Dianic Wicca

Dianic Wicca or Feminist Dianic Witchcraft[1] was historically the first part of the Goddess movement and an offshoot of Wicca notable for its second-wave feminism and exclusive worship of the Goddess - and for female only circles. And that means cisgender women only; many Dianic Wiccans consider it a core belief that "A belief that only women-born-women truly understand women's experience."[2]

I'd rather be a
Pagan
Suckled in a creed outworn
v - t - e

History of Dianic Wicca

Dianic Wicca was started on the winter solstice of 1971 by Z Budapest and it is notable for being the first modern all-female religion. In the early years it was so dominated by lesbians that declaring yourself a member was equivalent to coming out.[2]

Z Budapest claims that her tradition comes from her mother, despite the strong likenesses to Gardnerian Wicca, with parts also borrowed from Aradia in much the same way as Gardener did.

Appropriation and false history

Dianic Wicca uses the pentacle as one of its symbols despite the fact that in other branches of Wicca it symbolizes the Triple Goddess with the Horned God and in ceremonial magic (Cornelius Agrippa, Eliphas Levi, Pythagoreans, et al) as the union between male and female.[3][4]

Dianic Wicca is commonly associated with the pseudohistory associated with the rest of the Goddess Movement and in particular the Burning Tymes.[note 1]

Other meanings

There are other less famous branches of Wicca also known as Dianic Wicca, notably:

  • The McFarland Dianic traditionFile:Wikipedia's W.svg that worships the triple Goddess; the maiden, the mother, and the crone (whatever names they take). This allows in cis and trans women, and even some men (including McFarland's husband).[5]
  • The Living Temple of Diana, an emerging shamanic witchcraft tradition of Dianic witchcraft started by Devin Hunter.
  • Fluff Bunny Wiccans inspired by the writings of Z Budapest.

Notes
  1. The Burning Tymes should not be confused with burning thyme, which would just be bad cookery.
gollark: We can call it χ (chi) to annoy everybody.
gollark: I vote for ⅜π being our base unit.
gollark: On that note, did you know that Amazon really does not want you reading your ebooks outside their proprietary reader programs?
gollark: I can run smallish Node programs for you on the osmarks.tk server cluster. It is more than 40% reliable!
gollark: You either have to get some sort of actual server hosting from somewhere and use that, or make a program running on the client fetch JSON files from the server or something and work that way.

References
  1. Z Budapest's homepage
  2. The Dianic Tradition, Jade River, Witchvox
  3. About.com: Pentagram, Five-Pointed Star
  4. Buzzle: Paganism Symbols
  5. Dianic Wicca, LearnReligions.com
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