Dianic Wicca

Dianic Wicca is Goddess worship without a god, practised in most of its lines by women only, and it came out of the second-wave feminist movement as much as out of the Craft.

Zsuzsanna Budapest, a Hungarian emigre, founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One at the winter solstice of 1971 in Los Angeles, and described it as the first women-only coven. Its theology is effectively monotheistic: a single Great Goddess of whom all named goddesses are aspects. The Horned God, who stands opposite the Goddess in Gardnerian practice and supplies that tradition's polarity, is simply absent.

The tradition's working assumption is that women need a religious space of their own; that the divine imaged as female does something for women that the divine imaged as male does not; and that the passages of a female life (menarche, childbirth, menopause), are proper subjects of religion and have been treated as improper ones. Healing, self-defence and the recovery of a female religious history are recurring themes.

Its historical claims need the same handling as the rest of Wicca's. Budapest drew on Charles Leland's Aradia of 1899 and on the idea of a suppressed women's tradition surviving the witch trials. The witch-cult thesis is rejected by historians, and the trials were a persecution built on a fantasy rather than the destruction of an existing religion. What Dianic Wicca actually is, is new. Being new is not a criticism.

The name is taken from Diana, the huntress of Roman religion, and from the medieval and early modern accounts of a Diana cult that Leland drew on. Neither supplies a lineage, and the tradition has not needed one to work.

The tradition's public rupture came over who counts as a woman.

At the PantheaCon convention in San Jose in February 2011, Budapest led a ritual restricted to what the announcement called genetic women, excluding trans women along with men. The restriction had been the practice of her line for years; doing it at the largest pagan gathering in the United States made it a public argument, and the argument ran on through the following year's convention and across the wider community.

The positions are not hard to state. Budapest's line holds that its rites are built on a shared bodily experience, and that the space is meaningless if it is not restricted to those who have it. The opposing position is that this defines womanhood by anatomy, that trans women are women, and that a religion organised around the exclusion of an already vulnerable minority is doing something other than what it says. The dispute has not been settled and probably will not be, because the two sides disagree about what the ritual is for.

What should be said clearly is that not all Dianic Wicca holds the exclusionary position. The lines descending from Morgan McFarland differ from Budapest's, some admit men, and several Dianic groups have explicitly welcomed trans women. Treating the whole tradition as identical with one teacher's position is a common error and an unfair one.

Budapest herself was arrested in Los Angeles in 1975 for reading tarot under a municipal fortune-telling ordinance. The conviction was overturned after years of appeals, when the state supreme court found the ordinance unconstitutional.

Estimates of one to two thousand practitioners circulate in reference works without a dated source behind them, and should be treated as an order of magnitude rather than a count. Dianic Wicca is small.

Its influence, again, is larger than its size. The idea that Goddess religion could be a vehicle for feminist politics rather than a private devotion moved from Dianic circles into the wider pagan world and out of it again. The language of women's mysteries, the reclaiming of the word witch as a badge rather than an accusation, and the treatment of ritual as a form of political action all came through this tradition or alongside it. Reclaiming, which is a substantially different thing, drew on it directly.

Structurally it is loose. There is no central body, no lineage requirement of the Gardnerian kind and no single authority; leadership rests with ordained priestesses and with collectives, and covens are autonomous. Ruth Barrett and others carried the teaching forward and developed it well beyond Budapest's original material.

The tradition's difficulty is generational. Its founding conviction, that women need separate space, was formed in the 1970s among women for whom separatism was a hard-won achievement, and it now meets a younger constituency for whom the category of woman is itself the contested question. Some Dianic groups have resolved this by opening; others have not; and the argument has cost the tradition members on both sides of it, which is the usual price of a question a movement cannot settle.