{"id":1035,"date":"2008-06-25T02:22:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T02:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1035"},"modified":"2013-01-03T16:39:30","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T23:39:30","slug":"on-the-road-in-virginia-looking-for-gleb-botkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1035","title":{"rendered":"On the Road in Virginia: Looking for Gleb Botkin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Home

The house in Charlottesville, Va., where the Botkin familiy lived in the 1960s, also the final location of the Church of Aphrodite.<\/p><\/div>\n

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

The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Some of the argument he makes in his thealogical book In Search of Reality<\/em> could justify polyamory <\/a>as well, although I don’t know if he applied it in that way.<\/p>\n

Some of the Charlottesville Pagans still want an historical marker on the house. I don’t know who lives there now \u2014 when we stopped by, no one was at home but the cat.<\/p>\n

\"\"

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.<\/p><\/div>The Church of Aphrodite, meanwhile, had both a personal and a literary connection with the California Pagan group Feraferia<\/a> and hence to the broader Pagan revival of the late 20th century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,5,53],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-paganism","tag-russia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-gH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":387,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=387","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":0},"title":"The Russian Empire in Color","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Before there was such a thing as color film, a Russian photographer figured out a way to project the equivalent of color slides. His work can be seen in an online exhibition at the Library of Congress. Off-topic for this blog? Bear with me. Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was commissed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Aphrodite\"","block_context":{"text":"Aphrodite","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=aphrodite"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":833,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=833","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":1},"title":"My continued fascination with Gleb Botkin","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 13, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently found a Wikipedia entry on Gleb Botkin. I still think that he is one of the most fascinating figures in American Paganism, with a life whose arc connected the lost world of the Russian royal family to the contemporary Pagan revival of the 1950s and 1960s.He is worth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":964,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=964","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":2},"title":"Where’s the Wall? I Need to Hit It","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 16, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Forgive the melodramatic headline, but I have been grading tests and research papers for about six hours. At least \"the big class\" is done, and what lies ahead will be more pleasant reading--essays by better student writers.So to make up for the lack of blogging, some odds and ends:\u2022 A\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":687,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=687","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":3},"title":"The Da Vinci Code: A Pagan date movie","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 9, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"M. and I are not what you would call \"early adopters,\" other than perhaps when we bought a Jeep TJ right after they were introduced in 1997. (We still have it.) So this is not exactly a cutting-edge review of The Da Vinci Code.It is rated PG, which could just\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":528,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=528","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":4},"title":"This post is fillerI don't\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 6, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is fillerI don't normally let a week go by without blogging, but thing happened, like being asked by a magazine-editor friend to write a 2,000-word \"think piece\" on the dilemmas of a being an \"evacuee\"--from a forest fire in my case, but with obvious relevance to Katrina and\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5217,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5217","url_meta":{"origin":1035,"position":5},"title":"Parsing Paganism, Rejecting the F-Word","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 15, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"This whole issue of \"Pagan fundamentalism,\" Pagan identity politics, and related disputes have been giving me a lot of agita. In fact, I do wish that \"the f-word\" had never been introduced, because rather than helping the conversation, it shuts it down. As soon as you refer to someone as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4969,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions\/4969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}