The Church of Aphrodite is a Neopagan

Neopaganism

Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...

 religious group founded in 1938 by Gleb Botkin

Gleb Botkin

Gleb Evgenievich Botkin was the son of Dr. Eugene Botkin, the court physician who was murdered at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks with Tsar Nicholas II and his family on July 17, 1918....

 (1900–1969), a Russian émigré to the United States. Monotheistic

Monotheism

Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...

 in structure, the Church believes in a singular female Goddess, who is named after the ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

.

Having grown up in the Russian Imperial court, Botkin fought in the Russian civil war

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

 on the side of the counter-revolutionary forces after his father, a physician to the royal Romanov

Romanov

The House of Romanov was the second and last imperial dynasty to rule over Russia, reigning from 1613 until the February Revolution abolished the crown in 1917...

 monarchy, was executed by the Bolshevik government. Fleeing to Long Island

Long Island

Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

 in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, he began writing novels and non-fiction books, mostly set in his Russian homeland, before coming to believe in a female divinity and founding the Church of Aphrodite. He won the right to register it as a religious charter in the New York State Supreme Court.

Beliefs and practices

The relationship between the Goddess [Aphrodite] and the visible world may once again be illustrated by that between a mother and her child. Having given birth to a child organically, a mother proceeds to take care of it with both her body and her mind. So the Goddess in Her relation with our world is both the Universal Cause and the Universal Mind.

As Neopagan scholar Chas S. Clifton

Chas S. Clifton

Chas S. Clifton is an American academic, author and historian who specialises in the fields of English studies and Pagan studies. Clifton currently holds a teaching position in English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, prior to which he taught at Pueblo Community College.A practicing Pagan...

 noted, "Botkin's own writings anticipated by a generation the sort of Goddess religion found later in the pages of Green Egg and elsewhere", and which were propagated by Neopagan groups such as Dianic Wicca

Dianic Wicca

Dianic Witchcraft and Dianic Feminist Witchcraft, is a tradition, or denomination, of the Neopagan religion of Wicca. It was founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest in the United States in the 1970s, and is notable for its focus on the worship of the Goddess, and on feminism...

 in the 1960s onward during the Second Wave feminist movement.

Gleb Botkin and the Church's founding

Gleb Botkin

Gleb Botkin

Gleb Evgenievich Botkin was the son of Dr. Eugene Botkin, the court physician who was murdered at Ekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks with Tsar Nicholas II and his family on July 17, 1918....

 was born in 1900, the son of Eugene Botkin

Eugene Botkin

Yevgeny Sergeyevich Botkin was the court physician for Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and, while in exile with the family, sometimes treated the hemophilia-related complications of the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich of Russia.Botkin went into exile with the Romanovs following the Russian...

, who was the physician to the Romanovs, the Russian royal family of the time, and as such Gleb grew up in a wealthy background within the imperial household. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the Bolshevik Party, a group of Marxists

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 who wished to implement socialist

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

 reforms, took power, the monarchy was entirely abolished. A subsequent civil war

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

 broke out between those forces that supported the revolutionary government, the "Reds", and those that opposed them, the "Whites". The Bolsheviks subsequently ordered the execution of the Romanovs, fearing that the Whites would reinstate them, and so, in July 1918, the family, along with several of their closest aides, including Evgeny Botkin, were shot dead in the basement of the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg. His son, Gleb Botkin, continued fighting on the side of the Whites, but following their defeat, fled via Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 to the United States.

Subsequently gaining employment as a commercial illustrator, Botkin began writing a series of books, both fiction and non-fiction, including an account of his memories of the Romanovs entitled The Real Romanovs, as Revealed by the Late Czar's Physician and His Son (1931). Many of his fictional stories also drew from his experience and involvement with the Russian aristocracy: Her Wanton Majesty (1934) was a fictionalised biography of Catherine I, the wife of Tsar Peter the Great, which portrayed her as a particularly lustful figure, whilst Immortal Woman (1933) dealt with the story of fictional Russian composer Nikolai Dirin, who after being persecuted by the Bolsheviks flees to the United States where he settles in Long Island

Long Island

Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

, the very place that Botkin himself had settled into. Immortal Woman shows that Botkin was beginning to have ideas about a monotheistic goddess, for instance containing a quote in which the Russian Orthodox

Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...

 priest Father Aristarch states that "the Supreme Deity must be a woman" whilst at another point Dirin enters a church and began "to pray fervently to Aphrodite - his beautiful and kind Goddess whom the Christian Church decried as the White She-Devil, whose worshipers the heads of the Christian Church have repeatedly anathematized."

Later years

Botkin later moved the church to Charlottesville, Virginia

Charlottesville, Virginia

Charlottesville is an independent city geographically surrounded by but separate from Albemarle County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States, and named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the queen consort of King George III of the United Kingdom.The official population estimate for...

. He self-published a book arguing that Aphrodite

Aphrodite

Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation.Her Roman equivalent is the goddess .Historically, her cult in Greece was imported from, or influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia....

 was the supreme deity and the creation of the world was like a woman giving birth. The church was one of the earliest of its kind in the neopaganism

Neopaganism

Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...

movement in the United States. Botkin's church is mentioned in the recent book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, by Chas S. Clifton.