Signal Booster: Z Budapest, Mother of California Goddess Worship

LA Times reporter Deborah Netburn was on a witch hunt, and she found a prime one: Zsuzsanna Budapest. Now 81, living in a retirement community near Santa Cruz and writing a television series, this author of 13 books and self-described “lesbian feminist witch bitch” was born Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay in Hungary. For a time she was a Long Island housewife and the mother of two boys. She escaped this suburban life just as she’d previously escaped from the Soviets in 1959. Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 in Hollywood in 1971.

As Netburn describes it, part of what helped Budapest get the word out about the natural power hidden in women was a sense of the theatrical. Budapest studied improv in Chicago at Second City and she knew the importance of a good press conference. When the LAPD busted her in a sting operation for telling fortunes in Venice with Tarot cards, Budapest called up the reporters--inviting them to meet the first witch who’d been put on trial in 300 years. (As they hauled her off, she had told the L.A. cops, “I’m glad you arrested me, you’re going to make me rich and famous.”)

The article also looks at Budapest as a figure grounded in lesbian separatism who drew criticism for barring transgender women and men from a 2011 self-blessing ritual she performed in the nude. “I don’t agree with all her views, but in the history of the craft, she is an important person,” Sabina Magliocco, a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia, told Netburn. “When you look at all of the witchcraft as feminist resistance that flowered in the Trump era, none of that would have existed if it hadn’t been for what Z and others like her did in the 1970s.”

Read : "This feminist witch introduced California to Goddess worship" at the LA Times.