This polarity of God and Goddess is central to the older initiatory Wiccan traditions, Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and their kin, as well as Seax-Wica and the Feri tradition, and it distinguishes them from Dianic Wicca, which honors the Goddess alone, generally for explicitly feminist reasons developed from the 1970s onward, treating a Goddess-only theology as a deliberate corrective to what its founders saw as patriarchal religion generally, Wicca's own duotheism included.
The theology's balance of masculine and feminine has also drawn criticism from within the broader Pagan and queer communities for assuming a rigid gender binary mapped directly onto the divine, a critique that has led some contemporary practitioners and newer eclectic traditions to reinterpret the God and Goddess as fluid symbolic poles of energy rather than as literally gendered beings, or to set the pairing aside in favor of a wider range of named deities, of any gender configuration, drawn from historical pantheons. The vision of divinity as a balanced pair nonetheless remains the theology most identified with Wicca in its classical, mid-twentieth-century form, and it continues to shape the movement's ritual calendar and structure even among practitioners who hold its specific gender symbolism loosely.