honesty about its own recent invention, in a field where some founders claimed ancient unbroken lineages, was itself part of what set Buckland's approach apart.