Eddie Buczynski

Edmund Buczynski (January 28, 1947 – March 16, 1989) was an American Wiccan and archaeologist who founded two separate traditions of Wicca: Welsh Traditionalist Witchcraft and The Minoan Brotherhood.

Born to a working-class family in New York City, Buczynski eventually embraced his homosexuality, moved to Greenwich Village, and immersed himself in the local gay scene. His relationship with Herman Slater led the two men to open The Warlock Shop, an occult supply store, in 1972. Following ordinations into various covens, Buczynski founded the Minoan Brotherhood in 1977 as a Wiccan tradition for gay and bisexual men. Buczynski was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1988, and died the following year.

Eddie Buczynski was born on January 28, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York to working class parents. His father Edmund, who Eddie was named after, was the eldest son of Polish parents, and had been raised in a Brooklyn tenement with four brothers and two sisters. Edmund Sr. enlisted in the Naval Armed Guard in 1943, he fought in the Second World War aboard two Liberty ships, the SS John Howard and the SS José Marti. Eddie's mother, Marie Mauro, was the granddaughter of southern Italian immigrants, and had grown up in a Brooklyn apartment. She began communicating with her future husband in 1944 as pen pals before meeting him when he returned home on leave.

They married against their parents' wishes on April 27, 1946. Edmund Jr., was born nine months later. At the outbreak of the Korean War, Edmund senior was called back to active duty with the Navy Reserves. After his permanent discharge in October 1951, he moved his wife and child from Brooklyn to the middle-class neighborhood of Ozone Park, Queens.

In 1952, Buczynski started at the Old School Elementary in Queens, where he made good grades and particularly enjoyed music, reading, drawing, and painting. In August 1954, his mother gave birth to his first brother, Frank, who he would remain fond of despite the seven-year age gap. Although his family was Roman Catholic, he took an early interest in the pre-Christian religions of Ancient Egypt and Classical Greece, which he read about in books. He began devising and performing his own rituals to the deities of those religions, sparking his lifelong interest in contemporary paganism. His interest in pagan religion only increased following his father's sudden death from a heart attack at age 31 in August 1958. His mother married Edward Nascato in 1961.

Eddie eventually decided that he wanted to become a Roman Catholic priest, following in the footsteps of his uncle, Father Michael. He received Catholic confirmation in early 1961, and in September of that year he began his studies at the Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School in East Elmhurst. Bullied for being effeminate and homosexual, Eddie disliked the school, and he was ultimately expelled for being overly critical of their religious instruction.

In September 1962, he enrolled at John Adams High School, but was again bullied. He became increasingly rebellious, took up smoking cigarettes and marijuana, and made several suicide attempts. Family life became increasingly strained following the birth of a half-brother, Tommy, in September 1962, and in March 1964, he quit highschool and left home.

From Ozone Park, he moved to Manhattan, where a counter-cultural community had built up around the Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side that contained an array of gay people, hippies, occultists and others adopting bohemian lifestyles. Without money, he resorted to working as a rent boy, and made use of both marijuana and LSD. Although he briefly returned to Catholicism, in 1971 he read a copy of Witchcraft Today (1954), a book authored by Englishman Gerald Gardner, the founder of Gardnerian Wicca, and it reignited his interest in pagan religion. In autumn of that year, he tracked down Leo Martello (1931–2000)– a prominent gay-rights activist and pagan witch, who practiced his own Italian-focused form of witchcraft, called Strega. Although Leo thought that Buczynski was too inexperienced in magic to begin practicing Strega, Leo befriended him and shared his contacts with him, and took him to visit Herman Slater (1935–1992)– a fellow New Yorker who was of Jewish heritage. Like Buczynski and Martello, Slater was gay, and a romantic relationship soon developed between Buczynski (who was attracted to bears) and the older man. Buczynski moved-in with Slater in an apartment in Brooklyn Heights in June 1972.