Notable figures

Notable figures

• Zsuzsanna “Z” Budapest 1940–
  Founder; principal author

  Hungarian-American writer, activist, and witch who founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 in Los Angeles in 1971 and authored the principal published works of the tradition. Her 1975 arrest and trial for fortune-telling in Los Angeles County, after a sting operation by an undercover policewoman, was the last such prosecution under California’s anti-divination statute and contributed to the law’s repeal in 1985.

• Morgan McFarland 1948–2015
  Founder of the McFarland Dianic line

  American Dianic priestess based in Dallas, Texas, who founded a parallel Dianic line in the early 1970s that admits male initiates and is theologically duotheistic. The McFarland Dianic line is organisationally distinct from Budapest’s and reflects a different reading of the Dianic concept.

• Starhawk (Miriam Simos) 1951–
  Founder of Reclaiming; major influence on the wider Dianic / Goddess-movement field

  American author and activist whose The Spiral Dance (1979) became one of the foundational texts of the Goddess movement and influenced Dianic and other feminist-witchcraft currents internationally. Starhawk was initiated by Z Budapest among others and went on to co-found the Reclaiming tradition in San Francisco in 1980, which is closely related to Dianic Witchcraft but not identical with it.