New York City, USA - A book party Sunday night in Manhattan attracted so many witches in New York City that as one attendee, Rhea Rivera, put it, “I felt like all the brooms were just suddenly descending.”
With the obligatory broom jokes out of the way, a real discussion can begin of this event that included Ms. Rivera, a Wiccan high priestess known as Lady Rhea, and many members of the city’s Wiccan culture.
Sure, there were plenty of witches of both sexes on hand Sunday night at Sala One-Nine, a tapas restaurant at 35 West 19th Street, to celebrate a new biography of Eddie Buczynski, a leader of the Wiccan movement in New York beginning in the early 1970s.
So many friends and followers of Mr. Buczynski turned out, that the evening became one of the largest Wiccan summits in New York in years.
“It’s a blessing of the gods,” said Michael Lloyd, the author of “Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan.”
His was just one of many invocations of the Wiccan gods, which quickly turned into a giant prayer circle, with chanting and singing of Wiccan prayer and song in veneration of Mr. Buczynski, an openly gay Wiccan priest who died in 1989 from AIDS.
Working the door at the event was a strapping man clad only in a loincloth and headdress.
Most of the roughly 80 attendees were practitioners of some sort of nature-worship, with many of them prominent figures of the New York coven when it flourished from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Just beyond the restaurant’s bar was a big cake, courtesy of “The New York Coven of Witches,” according to its message in icing. Placed on a central table were photographs of Mr. Buczynski.
The party was held at Sala One-Nine because it occupies the space once filled by the Magickal Childe, a shop opened in the mid-1970s by Mr. Buczynski and his partner Herman Slater, who had previously run a similar store, The Warlock Shop, in Brooklyn Heights. For the nearly 25 years it remained open, the Childe was the center of the city’s occult, Wiccan and neo-pagan scene.
Once again the space was packed with high priests and priestesses of the New York coven – even if they were eating tapas and drinking Spanish wine, instead of buying deer’s tongue and other items for potions.
There were pagan luminaries like Margot Adler, author of the seminal 1979 neo-pagan book “Drawing Down the Moon” and a granddaughter of Alfred Adler, the pioneering Austrian psychotherapist who collaborated with Sigmund Freud. There was also Kaye Flagg, a Wiccan known as Lady Vivienne, who thrilled the crowd by reciting from memory a long incantation of Mr. Buczynski’s.
Carol Bulzone (Lady Miw) was also on hand. In the 70s, she and Ms. Rivera founded the Minoan Sisterhood, the first lesbian coven in the city. They also owned, Enchantments, a Wiccan store in Greenwich Village that was open from 1982 to 2003.
After cocktails and mingling, the group gathered in a circle and spoke about Mr. Buczynski.
Mr. Lloyd, a chemical engineer from Columbus, Ohio, who runs a coven there, thanked attendees for sharing their stories for his book, which focuses on Mr. Buczynski and the role he played in New York’s Wiccan, occult and contemporary Pagan movements that flourished from the 1960s through the 1980s.
One of Mr. Buczynski’s former partners, Bennie Geraci, 61, traveled from New Orleans, who said a few words, as did Ms. Rivera.
“We all stand on the shoulders of Edmund Buczynski,” said Ms. Rivera, who now runs the Pagan Center of New York in the Bronx, with her wife, Sandra Rivera, a Wiccan priestess known as Lady Zoradia. “He breathed life into our religion. He made us know the magic. We felt the magic.”
Then came a memorial ceremony for Mr. Buczynski. Lights were dimmed, candles were distributed, and apocalyptic choral music was turned on for a ritual that looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”
Gary Suto, a Wiccan high priest of the Minoan brotherhood, which was founded in 1975 by Mr. Buczynski as a way for gay and bisexual men to practice witchcraft together, led a group of men in chanting and singing around a central altar bearing a framed photograph of Mr. Buczynski, next to a bowl of smoldering frankincense and myrrh.
Mr. Suto, a fashion designer from Brooklyn who also goes by the Wiccan name Lord Jack in the Green, has for eight years run a weekly pagan circle for gay men.
The crowd gasped when Matthew Sawicki, a high priest of the Wica, a neo-Gardnerian tradition founded by Mr. Buczynski in 1974, invoked the ancestors using Mr. Buczynski’s own ceremonial wand.
They called Mr. Buczynski by his occult name, Lord Gywddion, and one after the other, they offered testimony to Mr. Buczynski, followed by the affirmation “Blessed Be,” a common Wiccan affirmation.
Mr. Suto asked for reminiscences about Mr. Buczynski. “The man was absolutely awesome in a circle” one said. Another yelled, “May his name be spoken for a thousand years.”