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.

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.

[10] 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.

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.

[12] 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.

[15] Buczsynki then approached Gwen Thompson (1928–1986)– the matriarch of the New England Covens of Traditionalist Witches (NECTW), asking for initiation, although he declined to inform her of his sexual orientation.

They developed a strong friendship, much to Slater's dismay, and Buczynski soon rose to a second degree position, adopting an adapted craft name of "Hermes Dionysos" and becoming High Priest of Thompson's coven.

[19] Although taking an open attitude to spiritual seekers, Buczynski prevented the occult investigator, Hans Holzer, from entering the outer coven when the latter requested admission to undertake research for his book The Witchcraft Report.

Buczynski's high priestess– Kay Smith, decided to take lead of one of the covens, while Eddie remained in the other, being joined by a new ritual consort named Judith.

Buczynski decided to do so, founding his own Gardnerian coven with an older German woman named Renate Springer as high priestess that operated in the Brooklyn Heights area.

[30] Despite the internal "witch wars" that Buczynski had become involved in, he continued to propagate information on Wicca and paganism in the media, giving talks for a group known as "The Friends of the Craft", which had been co-founded by Slater, and helping to organize the "OCCULT" exhibit which was held at the Museum of American Folk Art.

[31] Activity also continued at The Warlock Shop, and in December he and Slater published the first issue of a pagan newsletter called Earth Religion News, which would run for several years.

Meeting at Jane's apartment in Brooklyn, which she shared with her husband Burt, Buczynski continued to maintain his own legitimacy within the sect despite Siero's denunciation of his original initiation.

Embarrassed, Jane stood down as The Wica's high priestess, with leadership of the group falling to another married couple– Ria and David Farnham, who moved the covenstead to their home in the Bronx, resulting in a lengthy commute for most of the coven members.

[37] Adopting the ritual name of "Un-Nefer", he devoted himself to the worship of the goddess Isis, organizing a temple based in New York, and beginning the publication of a newsletter, which he titled Esbat.

By the summer of 1974 they had broken up, and although they briefly remained roommates, Buczynski soon collected together his belongings and moved back in with his mother and step-father in Ozone Park, where he converted the basement into a bedroom for himself.

Eventually, he obtained a part-time job at the BookMasters bookstore at 1482 Broadway in Times Square, and it was while commuting home on the subway one night that he met Bennie Geraci (1950–), a native of New Orleans who had moved to the city.

Saperton had become increasingly interested in Buckland's newly developed sect called Seax-Wica, and founded a Seax coven from her home in Huntington Station on Long Island.

Buczynski had become increasingly dissatisfied with Gardnerian Wicca and other forms of contemporary paganism, which he said treated homosexual and bisexual individuals as inferior to their heterosexual counterparts.

He would later place many of these texts on the required reading list for new initiates, including among them academic works of history and archaeology like Arthur Evans' The Palace of Minos, Martin P. Nilsson's A History of Greek Religion and George E. Mylonas' Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, books on mythology such as Robert Graves' The White Goddess, fictional novels like Mary Renault's The Bull from the Sea and Thomas Burnett Swann's How Are the Mighty Fallen, and such works on occultism as Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today.

That year, Buczynski decided to stop using his flat as a covenstead, which he moved to the Earth Star Temple, the back room of The Magickal Childe, Herman Slater's new shop.

[58] Deciding to explore this topic further, he enrolled to study for an undergraduate degree in Classics and Ancient History at Hunter College, a part of the City University of New York (CUNY) located in Manhattan's Upper East Side, beginning there in September 1980.

[62] His increased interest in academic archaeology came at the expense of his involvement in the occult, and in the Spring of 1981 he stepped down from his leadership of the Knossos Grove coven, handing control over to Tony Fiara.

He moved into the Thornbrook Manor apartments on Montgomery Avenue with his cats Maybelle and Grimalkin, renting a flat that was larger than that in which he and Muto had lived in New York.

[66] Buczynski attempted to start a coven of Minoan practitioners at Bryn Mawr, but the only response he received was from a man named Kevin Moscrip, who he initiated in the spring of 1986.

[67] In the winter of 1986, he and Muto traveled to Colombia, where they visited Cartagena, but in the following March, Buczynski took ill, and though some of his friends suspected that he might be exhibiting symptoms of AIDS, he refused to get tested.

By this stage, he was unable to attend to basic tasks on his own, including eating and dressing himself, and required almost constant care, from both Muto and from carers based at St. Joseph Hospital.

[75] Asphodel Press published the 2012 biography Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan by Michael Lloyd, with a foreword by Margot Adler.

The book's launch party was held at Sala One-Nine, a tapas restaurant at 35 West 19th Street in Manhattan, which stood on the site of Slater's Magickal Childe store.