Dianic witchcraft as explicit feminist religion (1971–)

Z. Budapest — Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay — founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One in Los Angeles on the winter solstice of 1971. The Coven was, from its founding, an explicitly women-only religious body dedicated to what Budapest called "womyn's religion" — a feminist reclamation of pre-Christian goddess traditions and a self-conscious construction of a religious practice for the second-wave women's movement.

Budapest published her working liturgy as The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (self-published, 1975), reissued and expanded as The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries (Wingbow Press, 1980). She has been public and consistent in her characterisation of Dianic witchcraft as a feminist religion across the last five decades — in her published books, in newspaper and magazine interviews across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and in her continuing public teaching. The tradition's stated position, from Budapest's earliest publications onward, is that Dianic witchcraft is spiritually and politically continuous with the second-wave women's movement.

The Dianic tradition took its name from Diana, the Roman moon goddess whose earlier folkloric associations with pre-Christian female religion had been catalogued in Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899). Budapest's specific innovation was the deliberate marriage of the Leland material and the Gimbutas-Stone Goddess-movement synthesis with second-wave feminist political practice. Consciousness-raising groups and women's-only religious practice were treated by the Dianic tradition as continuous with the wider women's movement, not as parallel to it.

The tradition's subsequent extension is documented in the tradition entry on Dianic witchcraft on this site. Budapest's founding and the subsequent evolution of the tradition through the Reclaiming line, the McFarland Dianic line, and other successor bodies established explicit feminist religion as a durable component of the Western esoteric field. On the record, Dianic witchcraft is the clearest documented case of an occult tradition founded as, and continuously identifying as, a feminist project. The 1980 founding-quote treatment appears in the final sub-page of this tract in context.