Zsuzsanna Budapest

She is the founder and director of the Women's Spirituality Forum, a nonprofit organization featuring lectures, retreats and other events, and was the lead of a cable TV show called 13th Heaven. She had an online autobiography entitled Fly by Night, and wrote for the religion section of the San Francisco Examiner on subjects related to Pagan religions. Her play The Rise of the Fates premiered in Los Angeles in the mid-seventies. She is the composer of several songs including "We All Come From the Goddess". She lives near Santa Cruz, California.

In the eighties, she created the TV show 13th Heaven, which ran on syndicated cable in the San Francisco Bay area for seven years.

Z Budapest is considered by many in the Neopagan community to be transphobic. Famously, she conducted a ritual exclusive to women by the Circle of Cerridwen at PantheaCon in February 2011. This caused a lot of backlash that led many to criticize Dianic Wicca as inherently transphobic. Others were grateful to her for standing up for women and recognizing that women and men are, indeed, different and have different needs. Participants and authors in the neopagan scene wrote articles, staged silent protests and wrote open letters to Budapest. Others applauded and thanked her for standing up to the sexism of some in the neopagan community.

In 1975, she was arrested for "fortune telling" at her candle and book store in Venice, California following a "sting" by an undercover police woman Rosalie Kimberlin, who received a tarot reading from her. Subsequently, Budapest was charged with violating a municipal by-law, Code 43.30, which made fortune telling unlawful. Budapest and her defense team described her as "the first witch prosecuted since Salem," and the ensuing trial became a focus for media and pagan protesters. Budapest was found guilty.

Budapest moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1970, and became an activist in the women's liberation movement. She was on the staff of the first Women's Center in the U.S. there for many years, and became the Founder and High Priestess of Susan B. Anthony Coven #1, the first women-only witches' coven, which was founded in 1971. She was responsible for the creation of an Anti-Rape Squad and the Take Back the Night Movement in Southern California, and facilitated many of their street marches.

Budapest emigrated to the United States in 1959, where she studied at the University of Chicago, with groundbreaking originator of the art of improvisation, Viola Spolin, and the improvisational theater group The Second City. She married and had two sons, Laszlo and Gabor, but later divorced. She realized she is a lesbian and chose, in her words, to avoid the "duality" between man and woman.

Z. Budapest was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her mother, Masika Szilagyi, was a medium, a practicing witch, and a professional sculptress whose work reflected themes of Goddess and nature spirituality. In 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution began, she fled to Austria as a political refugee. She finished high school in Innsbruck, graduated from a bilingual gymnasium, and won a scholarship to the University of Vienna where she studied languages.

Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay (born 1940) is an American writer, activist, playwright and songwriter living in America who writes about feminist spirituality and Dianic Wicca under the pen name Zsuzsanna Budapest or Z. Budapest. She is the founder of the Susan B. Anthony Coven #1, which was founded in 1971 as the first women-only witches' coven. She founded the female-only type of Dianic Wicca.