User:NinaRudnikova

Nina Rudnikova (also Nina Roudnikova, Nina Rudnikoff) (1890-1940) was born in St. Petersburg. Nina Roudnikova graduated from the Bestuzhev higher women's course, where she received a doctor's degree. She was interested in the occult from an early age, especially the field of Egyptian Hermeticism. She searched long for a master and it might be said that fate led her to the society for the study of Tarot Arcana that was headed by G.O.Mebes. She quickly became his first inner circle student and was a Rosicrucian Templar of a high initiation level.

Nina Roudnikova was twice married, first to Gavrila Yelachich, with whom she moved to Tallin, Estonia in 1919 alongside the retreating North-Western Army. She divorced him two years later and married Baron Baron Andrei Uexküll, a Vedantist and student of Vivekananda

Mebes was a true son of Holy Russia, which in those years produced hundreds of occult groups in St Petersburg alone. As it is written in the English language translation of Nina Roudnikova's book, The Solar Way: "One of [Mebes'] star pupils was Nina Roudnikova, who went onto become a doctor by profession and ultimately one of the fabled ‘White Russian Sisters’, who worked in spiritual opposition to the dark occult forces unleashed by Bolshevism. Nina Rudnikova escaped the Red Terror in the early days of the Revolution and joined the Russian émigré community in Estonia. There she became highly regarded as a healer and teacher of spiritual work, maintaining contact with such illustrious figures as Nicholas and Helena Roerich, with whom she enjoyed a close relationship and fruitful correspondence.

Though her official job was in the editorial office of the newspaper "Freedom of Russia", throughout the 1930s Roudnikova also worked in service of the white emigrant intelligence agencies, developing close ties with its head, Colonel Boris Engelhardt, a former member of the Russian State Duma and commandant of Petrograd during the February Revolution. In 1932 she was instructed by the ROVS (Russian General Military Union) to let herself be recruited by Soviet intelligence, which she was able to misinform for some time.

Already closely connected with the Tallinn society of metaphysical research, in 1937 Nina founded her spiritual society, 'Solar Way', for which she asked the Roerichs to send her blessings from the Great Teachers of the East, which they did by way of a letter that same year. Elena Ivanovna Roerich was highly appreciative of Nina Roudnikova, noting her exceptional intellectual level and deep knowledge. Nina, in turn, was sympathetic to the Roerichs’ mission, contrary to the opinion of most of the leaders of the Theosophical society, who were jealous of the new teaching and its heralds.

A prolific lecturer and disseminator of knowledge, Nina was also a woman of letters, producing several dozen books and articles devoted to various issues of human development. Her most regular publishing channel was the journal "Occultism and Yoga", which was published for several decades, first in Europe and then South America. She was also a wonderful poet and writer of spiritual works, but the bulk of her huge manuscript heritage did not get into print and was lost during the Second World War. After the war, one of the issues of the collection "Occultism and Yoga" renewed in Asuncion (Paraguay) (1960, book. 23) saw the publication of her mystery poem, "Lazarus", written in Estonia in 1919-1921 in collaboration with her first husband G. Elachich.

A member of the Revel Literary Circle, her poems and articles about the occult were published in the Tallinn newspaper "Dawn", the magazines "Clouds" and "In a Foreign Land”. Nina most frequently published her articles in the journal "Occultism and Yoga", published for several decades, first in Europe, then in South America by Dr. Aseev, a follower of the Teaching of Living Ethics. Extremely well connected with the leading occult circles of his day, Dr Aseev was also on friendly terms with the Roerichs, who were also published in this publication.

In 1936, Rudnikova gave a series of lectures at the Tallinn Society for Metapsychic Research, which later became the basis of her most famous book "Sacred Mysticism of Egypt. 22 steps of the initiatory path". The content of this work – and the present volume - is devoted to the presentation of 22 secrets of the universe, represented by 22 principles and laws, considered both from the macrocosmic, universal, and from the microcosmic, human point of view.

As a prominent Theosophist and one of the most favoured pupils of Mebes – himself at the pinnacle of Russian Freemasonry, Rosicrucian, Templar and Kabbalistic occult schools – Nina had left the motherland with more than a few worldly possessions and the will to survive. She also carried with her meticulous notes from the lectures Mebes gave to both his outer circle of initiates and the veiled inner circles to which she belonged, the only works of the master which would survive the ruthless intellectual purges of the OGPU, the secret police of the Bolshevik regime.

The OGPU caught up with Mebes himself in 1926, in what became known as the Case of the Leningrad Freemasons. The Master was arrested, accused of being a ‘Black Magician’ and sent to a gulag on the White Sea islands where he is believed to have died four years later.

Nina Roudnikova, therefore, helped ensure the survival of the greatest occult teachings of the modern era, which through her would find their way across Western Europe – where having escaped Lenin and Stalin they then survived Hitler – to England and then across the Atlantic to South America.

The Russian community in Estonia was the starting point for this activity and it is here that Nina – at the spiritual heart of the community - and others working with her encountered the young Christian Hermeticist, Valentin Tomberg and initiated him into all they knew of The Great Work. Tomberg had a long journey of England. After spending several Cold War years working as a translator for the BBC, intercepting and interpreting messages from communist Russia, Tomberg took up the baton handed to him by Nina and completed one of the acknowledged spiritual classics of the 20th Century, Meditations on the Tarot, a masterpiece of the ‘synthetic philosophy’, which brought together the gold and silver threads of Russian occultism, Catholic theology and Hermetic lore.

This book would be given to John Paul II early in his papacy by the maverick theologican, Hans urs von Balthasar, who wrote in his foreword to the German and English editions that Meditations on the Tarot was written by “a thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity [who] reveals to us the symbols of Christian Hermeticism in its various levels of mysticism, gnosis and magic, taking in also the Cabbala and certain elements of astrology and alchemy.”

John Paul II would make it his mission to bring down communism, not only in his Polish homeland but all across Europe – a mission he shared with the White Russian occultists who formed a spiritual core of resistance to the terrible egregore of Communism which afflicts the world to this day.

Whilst Tomberg, brought the Great Arcana of the Tarot to England and would become their most beloved exponent in the West, another friend of Nina – Catarina Sreznewska-Zelenzeff - was given a copy of her inner circle notes to take to South America, where they eventually took form as the Tarot Minors. Nina asked her friend to transfer the great legacy to ‘someone dignified’ who would be capable of preserving the lessons for humanity. On that continent and by a series of serendipitous events and acquaintances, they would eventually be taken up by another initiate of Mebes, the Martinist Nicholas Girs, but remained hidden from the English-speaking world until the publication of our translation in April 2020.

Thus it transpired that the primordial tree of knowledge and learning - always rare - was almost but never quite lost to the mists of time. Our task is to ensure the revival of this knowledge from the obscure annals of history and its continued evolution for present and future generations.

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Another extract from The Solar Way (Shin Publications): It is Titanic human personalities and public figures who are most often thought of as fashioning the grand art of History, conceived in the minds of gurus and genii, forged in the fires of war and revolution. Behind such Titans – the Kings, Queens, Popes, Emperors, Military Generals and cultural icons - are enigmatic ‘hidden hands’, the unknown masters whose words and deeds had a butterfly effect on the shaping of human culture, links in the chain of a more subtle and secret History. It is this, more secret history, that is revealed by the works of the White Russian School.

Nina Roudnikova’s Solar Way treads a roughly middle path through the metaphysical and philosophic teachings of Vladimir Shmakov on the one hand and the astral occultism of G.O. Mebes on the other. Her text includes some rather surprising historical information and hitherto unknown details gleaned from mystical societies and secret orders, including the Templars. Like both Shmakov and Mebes she is a disciple of the wisdom of ancient Egypt, which she sets against a background of new spiritual revelations which came to the world through the Theosophy of HP Blavatsky and Agni Yoga of the Roerichs. Like all masterworks of this school her Solar Way has a decidedly ‘synthetic’ character, which sublimates and synthesises knowledge of key teachings from within the tradition and develops them further with her own unique insights.

The special value of this work is in its consideration of the hidden hermetic wisdom of ancient Egypt in the context of new spiritual revelations brought to humanity through the Theosophical impulse and Agni Yoga.

Nina Roudnikova died of liver cancer on July 15, 1940 in Konigsberg (Prussia).