Part 1, yesterday traced how the eight-festival Wheel of the Year was assembled in the middle of the twentieth century from older ingredients, some surviving only in a line or two of medieval writing. It began with a blessing. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ closed a post with words that name no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.” We return to it at the end.”
The divine couple, and who was told no
The gendering was there from the beginning. Hutton describes Gardner’s earliest seasonal rites as pairing a god and a goddess, “a divine couple who were intrinsically linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer”, the god predominating in the cold-season festivals and the goddess in the warm-season pair.
The seasonal love story that many readers first meet as something ancient is a modern liturgical pattern, not a preserved pre-Christian myth. That does not make it less meaningful to those who keep it; it makes it datable.
The pattern also carried an exclusion. The World Religions and Spirituality Project, in its profile of the Minoan Brotherhood, describes Gardner’s Wicca as a “fertility religion” organized around male-female polarity, God and Goddess, high priest and high priestess, and records that “Gardner was homophobic and refused initiation to anyone whom he thought was homosexual”, noting that Alex Sanders and Doreen Valiente rejected that exclusion. A framework built on a heterosexual pair puts pressure on those it does not fit, and some people built elsewhere.
Same-gender reworkings
Women-centered Dianic practice, the lineage associated with Z. Budapest in the reporting discussed below, gathers ritual around women and goddesses rather than a pair. The Minoan Brotherhood, founded by Eddie Buczynski on 1 January 1977 with its first group, Knossos Grove, is a tradition for gay and bisexual men; Buczynski died of AIDS-related complications on 16 March 1989, and Michael G. Lloyd’s 2012 biography Bull of Heaven tells his story. A year that no longer turns on a male and female pair needs other central images, and each tradition supplied its own.
PantheaCon, 2011 and 2012
The sharpest public test came at PantheaCon. In 2011 the Amazon Priestess Tribe, then clergy of CAYA Coven, held a “Rite of Lilith” from which trans women were turned away. CAYA’s clergy statement of 2 March 2011 said the program description had not made clear that the ritual was for female-born women, and recorded an apology from the organizer.
Writing in The Guardian days later, Roz Kaveney reported that “trans women were excluded from a Dianic ritual in honour of Lilith”, and that Budapest defended exclusion. Whatever one concludes about the theology, the cost is plain: women came to a publicly listed ritual at a public convention and were refused entry.
The next year it was scheduled in advance. The Wild Hunt reported in February 2012 that a “genetic women only” ritual led by Z. Budapest was on the program, that a silent protest led by T. Thorn Coyle took place, and that an inclusive ritual ran at the same time. Coyle said: “Z has the right to perform her ritual. I have a right to sit outside in silence and prayer.”
In March 2012 the Amazon Priestess Tribe left Budapest’s Dianic lineage and took the name “Pan-Dianic”, its statement supporting “the right of trans-women to create rituals specific to their experiences”. CAYA itself had planned two rituals that year, one for self-identified women and one pan-Dianic rite open to all genders.
Rewriting the words
Creeds can be amended. Reclaiming’s Principles of Unity had included this sentence since 1997: “Honoring both Goddess and God, we work with female and male images of divinity, always remembering that their essence is a mystery which goes beyond form.”
At the Fifth Dandelion Gathering near Portland, Oregon, on 2 and 3 August 2012, its BIRCH council revised that sentence by consensus, as Abel R. Gomez reported for The Wild Hunt: “We include those who honor Mysterious Ones, Goddesses, and Gods of myriad expressions, genders, and states of being, remembering that mystery goes beyond form.” The current published text records further updates in January 2021.
Others have worked on the mechanics. Reviewing Yvonne Aburrow’s All Acts of Love and Pleasure: Inclusive Wicca for The Wild Hunt in 2015, Lisa Roling summarized the argument that the divine couple read as lovers “excludes LGBT practitioners”, and that polarity can be relocated to “the dance of light and dark as seen in the seasons”, to the “interaction between self and other, lover and beloved (rather than as male and female)”, or to images such as “primordial ocean and lightning bolt”.
Because these words were written by named people at datable meetings, they can be examined, kept or changed. Any group can ask which of its images are load-bearing and which are habit.
Back to the blessing
In that 2017 post, Christ also recalled Starhawk explaining the Wheel “through the metaphor of a psychological journey of the soul”, and said she had come to think such psychologizing “misguided”. Her closing blessing rests on no gendered pair: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”
That is one writer’s resolution, not a template. But it points to the question worth asking of any festival liturgy: not whether the Wheel is old, but who wrote the words in front of you, when, and what they leave room for.
About this piece: Myriapath drafts with AI assistance. Our editors directed the research and checked every source and quotation cited here for accuracy.
BIO: Myriapath publishes sourced, practical guides to seasonal and spiritual practice at myriapath.com, including a free Next Sabbat date finder for both hemispheres.
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