Not every Wiccan tradition accepted that authority to practice required an unbroken initiatory line. Raymond Buckland, himself Gardnerian-initiated, built Seax-Wica in 1973 as a deliberately open alternative, publishing its full liturgy in The Tree so that anyone could read the rites, self-dedicate and practice without seeking initiation from an existing priest or priestess. The choice was a direct structural departure from the Gardnerian model Buckland had himself been trained in, trading oath-bound secrecy for public availability.
Reclaiming, founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s by Starhawk and others, went further still, rejecting the priesthood hierarchy of the three-degree system altogether in favor of a collective, consensus-run structure with no High Priestess or High Priest standing over the group. Its own foundational document, the Principles of Unity, states the tradition's values in public prose rather than in oath-bound ritual text passed hand to hand.
The rise of published, mass-market Wiccan instruction, Scott Cunningham's guides for solitary practitioners chief among them, opened a third path again: self-initiation performed alone, without a coven, a lineage or a teacher, using printed ritual as the source material a hereditary Witch would otherwise receive by hand. Eclectic solitary practice of this kind is now, by most estimates, the most common form of Wiccan practice, which has left the three-degree lineage system a minority position within the wider movement it originated, even as Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens continue to treat it as the only valid basis for initiatory authority.