Reclaiming is the tradition that took the position that ritual is a political instrument, and meant it literally.
It grew out of a class that Starhawk and Diane Baker taught in San Francisco at the end of the 1970s, in the wake of Starhawk's The Spiral Dance, published in 1979. The Reclaiming Collective ran from then until 1997. What distinguished it from the initiatory traditions was structural and deliberate: no degrees, no initiatory lineage, no High Priestess, no oathbound material. Anyone who agrees with its statement of principles may practise it. Decisions are made by consensus in autonomous working groups, on an explicitly anarchist model.
The politics are not decoration. Reclaiming came out of the American anti-nuclear movement, and its members were arrested at blockades; ritual and direct action were done by the same people on the same weekends, and the spiral dance that gives the book its title has been performed at protest sites as well as at Samhain. Environmental, feminist and anti-racist commitments are written into the tradition's formal documents rather than left as private opinions.
Its theology is Goddess-centred and loose. Reclaiming holds that the sacred is immanent in the world rather than above it, and that is the theological ground of the politics: if the earth is divine, then defending it is not an ethical addition to the religion but the practice of it.
The Spiral Dance itself was written by a woman in her twenties and has never been out of print, which is a fair indication of how little competition it had in 1979.