So, a pagan walks into a church: a Russian Orthodox Church, to be specific.

I'm not just visiting or sightseeing. Incredibly, I'm there to venerate the icon of “Passion-bearer” St. Yevgeny Botkin.

Botkin (1865-1918) was personal physician to “Slick Nick” Romanov, the last (well, the last before Putin, anyway) tsar of Russia. He went into Siberian exile along with the royal family, and was executed with them by the Soviets in 1918.

Even in Heaven, there's inequality. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the tsar and his family in 1981, but didn't get around to sainting the faithful servants who died with them until 2016, more than 30 years later. Jeez.

I'm neither some sort of Christo-Pagan nor some ghoulish Romanov groupie. I'm here, rather, to honor St. Yevgeny the Physician for one reason: because his son was not just a pagan, but the father of American Paganism.

Gleb Botkin (1900-1969) managed to escape the Revolution and came (via Shanghai) to America, where he made a successful career for himself as a novelist and illustrator. He supported the (as it turns out, false) claims of Franziska Schanzkowska—AKA Anna Anderson—to be the tsar's youngest daughter, Anastasia. (Pagans have a quixotic affinity for lost causes, maybe because here in the West there's no bigger Lost Cause than paganism.) Most importantly—to me, anyway—he founded (in 1938, if you can believe it) the Long Island Church of Aphrodite, the US's first legally-recognized pagan temple.

Freshly-painted, the icon glimmers in the candlelight. The iconographer has managed to convey Botkin faithfully within the idiom of the Byzantine (both literally and figuratively) canons of stylization that govern Eastern Orthodox iconography. St. Yevgeny's face is long and serious, but a little will o' the wisp smile plays about his lips and eyes, as if he's in on the joke; his cranium bulges like an onion-dome, just as the medieval saints of Russia are usually depicted. In his right hand, he holds a spoon with which to administer medicine from the three vials in the coffered casket that he holds in his left hand: the traditional attributes and gesture of a physician in late Classical art.

They say that the dead speak all languages. I Hammer-sign myself—you can call it a cross if you want to—and bend to kiss the icon on its velvet-hung stand. Then I light my honey-wax candle and place it before the painting of the man who is, in a sense, my spiritual grandfather, or one of them at least. I kneel.

“Spasiba, dyedushka,” I say. “Thanks, grandpa.”