Church of Aphrodite

The Church of Aphrodite is a Neopagan religious group founded in 1938 by Gleb Botkin (1900–1969), a Russian émigré to the United States. Monotheistic in structure, the Church believes in a singular female Goddess, who is named after the ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.

Having grown up in the Russian Imperial court, Botkin fought in the Russian civil war on the side of the counter-revolutionary forces after his father, a physician to the royal Romanov monarchy, was executed by the Bolshevik government. Fleeing to Long Island in the United States, 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.

The only known printed source concerning the doctrine of the Church of Aphrodite is the treatise In Search of Reality written and pubished by Gleb Botkin in the 1960s. The treatise opens with the opinion that "prevalent religious beliefs and standards of morality . . . are based chiefly on . . . fantasies . . . of primitive people of an ancient past”, and he “to develop morally and intellectually, as well as enable us to lead happier lives.”

The central concept in Botkin's metaphysics is Love, which he defines not as an emotion but "energy", which engenders all being. The only “inexhaustible Generator of Love—its Prime Source and Ultimate 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.” Since Botkin considered love an eternal flow, he based the hopes for the immortality of human beings with the fact that they were consciously capable of love towards each other and the Deity. "The Beyond" or "Paradise" is a place where evil - the antithesis of Love and its concomitants Beauty and Harmony - is absent.

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