Origins & history

Z Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 in Los Angeles on the winter solstice of 1971. Her Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows (1976), expanded as The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries (1980), set out the ritual material and theology of the new tradition. Through the late 1970s and 1980s the line spread across North America, both through covens descending directly from Budapest and through independent women’s spirituality circles that drew on her published work.

A separate Dianic line associated with Morgan McFarland of Dallas, founded around the same time and sometimes called the McFarland Dianic, allows male initiates and is theologically distinct: it is duotheistic in the Wiccan sense but with the Goddess primary. The two lines share a name and a starting decade, and are organisationally unrelated.

The wider Goddess movement of the late twentieth century — including Starhawk’s Reclaiming tradition, the cultural feminist scholarship around Marija Gimbutas, and the broader feminist-spirituality network — intersected substantially with Dianic Witchcraft without being identical to it.