Drawing Down the Moon (41 page)

OUTSIDE OF THE VARIOUS Witchcraft traditions, the most prevalent forms of Neo-Paganism are groups that attempt to re-create ancient European pre-Christian religions.

In the United States the first reconstructionist Neo-Pagan organization was the Long Island Church of Aphrodite, established in West Hempstead, Long Island, on May 6, 1938.

Gleb Botkin, founder and priest of the church, was the son of the court physician to the last Russian Tsar. After Botkin came to the United States he wrote several novels about Russia before and during the Revolution. Some of them, such as
The Real Romanovs,
concern the last days of the royal family; others depict the lives of students, priests, and more ordinary folk. But the theme of goddess worship drifts through many of them. The titles themselves are revealing—
The Woman Who Rose Again
(about Anastasia);
Immortal Woman; The God Who Didn't Laugh;
and
Her Wanton Majesty.
¹

All the novels, dating from 1929 to 1937, involve women who inspire men to worship them, and men who are tempted and allured by the “divine feminine.” In two of the novels the Pagan religious ideal is stated directly: the protagonist becomes a worshipper of Aphrodite.
Immortal Woman
(1933) is the story of Nikolai Dirin, the son of a Russian priest, who flees to America shortly after the Russian Revolution and becomes a world-famous conductor. His musical ability is inspired by a vision of Aphrodite and by the remembrance of a real woman, a playmate from his youth. His dreams and daydreams lead him to reject his Russian Orthodox upbringing and to adopt the Aphrodisian religion:

Another novel,
The God Who Didn't Laugh,
is the most autobiographical of Botkin's works. It is the story of a Russian man who studies to be a monk, but is visited early in life by a vision of Aphrodite and, again, by actual women who seem to embody that vision. At one point, the protagonist imagines a world of Greek temples of white marble where naked worshippers sing hymns, burn incense, and fall asleep on the grass after laying wreaths of roses at Aphrodite's feet.

While training for the priesthood, he is repeatedly instructed that women are the “Vessels of the Devil” and that he must reject all his experiences with them as dirty, repulsive, and sinful.
³
Just before his ordination he realizes that his feelings toward women were the purest and most sacred he had ever experienced. He begins to find Christ at fault for thinking of women with disgust. At the end of the book he leaves the monastery with ambivalent feelings.

Gleb Botkin converted his vision into reality when he established the Long Island Church of Aphrodite in 1938. He had only about fifty followers. He created three different liturgies and he held worship services four times a week, before an altar with a replica of the Venus de Medici. Behind the statue was a purple tapestry. There was incense of frankincense and myrrh. Nine candles were placed on the altar, as well as the symbol of the church, the planetary sign for Venus.

In 1939 Botkin told a reporter for the
New York World-Telegram
that the purpose of the Aphrodisian religion was “to seek and develop Love, Beauty and Harmony and to suppress ugliness and discord.” The principle of Christianity, he said, was to suppress desire in order to develop the spirit; but the religion of Aphrodite sought to develop the spirit through antithetical principles. Botkin conceived of nature as good. He considered hate, selfishness, and jealousy “unnatural.” While in theory he idealized sex as a “divine function,” in practice he was conservative and concerned lest the church “attract neurotics and those emotionally unstable.”
⁴

Botkin envisioned the Aphrodisian religion as a formal structure, complete with church, clergy, and liturgy. Unlike most Neo-Pagans today, he believed in monotheism and creed and dogma.
Belief
was considered necessary for salvation; one had to come into a “correct relationship” with the Goddess. During the services worshippers chanted their creed before the altar:

Botkin died in 1969, and none of his five children carried on the faith.
⁶
But one man who did was W. Holman Keith, a former Baptist minister who attended services at Botkin's church in the early 1940s and became a convert. He wrote
Divinity as the Eternal Feminine
(1960), and has continued to write articles for Neo-Pagan publications. Keith is considered to be one of the true elders of the Neo-Pagan movement, but his views, like those of elders in many religions, are not very similar to the views of younger Neo-Pagans. Keith died in 1995.

Keith described Botkin as a man who seemed to dislike both communism and democracy and to be for “some kind of Theocratic rule through the Aphrodisian religion.” In an article in
Green Egg
he observed that many of Botkin's views would not coincide with those of most Neo-Pagans today.

In many of these beliefs, Keith wrote, Botkin was more in line with the ancient mystery traditions than most Neo-Pagans would admit. Keith finally left Botkin's church in a dispute over its dogmatism and today is an elder in the Neo-Pagan group Feraferia.

—ROBERT GRAVES,
Watch the North Wind Rise
⁸

 

 

In 1949 Robert Graves created a fictional utopia called New Crete in a book titled
Watch the North Wind Rise.
New Crete, he wrote, came into existence during a period filled with wars and revolutions, culminating in a nuclear war. An Israeli philosopher, concerned with the survival of humanity, recommended the creation of anthropological enclaves, each of which would represent a stage in the development of civilization.
⁹
Each enclave was to be sealed off from the world for generations, communicating only with an anthropological council that studied the reports from these societies to determine which of them were viable and where civilization ultimately went wrong.

The enclaves devoted to the Bronze Age and early Iron Age became so successful that they were resettled on Crete. A new society evolved and, with it, a new religion devoted to the Mother Goddess, Mari, a religion similar to pre-Christian European Paganism, complete with agricultural festivals and mysteries. The new society on Crete was seen as “the seedbed of a Golden Age.”
¹⁰

But the society of New Crete was not perfect. Although much different from the bureaucracy to which we are accustomed, it was no less authoritarian. Nothing outside the dictates of poetry could be manufactured; nothing purely utilitarian. Rigid patterns of custom ruled the country's five classes. The protagonist, an Englishman from the 1940s, is sent for by the Goddess to shake the society up a bit, to put a little salt in the bread and butter, as the above quote suggests, and bring about the winds of change and freedom.

Graves was writing fiction, of course, but the idea of a Goddess religion emerging after a cataclysm is not uniquely his. Many Neo-Pagans told me they envisage a similar outcome, and several spoke to me of the Hopi prophesies of a Great Purification. Many of them seemed to feel that only a great catastrophe could bring about the seeds of change from which a new society could be created. “Look at the freak weather phenomena all around us,” was a comment I heard frequently. “Mother Nature is beginning to take things into her own hands.” Certainly the utopian vision that is central to a number of Neo-Pagan religions makes sense only in a world far different from the present one. And there is at least one group that could fit Graves's description of a new Goddess religion awaiting the blessed cataclysm. That religion is Feraferia, founded by Frederick Adams.

 

—ED FITCH, Gardnerian priest

 

 

Of the many groups I have encountered, Feraferia is one of the most difficult to describe. Feraferia—the name is derived from Latin words meaning “wilderness festival”
¹¹
—is the most intricately formed of the Neo-Pagan religions in the United States. As the quote by Fitch implies, it is a jewel, an artistic creation, the private vision of one man, which sits like a beautiful crystal on a shelf, highly admired but mostly from afar. It is never contaminated by offshoots, or schisms, or changes, or even by many followers who might spread it too thin. As the sound of its name implies, it is a religion of both wildness and delicateness. Considered by its small following to be the aristocrat of Neo-Paganism, it has all the advantages and disadvantages that the word “aristocrat” implies.

Frederick Adams is a kind and gentle man who has spent most of his creative energies as an artist, astrologer, and researcher into archeology and geocosmic lore (such as ley-lines and henge construction). When I met Adams, he lived in Los Angeles with his partner, Svetlana Butyrin, in a small house covered with his artwork. When I visited them, I was welcomed with a short ritual in English and Greek. I was given a drink that tasted of cinnamon and mint, and a dish of fresh raspberries. The house radiated peace and beauty, and there was a frailty about Adams as he sat barefooted in a blue robe; I came away with the feeling that he had been buffeted by a harsh world that would not accept his sensitivity.

They were evicted from their former dwelling place several years before, after neighbors told their landlord about strange religious activities. Robert Ellwood described this home:

Fred Adams described Feraferia in
Earth Religion News: