Tag Archives: American religion

On the Road in Virginia: Looking for Gleb Botkin

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Home of Gleb Botkin in the late 1960s. Photo by Chas S. Clifton

The house in Charlottesville, Va., where the Botkin familiy lived in the 1960s, also the final location of the Church of Aphrodite.

Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite lasted from the 1930s to 1969. (He formally incorporated it in 1939, but I don’t know just when it started.)

The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:

Aphrodite, the flower-faced, the sweetly smiling, the laughter-loving Goddess of Love and Beauty, is the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos, the Universal Cause, the Universal Mind, the Source of all life and all positive and creative forces of nature, the Fountainhead of all happiness and joy.

But Botkin rejected such formulas as “love thy neighbor as thyself” and the “so-called Golden Rule,” arguing instead that love requires “two mutually responsive poles.”

Some of the argument he makes in his thealogical book In Search of Reality could justify polyamory as well, although I don’t know if he applied it in that way.

Some of the Charlottesville Pagans still want an historical marker on the house. I don’t know who lives there now — when we stopped by, no one was at home but the cat.

Botkin, his wife, Nadine, and his daughter, Marina Botkin Schweitzer, are buried just outside Charlottesville, where his marker describes him as the Reverand [sic] Gleb Botkin and includes the astrological symbol of Venus.

The Church of Aphrodite, meanwhile, had both a personal and a literary connection with the California Pagan group Feraferia and hence to the broader Pagan revival of the late 20th century.

On the Road in Virginia: Monticello

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Today to Monticello to visit the First Citizen, Thos. Jefferson, but he was unable to Receive us. Hundreds of his Fellow Citizens waited upon him also, diverting themselves with Tours of the House and Gardens, which are both Marvelous.

M. and I walked up to the house from the parking area. We came to the family cemetery. I saw his tombstone and started weeping and had to move away.

“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”

Then we walked in the vegetable garden and orchard. I picked a few cherries—they seem to be going to waste. I hope he won’t mind.

The house truly is a marvel. If he lived today, Jefferson no doubt would have a high-tech house with photo-voltaic solar panels, hydroponic gardens, and a garage full of classic and hybrid cars. And he would finally be able to serve fine Virginia wines.

And thence to Charlottesville, where we shall remain the next three Days.

The base of Jefferson’s obelisk tombstone is covered with coins. Some kind of unconscious folk-paganism going on there: offerings to the genius of Thomas Jefferson. I would have burned a pinch of incense had any been available.

Process Theology and Feminist Wicca

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In her new book, Hidden Circles in the Web: Feminist Wicca, Occult Knowledge, and Process Thought, Denver priestess and theologian Constance Wise argues that process theology is uniquely appropriate for Paganism.

When we speak of the “Web of Being,” she writes, “the interconnectivity of events posited by process though is so expansive across both time and space that it can scarcely be grasped by human thought. On the other hand, process cosmology provides a clear way to talk about the Web (114).”

Process thinkers’ understanding of deity leans towards the abstract. It is not “hard polytheism.” But process thought does offer a useful and challenging way to think about inter-connectedness and the Goddess.

It is the fourth book in AltaMira’s Pagan Studies series.

A Man of Faith (the brochure says so)

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Barack Obama drapes himself in his Christian credentials.

Apparently when Mike Huckabee (a former pastor) did much the same thing, he was appealing to the worst impulses of the Religious Right. When Obama does it, there is no problem. Apparently.

I want to see Obama posed on the steps of the Parthenon — the one in Nashville — speaking about classical values. A little speech about arete. Then I would vote for him for sure.

A Day for Desk Work

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It is a damp, grey day here on Hardscrabble Creek, with the temperature struggling to climb out of the 40s F. It’s a good day to be indoors editing Pomegranate articles. Were the weather warm and sunny, I would want to be doing chores outdoors–all the little jobs that built up over the winter.

Meanwhile, some links:

&para: Articles on Pagan infiltration of Quaker meetings and other creeping Paganism from Christianty Today and Modern Reformation. Via Cat Chapin-Bishop, who is quoted in the former, being one of the infiltrators.

¶ Beyond mere steampunk: Building a Victorian computer. Via Mirabilis.

¶ Bablestone posts on the difficulties of deciphering Ogham inscriptions. What looked like a description of a battle might in fact be a simple grave marker.

Gallimaufry and the iMac

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¶ Metaphysical writer Louise Hay is profiled in the New York Times: “Queen of the New Age.” (Hat tip: Jordan Stratford.)

¶ I can tell that you are reading only 20 percent of my blog.

¶ Ten years ago, the look of personal computing changed forever. “As far from the cable-twined tangle of beige boxes as you could imagine, its smooth-as-an-egg blue-and-white all-in-one shape was compelling and futuristic.”

¶ When I saw Jason’s post about people choosing to have Pagan weddings for what amount to aesthetic reasons, I was reminded of a news article I linked to in 2006 about Westerners performing fake Christian ceremonies in Japan.

Back in our days as active coven leaders (20+ years ago), M. and I did marry a sort-of Pagan American guy and the daughter of a Thai UN official. Her family treated it as an unusual ethnographic spectacle, but we got a great Thai dinner out of the experience.

No, the marriage did not last. I think we are 1 for 3 on handfastings. You had better choose someone else.

The Hopi Orpheus

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Writing my post about the Inquisition and the church at Quarai, I reviewed the history of the Pueblo Revolt, which led me to the work of Ekkehart Malotki, a specialist in Hopi language and oral literature. I ended up reading his Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic, which are full of shapeshifting, potions, evil sorcerers–all the usual stuff. Malotki collected these stories in the 1980s.

One story, “The Man Who Traveled to Maski, Home of the Dead, to Bring Back His Wife,” maps almost perfectly onto the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.

I could make several stories out of that coincidence:

1. Aha, it’s another example of trade links between Mediterranean world and the American Southwest 2,000 years ago, but the tenured professors won’t accept the evidence that is in front of their eyes!

2. Or maybe a century ago some Hopi kid got sent off to boarding school, found solace in a book of Greek myths in the school library, and came back and told the story, giving it a Hopi gloss, and soon it became “traditional.”

3. Or maybe going to the Land of the Dead to bring home your dear one is not a good idea and usually ends up tragically, regardless of the culture.

What Lies Ahead

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Here are a couple of links. Meanwhile, expect a series of new book-related posts, now that spring semester is finally coming to a close.

¶ What was it like to live in a Norse longhouse in Vinland or Iceland? Re-enactors have ideas.

¶ At least Pope Benedict understands that religion thrives better without governmental support.

The Inquisition in New Mexico

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This ruined church, Nuestra Señora de La Purisima Concepción de Cuarac, stands at the edge of the Southern Plains, southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is one of three large mission churches built in the early 1600s by forced labor from the Indians who lived at the adjacent villages. The interior is about 100 feet long.

It is now part of Salinas Pueblos National Monument.

Constructed by the Franciscan order, it was also the location of the Inquisition in New Mexico, which could bring charges of heresy, witchcraft, etc., against the few thousand Spanish colonists in the province.

The remote Spanish colony of New Mexico suffered from two command structures: one religious and one secular-military, with frequent “turf wars” between them — all very medieval.

You can imagine the conflicts:

Don Somebody y Somebody de Someplace, encomendero: “I need los indios to to work for me, to herd my livestock and build my new house.”

Fray Somebody, Franciscan priest: “Oh, no, señor, they must work building the new rooms on the church. Such labor helps in the conversion of their heathen souls.”

(Los indios, in Tiwa: “Do we ever get to hoe our own corn fields?”)

Fray Somebody, playing his trump card: “And we have reports that you have permitted los indios to perform their devilish kachina dances. Could it be that you are sliding into heresy? We have prepared these documents for the holy Inquisition. . . .”

Meanwhile, the Apaches and Comanches of the Plains, having mastered the horse-riding lifestyle, started playing the game of “Let’s attack the settled agriculturalists, kill them, and take their stuff.”

The Spanish were spread too thin to fight them off, and arming the Pueblo Indians went against their plan of keeping the Indians subservient and helpless.

Between raids and drought, things got so bad at the three Salinas pueblos that the Franciscans pulled the plug. In 1677, the priest at the church in the picture, Fray Diego de Parraga, locked the doors and rode off in a cart with all the altar goods and the church bell, accompanied by the remaining residents of the pueblo of Quarai (Cuarac). They went to Isleta, where the people spoke the same language.

And then three years later came a significant event in American Pagan history: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when all the missionized Indians of New Mexico and northern Arizona revolted simultaneously.

The revolt’s cultural effects linger to this day, as David Roberts explains in The Pueblo Revolt : The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest.

The Heart Has Its Reasons–For Wanting a Beer

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Stories like this one about a heart transplant may seem like fodder for Fate magazine.

But they do raise interesting questions about the whole body-soul split, which is basic to all those religious traditions that teach we are spirits temporary in bodies–or trapped in bodies, as some would have it.

Was it possible that my new heart had reached me with its own set of tastes and preferences? It was a fascinating idea. During those early days, I had no idea that I would look back on this curious comment as the first of many mysteries after the transplant.

UPDATE: Purely by coincidence (really!) Yvonne Aburrow is thinking about organ donation. Consider the implications.