Z Budapest makes page 1 of the LA Times!
Niyad asked me to X-post this from Ancient Wisdom and Pagan Spirituality, so here you are. 
COLUMN ONE
How ‘Z’ became a witch pioneer
Zsuzsanna Budapest, who created feminist, Goddess-centered religion in 1970s, says she’s not done yet.
BY DEBORAH NETBURNREPORTING FROM SANTA CRUZ
In a small stucco house in a retirement community near Santa Cruz, an 81-year-old witch is writing a television series.
She calls it “Baba Boogie and the Berkeley Broads.”
The premise goes like this: Baba Boogie is a reluctant immortal — old and tired. All her friends have passed on, but she herself cannot die until she finds a new generation of women to receive her superpowers.
When a quartet of granny peace activists from Berkeley winds up in jail, Baba Boogie comes to their aid and finds the perfect group to teach her secrets.
Fun, adventure and magic ensue.
Fiction, yes, but it’s easy to see parallels between Baba Boogie and the screenwriter, Zsuzsanna Budapest. For 50 years, Budapest dedicated much of her life to creating and disseminating Dianic Wicca, a feminist, Goddess-centered spirituality she originated in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
She founded the all-women Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 and was arrested for reading tarot cards in Venice when divination was still illegal across most of California.
She publicly hexed murderers and rapists, wrote 13 books on ritual and witchcraft and founded the long-running International Goddess Festival, a biennial gathering of women in the California redwoods that continues to this day.
Outside witchy circles, Budapest remains relatively unknown, but she has been a pioneering, though sometimes divisive, force in a state famous for fostering unorthodox forms of spirituality and belief.
“I don’t agree with all her views, but in the history of the craft, she is an important person,” said Sabina Magliocco, professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia. “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.”
Budapest believes her work as a public witch was essential, but like Baba Boogie, she is ready for a respite. She also believes there’s a wide audience for the Baba Boogie story, and she’s looking for an agent (if you happen to know anyone).
And she’s confident of something else: that her feminist brand of Goddess worship will live on.
Read on:
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e&edid=9a1e7228-1aa3-4a87-9dfc-54a025fc4c4d&pnum=1
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