Gleb Botkin - Religious Views

Religious Views

Botkin, following his father's murder, had considered becoming a priest, but he eventually turned away from the Russian Orthodox Church. Botkin eventually turned his interest in religion towards his own nature-based religion, which he started first in Long Island, New York and later in Charlottesville, Virginia. His church was called the Church of Aphrodite. Botkin was of the opinion that patriarchal society had caused many of the problems plaguing humankind. "Men!" he once said. "Just look at the mess we've made!"

His church drew from ancient pagan rituals and from some of the tenets of the Old Believers, a rebel branch of the Russian Orthodox Church who had separated after 1666 -1667 from the hierarchy of the church as a protest against liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon. Anderson never joined his church but did not object when Botkin finished his letters to her with this prayer: "May the Goddess bestow Her tender caress on Your Imperial Highness's head."

Botkin had argued his case before the New York State Supreme Court in 1938 and won the right to an official charter for the religion. The judge told him, "I guess it's better than worshiping Mary Baker Eddy." His wife, whom he doted on, converted to his church in later life.

Botkin held regular church services in front of a statue of Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love, and presided over them dressed in the regalia of an archbishop. The female symbol, a cross inside of a circle representing Aphrodite, was embroidered on his headdress. He later published a book, at his own expense, arguing that Aphrodite was the supreme deity and creation had been much like a woman giving birth to the universe.

Botkin told a reporter for The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, that his religion pre-dated Christianity. With Christianity, he said, "you have the dilemma of either following the straight and narrow path and going to Heaven or having fun on earth and going to Hell." On the other hand, he said that his "Aphrodisian religion" was based on "truth and reality. Anything true will survive. Life itself is the blossoming of love, and love is the basis of goodness and happiness." He thought his church would expand in coming years.

The student newspaper reporter commented on Botkin's "unorthodox" beliefs regarding sexual relations between men and women. Botkin believed that it was inappropriate for a man to react to his wife's affair with the rage that was expected by society: "A woman falls in love with another man. All that is necessary is to let her have her fling. After that she is often a better wife and mother. It is like a person who loves to play Bach and suddenly wants to play Beethoven." One historian commented that Botkin's church "was a curious faith, to be sure," but "the Church of Aphrodite was not nearly so wanton as it sounds."

The church did not continue long after Botkin's death from a heart attack in December 1969, but some of his followers went on to join neopagan movements with beliefs drawing from the Church of Aphrodite.