Worship of the Goddess Alone

Dianic Wiccans affirm the exclusive worship of the Goddess, honouring the divine feminine alone rather than the God-and-Goddess pair of other Wiccan traditions. Named for the goddess Diana and shaped in the 1970s especially by Zsuzsanna Budapest, Dianic Wicca centres its ritual and devotion on the Goddess in her many forms and has often been organised in women-only covens as a spirituality of and for women. It arose in close connection with feminist thought, presenting goddess-worship as a reclaiming of sacred female power. Because Dianic Wicca has often organised in women-only spaces, questions about who counts as a woman for the purposes of ritual participation have produced serious internal conflict.

At the 2011 Pantheacon festival, a Dianic ritual led by a coven in Z Budapest's own lineage restricted entry to "women born women," excluding transgender women; Budapest publicly defended the exclusion afterward, while other Dianic and wider Pagan practitioners condemned it as discriminatory, and at least one affiliated group, the Amazon Priestess Tribe, publicly broke from Budapest's lineage in protest. The dispute remains unresolved between practitioners who hold that Dianic ritual space requires a female-only definition of womanhood and those who reject that boundary as inconsistent with the tradition's own feminist commitments.