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30 April 2008

Herman Slater (1935 - 1992) occult retailer.

Herman Slater was raised by Jewish parents in New York. He studied business administration at New York University, liberal arts at Hunter College, traffic management at the Traffic Management Institute in New York, and also at the US Navy Personnel School in Bainbridge, Maryland. From 1958-69 he worked in management, traffic control and insurance claims. 

In 1969 he was crippled with tuberculosis of the bone and in convalescence for three years. He experimented with psychic sciences and managed to levitate while wearing a 300 lb body cast. 

After hospital he joined a coven of Welsh Traditional Witches led by Ed Buczynski, who became his lover. They opened the Warlock Shop in Brooklyn Heights. The shop became a focal point for the various occult/wicca groups in New York City.

Herman also put out a magazine, Earth Religion News, and hosted a local weekly cable television show. Herman is given credit for effecting a truce in 1975 between the various New York occult groups that had been been putting curses on each other. He persuaded them to meet in the back room of The Warlock Shop.

In 1976 Herman and Ed renamed their shop Magickal Childe and moved it to Manhattan. In 1977, he was one of the facilitators of the publication of The Necronomicon by Simon (generally taken to be a pseudonym for Peter Levenda).

Herman edited three books of Pagan Rituals, and two Magikal Formulary Spellbooks.

He was also a drag queen inclined to the outrageous.

Ed Buczynski died of Aids in 1989, and Herman also in 1992.

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