Exclusive worship of the Goddess

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.

The exclusive focus on the Goddess sets Dianic Wicca apart from the duotheistic mainstream of the craft and links it to the wider current of feminist witchcraft. Its women-centred character has been a defining feature and, at times, a subject of debate within the broader Pagan community. The affirmation expresses a deliberate theological and social choice, to make the Goddess the whole of the divine, and connects Dianic practice to the movement that understands witchcraft as feminist spirituality.

Budapest, a Hungarian-American witch who emigrated to the United States in 1956, founded the first Dianic coven, the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, in Los Angeles in 1971, explicitly linking her practice to the feminist movement of the period. A related but doctrinally distinct feminist tradition, Reclaiming, founded in San Francisco in 1979 by Starhawk and others, also centres feminist and Goddess spirituality but has positioned itself as explicitly trans-inclusive and non-hierarchical, illustrating that feminist Pagan witchcraft has developed at least two significant and, on the question of gender boundaries, opposed lineages rather than a single unified position. Both traditions nonetheless share roots in the wider second-wave feminist spirituality movement of the 1970s, which read goddess-centred religion as a deliberate corrective to millennia of male-dominated theology and clergy.