Missing Witches - Missing Witches - Z Budapest： She Is Not Perfect And Neither Are We

00:00:00.000 It's Friday, April 19th. Good Friday, a full pink moon. I meant to record this story about

00:00:13.040 a Hungarian witch and my Hungarian-ness from my Hungarian father on Tuesday, but my father

00:00:22.160 died on Tuesday. So needless to say, this won't be my best-performed or best-edited episode,

00:00:31.320 but I wanted to finish it, and I want to dedicate it to the memory of my Hungarian father. 0.95

00:00:40.140 Problematic. Powerful. 1.00

00:00:44.580 Sarad-Lek-Edeshapa. 0.94

00:00:46.020 Warning. We discovered during our research that Z-Budapest has been labeled and embraced the 0.98

00:00:54.240 label of TERF. For those of you not familiar with this acronym, it stands for Trans-Exclusive

00:00:59.520 Radical Feminist, and it basically denotes a feminist who doesn't accept that trans women

00:01:04.060 are women. We at Missing Witches are not that. Inclusivity is our mandate and our guiding

00:01:10.620 principle, so we were a bit shook by this discovery. After some discussion, we realized

00:01:15.120 we had three choices. We could ditch the episode, we could go ahead with the story but sweep that

00:01:20.140 stuff under the rug, or we could use this platform to respectfully disagree and tell this story as a

00:01:26.220 way to start a conversation not just about gender but also about what we do when we find rot amid

00:01:32.180 the ancestors' bones we've been collecting. In the spirit of safe spaces of all kinds, we want to make

00:01:39.180 missing witches as safe as we can. A place where we can talk about issues from a core ethic of

00:01:44.960 radical compassion, where it's safe to ask questions, make mistakes, or respectfully disagree.

00:01:51.540 Learn, grow, change our minds, change the world. Recognize how experience shapes point of view.

00:01:59.380 We want to name and shame the failings of our ancestors, but retain the ability to separate

00:02:04.480 the toxic from the healing. Our goal is to learn from their missteps, why they happen, and do better

00:02:10.200 without throwing away the valuable lessons they have to teach. As Leila Saad wrote, the loftier

00:02:16.560 goal is to help us become better ancestors for those who will come after us. And as Michelle

00:02:22.580 the Birch Trail taught us, call in before you call out. So this is us, Zee, calling in.

00:02:29.860 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:02:34.480 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:02:38.300 This story got very personal for me, very fast. 0.89

00:02:42.460 I read that in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution,

00:02:45.520 Zhuzhanna Budapest walked from Hungary to a refugee camp in Austria.

00:02:50.140 And in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution,

00:02:53.520 my father had walked from Hungary to a refugee camp in Austria. 0.93

00:02:57.700 And it's possible that this witch may have walked beside my father on that traumatic road. 0.79

00:03:03.320 and maybe they made eye contact and maybe there was comfort in that. It makes me feel connected

00:03:09.600 to her in the same way I feel connected to my own family, those whom I love despite their shady

00:03:15.180 politics and clashing personalities. See, I'm a child of a not altogether friendly divorce,

00:03:21.580 so I've had to contend with a lot of bad-mouthing. My parents were constantly talking contradictory

00:03:26.660 smack about each other, but in a way it kind of did me a favor because I learned early to make

00:03:32.820 up my own mind, to do my own research and draw my own conclusions. Also, to accept the good and do

00:03:39.780 my best not to dwell on the bad, snatching the teachable from the jaws of the traumatic.

00:03:45.720 All this to say, Zhijana Budapest could very easily have been my aunt. In fact, her brother

00:03:51.640 and my father were both named Imre. So I'm approaching this story the way we all do,

00:03:57.480 with distant and problematic relatives at weddings or funerals. Agree on some issues.

00:04:04.040 Speak up when we disagree on others. Connect based on what we have in common and what we admire

00:04:09.800 about problematic Auntie Juju. Once you hear her name, you don't stop seeing it. She pops up

00:04:16.640 constantly in feminist documentaries and witchy reading lists. As a lesbian radical feminist, 1.00

00:04:21.900 she lit up the 1970s manifesting the witch as author, activist, journalist, playwright,

00:04:28.580 and songwriter. She is iconoclast, tongue-in-cheek, having faced both, in my view,

00:04:34.380 legitimate detractors and zealotist protesters. I mean, she was arrested for doing tarot readings 0.55

00:04:41.880 and took that battle to the California Supreme Court. Lover or hater, Z Budapest is a firebrand,

00:04:49.040 and contemporary witchcraft has felt her heat. In her autobiography, My Dark-Sworded Past as a

00:04:57.060 Heterosexual, Budapest recalls driving to a speaking engagement and passing rows of demonstrators 0.95

00:05:02.840 bearing placards with phrases like, death to the witch. She wrote, I had been invited to the library 0.67

00:05:09.360 to give a lecture about the goddess. My need for political freedom had brought me from Hungary to

00:05:14.580 the United States. My desire for religious freedom brought me to the goddess, the cure for the fear

00:05:20.780 of God, a cure that I have been talking about to anyone who will listen ever since. But to a lot

00:05:26.760 of people, the very concept of the great goddess is the greatest heresy and the greatest threat

00:05:32.940 to male domination of women. Once women discover what has been taken from them, they want to 1.00

00:05:38.260 reclaim her. When women know they're goddess, it is impossible to enslave them. Once again, 1.00

00:05:45.540 I was being hunted. Do we even need to recite the Ipsita Roy Chakravarti quote at this point?

00:05:52.840 Let's hear it instead. Every strong woman is a witch and is hunted. Budapest continues. 1.00

00:06:03.220 The library had noticed that teenagers were taking out a lot of books about witchcraft,

00:06:07.420 and one of my sisters who worked there suggested they invite me to come down from Oakland so that

00:06:11.780 the kids could talk to a quote real witch. To generate some interest the library photocopied

00:06:17.060 a picture of a black cat from the holy book of women's mysteries with the words witchcraft

00:06:21.600 and goddess lecture. The time and date and my name. It was supposed to be humorous not scary

00:06:27.780 but when one boy took a copy home to his militant Christian mother all hell broke loose. Her minister 0.77

00:06:34.740 thought it was a splendid opportunity for a crusade against Satan. Well, it turned out that

00:06:40.980 many saw this as an opportunity. The 700 Club, a Christian television show, organized buses to

00:06:47.400 bring in protesters from all over Northern California to this little library. Budapest

00:06:52.540 wrote, their hatred was a potent weapon. By definition, I was evil and it was God's will

00:06:58.680 to destroy me. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, one of the posters proclaimed. To them,

00:07:04.220 I was not a human being, but a dehumanized witch, much easier to hate. 1.00

00:07:12.320 Jejana Budapest was born in 1940 to a long line of nasty women. Her mother was a sculptor of 1.00

00:07:18.940 goddesses. Her granny, Iona, was a suffragette who gave motivational speeches and wrote for 0.95

00:07:23.700 the National Women's Paper, preaching women's liberation before women had the vote. In Summoning 0.97

00:07:28.700 the Fates, A Generational Women's Guide to Destiny and Sacred Transformation, Budapest wrote,

00:07:34.740 During the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, I was on my way to a demonstration. When you were

00:07:40.740 16, being part of a collective uprising is very exciting. When I finally crossed the bridge, I

00:07:46.660 heard shots. That wasn't too unusual. It was a revolution and people had been shooting off guns

00:07:51.880 in celebration for days. But when I turned the corner to the plaza, everything was silent.

00:07:57.580 Too silent.

00:07:59.480 Instead of a crowd of cheering, shouting people, the plaza was covered with bodies.

00:08:05.060 All those who had made it to the plaza on time had been shot down.

00:08:09.180 The blood was still dripping on the stones.

00:08:12.120 I stood stock still, realizing that I had indeed arrived too late.

00:08:17.120 Too late for the massacre.

00:08:19.880 In Hungarian, the fates are Sorsz Istanok, the destiny goddesses.

00:08:25.520 But their Latin name, the Parcai, means those who spare.

00:08:30.400 And indeed, my life was spared by them that day.

00:08:40.440 My father's skewed take on the revolution was heartbreaking in his retelling.

00:08:45.520 He had dementia, so I'm working with the memories he has lost,

00:08:50.900 searching for snippets of old conversation and bowls of chicken paprikash.

00:08:55.040 He once told me the Hungarian revolutionaries managed to rise up,

00:08:58.600 free political prisoners, hold down the Russian army.

00:09:01.300 They called out to the rest of the world, 0.94

00:09:03.080 come and help us, we have them, but we can't hold them down for very long.

00:09:06.640 Come, help us out.

00:09:08.700 And no one came.

00:09:10.920 No one came and no one helped.

00:09:12.940 So the revolutionaries, mostly university students,

00:09:16.420 the young, bright future of Hungary,

00:09:18.960 exhausted and outmatched, fled or were killed.

00:09:22.000 At least that's how my father told it.

00:09:25.900 And I think maybe a hint of that bitterness and distrust made its way into my blood

00:09:30.740 and manifested in an unwillingness to ask for help.

00:09:34.900 It's infinitely easier to struggle alone than to ask for help and be ignored.

00:09:41.980 Budapest writes,

00:09:43.500 In our family, being a Hungarian was the religion.

00:09:47.520 You had to know your history, honor ancient feuds and treaties, 0.66

00:09:50.800 and revel in being a majar. This was the best and most cursed of all nations one could get born into, 1.00

00:09:57.220 but also the most magical. Situated at the crossroads between the steppes of the east and

00:10:02.320 the nations of the west, we had regularly been overrun by bigger nations. I had to laugh when

00:10:10.080 I read this. I heard that message growing up so many times. It was a point of pride that Hungary

00:10:16.420 had been overrun so many times, but the language, the country still existed. Hungarian Hungarians

00:10:22.860 persisted. And maybe there's something there that informs Budapest's abject stubbornness, 0.95

00:10:29.120 for better and for worse. My mom was born in southern Ontario, my father is Hungarian, 0.75

00:10:35.560 his second wife was from Venezuela, and my husband was born in Scotland. And we live in the woods of

00:10:40.760 Quebec. So there's no room for nationalism in this family, but it's crazy that my life as it

00:10:46.120 is exists at all. So I often wonder, is it fate or just a single random endpoint in the chaos of

00:10:54.020 dispersion? Maybe people with this location in their blood contend more with the notion of

00:10:59.540 providence than those with a clear and local history. And maybe in that way, being forced

00:11:04.520 to leave her homeland fueled Budapest's repeated consideration of destiny. She wrote,

00:11:11.200 What rules our lives? Is it chance or choice or something else? Is it the stars or that strange

00:11:18.520 force people call Lady Luck or Fortuna? Since the beginning of time, people have tried to figure

00:11:23.820 out what determines their destiny. In Hungary, we have a saying, Ember Tervesz, Isten Vegas.

00:11:30.880 Human's plan, God finishes. But the fates are beyond even goddesses and gods. They are raw

00:11:38.200 forces of nature. They are rhythms of the ebb and flow of energy, matter, and meaning,

00:11:44.580 the three basic components of the universe. They were here first, they will stay to the last.

00:11:52.400 Again, maybe it was being forced to leave, but being Hungarian and these northern eastern 0.99

00:11:57.320 European roots come up in her writing often. She is so fiercely Hungarian that she named herself

00:12:03.560 after its capital city. Born Zhujana Mze Mokshi, she took the name Budapest and has worn it as a

00:12:10.380 badge of honor, defiance, and persistence. She wrote, in northern Europe, we also find three

00:12:16.880 maidens who sit beside a well in a deep cavern. This original model of the three sisters is the

00:12:22.860 source for all other triple goddesses, such as Hecate, who stands at the triple crossroads,

00:12:28.280 her faces looking in three directions, the past, present, future, and Triple Brigid who appears as

00:12:35.340 a healer, a goldsmith, and a lady of inspiration. It is the pattern for the trinities of maiden,

00:12:41.720 mother, and crone, and all the other goddesses who have three aspects. Each of the many components

00:12:46.960 of our human existence required the goddess to show a separate face and attributes. Eventually,

00:12:53.200 the original Trinity becomes 10,000 aspects, each with her own name, each still harking back to the

00:13:00.000 beginning, the middle, or the end of the life cycle, which the three fates rule. When we summon

00:13:06.160 the fates, we call them out from their deep hiding place in the unconscious. We draw them slowly into

00:13:11.960 the conscious mind, illuminated by goodwill and understanding. This eternal magic can transform

00:13:19.060 the powers that rule us from the misunderstood three hags into the wonderful three graces.

00:13:26.000 Or at least we hope so. There are no guarantees with this force, but there are certain practices,

00:13:31.520 a kind of etiquette of interaction with the fates that have worked for people before.

00:13:36.500 We call it the technology of the sacred. Sacred means that we are speaking not of a technology

00:13:42.440 of machines, but of souls. We behave differently and do unusual things to relate to an unseen

00:13:48.920 divine force. Prayer, for example, is such a sacred technology. Creating sacred space is

00:13:55.320 another. Traveling between the worlds in meditation is one as well, and blessings and curses are

00:14:01.900 others. As they learned about the likes and dislikes of the fates, people created ways to

00:14:07.080 talk to them. When you mention their names, you should always show a great deal of respect.

00:14:11.760 The fates live in each DNA cell in our bodies. This is why they can hear everything.

00:14:18.920 everywhere. In Austria, Zee finished high school and attended the University of Vienna on a

00:14:28.220 scholarship. Landing in the United States in 1959, Budapest studied in Chicago where she met and

00:14:33.900 married Tom, the father of her children. After her two sons were born, Zee started using birth

00:14:38.980 control and told this to a priest during confession. The priest flew into a rage and

00:14:44.020 told her that this was an unforgivable sin. Budapest wrote, this sounded a lot like what

00:14:50.000 my father had said when he was guarding my virginity, only now it was my womb. I think

00:14:56.280 you are a pompous ass, I told the astonished Father Taylor. You know nothing of menstruating 1.00

00:15:01.280 or getting knocked up or birthing children, much less raising them. You don't even know about

00:15:05.520 sex. The church says, he gulped. The men who run the church say, I interrupted. You say,

00:15:12.960 you ignorant, self-absorbed, over-served men. You have nothing, nothing to offer women but grief. 1.00

00:15:19.820 I will never come back to your church. As I left, I lit a last candle for the Blessed Mother.

00:15:26.020 Please don't let them ever humiliate me again. Then I left the church, and the church forever.

00:15:34.860 her. On this day, Z says, she became a feminist. And here we see how, for better and for worse,

00:15:43.660 she solidified the bond in her mind between goddess, womanhood, feminism, and the womb.

00:15:50.840 And a kind of understandable scorn for anyone without those organs who dared to tell her what 0.55

00:15:56.600 a woman is, does, or should be. It's a little ironic, right? Her mother-in-law loved being 0.85

00:16:03.760 her grandmother, so Z was often free to take small acting and modelling jobs. She learned

00:16:08.660 improv at the famed Second City. Then the family moved to New York. Fast forward through run-ins

00:16:14.720 with Johnny Carson, Harry Belafonte, TV, film, theatre, her husband's affair, their divorce and

00:16:21.000 his remarriage, and Z is on a bus to Toronto to hitchhike across Canada. I looked back as the

00:16:29.800 city diminished behind me, telling myself that this was just a three-week vacation until the

00:16:34.820 boys got back from their trip with their father and his mistress. At a certain point, Z realized,

00:16:42.260 quote, men just didn't deliver love to me anymore. By 1970, she was an out and proud lesbian and witch 0.98

00:16:49.640 living in Los Angeles, California. In 1971, she founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, 0.98

00:16:55.780 a women-only witch's coven. Now, if you female identifiers have ever planned a girl's night,

00:17:01.500 you might understand this feeling. A lot of women, especially at the time of Budapest's

00:17:06.760 early activities, were struggling to get their voices heard. Many were breaking into entirely

00:17:12.000 male-dominated realms and dreaming of a place where they'd be less likely, maybe, to be interrupted,

00:17:18.160 dismissed, ignored, talked over, or straight-up demeaned and abused. Patriarchy is a hard slog.

00:17:25.640 It's violent.

00:17:27.260 It creates a culture of fear and capitalizes on that fear.

00:17:31.440 Z had seen this through a domineering father, a domineering state, and a domineering church.

00:17:37.480 An oppression that she boiled down to one thing.

00:17:41.140 Men.

00:17:42.080 Even Wicca itself in the neo-pagan renaissance is largely credited to a man, Gerald Gardner.

00:17:47.800 You heard about him in our Dorian Valiente episode.

00:17:50.100 And elsewhere, there are weird, ugly stories about unsettling, hierarchical, dogmatic, even exploitive New Age covens where ideas like sexual freedom were used to manipulate and abuse rather than to heal.

00:18:03.160 Janet L. Jacobs did a study she named The Effects of Ritual Healing on Female Victims of Abuse, a Study of Empowerment and Transformation.

00:18:12.660 Here's the abstract.

00:18:13.940 This research analyzes the effects of ritual healing on women who have been victims of

00:18:18.980 abuse, including incest, rape, and battering.

00:18:21.500 The study was conducted through participant observation of a women's spirituality group.

00:18:26.720 The focus of the analysis is on the process of empowerment as it is experienced in a ritual

00:18:31.980 context that provides a means for cathartic expression as well as participant identification

00:18:37.820 with female symbols of power. 0.91

00:18:39.800 The findings of this study suggest that women-centered rituals are effective in reducing 0.96

00:18:44.700 fear, releasing anger, increasing one's sense of power, and improving the overall mental health

00:18:50.920 of those who have experienced the trauma of victimization. So it's from this perspective

00:18:56.160 that Dianic Wicca and Z's coven were born. First problem. Budapest named the coven after

00:19:02.580 Susan B. Anthony, who is another great example who goes in the, well, category. Yes, Susan B.

00:19:09.120 Anthony worked tirelessly as a suffragette, but her quest for women's right to vote in particular 0.72

00:19:14.420 contained extremely racist rhetoric, a reaction to the prospect of black men being given the vote 0.90

00:19:21.260 before white women. But Anthony was also an abolitionist, an anti-slavery activist from the

00:19:27.260 age of 17. We could go back and forth all day, but what we find is another problematic ancestor who,

00:19:33.140 like many, quote, heroes, did some really great stuff and said some really terrible shit. Women 1.00

00:19:40.280 who rank humans in their quest for their own equality. Women arrested for acting on beliefs. 0.98

00:19:48.320 Susan B. Anthony and Georgiana Budapest have a lot in common. Listen to this. Budapest will go

00:19:53.700 down in history as the last person to have been arrested and tried for witchcraft in the United

00:19:59.100 States, unless, of course, the current administration reconsiders those laws. She was arrested for doing 1.00

00:20:05.860 tarot reading in her own shop, the Feminist Wicca, in 1975, and tried and convicted. Budapest applied

00:20:15.120 the ferocity that all her years had taught her, and she appealed her conviction on the grounds

00:20:19.800 that tarot readings are a form of spiritual counseling for women within the context of

00:20:24.160 their religion. It took nine years in courts, but she was acquitted, and better yet, the laws

00:20:30.520 against, quote, fortune-telling were struck from the California legislature. So if you are an

00:20:36.620 entrepreneurial witch, you can thank Auntie Juju for blazing that trail. The formal establishment 0.99

00:20:42.960 of the SBA coven was also a reaction to the charges. Her defense team called her the first

00:20:48.480 which prosecuted since Salem. They established Dianic Wicca as a bonafide religion, making her 0.99

00:20:54.900 conviction explicitly unconstitutional and in violation of the Freedom of Religion Act. 0.82

00:21:01.660 Z was also instrumental in the creation of Take Back the Night marches. I remember attending a

00:21:07.160 Take Back the Night march as a teen in my hometown, and even then I remember arguments over the fact

00:21:12.280 that men were allowed to attend the rally, but the march itself was only for women and children.

00:21:16.700 It was a symbol of women's power, what we were capable of doing and being on our own,

00:21:22.300 even in the darkness, even in the face of fear.

00:21:25.840 More than 20 years later, that conversation has become even more complicated, more nuanced.

00:21:32.520 We as a culture are moving toward a place where binaries no longer make sense,

00:21:36.580 or maybe rather back to a place where we recognize that binaries never made sense.

00:21:42.060 Binaries beget hierarchies.

00:21:44.460 They are an easy and lazy way to classify and label people, at best incomplete, and at worst, very, very dangerous. 1.00

00:21:55.100 All women, or women only, sounds fine, great even in a healing context, until we have to decide what a woman is.

00:22:03.720 We are all so much more than just the sum of our parts. 0.63

00:22:07.360 But here's what we do know. Budapest has been explicit about her denial of trans women into her

00:22:13.540 dianic all-women's coven. In her view, trans women do not fit the biological or experiential

00:22:20.040 prerequisites for womanhood. But here's what we also know. USA Today reported that 2018 was the 0.96

00:22:26.840 deadliest year for assaults against transgender Americans since the human rights campaign began

00:22:32.920 keeping records. Transgender deaths by fatal violence have increased during each of the last

00:22:38.780 three years. And we know that the gay panic defense is a real thing. Here's an example, 1.00

00:22:45.500 and this is just one example. A trans woman named Island Nettles was beaten to death in the street

00:22:50.760 by a man whose friends had mocked him for flirting with her. The killer confessed to the murder and

00:22:55.900 was ultimately sentenced to just 12 years in prison. The mitigating circumstance being that

00:23:01.320 Nettles was trans and her murderer just freaked out. This happened in 2013. It's not a history 0.60

00:23:08.580 lesson, it's current events. It costs nothing to welcome a trans person into a coven, but to 0.98

00:23:15.760 exclude them in this society is deadly. To exclude people keeps them on the outside and allows for

00:23:23.340 the type of thinking that allows the panic defense. When you exclude someone, you make them a freak,

00:23:28.940 which means it's totally normal and righteous to be freaked out by them,

00:23:32.800 and by extension, totally normal to react to that fear with violence.

00:23:37.140 Exclusion is deadly.

00:23:40.380 Things came to a head for Zee at a public pagan conference, Pantheocon, in 2011,

00:23:46.180 when Zee held a ritual for cis women only.

00:23:49.440 Pagan writer Peter Dybing led a protest of Zee's comments and later wrote,

00:23:53.420 It is time for compassion in this discussion.

00:23:57.200 Time for the trans community to sit and listen with open hearts to the pain of women who have suffered abuse at the hands of men.

00:24:04.600 Time for the Dianic community to listen with open hearts to the trans community's experience of violence and exclusion.

00:24:12.820 I believe all of my sisters have the ability to tap into the energy of the divine and approach these issues with respect, compassion, and the intent to heal.

00:24:23.080 there is no one singular shared experience of being a woman it is different for every one

00:24:32.840 we as humans are condemned in a way to live our lives from our own perspective but when we listen

00:24:38.080 to other people and look to them for their difference of experience this this is how we

00:24:44.000 expand our worldview past the boundaries of our own vision it is astral projection of perception 0.97

00:24:50.800 Listening to people with differing experiences is fucking magic. 0.89

00:24:55.160 We can listen and be transported out of our narrow field of view. 0.98

00:24:59.840 We can connect on what we share and what we don't.

00:25:03.240 We can say with eyes wide, I never thought of it that way.

00:25:09.660 I was raised in a very gynocentric environment.

00:25:12.740 I have a sister.

00:25:13.560 My mother had a sister.

00:25:14.640 My grandmother had a sister.

00:25:16.100 My father moved out when I was six. 0.71

00:25:17.420 so I lived most of my life surrounded almost entirely by women, and I was raised feminist.

00:25:22.740 So, despite the fact that I'm six feet tall, have a deep voice, broad shoulders and body hair,

00:25:28.140 thick eyebrows, androgynous clothes, and a bravado that one woman, after seeing my rock

00:25:32.820 and roll band, said was, quote, like a man. For the record, and in her defense, English was not

00:25:38.300 her first language, and she meant it as a compliment, and I took it as one. Despite the

00:25:42.600 fact that I get misgendered or have my sex questioned by curious always men. I myself

00:25:48.000 personally have never questioned that I'm a woman. I don't know how it feels to be trans.

00:25:53.260 I don't understand what it truly means. But I don't need to understand. I don't need empathy 1.00

00:26:00.160 to have compassion. We as a society need to get to a place where our differences are revered and

00:26:06.100 not feared, where we can love without understanding. But I guess that's easy for me to say. The

00:26:12.180 dumb luck of being born white, middle class, cis, het, Canadian. If I was hurt or sick, 0.99

00:26:17.960 I had access to free health care. My public school teachers were mostly good. The system

00:26:22.860 was set up, for the most part, to protect me. The world, for the most part, is my safe

00:26:29.760 space. Little things that add up. I can kiss my partner in public without fear of judgment

00:26:34.560 or attack. My identification matches my identity. I do not take this for granted. I respect

00:26:41.320 so much the need and desire for safe spaces, especially for people who feel alienated by

00:26:48.200 the world at large. A place free of judgments and devil's advocates. Free from scorn or the

00:26:54.340 threat of violence. A place where you are one and not the other. I get why Jujana Budapest felt

00:27:02.600 compelled to create a safe space coven for women. I do not get why she feels she gets to decide what

00:27:09.080 being a woman means and who qualifies. In the Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, she wrote,

00:27:15.720 that is a definition of the female, a definition of womanhood, strength, and beauty combined.

00:27:23.720 And elsewhere, she wrote, the beauty and grace of the feminine form in all of her infinite variety.

00:27:31.800 Infinite variety. As I look at her and my own problematic ancestors, I worry that

00:27:38.940 all her good legacy work will be lost to her stubbornness on this one issue. Is it that same

00:27:45.000 laudable stubbornness that fueled her decade-long state supreme court battle to legalize witchcraft 1.00

00:27:50.620 that is also fueling her shameful trans exclusion? And if so, what do we make of this stubbornness?

00:27:57.520 It's almost as if nothing, no one, is inherently good or inherently bad. No one. When asked about

00:28:07.540 her choice to name her coven after Susan B. Anthony, Budapest said, we chose her name because

00:28:13.440 she was a suffragist whom we all respected. She had her limitations. She was not perfect. And

00:28:19.980 neither are we. Well, Z's darn right about that. None of us are perfect. But what will our legacy 0.75

00:28:27.360 be? And in the passing of my father, I wonder, now is he the young, powerful, athletic, handsome,

00:28:39.160 charming person he was? Or the frail, confused man that he finished as? When we go, who are we?

00:28:50.440 And what will our legacy be?

00:28:53.800 None of us are perfect.

00:28:56.240 But what will our legacy be?

00:28:59.500 Zhejana Budapest is alive and well and continuing her practice.

00:29:03.760 She is boycotting this year's Pantheocon.

00:29:06.620 So what is the message here?

00:29:08.680 What is her message here?

00:29:10.580 To segregate ourselves until we are alone?

00:29:13.260 To curate the people around us to the point where we only have a mirror? 0.86

00:29:17.140 to take witchcraft and womanhood back to the dark corners because we can't agree on who is allowed 0.94

00:29:23.180 in? Funny me. I thought the whole point was that we are all one. Patriarchy divides, I thought. 0.99

00:29:31.800 Witchcraft connects. Patriarchy is competition, I thought. Witchcraft is collaboration.

00:29:39.740 I told you this shit got personal, so what does it all mean for me? I went looking for the witches 0.99

00:29:45.040 I'd been missing. I went digging in Hungary for my geographical basorkine heritage of goddess 1.00

00:29:51.560 and craft and destiny and roots. And I was so excited to find this feminist force of nature 0.82

00:29:58.100 and fate who had shared part of my own father's journey. Years ago, I took my dad back to his

00:30:04.200 hometown in Hungary. This was after his diagnosis, after he had come to live with me. I didn't know

00:30:09.700 how long I had before he'd be incapable of travel, so I took everything I had and poured it

00:30:14.880 into tickets to a place I had never been. So I could go, for the first time, with him,

00:30:20.900 to the place where our blood came from. Over dinner on our first night, my father's brother,

00:30:26.580 my uncle, went on an insulting monologue about my mother. And the feeling I had was similar to

00:30:32.600 the feeling of discovering some of Z's politics. Just, why? I came all this way to see you,

00:30:40.020 to find you. I was so ready to connect. Healers and scientists can harness the power of natural

00:30:48.680 poisons and turn them into medicines. It's a very witchy thing to do. We make medicine from poison, 0.51

00:30:55.040 art out of grief, grab calm from the inside of a storm. So what do I do with these disappointments?

00:31:02.940 These poisons hid among the flowers? These thorns among the roses? I harness their sharpness

00:31:09.980 and power to carve a welcome sign and hang it up on the Missing Witches door and in the doorway

00:31:16.640 of my heart. Come inside. Join our circle. You are welcome here.

00:31:29.020 You must be a witch. 0.96

00:31:32.200 Thanks for listening to the Missing Witches podcast. Be sure to come back Wednesday where 0.99

00:31:37.740 I'm giving our beautiful trans witch sister, Jackie Beaumont, double time for her witches found. 0.93

00:31:44.700 In the meantime, please light a candle for my father, and blessed be. 0.99

Missing Witches - April 21, 2019

Missing Witches - Z Budapest： She Is Not Perfect And Neither Are We

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