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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. ==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.〔Botkin 1967. p.〕 As it espouses a monotheistic, syncretic faith, its beliefs were not consistent with the modern reconstructionist Hellenic religion of Hellenism but closer to that of () Wicca. As Neopagan scholar Chas S. Clifton 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 in the 1960s onward during the Second Wave feminist movement.〔Clifton 2006. p. 139.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Church of Aphrodite」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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