[The Pomegranate 14.

1 (2012) 91-107] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print)

doi: 10.1558/pome.v14i1.91 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite1

Dmitry Galtsin
dmitrygaltsin@gmail.com

Abstract

The Church of Aphrodite was the first Pagan religious group officially
recognized as a religion by a modern state. The Church of Aphrodite was
incorporated in the United States in 1939, headed by Gleb Botkin, son of
the physician of the last Russian Czar, Nicholas II. Gleb Botkin emigrated
to America after the Revolution in Russia, and in the 1920–1930s created
a religious and philosophical system, which finally was embodied in his
church. The church didn’t survive its founder and vanished after Botkin’s
death in 1969. Besides Botkin’s printed works the author makes use of
Botkin’s letters to Philip Proctor (1944–1963) to reconstruct the theology
of his church and his life as its Arch-Priest. Ironically, Botkin did not want
to revive or create Paganism: he viewed his “true” and timeless religion,
based on “the laws of the cosmos,” as separate both from world religions
with their “distorted” teachings, and from the Pagan element, no matter,
whether that of the ancient or the modern world.

In the twentieth century many cultures witnessed the emergence (or,

as others put it, the revival) of the religious and spiritual movements
marked as Pagan/Neo-Pagan2 by their followers.3 Though some of the
new religious movements never accepted the title, they are still deemed
Pagan by the larger public. One of these is the now defunct Church of

1. Research on the article was carried out by the author as a Fulbright Visiting
Scholar, 2011–2012, at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.
2. For the purposes of the present study I prefer to use the term Pagan as a common
denominator, referring particularly to the non-Reconstructionist and non-ethnic reli-
gions that have spread mostly in the English-speaking world, especially America,
since the 1960s.
3. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers,
and Other Pagans in America Today (New York: Viking Press, 1978); Chas S. Clifton,
Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham, Md.: Alta-
Mira Press, 2006); Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan
Witchcraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Waldron, Sign of
the Witch: Modernity and the Pagan Revival (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008).

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92 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

Aphrodite (1939-1969)—the first Pagan or quasi-Pagan denomination to

be recognized by a modern state as a religious organization. Its founder
was Gleb Botkin (1900-1969), the first and so far the last prophet of the
religion of Aphrodite.4 The present essay should be treated as prolegom-
ena to the study of Gleb Botkin, who, in the words of Chas S. Clifton, “is
worth a biography of his own.”5 Botkin is at present mostly known to the
broad public both in the United States and in Russia, where he was born,
as an advocate of Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Princess Anastasia
of Russia, and who had allegedly survived the execution of Czar Nicho-
las II’s family by the Bolsheviks in 1918. According to Botkin, however,
his “main interest in life” had always been religion,6 which finally led
him to the position of an Arch-Priest and “Aphrodisios” of the church
which revered a Goddess of Love, Beauty and Harmony.
Gleb Evgenyevich Botkin was the son ,of Evgeny Sergeyevich Botkin
(1865–1918), the physician to Czar Nicholas II, who himself was exe-
cuted in July 1918 together with the Czar and his family. Botkin thus
characterized his early years in life:

As a child, even before I could speak, I was taught to worship His Majesty
Emperor Nicholas II and his whole family. The first tune I could reproduce
on a comb wrapped in a piece of tissue paper was God Save The Tsar. At
the age of eight I came into personal contact with the sovereigns and their
children. Up to 1917, monarchy meant to me the most gracious smiles
and handshakes from Their Majesties and Their Highnesses. It meant life
among palaces and parks of fantastic beauty, gorgeous uniforms, court
carriages and parades without end . . . I knew no government interference
in my private affairs, and had the very great pleasure of playing with the
Emperor’s children. It is only natural that I refused to believe that monar-
chy could be at all oppressive. To me it was no more weighty than a silk

4. The sources for the history of the Church of Aphrodite which I so far detected
are stored in the archives of Stanford University and Beineke Rare Book and Manu-
script Library at Yale University. These archival collections store documents related
to Gleb Botkin. I managed to work with only one of these collections, which is com-
prised of Botkin’s letters to his friend Philip Proctor, written in 1944-1966 (Philip
Proctor. Correspondence with Anna Anderson and Gleb Botkin. General Collection,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Folders 3 (1944-1947);
4 (1948-1956); 5 (1957); 7 (1959-1960); 8 (1961); 9 (1962); 10 (1963), hereafter referred
to as “Proctor”). Though these letters give valuable evidence concerning Botkin’s
everyday life as an “Archierarch” of the Church of Aphrodite, they are insufficient to
find out the circle of the Church’s sympathizers and attendants, its liturgical calendar
and ritual. They are partially complemented by the memoirs left by a user at alexan-
derpalace.org, an Internet forum devoted to the last Romanovs, in the spring of 2005.
Besides these, we have a number of Botkin’s published works (see below).
5. http://www.chasclifton.com/2007/03/my-continued-fascination-with-gleb.
html
6. Proctor, Folder 3. 16.12.1944, f. 2.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 93

blanket.7

Botkin mentioned his special friendship with Princess Anastasia:

he amused her with drawings representing martial accomplishments
of a bear (dressed in the uniform of the imperial army) in his war
against the ape-like foes of the motherland (very recognizably Russian
revolutionaries).8
He was sixteen when Nicholas II abdicated in 1917, and the revolu-
tions of February and October made the royal family prisoners, first of the
Provisional Government and then of the Bolshevist regime. Dr. Evgeny
Botkin, with his family and his children, Tatiana and Gleb, followed the
exiled sovereigns to Tobolsk, where they lived practically under arrest.
“The winter of 1917–18 will forever remain in my memory as a night-
mare of indescribable ghastliness,” 9 Botkin wrote ten years later. Being
denied any personal contact with the royal family in Tobolsk, the young
Botkins exchanged letters and drawings with them, especially with the
Princesses Olga and Anastasia. Once the guards “officially informed”
the members of the royal court, that they “ ‘ were going to be shot in the
course of the next twenty four hours.’ These hours, which I spent pacing
my room and trying to visualize the forthcoming shooting, I shall never
forget. What helped me most to preserve my calm was the ticking of the
clock. It sounded so peaceful, so unalterable, a true symbol of eternity.
It occurred to me how little the death of all of us would mean, when it
wouldn’t even interrupt that quiet, eternal ‘tick-tack-tick-tack’ . . . I have
never known why the threat was not carried out”10.
In 1918 Dr. Evgeny Botkin was sent from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg with
the royal family, only to find his death there.11 His children went further
to Siberia, which fell into the hands of the White regimes, hostile to the
Bolsheviks. Perhaps,it was the tragedy of these years that made Gleb

7. Gleb Botkin, “An American in the Making,” The North American Review, 229, no.
1 (1930): 23–24.
8. Kim Hubbard and Jane Sims Podesta, “Tsar Wars: Gleb Botkin’s Martial
Fairy Tales, Drawn to Enchant the Doomed Children of Nicholas II,
Resurface In Virginia,” People, June 16, 1997, 83-84. According to Botkin’s sister
Tatyana Botkin-Melnik, the children of Nicolas II delighted in Gleb’s drawings, and
he presented at least three albums of his watercolor paintings to Prince Alexis in
1914–15. See T.E. Botkina, Vospominaniya o tsarskoi semye (The memories of the royal
family) in: Tsarskiy leyb-medik: Zhizn’ i podvig Evgeniya Botkina (Czar’s physician: life
and heroism of Evgeny Botkin). (Saint-Petersburg: Tsarskoye Delo, 2010), 238–39.
9 Botkin, “An American in the Making,” 25.
10. Gleb Botkin, “This Is Anastasia,” The North American Review, 229, no. 2 (1930),
195.
11. Evgeny Botkin was canonized as a martyr by the Russian Orthodox Church
Outside Russia.

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94 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

seek a novitiate in one of the monasteries in Siberia. He never became a

monk, however. His novel The God Who Didn’t Laugh (1929), which has,
as most of his novels, an autobiographical element, tells of the early dis-
appointment in Christianity which he might have experienced having
lived in a Russian Orthodox monastery.
With the Bolsheviks moving eastwards, Gleb and his relatives, follow-
ing the White armies, retreated towards the Pacific. When Bolsheviks
captured Vladivostok, Gleb was “sentenced to six penalties of death,
counting one execution for each of the following offences: 1. Personal
devotion to the Imperial Family; 2. Monarchic convictions; 3. Active
counter-revolution; 4. Publication of funny verses inciting racial hatred;
5. Sabotage, and 6. Refusal to serve in the Red Army. Feeling that the
execution of even one of those six sentences would be rather unpleasant,
and that all six would be unendurable, I missed the appointment with
the firing squad and, after, after a month of hiding, escaped to Japan.”12
In 1920 or 1921 he married Nadezhda (Nadine) Mandraji-Konshina,
with whom he lived until his death. In 1922 the Botkins emigrated from
Japan to the Russian diaspora in New York. In America he became dis-
appointed with monarchism and the Russian aristocracy. He earned a
“reputation of a dangerous revolutionary,” having refused to participate
in Russia’s monarchist shadow government and derided Grand Duke
Cyrill Vladimirovich, who proclaimed himself Emperor of Russia in
exile. The clan of the Romanovs considered Botkin their enemy when he
started to defend the claims of Anna Anderson to be the surviving prin-
cess Anastasia; for his own part, he, evidently, believed his whole life
that she was the girl he had first met in his boyhood. After 1927 Botkin
served as the main public voice for Anna Anderson; he wrote articles,
tried to convince others of the ingenuity of her claims and stood up
for her in court. By 1930 Botkin was on bad terms with the most of the
Russian émigré establishment. At the same time he became an American
citizen, and, moreover, “an ardent Crusader of Americanism.”13 He was
convinced of the advantage of American democracy over Russian aris-
tocracy by the “kindly companionship” his American neighbors offered
him, which contrasted with the intrigues, mutual mistrust, egotism, and
striving to benefit from the others’ troubles that he faced in the émigré
circles.14
Botkin worked as book illustrator and wrote novels with action

12. Gleb Botkin, “The Czar of Shadowland,” The North American Review, 229, no.
5 (1930), 537.
13. Botkin, “An American in the Making,” 23.
14. Ibid., 23, 26-28; Botkin, “This is Anastasia,” 196–98; Botkin, “The Czar of Shad-
owland,” 536–43, passim.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 95

mostly set in Russia under the last czar and during the Revolution.15
These novels recurrently speak of the main characters’ personal belief
in the goddess of love and beauty, whom they refer to as Aphrodite. As
a rule, this goddess has her earthly avatars in brave, emancipated, and
explicitly sexual heroines. Another recurrent topic is a critique of Chris-
tianity as an “irrational” religion with “distorted” ideas about the Deity,
the world, and human nature. Botkin’s critique was especially bitter in
The God Who Didn’t Laugh (1929).
In The Immortal Woman (1933), “the religion of Aphrodite” takes its
shape as a religious and aesthetic program. The main character, com-
poser Nikolai Dirin, who just like Botkin himself fled Bolshevist Russia
for America, studies the ancient religions, trying to find the goddess
whom he had instinctually worshipped from his childhood:

The more he studied the more convinced he became that his Goddess was
no myth, that millions upon millions of human beings had worshiped
her for thousands of years and that many continued to worship her in
the present. She was the Star of Love of the ancient Semites, the Astarte
of the Phoenicians, the Eastre of the Anglo-Saxons, the Aphrodite of the
Greeks, the Kwanon of the Japanese. Those many variations of the same
conception of a beautiful Goddess of Love and Beauty, of Mercy and fertil-
ity, who had created and was ruling the universe through love, precisely
corresponded to Nikolai’s own imaginings about the mysterious Divine
Woman, the Great Cosmic Mother. This discovery became for Nikolai a
source of enormous satisfaction. Now he had again a deity to whom he
could pray and appeal for help and courage. Now his life had again a
mystical significance, independent of all earthly affairs.

Having gained success as a composer in America, Nikolai planned to

build a shrine to Aphrodite in Long Island (Botkin was a resident there,
first in West Hempstead in the 1930s, then in Cassville in 1950–62). The
scene of the visit paid to Nikolai by Aphrodite later in the novel might be
a reflection of a genuine mystical experience Botkin had had himself.16
Six years after The Immortal Woman was published, the Supreme Court
of the state of New York issued a charter to Long Island Church of Aph-
rodite. According to Botkin, the judge said, handing the charter to him,
“I think it’s better than worshipping Mary Baker Eddy.”17 Life maga-
zine wrote about the establishment of a “frankly pagan church” as a
triumph of religious freedom; it told of the congregation of thirty-five

15. Novels by Gleb Botkin: The God Who Didn’t Laugh (New York: Payson & Clarke
Ltd., 1929); Baron’s Fancy (New York: Doubleday, 1930); Marianna (New York: Long-
mans, 1931); The Immortal Woman (New York: Macaulay, 1933); Her Wanton Majesty
(New York: Macaulay, 1933).
16. Botkin, The Immortal Woman, 184; 285-287.
17. http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php/topic,3126.0.html

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people and that “sex, its central theme, plays its part in the church not
in orgiastic ritual, but as an ideal ‘divine and wonderful.’ ” The short
article included photographs of Gleb and Nadezhda Botkin, a charter
of the new church, and an altar to Aphrodite Gleb had constructed at
his home.18 From 1939 till his death in 1969 Botkin served as the “archi-
erarch” and “Aphrodisios” of the Church of Aphrodite—the two terms
he coined to use interchangeably for his office as the chief minister of
his religion. He published no more novels in his last three decades, and
his career as an illustrator had apparently come to an end. He devoted
himself full-time to the theology and liturgy of his religion. It is unclear
how he and Nadine supported themselves financially; in his letters
to Proctor he frequently wrote about their poverty (which struck him
especially after a serious illness he had in late 1940s, when they had to
leave West Hempstead for Cassville.)19 It is highly possible that their son
Nikita, who started his career as a successful advertisement agent and
then held a public office in the state of New York, helped his parents.20
Gleb Botkin, raised at the Romanovs’ court, an ex-novice at a mon-
astery, a founder of monarchist groups, and a defender of an alleged
Russian Princess, finished his life as an American citizen, a believer
in American-style democracy, and a leader of an officially recognized
church worshipping a Pagan deity.
The treatise In Search of Reality was published by Botkin two years
before his death. It can be regarded as his programmatic theological
statement, explaining the “religion of Aphrodite” as it was practiced
in the Church of Aphrodite through the three decades of its existence.
Undoubtedly, Botkin himself was the chief (and, probably, the only)
theologian of the church. Many ideas which he put forth in the trea-
tise have independently played their crucial role in the American Pagan
boom of the 1960-70s—particularly, the Divine Feminine, the sacredness
of sexuality, the story of a clandestine religion that survived through
ages of Christianity and worshipped a Goddess. As Clifton notes, “Bot-
kin’s writings anticipate by a generation the sort of Goddess religion
found later in the pages of Green Egg and elsewhere.”21 It is hard to say,
whether Botkin knew about Gerald Gardner and the emerging Wicca or

18. “Church of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, Is Chartered in New York,” Life,

December, 4, 1939, 101.
19. Proctor. Folder 4, 19.01.52, f. 2; 6.01.55. He described their house in Cassville
as “a shack—not a real house—and it is recognizable by a low earthen wall which I
have constructed around it” (Folder 4, 3.02.54).
20. Obituary for Nikita Botkin, 2001, http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.
php?topic=3126.45
21. Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 139.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 97

whether he read books by Robert Graves. It is obvious, however, that the

religion of Aphrodite had taken shape already in late 1920s–early 1930s
when Botkin wrote The God Who Didn’t Laugh and The Immortal Woman.
In Search of Reality starts with a brief foreword, where the author states
plainly that “prevalent religious beliefs and standards of morality . . . are
based chiefly on . . . fantasies . . . of primitive people of an ancient past”
and therefore are not meet for solving the problems of today. The trea-
tise is focused on formulating the philosophy which could help human-
ity “to develop morally and intellectually, as well as enable us to lead
happier lives.”22
The central concept in Botkin’s ontology is love: “Love is not—as most
people seem to think—just an emotion. Love is an energy—indeed, the
basic creative energy in the cosmos. Life itself is naught else, but the
blossoming of love. Every living organism exists only because it con-
tains love, and the degree of its vitality is determined by the amount of
love it contains.” As any energy, love presupposes a current between
the two poles—a subject and object of love. The commandment to love
one’s neighbor, as well as “the so called Golden Rule” are meaningless,
since, Botkin thinks, it is impossible to love oneself by definition—it is
only possible to love the Other: “love only begins when the happiness
of its object becomes of greater importance to its subject than the latter’s
own happiness; and love impels people to do for others far more than
they ever expect others to do for them.”
Anything can serve as an object of human love: things, people, ideals,
aspirations. All kinds of love “are identical in substance and hence con-
ductive to goodness and happiness.” There are no different species of
love; it is especially dangerous to divide love into the sensual and the
ideal varieties: “There is no love which is totally void of a sexual element.
It is present, however unnoticeably, in any form of love, not only for
persons, but also for things, phenomena and ideas. There is a sexual
element even in, let us say, love for music or the beauty of nature. Con-
versely, there is no manifestation of love which does not contain what is
usually referred to as the spiritual element.” Contempt for the body as
something contrary to the spirit is the basis of civilizations “marked by
extreme cruelty and bloodthirstiness.” These civilizations cultivate not
only wars and violence, but also sex without love, which is like “coun-
terfeit money” or “poisoned food”:

Had human beings, in the course of so many centuries, been taught not
to despise, but to respect, admire, cherish and love the human body, they

22. Gleb Botkin, In Search of Reality (Charlottesville, Va.: Church of Aphrodite,

n.d.), 1.

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98 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

would long since have, not only become incapable of murdering and
maiming one another, but also cured themselves of most forms of cruelty;
and modern mankind would by now be well on its way towards a new
Golden Age.

However, the capability to love is not limitless:

Created organisms are only secondary generators of love. They can at

will direct such love as they possess at any object of their own choice,
respond or fail to respond to the love directed at them and, in responding
to such love, intensify or weaken it in the process. But they cannot gener-
ate love independently, or hold it within themselves in a static condition.
They must be constantly recharged with love; and the only way in which
a created organism can be recharged with love is to keep discharging the
love it contains.23

Thus, for Botkin, the idea that love is energy is far from being simply a
metaphor: “Like any other energy, electricity for instance, love is present
and functions only when and where it is generated; and it is impossible
to know in advance that any two organisms will keep exchanging stead-
ily currents of love with each other throughout their terrestrial sojourn.”
Multiplying objects of love doesn’t mean diminishing its intensity, for
“each new object of love represents a new fountainhead of it and, hence,
tends to intensify—not weaken—the love directed by the same subject
at other objects.” Love, Beauty, and Harmony are “different aspects of
one single phenomenon.” This is Botkin’s holy trinity.
An antithesis of love, beauty, and harmony, “the source of all man-
made evil and suffering” is the trinity “hatred, ugliness, and discord.”
Its ultimate manifestation is cruelty; as love is accompanied by respect
and gratitude, hatred begets anger and unhappiness. Botkin fiercely
rejected the notion that love and hatred alike are of the same kind, as
they are both “strong emotions”: love for him is not an emotion, but “the
basic creative energy in the cosmos” while hatred is an emotion indeed,
though a “pathological and destructive one.”24
The only “inexhaustible Generator of Love—its Prime Source and Ulti-
mate Object—is the Supreme Deity and Creator.” According to Botkin,
the Deity is Creator by the very reason it radiates love, which creates the
cosmos. The process of this emanation is “an organic one,” and therefore
“the cosmos must be regarded as a fruit of the Divine Organism—not
an arbitrarily created artifact.” This is why the Supreme Deity should
be visualized “not as a Father God, but the Mother Goddess,” since “it
is only the feminine organism which is capable of bearing fruit.” She

23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 1-3; 4; 5-6.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 99

is the Goddess of Love, Beauty and Harmony: “the name Aphrodite

which means ‘Foam Revealed,’ was coined on the basis of the cosmogo-
nal theory that originally our visible world was in a state of chaos which
culminated in a gigantic explosion, whereupon the Goddess revealed
Herself in the fiery foam of the sundered world, imposing the order of
harmony upon chaos, replacing ugliness with beauty and infusing dead
matter with the life born of Her love, thus inaugurating the process of
orderly creation.”
Love to any object is “a form of communion” with Goddess, and
“creative activity” fostered by love is her worship. Though any love is
“conductive to goodness and happiness,” yet “[o]nly a direct, conscious
communion with the Goddess can satisfy completely all the aspirations
of the human heart…At the same time, a conscious love for the Goddess
places all the other objects of one’s love in the right perspective, on the
one hand, making one tolerant of their limitations and, on the other hand,
enabling one to perceive the full measure of their goodness—reflection
of the Goddess Herself in them.”
Since “love is eternal” in Botkin’s view, any “organism which con-
tains love is potentially immortal. Whether that potentiality, as so many
churches teach, is realized in one sudden leap from this earth to Heaven,
seems open to question. It may well be that human beings have to undergo
repeated incarnations on this earth. It may also be that our visible world
is only a cosmic kindergarten and that we have to graduate successively
from many worlds until we finally ripen for that cosmic core of absolute
reality and Divine and eternal goodness and happiness, which we call
Heaven. But those details hardly matter. The laws of love are exactly the
same in all those worlds, including Heaven itself…” Though we can say
nothing definite about “the Beyond,” “we know our earth to be beautiful
and therefore can be certain that the Beyond is also beautiful—indeed,
more beautiful, by far.”
Having expounded his theory of love and its source, Botkin writes
about the religion of Aphrodite. The true religion, according to Botkin,
means the “perception of truth” about the Deity. One of the grossest mis-
conceptions about the Deity is the idea that it is almighty. An almighty
god becomes responsible for all evil that happens in the world; “Hence
such a creator and cosmic ruler would be, not a God, but a Monster.” On
the contrary, “If we accept the axiom that the Deity is the very Source
and Supreme Expression of all love, we thereby assert that the Deity
does not possess the power of doing anything incompatible with love.”
The Deity of love equally can’t be represented as male: males are inca-
pable of giving birth; therefore, the god “could only be thought of as an
arbitrary creator who does not give birth to things, but invents and fash-

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100 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

ions them at will.” Such a god becomes responsible for his creation, and
particularly for the evil inherent in it. For Botkin “it is as impossible to
assume that the Deity has created and is tolerating evil, as it is to assume
our visible world to be an arbitrarily fashioned artifact.” Though we
can’t know the Creator’s mind, “we have substantial reasons for accept-
ing certain conclusions about the Godhead as axiomatic,” namely, that
“the Supreme Deity is the very Source of life, love, goodness and hap-
piness” and that this Deity creates the world with Love, Beauty and
Harmony, “which emanate from the Divine Being.” The cosmos should
be seen as “a fruit of the Divine organism and hence owing its existence
not to a Divine caprice, but to an organic need of the Divine organism.
In consequence we also must visualize the Divine Being, not as God,
but Goddess, or, more specifically, as the Goddess of Love, Beauty and
Harmony.”
In contrast to the cosmos created by the Deity, evil is “chaos, that is, a
negative condition of the absence of order.” Evil is not created; in fact, it
antedates creation. Goddess, “by imposing the order of harmony upon
that primordial chaos, changing ugliness into beauty and infusing the
whole with love automatically productive of life,…started the process
of creation by transforming a wholly evil world into an essentially good
one.” The act of creation is not limited in time, as Goddess “has contin-
ued and still continues to develop it towards greater excellence.” The
ideal of development is, for Botkin, “a world of high moral excellence,
in which the chaotic element has shrunk to the role of shadows which
only serve to accentuate the beauty of triumphant light.”
Botkin thought that the ultimate aim of all living beings in the mate-
rial world is cooperation in its development toward this ideal: “the only
way for humans to fulfill the purpose of their existence is to pursue love,
beauty and harmony and shun their opposites, hatred, ugliness and
discord.” Evil cannot be simply abolished by the Deity’s will, for the chief
evil is the absence of love, and love can’t be incited by compulsion25.
Botkin appended the treatise with an “explanatory note,” which
briefly sketches the history of the religion of Aphrodite, as Botkin per-
ceived it. The origins of the religion are “lost in pre-history.” It was
brought to Greece by Orpheus. In Asia Aphrodite since time immemo-
rial was worshipped as Kwannon. The ancient Hebrews, King Solomon
among them, worshipped Aphrodite as Ashtoret, for which they were
scalded by Jerusalem priests. The Christian Church proclaimed Aph-
rodite to be a demon and Emperor Justinian in the sixth century had
prohibited her worship under penalty of death. However, the Christian

25. Ibid., 13; 15-18.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 101

church “itself borrowed—and thus preserved—many concepts, symbols

and rites of the religion of Aphrodite” (the borrowings included the
cross, “the oldest known symbol of love,” the Holy Ghost, Mother of
God, and Logos). For centuries the religion of Aphrodite was preserved
by “peasants in remote villages and by secret societies in urban centers.”
The foundation of his church Botkin saw as the restoration of “the open
worship of Aphrodite in the Christian world”26.
The picture of the Aphrodisian theology is complemented by the
evidence from Botkin’s letters to Philip Proctor. In these letters Botkin
speaks harshly against Christianity, yet does distinguish in the Christ of
the Gospels “a Hebrew monk” and “an Aphrodisian Christ.” While the
former’s teaching is the “religion of death,” that runs counter to “the
religion of life,” which Botkin serves, the latter is “an entirely differ-
ent Christ, the radiant “Lord” (Adonai, Adonis), who speaks of benevo-
lence and kindness, performs salutary miracles and keeps invoking the
Holy Ghost (Aphrodite). That Christ is, of course, but another version
of Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Dionysus, Adonis, Orpheus—all of them
Priests of the Goddess of Love and Beauty.” All these figures, though
not necessarily historically true, are examples of love, which, according
to the teaching of the Church of Aphrodite, one can “love worshipfully,”
but cannot worship. “I have always been a strict monotheist in heart,”
Botkin wrote.27
Botkin, who positioned the religion of Aphrodite as the only true one,
nevertheless admitted inclusive views on prayer: “I am . . . convinced
that a prayer prompted by true love will whenever possible be answered
by the Goddess of Love even if the person who prays to her addresses
Her as Jehovah, or Allah, or Buddha, or Christ.” 28 From the letters to
Proctor we learn of an interesting episode, where Botkin’s Aphrodite
religion, his anti-Communism, and his pacifism met the events of world
politics in 1962, namely, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Botkin was a keen
observer of world politics and since at least 1944 had been waiting with
fear for a Third World War. In November, 1962, after the main USSR-
United States tension over ballistic missiles in Cuba started to pass,
Botkin wrote to Proctor: “On Tuesday, October 23rd, I could all but see
the Goddess and became completely convinced that She can prevent the
war from exploding. On Wednesday mornings I usually celebrate the
Liturgy.” Before the liturgy on October, 24, “I all but heard a voice telling
me that the danger of war was over and that, therefore, I no longer had to

26. Ibid., 31-32.

27. Proctor, Folder 7, 1960, last letter, undated, f. 1–3..
28. Ibid. Folder 5, 22.08.57. f. 2.

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102 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

pray for its prevention, but could make the service a wholly joyful one,
thinking of nothing but Aphrodite, Her love for us and our love for Her;
and a very joyful service it proved for me. Immediately after the service,
I turned on the radio and the very first words I heard were those of the
announcement of Russia's complete surrender.” 29
Studies of modern Paganism view the Church of Aphrodite as a first
instance of a modern Pagan denomination, which differed significantly
from the religions that developed in Great Britain and the United States
in 1950–70s. The main difference lay in Botkin’s church being a hierarchi-
cal organization with a strict distinction between the clergy and the laity,
and an exclusivist doctrine, which any member was expected to accept (a
belief in Aphrodite as one true deity, strict monotheism).30 Botkin did not
approve of the members of his flock participating in other Pagan orga-
nizations.31 According to W. Holman Keith, a member of the Church of
Aphrodite who was later active in other American Pagan groups, about
fifty people frequented Botkin’s services.32
Botkin wrote three kinds of liturgy for the church. The services were
held four times a week before an altar with a plaster statuette of Venus de
Medici and several burning candles.33 The ritual garment of the Church
of Aphrodite priests was much like the vestments of Catholic and Eastern
Orthodox clergy. At present I know nothing of the special holidays or of
the liturgical calendar of the church.
The symbol of the church was “the mirror of Venus,” the astronomical
sign of the planet Venus. A picture of Gleb Botkin in a miter topped with
a cross and a circle appeared in the Richmond Times in 1965.34 The symbol
was printed on the paper which Botkin sometimes used to write letters to
Philip Proctor, and appears on the gravestone of Gleb and Nadine Botkin
in Charlottesville, Virginia. According to Botkin, this symbol has from
time immemorial meant the attainment of immortality through love.35

29. Ibid. Folder 9, 08.11.1962.

30. From the printed treatise we learn of an “Aphrodisian Creed,” the “21 Articles
of Aphrodisian Faith,” and “Fundamental Beliefs of the Church of Aphrodite.” One
of the articles of faith stated that “there is no Supreme Deity other than Aphrodite;
and whoever worships the Supreme Deity, under whatever guise or name, worships
Aphrodite; and whoever achieves communion with the Supreme Deity, achieves
communion with Aphrodite” (Botkin, In Search of Reality, 34).
31. Waldron, Sign of the Witch, 137: “As opposed to the unstructured systems of
associations practiced by many Pagans today, Botkin’s system was constructed as a
rigid hierarchical movement with an organized Church, clergy and liturgy.”
32. Clifton. Her Hidden Children, 140.
33. Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 226.
34. Oliver Moore, “Founder Tells of Church,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, April, 12,
1965, 2.
35. Proctor, Folder 8, 13.08.61.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 103

The liturgy comprised a separate volume of the writings of the church

named The Ritual of the Church of Aphrodite.36 In Search of Reality gives us
a sample of what Aphrodisian services might have sounded like in “The
Thanksgiving Hymn”:

For the light and warmth of our sun, for the radiance of our moon, for
the brilliance of our stars, we thank Thee, O Aphrodite. For the loveli-
ness of our sky, for the sweetness of our air, for the magnificence of our
seas, we thank Thee, O Aphrodite. For the fertility of our valleys, for the
grandeur of our mountains, for the beauty of our forests, we thank Thee,
O Aphrodite.
For, Thou art the Universal Cause, and everything that breathes in Heaven,
on earth and in the deep of the sea, is Thy Creation…
For the tenderness of our parents, for the embraces of our lovers, for the
caresses of our children, we thank Thee, O Aphrodite. For the goodness
of friendship, for the delight of cognition, for the enchantment of arts, we
thank Thee, O Aphrodite…
For the gift of courage, for the gift of wisdom, for the gift of joy, we thank
Thee, O Aphrodite. For the miracle of life, for the wonder of thought, for
the hope of Thy Heaven, we thank Thee, O Aphrodite…
For Thy goodness to us, we thank Thee; for Thy goodness to us we laud
Thee; for Thy goodness to us we extol Thee, O Aphrodite the Universal
Cause…Thy goodness is the Source of all life. Thy goodness is the Core of
all truth. Through Thy goodness alone the whole cosmos exists, O Aphro-
dite the Universal Cause.
Blessed Thou art, O Mother of the cosmos, and our gratitude to Thee is
like the sky that has no bounds, like eternity that has no ending, like Thy
Own beauty that no words could describe. For, we thank Thee with every
atom of our souls and bodies. O Aphrodite, holiest, sweetest, loveliest,
most blessed, most glorious, most loving Goddess of Love.37

Botkin shared with Philip Proctor his personal prayer to Aphrodite:

“Let my mind be like a quiet pool which reflects Thy beauty, O Aphro-
dite. Let my heart be like a golden harp which vibrates, O Goddess, with
Thy love.” Of course, Botkin added, “like every prayer, in order to be
fully effective, it has to be not merely recited, but as much as possible,
lived,” and though it is not easy, “the mere effort at becalming one's
mind and filling it with the image of the Goddess and searching in one's
heart for the tender yet powerful strings of Divine love, does help a great
deal to perceive things in their right perspective.” The ultimate goal of
praying was, according to Botkin, moral behavior.38
Though the church had been established in 1939, it is only in the late
1950s that we find evidence of a continued interest in it on behalf of the
public. In late 1958 or early 1959 several delegations visited Botkin’s

36. Botkin, In Search of Reality, 32.

37. Ibid., 39-40.
38. Proctor, Folder 5, 4.06.57, f.3.

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104 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

house in Cassville, which served as the church’s headquarters. These

were “three priests of whom one turned out to be a Greek Catholic and
the other two Roman Catholic, as well as professors in a Catholic college
in Boston,”39 a group of students from New York with their professor,40
and a military commission from Washington, D.C., collecting data con-
cerning religious groups. One of the officers from the latter group said
to Botkin, “Do you realize that you have millions of adherents in this
country? You are saying the very things which most Americans long to
hear.”41 However there is no evidence of continuous Church of Aphro-
dite attendance in Botkin’s Cassville period.
The situation changed when the Botkins moved to Charlottesville,
Virginia. According to the memories of one of the Church of Aphrodite
attendees, left at alexanderpalace.org—an Internet forum devoted to the
history of the last Romanovs—in 1960s Gleb Botkin became a center
of a small circle of people interested in the religion of Aphrodite and/
or Russian history, of which Botkin had considerable knowledge.42 It
mostly consisted of local students and professors. Membership in the
church was informal and the copying and publication of the church
materials was done by unpaid volunteers. Botkin confirmed at least one
marriage in the late 1960s according to the rite of the Church of Aph-
rodite. Gleb’s wife, Nadine, converted into the religion of her husband
later in the decade; Gleb claimed that he had never “pressured her to
do so.” Andrew Hartsook, ordained as a priest, later sought the office
of an army chaplain, being a minister of an officially recognized reli-
gion, but “The Army very politely said ‘No.’ ”43 Philip Proctor in the
early 1960s was thinking of joining the Church of Aphrodite, but was
drawn back by the reverence he felt towards Jesus Christ. Botkin tried
to console his friend: “My own feeling is that you are a true worshipper
of the Goddess, but remain deeply attached, not to any formal version
of Christianity, but an image of Christ largely of your own devising and
not basically incompatible with the worship of Aphrodite…She knows,

39. Ibid. Folder 7. 11.02.59. f.1.

40. Ibid. 11.02.59. f.1; 3.04.60. f. 1–2.
41. Ibid. 7.09.59.
42. Botkin even wrote and published a book on the subject: The Fire Bird: An
Interpretation of Russia (New York: Fleming H. Revel, 1940). Philip Proctor first
wrote to Botkin, knowing him to be an expert on the Romanovs (Proctor, Folder 3,
11.07.1944).
43. This account of the Church of Aphrodite membership rests solely upon the
data provided by only one person who chose to share his memories online. According
to it, we can make no conclusion concerning the seriousness of the church attendees’
commitment to the religion of Aphrodite, their background or gender. http://forum.
alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=3126.15; http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/
index.php/topic,3126.0.html

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 105

She understands, She does not mind”. However, it seems that Proctor,
sympathizing with the religion of Aphrodite, never joined the church,
let alone became a minister of Aphrodite – the position which Gleb has
more than once offered him in the letters.44 The religion of Aphrodite
apparently didn’t survive the death of its prophet: nothing is known of
its activity after Botkin’s death in 1969.
I have already cited the characteristics of the Church of Aphrodite
as a hierarchical project that paradoxically appeared to be a forerunner
of a largely egalitarian American Paganism of the 1960–70s. According
to W. Holman Keith, who wrote an obituary for Botkin, Aphrodite reli-
gion came closer to the ancient religions than most of modern Pagan
denominations.45 Scholars have repeatedly noted the heavy impact of
Neoplatonism on Botkin’s theology.46 David Waldron sees the religion of
Aphrodite as a part of a “Hellenic pagan revivalist movement” popular
in the 1930s in New York among students of antiquity, artists, and intel-
lectuals with sympathies towards the ancient Greeks47.
Chas S. Clifton finds another precedent for Botkin’s church: “Perhaps
the Church of Aphrodite resembles what [Robert] Graves would have
created had he chosen the path of religious creation instead of writing, but
it is significant that Graves’s utopian Pagan novel Watch the North Wind
Rise . . . ends with the Goddess assessing her utopian society, judging it
to be stale and lacking savor, and destroying it in a wind storm.”48 The
utopian character of Botkin’s vision is as well noted by Margot Adler,
who compares it to another idyllic branch of Paganism—the Califor-
nian Feraferia, established by Frederic Adams in the 1960s. Such proj-
ects, according to Adler, shared the expectations of a forthcoming global
catastrophe (as natural disasters in Feraferia or the Third World War in
Botkin) at the end of which a new civilization, worshipping the Goddess,
will survive. It is worthwhile mentioning, however, that Botkin feared
the Third World War and saw the religion of Aphrodite as a means to
avoid it, unlike Frederic Adams, who frankly welcomed the climatic
changes that would soon, in his view, destroy the most part of human-

44. Proctor, Folder 8, 5.07.61, f. 5; Folder 7, 3.04.60 Folder 9, 8.09.62.

45. Quoted in: Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, 227.
46 Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 141; Marguerit Johnson, “Drawing Down the
Goddess: The Ancient Female Deities of Modern Paganism,” in The Handbook of Con-
temporary Paganism, ed. Murphey Pizza (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 327 (Marguerit Johnson
sees Botkin’s Aphrodite as echoing the Neoplatonists’ World Soul); Christopher W.
Chase, Approaching the Sacred Grove: The Orphic Impulse in Pagan Religious Music (PhD
diss., Michigan State University, 2009), 115–16.
47. Waldron, Sign of the Witch, 136.
48. Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 141.

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106 The Pomegranate 14.1 (2012)

kind and free the earth for an idyllic nature-worshipping culture49.

Finally, a word should be said about the Russian legacy in the Church
of Aphrodite. Maybe the ungrounded statement that the religion of Aph-
rodite “owed a lot to the Old Believers in Russia”50 has Botkin as its
author, for he was prone, as are many Pagans, to create historical myths
of the surviving ancient true faith under various disguises. Nevertheless,
it is hardly possible to deny that the cult of the Church of Aphrodite was
heavily influenced by Russian Orthodoxy. “The Thanksgiving Hymn”
to Aphrodite sounds much more like an Eastern Orthodox Akathistos
than an ancient Greek hymn. Botkin’s personal prayer may reflect the
monastic contemplative exercises. The choice of the word for “universe”
(cosmos) could have as well been determined by the Greek terminology
of the New Testament as by Greek philosophy. Even in his most anti-
Christian novel, The God Who Didn’t Laugh, Botkin could not keep from
praising the beauty of the Orthodox service. However, it is clear, that
Botkin’s break with Christianity was a complete and, one may surmise,
a rather painful one.
The religion of Aphrodite, through thirty years of its church’s exis-
tence, remained not a living religious movement, but an idiosyncratic
dogmatic construct based on Botkin’s personal beliefs. If there were
documented personal responses to the religion on behalf of the church
attendees and sympathizers, they are yet to be found and studied. At
present it can be said that the significance of the Church of Aphrodite
lay in its status as a religion in the United States and its theology that
centered on the Divine Feminine, named after an ancient pre-Christian
deity. For later Pagans, Gleb Botkin has become a pioneer, being the first
religious leader who had openly proclaimed the existence of a spiritual
movement with which they identify. At least one of the Church of Aph-
rodite attendees, W. Holman Keith, became a prominent figure in the
American Pagan movement in 1960s–90s. May 6, 1939, when the Long
Island Church of Aphrodite was incorporated, is an important date in the
history of modern Paganism.51 The irony lies in the fact that Botkin did
not want to revive or create Paganism; he viewed his “true” and timeless
religion, based on “the laws of the cosmos,” as separate both from world

49. Ibid., 228–29; 234–35.

50. Peter Kurth, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderon (Botston: Little, Brown,
1983), 287. The Old Believers (Starovery) is a group of related religious movements
within Russian Orthodox Christianity that opposed the church reform carried out
in the mid-seventeenth century by the state and the established Russian Orthodox
Church.
51. See, for instance, Gerina Dunwich, The Wicca Book of Days: Legend and Lore for
Every Day of the Year (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1998), 58.

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 Dmitry Galtsin  Gleb Botkin and the Church of Aphrodite 107

religions with their “distorted” teachings, and from the Pagan element,
no matter whether that of the ancient or the modern world.

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———. The Fire Bird: An Interpretation of Russia. New York: Fleming H. Revell
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