Additional information
by Nina Roudnikova (Author), Charlotte Cowell (Translator)
Born in St. Petersburg, Nina Roudnikova graduated from the Bestuzhev higher women's courses, where she received a doctor's degree. She was interested in the occult from an early age, especially the field of Egyptian Hermeticism - an inclination she shared with other Russian masters. 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.
Nina Roudnikova 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 Roudnikova 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.
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.
In 1936, Roudnikova 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.
