The Degree System And Coven Leadership

Traditions descending from Gardnerian and the closely related Alexandrian Wicca, founded by Alex Sanders in the 1960s, organize initiatory advancement through a three-degree system, with third degree required to lead a coven independently as High Priestess or High Priest, a progression each requiring formal initiation by an already-qualified High Priestess or High Priest and, at third degree specifically, ritual work traditionally understood as uniting the High Priestess and High Priest in a symbolic enactment of the sacred union between Goddess and God central to Wiccan theology.

A High Priestess who reaches third degree and leads her own coven is understood in most Gardnerian-descended traditions to found a new, formally independent lineage line traceable back through her own initiators to Gardner's original coven, a genealogical model of authority, called lineaged Wicca, that distinguishes these traditions from the many eclectic and solitary forms of Wicca that have developed since the 1970s and 1980s without requiring initiation into any specific historical lineage at all, a divide within contemporary Wicca between initiatory, lineage-based practice and self-initiated, eclectic practice that remains a live and sometimes debated distinction among practitioners today.