Zsuzsanna Emese Budapest was born in Budapest in 1940, into a family with a long heritage of female herbalists and healers. She escaped to the West after the Hungarian Revolution and won a scholarship to the University of Chicago. In her 30s she got involved in the world of American feminism, where she found an absence of spiritual understanding. She decided that the spiritual liberation of women would be her contribution to the cause and started the Susan B. Anthony Coven Number 1. The women who got involved soon found the Goddess, and many new covens sprang up all over the USA. The conceptof self-led, self-developed groups of women bonding as souls came to regarded as the beginning of the Third Wave of Feminism – Spiritualized Feminism.
Zsuasanna said: “When women change, everything changes. If we concentrate on changing women, we can turn the world around in her hour of near annihilation.”
In her work, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, published in 1981, Zsuzsanna sought to educate, inform, inspire and motivate women to remember and reclaim their natural spirituality, long suppressed by the patriarchal forces with their militaristic religions. The book is credited with launching the Dianic Witchcraft Tradition and the Women’s Spirituality Movement. Her teachings reveal and drive home basic, essential, truths that, forty years later, are still not really reaching mass awareness. Timely then that this seminal book, full of wisdom and insights that assist us to live healthily and happily in body, mind and spirit, has recently been reprinted as The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Aquarian Rituals and Spells for Present and Future Witches.
Excerpts from The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries by Zsuzsanna Emese Budapest:
THE SACRED WHEEL
Study the Great Mandala of our lives – the Wheel of Karma, the Wheel of Life, the Way. All is encompassed by it. Nothing escapes the ordered, complicated, sensitive, and effective chain of events the Wheel of Change. All that is alive must change. That is the Law. That which does not change dies (and thus changes). All is subject to the Law of the Way.
The Goddess Dike is associated with the Wheel, a floating, angel- like, winged Goddess, Victory. Her names are many. As Themis’s daughter, She is sister to Truth, the Goddess Maat.
Contemplate the Great Mandala in terms of your internal life. Contemplate yourself as a part of the Great Design. You belong here. This is your spaceship. Nobody leaves to ascend to “heaven” or de- scend into “hell,” because they both exist simultaneously in the here and now. You can move into heaven now, if you wish; you’ve probably already visited hell. Redemption is like responsibility; you cannot pass it on. It is you, and it is us, makers of Divine Choices, makers of Karma, makers of Change and maintainers of the Wheel.
What a beautiful spaceship we have to live on! As the Blue Planet in space, we have the only water in the entire solar system. Without water, there is no organic life. Aphrodite still lives here. Our Mother, Earth, Gaia, Demeter, Kore, Tara, Ceres, has dictated all seasons and changes into a calendar of life. Food is life. Knowing how to plant and reap is the core of every culture’s reservoir of knowledge. That is one cycle of change.
Then there is the other-changes of the spirit, management of feelings, relationships, and personal well-being. Love is the food of the spirit. The communal events that bind communities together around spiritual issues make up our lives and are the highlights in our humanities.
Having celebrations of all sorts – calling, summoning the people to rejoice, parading, gathering together, feasting, purifying together, making oaths together, producing culture together, worshipping together – were stock and trade of the most important concerns of the life-oriented society that women created. It is true these festivals and holy days were observed by both sexes for the most part, but they were “priestessed” by women.
Although diverse in function, the celebrations all had to do with the theme of the communal spirit of the year. Following the simple observance of these festivals, holy days and Sabbats would give rich exposure to the other people in one’s community, and isolation of any one person (unless chosen) was virtually impossible. Hence, there was no loneliness as we know it today, that gnawing awareness that nobody cares. No one had to experience any deep degree of lovelessness, because the attitude toward love was such that, at least ritualistically, everybody had a chance to participate in communal sex as well as communal nurturing. Even the priestesses of Aphrodite vowed to distribute their favors evenly.
Today’s calendar, with the meaningless and artificial days of so-called “celebration,” which is usually synonymous with drinking and time off from work, pales in comparison with the genile Path of Old. Therefore, try to celebrate the many holy days of this ancient calendar as often as you can, choosing at least one or two from each end of the wheel, and making the celebration of these sacred days a tradition for your family from now on.
Do not allow your soul to grow without tending to the spirits of old – our ancestors. You are part of a never-ending continuation and it is perfectly all right to take heart and sustenance from the past. When you allow the spirits to awaken in you, difficulties will be clari- fied and unseen powers suddenly revealed. Do not forget that the Goddess is re-emerging in the public consciousness today, but She has been with you from the beginning, and She is all that is attained at the end of desire.
Tread lightly into the soul’s hidden desires. The hunger of the spirit will be satisfied by the motherly hands of the Goddess. The cost humanity will have to pay for ignoring and denying the Female Principle of the Universe is soaring. It is through this Female Principle that the Way will be found. Let this spaceship find home in the Mother’s harbor – paradise restored, at least spiritually. By accepting all elements in nature, we make whole the collective and individual Soul.
FEMINIST WITCHCRAFT
Wimmin’s Religion, As in Heaven, So on Earth
What people believe (faith-religion) is political because it influences their actions and because it is the vehicle by which a religion perpetuates a social system. Politics and religion are interdependent.
Every new social structure strives to come up with some kind of mythology of divine origin for its values and aims. The mythology is passed on for generations, and often its validity goes unquestioned for centuries. For example, a self-created male god who has no mother is a totally unsupportable concept. It is, to say the least, not supernatural, but merely unnatural. Nothing in nature parallels, let along substantiates, such an absurdity. Everything, even a star, originates somewhere every creature in the world has a mother force. Obviously, to deny motherhood is to deny wimmin.
Patriarchal religion is built on this denial, which is its only original thought, the rest of the edifice having been ripped off stone by stone from the Old Faith of Paganism. The Christian Trinity is a word-by-word reversal of the Fates, the Three-Fold Mother, the Three Graces. The Dove is the sacred bird of the Great Mother. The Great Mother was eventually incorporated into the new Christian religion in the form of the Virgin Mary, who is today worshipped in an “idolatrous” fashion in the Catholic church.
Who absorbs whose culture is a crucial issue on the cultural battlefield. Those who refused to accept this accommodation and continued to practice the ancient art were persecuted.
Wimmin’s spirituality is rooted in Paganism, where wimmin’s values are dominant. The Goddess worship, the core of Paganism, was once universal. Paganism is pleasure-oriented, joy and feasting prone, celebrating life with dancing and lovemaking. Working in harmony with Mother Nature, we discover and recover the All-Creatrix, the female power without whom nothing is born or glad.
Male energy pretends to have power by disclaiming the female force. Today, given the patriarchal society within which we live, witchcraft with a feminist politic (Dianic) says clearly that the real enemy is the internalized and externalized policing tool that keeps us in fear and psychic clutter.
The craft is not only a religion; it is also a lifestyle. In the time of the Matriarchies, the craft of wimmin was common knowledge. It was rich in information on how to live on this planet, on how to love and fight and stay healthy, and especially, on how to learn to learn. The remnants of that knowledge constitute the body of what we call “witchcraft” today. The massive remainder of that knowledge is buried within ourselves, in our deep minds, in our genes. In order to reclaim it, we have to open ourselves to psychic experiences in the safety of feminist witch covens.
A new kind of trust is the most important contribution that wimmin’s spirituality has to give to the wimmin’s movement. We learned we can trust our bodies when we learned we had the right to control them. We are learning we can trust our souls through learning that our right to have them is rooted in our recognition of the Goddess, of the female principle within the universe and ourselves. It is from this source that our independence comes.
MY VIEW IN 2023 – The sharing of this wisdom is now BEYOND URGENT. It has to spread through women and also through men who feel the call of the Goddess, a call I heard in 1995 at the age of 30. This wisdom is central to, but largely unknown by, the global Lesbian Gay Bi Trans Queer Movement – we need to hear that genderfluidity and same sex love were very much in the domain of the ancient Goddess religions: LGBTQ+ people embody ‘female principle within the universe and ourselves.’ The suppression of gendervariance and same sex love was part of the misogynistic drive of the patriarchy: the effect of suppressing women and queers was to suppress the whole community’s connection to Spirit – the embracing of the Goddess, of the feminine in all beings, including male bodied ones, takes us to the time of the GREAT RECONNECTION. Shokti
rainbow messenger 