This interview was a labor of love. I always try to tailor the questions I ask to the individual and personality I am talking to. When I sent off her questions and later followed up, she asked if I could simply make it easier for her by calling and taping us. So I eagerly called her one afternoon. We talked for almost an hour. She spoke of the Crone time of life, her early life and her family in Hungary before she left, and what it was like to leave as well as what it is like there now. We talked of war, of community and rebuilding our lives and keeping the things that are important. She talks to her grandmother, who comes to her in dreams. Her voice is tranquil and I soon felt as easy as if we were in a living room snuggled near a huge roaring fire or getting a story from my Mom before bed. Here are some of the highlights of that talk….
Z thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions and to let our readers get to know you a little more.
I am going to call this my ‘Interview with the Goddess’. You have done so much to promote the Goddess and helped so many women to get in touch with who they are at the core.
Z-For the past 30 years I acted as priestess, as well as a writer, initiator, conceptualizer. Priestess is the oldest profession by the way, not prostitution.
Meeting you at Goddess Spirit Rising in Malibu and joining with so many other women in the special ceremonies, gathering in the Temple for our rituals to celebrate and honour the feminine Divine in all Her many manifestations was an amazing experience and meeting such wonderful people and speakers. Does it energize you as much as all of us still?
Z-The Goddess is like a beautiful Tree of Life. If you envision our blue planet in space, the only one where there is beauty suitable for organic life, this freak accident of life is the Goddess. The planet herself is aware and can be talked to, sent love to, served, and she will embrace you. This is why witch’s spells work, because we address this life force, this Tree of Life.
I love in your book Celestial Wisdom where you said ‘Life is a challenging job, and we have to write our own instruction manuals for getting through it’. What has helped you get though life’s crazy through the years?
Z- I am no longer a dimple-cheeked agile young women with an attitude. I am a new Crone groping confidently for the third destiny. While I was having other plans, like becoming a great Hungarian novelist, LIFE has directed the essence of what I was to bring back the ancient Goddess into women’s lives. LIFE is the final editor. What she writes is often better than what I have thought up. She writes bolder herstories.
Z every person who does Tarot readings has you to thank really, for being arrested back in 1975, and going through 9 years of appeals to finally change the law. Do people still talk about this?
Z-My inspiration was Feminism and the lack of female centered spirituality at the time. Becoming a feminist was like you had to rebuild an entire culture and finally give women a place in it. A Spiritual Religion is important to women. This had to be done first. We had started all kinds of new things then, like communal living, sharing food expenses, self-defense, car repairs, women’s health care, anti-rape squads, Take Back the Night marches. Religion was just one of the many. I belong to this seeding generation
I love how in the book Grandmother of Time you honor your Mother, and your Grandmother as suffragets. Your Grandmother Ilona traveled giving speeches, ran a newspaper for the National Hungarian Women’s Suffrage Association. During WWII your Mom, Masika was once arrested for her sculptures of the wrong leader! And did a spell by going into trance in jail to get out, mentally influencing the minds of the officials who would later acquit her based on a mistake! That is powerful magic. What is the most powerful magic of mind over matter you have seen in your life?
Z-The big picture is that patriarchal wars must fail and become obsolete. I thought this would be done by now, thirty years after Women’s Liberation, thirty years after women coming into consciousness.
After wars there is no victory for anyone, mothers cry and burry their children on both sides; there is only famine, and poverty. The reasons for the wars are quickly forgotten, or never had any (WMD in Iraq) but its takes three generations to recover from a major war.
From coming to America as a political refugee after fleeing the Hungarian Revolution to founding the first feminist Coven, what is a little known fact about Z Budapest that we might not know you can share?
Z-I am still a work in progress. Nothing can be more powerful; nothing is more exuberant in the evening, nothing more worthy to dress up for than a ritual circle with a sacred fire and a few hundred women ready to dance and pray. Nothing compares to the oneness we feel when imagining the Goddess together. When women imagine the world, the world actually gets better. When blending action to our inner life, we are shapers of the new mythology that has bigger power then any President. Imagination and humor has toppled the powerful before.
Thank you so much Z for all you have done and for allowing me to share you with others.
Z Budapest has written her first tell-all autobiography filled with touching moments of reflection, some amazing moments of courage and tales of self-survival.
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